Hello, dear readers —
I’m taking you back in time today. The year was 1964: LBJ was president, Barry Goldwater was doing far too well in the Republican primaries for anyone’s comfort, “My Guy” and “Can’t Buy Me Love” were at the top of the U.S. charts, and after five years of construction, the second stage of Lincoln Center was finished. The ballet theatre was ready.
The New York State Theater was the new home of New York City Ballet, which had been performing a few blocks down and over at New York City Center and was now ready to move into its brand new, $19.3 million dollar house ($161 million in today’s dollars), built on land made available by the razing of blocks and blocks of low-income housing.
To celebrate this milestone, Newsweek ran a cover story about George Balanchine, who was pictured on the cover as he so often was in publicity photos: surrounded by “his” women. The accompanying quote is “ballet is woman,” a famous Balanchine adage, but the angle of the story is more like: Ballet is Balanchine.
(I bought this magazine on ebay in 2018, when I was working on the book proposal for Turning Pointe. It was originally mailed to a Dr. James E. Goode, in Dallas, TX).
The tone of the article is as reverent as much of the contemporary coverage of Balanchine was, literally. He is a “demigod of the dance.” He is “omniscient, omnipotent… Olympian.”
“His dancers call him Mr. B, as if not to take his name in vain. Like a medieval king, this great artist rules his realm by divine right.” Lest you think Newsweek is alone in thinking Balanchine is basically royalty, later in that paragraph the man compares himself to the Pope. “My Guy,” indeed.
And like a lot of the coverage, with help from Balanchine himself, the article makes a very big deal of the women in Balanchine’s life, going so far as to line up photos of the five women he married. All ballerinas, most of them his employees. “He marries his materials,” one of his former wives is quoted as saying. “Each dancer Balanchine married, he made famous,” the article gushes. And then Balanchine brings it home: “I like my old wives. They all left me and they’re better off… I’m selfish. I don’t want children of my own. I want someone else to make them and then I take them for dancers.”
It’s very sixties. The women can’t possibly exist on their own, even the ones he didn’t marry. They are his women: he found them, he picked them, he taught them, he promoted them. He made them.
This is how we have been taught to talk about men in the arts and the “materials” they make their art on. They are the visionaries, the women are just a product of their vision. This way of talking about Balanchine, and the men who took the reins at City Ballet after him, persists. Unpunctured by the second wave of feminism that would explode about five years after this article was published, and, so far, by the #MeToo movement.
“If you marry a ballerina,” Balanchine told Newsweek, “you always know where she is.” (She’s at the theater).
Anyway, back to 2020, where things are… not great. The ballet world has been hit enormously hard by the closure of theatres and the cancellation of performances. Most dancers who have company contracts are now on unpaid leave, but are required to stay in dancing shape while they’re off — and it’s not like they can fall back on their other usual revenue streams like teaching or performing with smaller companies or in showcase performances. They’re stuck.
Some have started teaching ballet classes on Instagram and other streaming platforms, and while I’ve yet to try any, here are some I suspect are quite good:
Ballez Everywhere: The queer ballet company has a whole suite of classes available on YouTube.
Tiler Peck, NYCB Principal and James Whiteside and Isabella Boylston, ABT Principals: Are teaching ballet to thousands of people from their kitchens. Whiteside and Boylston are requesting donations for the Dancers’ Emergency Fund, which a lot of ABT dancers need right now.
Crystal Serrano, Dance Theater of Harlem: Will take you through some nice gentle stretches from her living room.
One last thing: I told you last week about Revelations, by Alvin Ailey. The Ailey company, like everyone else, is on unpaid leave right now. Their Iowa City performance was one of their last — if not their last — before they cancelled the rest of their tour. Here’s some of the company, dancing the first part of Revelations, together but apart. It’s beautiful.
That’s it from me this week. Take care of yourselves and each other. Thanks for reading.