19. CUPID’S KISS
Mr. B often pronounced the word “boyfriend”—on the rare occasions he said it—with a lingering, amused twang on the “oy.” He didn’t like them. Why would he? It was so simple: more often than not if a young dancer—and we were always young when we first came into his orbit—got a boyfriend, she would become distracted from her dancing, from class, from performance as her sole purpose for being, and more than one career suffered, halted, or occasionally entirely evaporated as a result of this lost focus. If you put a stallion in the barn with a female champion racehorse, there will be trouble—nature’s favorite kind of trouble, perhaps, but trouble nonetheless—and she will lose her next race. Time for a dancer is so short; he wanted us to succeed.
It was the late 1970s and Balanchine had asked for an impromptu rehearsal between matinee and evening shows on a weekend—not the usual union-regulated rehearsal time but always a special request—with the three solo women currently performing Serenade. The four of them gathered in the Main Hall studio on the fifth floor of the theater with the pianist. Calegari, having just danced the matinee, was still in stage makeup, the great black wings of her false eyelashes hovering in place.
“Yes, my hair is still long,” said Calegari, who, though still in the corps, had been dancing the Dark Angel since she first was cast in the role at age seventeen in the 1974 School of American Ballet year-end Workshop performance. It was the same performance, staged by Suki Schorer, that I also had danced, where we all learned those steps together and entered Mr. B’s mystical blue world before ever knowing him.
The truth is, hardly any of us would have cut our long locks for any “boyfriend”—we didn’t highlight it, or layer it, and we certainly never wore bangs. We did nothing that would place us in any identifiable place or epoch; ballerinas are timeless and exist only in a moment of music. However, every now and then a rebel came into company class having cut her hair, thus Mr. B’s question.
Calegari had that rare, rich, deep-red hair, which, with her pale white skin, large green eyes, high cheekbones, and Italian heritage—via Queens—rendered her a veritable Botticelli by a Pre-Raphaelite. She reached up and started pulling out the endless hairpins holding her bun in place, piling them in one palm. The other two dancers, Karin von Aroldingen, whose hair was dirty blond, and Colleen Neary, whose hair was dark brown, also took their hair clips out. All had long hair, though of varying lengths. Balanchine was delighted. “GREAT!!!!” he said of the three colors: “It looks like a Clairol commercial!!!”
Sometimes in class or rehearsal, he would pause and say, “Ah! We are alone now,” meaning we were en famille, the public and critics absent, then he would proceed to make seemingly non sequitur references to current American advertisements and popular television series. Thus he would disarm our ever-present gravity, his constant levity keeping us all very down-to-earth—no “soul” required—particularly while working on a long-established “masterpiece.”
For four decades, all the female dancers of Serenade had worn their hair tightly smoothed back in either buns or French twists. Balanchine now wanted to see how it would look for the three muses of the Elegy to release their tresses, drastically changing the look of the ballet and the movement itself—their hair joined their tulle skirts in trailing waves, their movements extended.
Balanchine loved long hair on women, and it had a deep significance for him. A few of his earliest works in St. Petersburg even featured unpinned hair—radical in the immediate wake of Petipa’s classical mode. Free-flowing hair reappeared periodically throughout his life, right up to the end. A woman’s soft, long hair denoted the intimacy of the erotic, the vulnerability of the bedroom, though, of course, he never said as much. But it was evident: on the Sleepwalker in La Sonnambula in 1946 (well, after all, she’d been in bed, so her hair likely was down); in the mysterious, ethereal section of Ivesiana titled “The Unanswered Question” in 1954, where a solo woman with bare legs and feet and wearing a simple white leotard is partnered by four men and never touches the floor for the entire dance; in 1963, in the yearning, love-torn pas de deux between an older man and a younger woman in Meditation; on Dulcinea as she washes the Don’s feet like the Madonna in Don Quixote in 1965; in the first three of the four movements of Tschaikovsky Suite #3 in 1970, where the costumes, scenery, and lighting denote a balletic bedroom; in the opening section, the Elysian Fields, of Chaconne in 1976. Even his devastating farewell to romantic love, the 1980 Robert Schumann’s “Davidsbündlertänze,” has the four lead women wearing bouncing ponytails with silk ribbons. Their half-up, half-down hair signals the receding of the Romantic.
That same year in the finale of Walpurgisnacht, set to music from Gounod’s Faust, Balanchine wanted the hair of the entire cast of twenty-four women entirely untethered, and our movements here were anything but restrained. There was so much long hair of all hues flying about onstage that, backstage, we called the ballet “Fire at the Hairdresser’s.” Balanchine adored it: a world of beautiful, lithe Terpsichores, his goddesses. He our Apollo.
As Balanchine aged, his desire to see this kind of free, open, feminine beauty seemed to only increase. “Love is a very important thing in a man’s life, especially toward the end,” he told Solomon Volkov from his hospital bed a few months before he died. “More important than art. When you’re getting old, it seems that art can wait, but a woman won’t. In art, you think you understand a thing or two already. But with a woman, that’s not the case, you can’t understand her totally—never, ever.” When faced with his own end, love took precedence over art; his art done, love remained, wanting and wanted.
And never was Balanchine’s love for the mystery of women more apparent than in Serenade’s eight-minute Elegy, involving one man and, yes, three women. He liked what he saw that afternoon in the Main Hall on his ballerinas with their unleashed locks—and so it is danced to this day. This is how a ballet with no story gained yet deeper layers of storylessness.
More than one critic protested, not pleased with him—which amused him—for challenging their long worked-over analysis of the ballet’s meaning.
“People never seem to understand unless they can put their finger into things,” he said once. “Like touching dough: when people see bread rising, they smell something and they say, ‘Oh, is it going up?’ And they poke their finger in it. ‘Ah,’ they say, ‘now I see.’ But of course the dough then goes down. They spoil everything by insisting on touching.”
So very Balanchine, ever teaching by upending assumptions, all the while simply pleasing himself, true to his own compass. But his own direction, so clear, so precise, so vast as to have created not so much a body of work as an entire universe, was not the result of any “personal growth” or line of philosophical pursuit. He said it came from God. This, he said, is what he was given. I, an atheist, have no better answer. No one does.
The Waltz Girl remains grounded and motionless as the last movement, Elegy, begins. By presenting a woman downed, this dance becomes ever more inscrutable. Tipped onto her right side facing the audience, her body hugging the stage floor, she rests her head on her extended right arm. Is she wounded?
A man and a woman quietly enter from the shadows far upstage left and begin walking slowly on a diagonal in her direction. They do not travel side by side, but as one. The woman is the Dark Angel. She has always been called the Dark Angel—Balanchine called her this—though we never knew exactly why she got this name. In Stravinsky’s Orpheus fourteen years later, Balanchine has another Dark Angel, but he is male. It is rare in a Balanchine ballet to have a “character” defined, though this particular moniker gives her more evocation than specificity. With only a few short entrances and exits in the ballet so far, it is only now that she reveals her mantle. Her hair, like the Waltz Girl’s, is also free about her shoulders.
The unnamed man—her second anonymous man in dark blue, not the one who danced with her in the previous movements—walks in front of the Dark Angel. But she is so close behind him that her hips press against his, while his left arm curves low and back, the top of his hand resting on her lower back, their pelvises moving in perfect unison. Her left arm is curved up under his left arm, her hand resting gently on his left shoulder, their torsos now also locked together. Her right hand covers his eyes, her palm his mask, removing his sight. “You are his eyes,” Mr. B said to one Dark Angel. A dancer who was there in 1934 asked Mr. B about this unusual coupling and he told her with his classic specificity, “You know, Laskey [Charles Laskey, the male dancer], he is very near-sight. I thought he does not see, so, maybe more comfortable if eyes have cover and Kathryn [Mullowny, the Dark Angel] looks where to go.”
He is taller, and as she turns her head to rest her left cheek on his upper back, her head disappears: the two are bonded now, merged into a single body, with one head. They walk forward, two right legs stepping, then two left legs stepping, like a mythical four-legged, one-bodied creature. After a few more paces, they pause and he lifts his right arm straight before them, appearing to point them in a forward direction. But it is she, not he—who cannot see—who leads from behind. In this exquisite, unusual, and yet so very simple formation of a man and woman moving together lies so much of Balanchine: the eroticism of their physical closeness, the visual beauty and symmetry of their walk-as-one, and the manifestation of mystery. What is going on? Who is he? Who is she? Where are they going? Are they even a man and a woman? Or a man and a woman metamorphosed into metaphor? Are they but allegory? But of what? It is glorious.
They proceed magisterially toward the still girl. Ten unified steps later they reach her and stop just behind her, as if he, in his blindness, has encountered a physical impediment. What unfolds next is so very beautiful.
The Dark Angel lifts her right hand from the man’s eyes, allowing him to see again in such a way that the power is clearly hers, the decision to restore his sight hers. At the same time, her left arm lifts from her hold about his shoulder, releasing him from her entirely. Her arms float skyward, forming, briefly but distinctly, a V. Both arms stretched upward like this is not one of classical ballet’s codified arm positions. Are these the Dark Angel’s wings? Of course.
Angels were unique for Balanchine: they were not unreal to him. He called his dancers “angelic messengers”—though never, ever, to us directly—intermediaries between gods and humans, between the divine and the mortal, angels, with their wings, after all, can fly—classical ballet’s highest aspiration and occasional illusion. “When Balanchine spoke of angels,” wrote Lincoln Kirstein, “as he often did, and of his dancers as angels, he intended confidence in an angelic system that governed the deployment of a corps de ballet.” In keeping with ballet’s verticality, Balanchine’s angels’ wings are always raised upward, never folded down, most notably in the massive six-foot-high wings on the angels in the 1980 Adagio Lamentoso[*1]—two-winged seraphim—and as in one of the two angels on Tschaikovsky’s grave, who stands guard, holding the crucifix, protecting and blessing the composer.
The Dark Angel’s arms then drop low—are they still wings? or now arms again?—and she and the man lower themselves together on bended knees, she folded over his back, toward the prone, elongated body in front of them. As they descend, they arch their upper bodies over the girl on the stage floor, their arms curved downward to her.
Simultaneously, she moves too—she is revived!—drawing herself up so that her torso is vertical, though she remains sitting on the stage. She lifts her arms, mirroring theirs in an upward arc: four arms reaching down, two arms reaching up in a wide, all but closed, embrace. It is a gesture of intimate greeting, of compassion, of tenderness, the man airily sandwiched between the two women.
Or perhaps he is hovering between a woman he loves and his art, which, inexorably fastened to his being, pulls him elsewhere? How often a man—a woman—is lured by romance, though sense, and providence, dictate otherwise. This was most certainly the path of Balanchine’s own love life: many loves, but his work—celebrating women, expanding women—the constant throughout.
Tschaikovsky’s grave in St. Petersburg (© Paul Kolnik)
This grouping will be repeated later, closing out the ensuing drama, with broken yearning. But for now, they are together, not quite entwined. Not yet.
This pose is a re-creation of Antonio Canova’s voluptuous marble sculpture Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss. The young Balanchine likely saw it in Paris in the years just before he arrived in America and made Serenade.[*2] The statue was commissioned from the Italian sculptor in 1787 by a young Welsh member of parliament, John Campbell, later the Right Honorable Lord Cawdor. But Campbell never received the piece, having never paid for it, and, for two thousand gold coins, it came into the possession of Napoléon’s brother-in-law General Joachim Murat. He was executed in 1815, and the statue was eventually acquired by the Louvre, where it now resides. Canova was in his early thirties when he carved this statue (as was Balanchine when he made Serenade) that commemorates, in three dimensions, the birth of Love itself.
The story of Cupid and Psyche is an allegory about the fiery melding of physical desire and spirit. The tale was written in Latin, based on numerous folktales, by Lucius Apuleius, in the second century in his book The Metamorphosis (St. Augustine called it The Golden Ass). The story is later echoed in “Cinderella,” “Beauty and the Beast,” A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and “Orpheus and Eurydice.” It is a lengthy, poetic, entertaining, and ribald tale that includes not only a good deal of unsanctioned lovemaking but also what today would be termed the kidnap and rape of a woman by an anonymous captor, who impregnates her and with whom she falls in love. Despite these untoward doings, the mischievous Lord Byron wrote, “The story of Cupid and Psyche is not only one uniform piece of loveliness, but is so delicate that it might be read at school by a class of young ladies.”
The story is set in motion by the wrath of one very jealous woman, Venus, the goddess of love, beauty, and desire. “The earth had produced another Venus,” wrote Apuleius about the young and human Psyche, who is “endued with virgin-like flower,” such that the disciples of Venus divert their “celestial honors to worship a mortal virgin.” Psyche’s beauty is so great that her despairing father can find her no willing husband—she is worshipped but not loved—while he easily dispatches her two (also madly jealous) sisters into wedlock.
Venus plans her revenge, conscripting her son, the capricious Cupid, who, with his “depraved manners” runs “through other men’s houses at night,” “corrupting the matrimony of all,” and inciting “pernicious desires.” She orders him to arrange, with a prick of his arrow, for Psyche to awaken and fall in love with “a miserable son of the vulgar.” But upon viewing the beauty of Psyche, Cupid himself is so enraptured by her that he defies his mother—a Freudian field day.
Antonio Canova’s Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss (Jean-Pol Grandmont/Wikimedia Commons)
There ensues a sequence of misadventures: Cupid captures Psyche in a paradise where her every wish is met, and he comes to her each night, incognito, and ravishes her, eventually impregnating her. Disobeying his order never to look upon him, one night Psyche shines the light of an oil lamp on Cupid, and discovers that he is not the monster she feared but the god of love himself, with “wings of shining whiteness.” Examining his arrows, she inadvertently pricks herself and falls “in love with Love.”
But a drop of the boiling lamp oil burns Cupid and he springs “on his pinions” to Mount Olympus to convalesce in the “bedchamber of his mother,” while Psyche begins her arduous quest to locate her beloved. Her “desire of finding him,” wrote Apuleius, describing one of love’s great truths, increased “in proportion to the difficulty of the search.”
The Canova moment: Darci Kistler and Kip Houston, with Valentina Kozlova as the Dark Angel behind them (© Paul Kolnik)
Venus, meanwhile, resorts to the “consolation of revenge,” and appoints Mercury to find her rival. Soon enslaved by her, Psyche is given four increasingly dangerous trials. The last requires her to travel to the underworld to retrieve from Proserpina (also known as Persephone), queen of the underworld, a box of beauty for Venus. Though counseled not to open the box, once again, Psyche cannot resist knowing the forbidden. But Proserpina has tricked Venus, and when Psyche opens the box “it contained no beauty, nor indeed anything but an infernal and truly Stygian sleep, which being freed from its confinement, immediately invades her…so that she lay motionless, and nothing else than a sleeping corpse.”
Once recovered from his injury, Cupid flies to Psyche and rouses her with “an innoxious touch of one of his arrows.” It is this very moment when the lovers are reunited after a long separation and much suffering that Canova chose for his commission—and which Balanchine, in turn, replicated in the Elegy of Serenade. It is a tableau of such beauty, such tenderness, such erotic promise. While his arrows and quiver rest on his hip, Cupid cups Psyche’s right breast with one hand while cradling her head with the other as he leans in close to her, his slim, nubile body carried by the magisterial wings of an archangel. Their two faces are poised only inches apart, the kiss imminent.
Apuleius ends the tale with the god of all the gods, Jupiter, for whom Cupid has supplied “many a virgin,” ordering Mercury “to bring Psyche to heaven.” Upon her arrival, Jupiter gives her a cup of ambrosia: “Take this, Psyche,” he says, “and be immortal.” Thus Psyche becomes one of the few women in mythology to become a goddess, and thus Soul attains its desire: immortality. The lovers are wed. The daughter of Soul and Eros is named Pleasure.
Aside from breathing life into Canova’s moment of divine unison, what has the tale of Cupid and Psyche to do with Serenade? Balanchine repeatedly refuted all conjecture about his work: “There are no hidden meanings in my ballets.” Indeed, the links to the myth of the birth of Love itself weren’t hidden at all, but there in layers, in levels, both explicit and muted. He never acknowledged any connection of this myth about the unification of Psyche and Cupid with Serenade. He didn’t need to.
Psyche’s marble mane (© Sailko/Wikimedia Commons)
One might recall that it was in his debut onstage at the Maryinsky, as Cupid, that young Georgi was first entranced by the theater, igniting his passion for dance, and heralding the early deliverance of his destiny. And Canova’s Psyche displays an astounding, luscious, truly mad, marble mane.