In 1945, the Russian impresario Sol Hurok commissioned the visual artist Marc Chagall to design several drops and floor cloths, as well as costumes, for Ballet Theatre’s production of Mikhail Fokine’s Firebird, to be staged by Adolph Bolm. Chagall was reputed to have painted much of the scenery and costumes himself. In the fall of 1949, Balanchine planned to mount his own version of Firebird, starring his wife, Maria Tallchief. He persuaded Hurok to sell the Chagall decor to him, since the Bolm ballet had been dropped from Ballet Theatre’s repertoire and the Chagall creations had been languishing in storage.
Stravinsky had rearranged and shortened the score—there were no long passages of music that allowed a choreographer to linger on character development. Balanchine’s choreography was concise and direct. Bang! You’re onstage, and within the first few gestures, the dance movements had to convey exactly who you are and what you’re doing. From the Prince’s first entrance to the Firebird’s electric appearance—she zoomed out of the wings—Frank Moncion and Maria Tallchief were stunning. The spooky lighting, murky and evocative of the depths of the forest, reflected lighting designer Jean Rosenthal’s genius. Firebird was the smash hit of the fall 1949 season.
I was in the monster scene, along with most of the corps de ballet. We popped out of the wings on a crashing chord, and burst into dance, to find ourselves slipping and tripping on Chagall’s painted floor cloth. After a few performances, Balanchine eliminated the floor cloth.
It was also my first performance in a world premiere, and, to this day, Firebird resonates in my heart and memory. Toward the end of the ballet, just as the monsters are about to destroy the Prince and his love (the Maiden), the Firebird comes to the rescue. Holding a golden sword aloft in her hands, she dashes across the stage, and, after an enormous leap, gives the weapon to the Prince. Maria Tallchief’s eyes flashed red and gold, and she whirled in a blur of piqué turns, riveting a circle around the Prince. He then slashes away with the sword at the monsters, knocking us left and right, till we collapse to the floor, vanquished.
Panting, we would lie on the floor, grateful for the respite. As if to an icon, the Prince bows to the Firebird in gratitude and obeisance, and, hand in hand, departs with his Maiden, both of them climbing and stepping over our monster bodies littering the stage, and leaving the Firebird alone. During what is called the berceuse in the music, she dances an exquisite solo in a golden follow spot.
This was my opportunity on the darkened stage floor. I would pillow my head in my arms, wrap myself in the haunting music, and, half dozing, prepare myself for a journey into the Firebird’s realm. She floated above me, the glow from the follow spot reflected on the artwork of Chagall’s extraordinary scenery—birds, bouquets of flowers, and trees in deep, rich colors. Depending on where Maria moved in her follow spot, Chagall’s colors and images appeared and receded, ghostly, taking on a movement and life of their own, art pulsating.
Maria covered her tawny Native American skin with gold glitter, highlighting her cheekbones, arms, and upper torso. She even glued gold dust to her toe shoes. Her Firebird became a mysterious, metaphysical force. As she glided in her dance, I imagined regret in her eyes. This mythic bird—not for her, the love of a human Prince. Maria’s performance evoked a feeling of ancientness, carrying the heavy weights and sorrows of thousands of years. You didn’t think small-time watching her. It was eons, a fairy tale, archetypal.
At the end of her solo, the Firebird swoops toward the monsters, forcing them to roll, crawl, and slither into the wings, clearing us off her stage. Offstage, we clamber to our feet to hurry for a costume change, to transform ourselves from monsters into Russian courtiers for the final scene.
On her deserted stage, the Firebird moves backward in a bourrée, and, fluttering, turns and glides off into the forest. The gold light irises down to nothing, and the scenery starts to move. I would remain, mesmerized, staring at the spot where she’d just vanished. The scenery’s movement brought me back to reality, and I frantically rolled into the wings rushing, late for costume change. Many others have danced Firebird, and beautifully, but for me, Maria was the Firebird.
Over two years later, mid-May 1952, Firebird highlighted our opening at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. Before the second performance, Balanchine burst into our dressing room in a rage, equipped with a big pair of scissors, followed by agitated members of the costume staff. He zigzagged among us in our crowded dressing room, cutting up the monster costumes. He ravaged the painted unitards that dressed our bodies and left intact only the varied feathered monster masks that encased our heads. Chunks and pieces of old Chagall costumes accumulated on the dressing-room floor. “Throw out! Throw out!” he stammered to the wardrobe crew, and stalked away. The scraps disappeared and were quickly replaced by tights and leotards—black, brown, and gray. Oh, what a delight! We hated wearing those unitards; they were old, moldy, thick, and stiff with cracked paint. Insects that had taken up residence in the interstices and crevices would sometimes crawl out on us. My dance mate in Firebird, Brooks Jackson, was allergic to something in the paint and would be covered with a rash after every performance. If Firebird was on the program, he protested like Job all day. That night, he danced a jig of joy. “Oh, Mary, thank God we’re rid of those costumes! They were killing me.” “What got into Balanchine?” I asked. Brooks knew all about it. He’d read it in the papers.
Marc Chagall had come to the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, seen our Firebird, perhaps in dress rehearsal, and launched a public controversy, the kind the French love. He published an open letter to Balanchine in the French newspaper Le Figaro. “The … costumes are an outrageous caricature … the harmony [between sets and costumes] is now completely broken … the sets … betrayed by the unfavorable lighting …” He issued an ultimatum: “I demand that you remove my name (in so far as the costumes of the Firebird are concerned) from all posters, programs, and advertising.”1
Infuriated, Balanchine had cut more than posters, programs, and advertisements. The Chagall costume scraps were never found. Like the floor cloth, they vanished.
Seventeen years after this incident, Balanchine restaged Firebird. It was 1970. In the revival, I was cast as the Prince to Gelsey Kirkland’s Firebird. Balanchine had some of the original Chagall designs recreated for the much larger stage of the New York State Theater, with Karinska executing her version of the costumes—cartoonish cutouts of Chagall’s birds, dinosaurs, trees, bushes, and forest beasts.
The buzz in the company was Gelsey was Balanchine’s latest muse. She was a teenager and already an electric performer, a standout in the company. He chose Gelsey precisely because she was young and unformed. “The Firebird … is one of God’s natural creatures.”2 Balanchine told me that Gelsey would dance it brilliantly as she had a spark of greatness. For the monster scene, he handed over the choreography to Jerome Robbins, and the dancers struggled to move in Karinska’s enormous, foam-rubber costumes. Perhaps dictated by the costumes, Jerry’s choreography was minimal and cutesy. Despite Gelsey’s star-quality performance, Balanchine’s new choreography lacked the visceral excitement, fire, and passion of the original. The ballet premiered May 28, and reviews were lukewarm at best. However, Gelsey had a triumph.
Regarding this new production of Firebird, I believe there was history at work. First, Gelsey was a budding muse, and he wanted to challenge and develop her. His experience with Maria Tallchief’s monumental success in the first Firebird cautioned him. Balanchine’s original Firebird molded and shaped Maria Tallchief, and her performance made the ballet a sensation, catapulting her to international stardom. He had had enough of celebrity stars in his life, to whom he had to kowtow and whom he had to please, and of cliques of fans who would attempt to dictate artistic policy: audiences chanting, “Tallchief! Tallchief!” as they had for the star Serge Lifar at the premiere of Balanchine’s ballet Apollon Musagète in 1928. He didn’t want this version to showcase and be a vehicle for a new star.
Secondly, he may have been making up to Chagall. Recreating Chagall’s designs and featuring scenery over choreography might have salved the wounds of his own discomfort over that earlier controversy in Paris. Balanchine said, “I didn’t want a woman. I didn’t want a personality or a passionate performance … I didn’t want people. I wanted Chagall.”
Amazingly, he did a third version some two years later, with Karin von Aroldingen as the Firebird, and he eviscerated even more the Firebird’s central place in the ballet. “In Firebird, everyone is a monster. It’s a strange world. All of a sudden, you can’t have a ballerina in a tutu come in and start turning.”
Perhaps he was erasing the image of Tallchief’s fabulous pirouettes. Karin was so encumbered by the new costume (yet again a new design), with wings and an elaborate headdress and trailing tail, that choreographic possibilities were almost nil. “I took the Firebird and made her a Chagall woman, like the figure on the front curtain, so now she looks like part of the mysterious world. Most important is the music accompanying Chagall—Chagall and Stravinsky. There is no Balanchine in there. You’re not supposed to do anything. Just let the costumes flow. It’s like a moving exhibit.”3
This version of Firebird did not even rate a mention in my diary. I thought, “Going to a museum, gazing at a Chagall painting, and listening to the Stravinsky music on headphones would be more interesting.” In any case, the entire evening of the Firebird premiere was eclipsed by the first performance of Violin Concerto, up there with Apollo and Agon as one of Balanchine’s greatest masterworks.
Looking at the recreated scenery for this new Firebird, I wondered, “Where is the old Chagall scenery?” and started asking around. Generally, the replies were, “Uhh. Umm. I don’t know. Maybe in a warehouse?” One night at a cocktail party, I blabbed out loud that in some warehouse Chagall’s original Firebird drops lay sleeping. “Oh my God,” piped up a voice. It was Campbell Wylie—a man knowledgable and passionate about visual arts—“you have Chagall’s backdrops, and they’re going to waste? Chagall painted those himself! You could cut them into picture-sized pieces, and sell them! You could probably raise hundreds of thousands of dollars. Maybe millions.”
Making a stab as an art broker, I asked our company manager, Betty Cage, and Balanchine, “Where are the original Chagalls?” Neither knew, and both said, “Ask Ronnie Bates.” Straight to our company stage manager, Ronnie, went I, and out of the side of his mouth, he mumbled, “Let me check it out.” About a month later, he informed me, “I found them and it’s a good thing. There was a lot of water damage from a leak in the warehouse. So we have them … and we don’t. They’re nothing but piles of moldy, wet, stuck-together, painted goo.”
Balanchine, in his previous life, had risen from the ashes of dozens of missed opportunities, failed marriages, broken love affairs, disappointments, unrealized dreams, and short-lived companies. One of the biggest disappointments had been Lincoln! Believing Lincoln’s grandiose promises—“Come to New York! We’ll have the greatest ballet company in the world!”—Balanchine and his manager/agent, Vladimir Dimitriev, had gotten off the boat in New York City on October 18, 1933, expecting to build a company for a theater with a school to feed it, only to be told by Lincoln, “We’re going to Hartford [Connecticut]!” They didn’t even know where Hartford was, somewhere in the provinces? They turned around, ready to go back to Europe. But time and circumstances sketched a different scenario, and now, some fifteen years and many adventures later, in 1948 at City Center, a company called New York City Ballet was formed. The dream becoming concrete.
Ultimately, by 1964, Balanchine would finally get from Lincoln precisely what Balanchine desired—his own company, made up of dancers trained from childhood at his School of American Ballet, performing in his theater, the New York State Theater in Lincoln Center.4 Balanchine molded that school and sculpted that company. The partnership helped Lincoln realize his dream, as well—a world-class ballet academy and a world-class company—but on Balanchine’s terms. The difference was (to Lincoln’s bile) that Balanchine ran the show and realized the visions, not Lincoln. In the early days, Balanchine would address the dancers, “We—Lincoln and I—want this, you know. We are family.” In the first decade, there was no guarantee that the company would survive. After Balanchine was safely ensconced in the New York State Theater, it became, “I want!”
The first international NYCB tour (by invitation from Covent Garden, England, in the summer of 1950), and subsequent tours arranged by the impresario Leon Leonidoff, kept NYCB alive for years. Leonidoff, a friend of Balanchine’s from the Diaghilev days, took a chance, to everyone’s benefit. Tours gave employment between short City Center seasons, allowing us to dance! dance! dance!—and eight performances a week, for months, during normally off-season periods, helped us evolve and solidify a style and reputation. Further, reports and reviews from the big European cities—Paris, London, Berlin, Hamburg, Milan, Amsterdam—drifted across the Atlantic and illuminated the New York audiences and critics to the jewel they had in their midst. We gained the Old World stamp of approval.
In 1950, ten months into my first year as a member of New York City Ballet, I was on my way to London. For a fledgling company that had started some two years before, and for this fifteen-year-old, it was incredible. I read a dozen books on the city of London and the history of England, and, dazed with delight, struggled to understand pence, shillings, pounds, and crowns.
My sister and I arriving in London, 1950 (image credit 4.1)
Balanchine was ecstatic. He was forty-six years old, having left London for America close to seventeen years earlier, and was returning to perform at the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden with his new ballet company. Lincoln Kirstein was triumphant. For years, he had been shooting his mouth off to English friends about his great plans for ballet in America, and now he could flaunt his accomplishments. We had the theater to ourselves for five weeks (later extended by a week), then a short layoff, followed by engagements in three other cities.
Balanchine delighted in informing me of the proper manner of drinking tea, as there was a possibility the company would be hosted at a tea ceremony by the queen. “Diaghilev taught me. You know, with silver tongs, take only one lump of sugar, not greedy. And when you stir sugar, only half a swirl. Bzztt. Now, no sound—slurp, slurp—when you drink tea. And never finish tea to the end. Always leave a little in cup.”
England in 1950 was still recovering from the devastation of war. Blackened shells of bombed-out buildings pockmarked the country. The company dancers were on their own to find accommodations, and I found a rooming house on Upper St. Martin’s Lane; it had neither heat nor hot water. We were issued ration stamps for everything—soap, toilet paper, candy, food. Back home, I ate meat all the time, relishing my bacon in the morning, hamburgers at lunch, and sirloin or pork roast at night. In London, there was no meat. A stagehand, overhearing me complain, whispered that there was a place near the theater, called Nick’s, run by a Greek, where you could get meat. It was horsemeat, a chewy chunk, bathed in Worcestershire sauce. Not so bad.