Apollo’s Angels Read online

  Copyright © 2010 by Jennifer Homans All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Illustration credits are located beginning on page 641.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Homans, Jennifer. Apollo’s angels : a history of ballet / Jennifer Homans. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. eISBN: 978-0-679-60390-0

  1. Ballet—History. I. Title. GV1787.H58 2010 792.8—dc22 2010006945

  www.atrandom.com

  v3.1

  WAS researched and written over the course of a decade and draws on a lifetime spent in dance. I have incurred many debts: to people, places, books, and performances far too numerous to name here. I owe heartfelt thanks to them all.

  The idea for Apollo’s Angels grew out of conversations with Jerrold Seigel and Richard Sennett, whose own work and ideas convinced me that a cultural history of dance was worth writing. I have learned from many other historians along the way but have been especially influenced by the work of Paul Bénichou, Orlando Figes, Marc Fumaroli, James H. Johnson, Carl Schorske, Richard Wortman, and Frances Yates. In dance, I stand on the shoulders of many scholars and writers, including Joan Acocella, Arlene Croce, Robert Gottlieb, the late Wendy Hilton, Deborah Jowitt, Julie Kavanagh, Margaret M. McGowan, Richard Ralph, Nancy Reynolds, Tim Scholl, Roland John Wiley, and Marian Hannah Winter.

  I owe special thanks to Ivor Guest, a pioneer in scholarship on French ballet, who kindly invited me into his home and shared his research; to Clement Crisp, whose sharp injunction to avoid postmodern jargon was always to the fore; and to Alastair Macaulay and Jann Parry, who gave generously of their time and corresponded with me at length about ballet in Britain. Elizabeth Kendall’s work was always in my mind, and I am grateful for her expertise and close reading of many of these chapters. Lynn Garafola’s scholarly example and guidance are invaluable, and she too read and critiqued sections of the manuscript. In another key, I owe much to Philip Gossett, whose own pathbreaking work on opera has been an inspiration and who kindly read my chapter on Italian ballet. Anne Hollander taught me to see performers, and their clothes, in a new light. Judy Kinberg’s close reading of several chapters was invaluable.

  This book required travel, and I am grateful to the many scholars who guided my research in cities across Europe. In Copenhagen, Knud Arne Jürgensen shared his own research and extensive knowledge of the Danish Royal Library archives, and Erik Aschengreen generously offered advice. In Stockholm, Erik Näslund of the Swedish Dance Museum kindly gave assistance, and the late Regina Beck-Friis invited me to her home to discuss her work and historical reconstructions at the Drottningholm Theater. In Moscow, Elizabeth Souritz spent hours answering my questions about Soviet ballet, and I have also benefited greatly from correspondence and meetings with the Russian critic Poel Karp.

  In Paris, Martine Kahane pressed me to delve further into the Archives Nationales, and the late Francine Lancelot demonstrated the intricacies of baroque dance in her living room. Wilfride Piollet and Jean Guizerix talked with me at length about the history of ballet technique and showed me their reconstructions of nineteenth-century steps. The staff at the Paris Opera Library went out of their way to help, even taking me into the storage vaults where they pulled out boxes of old ballet shoes, including those of Marie Taglioni. In London, Kevin O’Day and Janine Limberg at the Royal Ballet patiently arranged for me to view company videotapes, and Francesca Franchi guided me through the Royal Opera House Archives. At the Rambert Dance Company Archives, Jane Pritchard generously stayed after hours to screen old clips of Ashton dances.

  To the archivists and librarians at the Jerome Robbins Dance Collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts I owe a deep and ongoing debt. They never tired of my requests or the long arc of my project, offering help at every stage. I thank them all, especially Madeleine Nichols, former curator of the collection, who graciously allowed me to work for long mornings even when the library was closed. Christopher Pennington, executive director of the Jerome Robbins Foundation and the Robbins Rights Trust, kindly gave me access to films of Robbins’s ballets.

  To my dance teachers I owe everything. I was fortunate to study with many of the best. Melissa Hayden and Suzanne Farrell were mentors, and their example and friendship taught me much of what I know about ballet. The influence of Jacques d’Amboise is everywhere in these pages; he kindly read sections of the manuscript, and I cherish his fierce, generous comments scrawled in the margins. I am also beholden to Maria Tallchief, Mimi Paul, Sonja Tyven, Robert Lindgren, Dinna Bjørn, Suki Schorer, Alonso King, Kazuko Hirabyashi, Francia Russell, and the late Stanley Williams, and to an older generation of teachers who first gave me a sense of the “pastness” of ballet: Alexandra Danilova, Felia Doubrovska, Antonina Tumkovsky, Hélène Dudin, and Muriel Stuart.

  Other dancers, colleagues, and friends have since taught me more. Merrill Brockway, Isabelle Fokine, Victoria Geduld, Rochelle Gurstein, Katie Glasner, Susan Gluck, Margo Jefferson, Allegra Kent, Lori Klinger, Robert Maiorano, Diane Solway, and Robert Weiss have all shaped my ideas. Thomas Bender and Herrick Chapman both read much of the book in draft. Travels in Greece with Yves-André Istel and Kathleen Begala put Apollo in my mind’s eye, and Mirjana Ciric’s artistic sensitivity and friendship have sustained me throughout. To Catherine Oppenheimer my debt is immense: we went through dancing together, and her insight has always pulled me back to what matters in ballet.

  My editor at Random House, Tim Bartlett, was attentive and patient, and the book benefited greatly from his intelligence; at Granta in Britain, Sara Holloway lent long-distance support. My agents, Sarah Chalfant and Scott Moyers of the Wylie Agency, have been friends and guardian angels every step of the way. The late Barbara Epstein of The New York Review of Books gave me my first opportunity to write about Balanchine and pressed me to think of new ways to write about dance.

  To Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, I owe more than I can say. When he appointed me the magazine’s dance critic in 2001, he was taking a chance: I was unpublished and unknown. He afforded me the opportunity to write about dance, and it is no accident that many of the themes in this book first took shape in his pages. He read Apollo’s Angels in manuscript and offered invaluable insights.

  My father, Peter Homans, read the first half of this book in draft but died unexpectedly before it was completed. His scholarship and intense intellectual curiosity, and his unswerving belief in the life of the imagination, have been my constant guides. My mother, who died shortly before the book came to completion, was the reason I danced. My children, Daniel and Nicholas, have lived with Apollo’s Angels most of their lives and have always gracefully shared my enthusiasms and forgiven my absences.

  My deepest gratitude of all goes to my husband, Tony. His love and devotion—to me, to what is right, to seeing and writing clearly, and to the importance of dance—have been my foundation. When I was almost finished writing the book, he was struck with a devastating illness. Even then, he pressed me to finish. He has read every word of this book and never tired of my passions and uncertainties. Apollo’s Angels is dedicated to him.

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction Masters and Traditions

  PART ONE

  FRANCE AND THE CLASSICAL ORIGINS OF BALLET

  Chapter 1 Kings of Dance

  Chapter 2 The Enlightenment and the Story Ballet

  Chapter 3 The French Revolution in Ballet

&
nbsp; Chapter 4 Romantic Illusions and the Rise of the Ballerina

  Chapter 5 Scandinavian Orthodoxy: The Danish Style

  Chapter 6 Italian Heresy: Pantomime, Virtuosity, and Italian Ballet

  PART TWO

  LIGHT FROM THE EAST: RUSSIAN WORLDS OF ART

  Chapter 7 Tsars of Dance: Imperial Russian Classicism

  Chapter 8 East Goes West: Russian Modernism and Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes

  Chapter 9 Left Behind? Communist Ballet from Stalin to Brezhnev

  Chapter 10 Alone in Europe: The British Moment

  Chapter 11 The American Century I: Russian Beginnings

  Chapter 12 The American Century II: The New York Scene

  Epilogue: The Masters Are Dead and Gone

  Photo Insert

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Illustration Credits

  the intensely intellectual milieu of the University of Chicago, where both my parents worked. I’m not sure why my mother started me in dance, except that she liked to go to performances, and ballet perhaps also appealed to her southerner’s appreciation of etiquette and form. I was enrolled at a local ballet school run by an old couple who had danced with one of the Russian ballet troupes that toured America in the immediate postwar years. Theirs was not, however, your average dance school. There were no annual recitals or Nutcrackers, no pink tutus with matching tights. He had multiple sclerosis and taught from a wheelchair—patiently, exasperatedly, describing steps in intricate verbal detail as we tried, with his wife’s help, to put them into movement. For him, ballet was something serious and urgent, even when it was also—and he communicated this too—a great joy.

  The teacher who set me on the path to the profession was a physics doctoral student at the University of Chicago who had himself once been a professional dancer. Ballet, he made me see, was a system of movement as rigorous and complex as any language. Like Latin or ancient Greek, it had rules, conjugations, declensions. Its laws, moreover, were not arbitrary; they corresponded to the laws of nature. Getting it “right” was not a matter of opinion or taste: ballet was a hard science with demonstrable physical facts. It was also, and just as appealingly, full of emotions and the feelings that come with music and movement. It was blissfully mute, like reading. Above all, perhaps, there was the exhilarating sense of liberation that came when everything worked. If the coordination and musicality, muscular impulse and timing were exactly right, the body would take over. I could let go. But with dancing, letting go meant everything: mind, body, soul. This is why, I think, so many dancers describe ballet, for all its rules and limits, as an escape from the self. Being free.

  It was at George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet in New York that I first began to glimpse the world that had made ballet what it was. Our teachers were Russians: exotic and glamorous ballerinas from another era. Felia Doubrovska (1896–1981) had been born in Russia in the nineteenth century and had danced at the Maryinsky Theater in Imperial St. Petersburg in the years before the Russian Revolution. She later joined the Ballets Russes in Europe and eventually settled in New York City to teach, but we all knew that some part of her was still elsewhere, in a world far from ours. Everything about her was different. She wore heavy makeup, long false eyelashes, and sickly sweet perfumes, and I remember her bejeweled and dressed in a deep royal blue leotard with matching scarf, chiffon skirt, and pink tights that showed off her unusually long and still impressively muscular legs. Her movements, even when she wasn’t dancing, were gracious and ornamented, elegantly conveyed in ways that we American teenagers could never quite replicate.

  There were others too: Muriel Stuart, an English dancer who had performed with the legendary Anna Pavlova; Antonina Tumkovsky and Hélène Dudin, who were both from Kiev and had emigrated to the States after the Second World War (Dudin’s feet were crippled; it was rumored the Soviets had broken them); and perhaps most striking of all, Alexandra Danilova, who had fled Leningrad in 1924 with Balanchine. Danilova was like Doubrovska: a former Imperial dancer inclined to pastel chiffons, spidery false eyelashes, and heavy perfume. She had been an orphan in Russia, but we never for a moment doubted her aristocratic pedigree. She coached us on carriage and comportment, not just in dance class but also in life—no T-shirts, slumping, or street food—reminding us that our training and chosen profession set us apart; dancers do not look like “the rest.” All of this seemed to me at once perfectly normal and extremely alien. Normal because we knew that these were the masters and we understood that they had something important to convey. Besides, there was something about standing so straight, about the body working so beautifully, and about our dedication and intense desire to dance that did set us apart. We really were, or so we thought, an elect.

  But the whole thing was also alien: nothing was ever really explained, and the teaching seemed offensively authoritarian. We were expected to imitate and absorb, and above all to obey: “please to do” was all the Russians could muster, and “why” was met with bemusement or flatly ignored. We were forbidden to study dance elsewhere (one of the few rules we blithely ignored). None of this sat well. We were children of the 1960s and this insistence on authority, duty, and loyalty seemed outrageously old-fashioned and out of place. But I was too interested in what these Russians were doing to quit or go away. Finally, after years of study and watching, I realized our teachers were not just teaching steps or imparting technical knowledge, they were giving us their culture and their tradition. “Why” was not the point and the steps were not just steps; they were living, breathing evidence of a lost (to us) past—of what their dances were like but also of what they, as artists and people, believed in.

  Ballet, it seemed, was another world. I had queued (with my mother) to see the Bolshoi and the Kirov; stood squashed in standing room at the back of the Metropolitan Opera House to see American Ballet Theatre and Baryshnikov; crowded into class to watch Rudolf Nureyev execute a ballet barre. And it was not just ballet. New York at the time was a dynamic center of dance, and we studied and saw everything: Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor; jazz, flamenco, tap; the small experimental troupes that performed in the city’s studios and lofts. But to me there was one overriding reason to dance: the New York City Ballet. These were the final years of Balanchine’s pathbreaking career, and the artistic and intellectual vitality of his company was electrifying. We knew that what he was doing was important, and we never for a moment questioned the primacy of ballet. It was not old or “classical” or dated; to the contrary, dance was more intensely alive and present than anything we knew or could imagine. It filled our lives, and we analyzed its steps and styles and debated every rule and practice with almost religious zeal.

  In the ensuing years, as I joined the profession and danced with different companies and choreographers, I learned that the Russians were not the only ones. I worked and performed with Danes and with French and Italian dancers, tried the Cecchetti method (developed by an Italian ballet master), and attempted to unravel the intricacies of the syllabus set by Britain’s Royal Academy of Dance. There were other Russians too, Soviet dancers whose technique differed sharply from that of Doubrovska and the tsar’s former dancers. It was a curious situation: the language and technique of ballet appeared ideal and universal, yet these national schools were so utterly distinct. Americans trained by Balanchine, for example, raised their hip in arabesque and engaged in all manner of distortions to achieve speed and a long, aerodynamic line. British dancers were horrified and considered these distortions in poor taste; they favored a more restrained, reserved style. The Danes had pristine footwork and quick, light jumps, achieved in part by dancing neatly toward the balls of the feet, but if you didn’t put your heels down you would never gain the soaring elevation and leaps that characterized the Soviets.

  The differences were not merely aesthetic: they felt different, and moving this way instead of that could make a dancer, for a moment, into a different kind of person. Swan
Lake was a world apart from Agon. It was impossible to master all of these national variations, and as dancers we had to make choices. To further confuse matters, each school also had its heretics: dancers who had discovered some better way of organizing the body and had split off with their own coterie of followers. Whom you studied with—which master or sect you followed—determined who you were and what you wanted to become. Sorting through these debates, with their Jesuitical distinctions and knotty interpretative (and personal) dilemmas, was intensely absorbing—and very physical. It was only later that I began to wonder how and why these national differences had come to be. Did they have a history? What was it?

  In those days, I never thought of ballet as anything but contemporary, a here-and-now art. Even the oldest of ballets are of necessity performed by young people and take on the look of their generation. Besides, unlike theater or music, ballet has no texts and no standardized notation, no scripts or scores, and only the most scattered written records; it is unconstrained by tradition and the past. Balanchine encouraged this idea. In countless interviews he explained that ballets are here and gone, like flowers or butterflies, and that dance is an ephemeral art of the present; carpe diem—we might all be dead tomorrow. The point, he seemed to be saying, was not to bring back old musty dances such as Swan Lake: it was to “make it new” (Ezra Pound). For the dancers, however, this was a paradoxical injunction: history was all around us—in our teachers and the dances, but also in Balanchine’s own ballets, many of which were suffused with memories and a Romantic ethos. But we nonetheless made a cult of never looking back, of setting our sights resolutely on the present.

  And yet it is because ballet has no fixed texts, because it is an oral and physical tradition, a storytelling art passed on, like Homer’s epics, from person to person, that it is more and not less rooted in the past. For it does have texts, even if these are not written down: dancers are required to master steps and variations, rituals and practices. These may change or shift over time, but the process of learning, performing, and passing them on remains deeply conservative. When an older dancer shows a step or a variation to a younger dancer, the ethics of the profession mandate strict obedience and respect: both parties rightly believe that a form of superior knowledge is passing between them. I never for a moment, for example, questioned the steps or style Danilova conveyed when she taught us variations from The Sleeping Beauty: we clung to her every movement. The teachings of the master are revered for their beauty and logic, but also because they are the only connection the younger dancer has to the past—and she knows it. It is these relationships, the bonds between master and student, that bridge the centuries and give ballet its foothold in the past.