Mr. B's poetic reality

By Lewis Segal

Sept. 26, 2004 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

George Balanchine would have turned 100 last January, and in celebration of that centennial, this whole year in the ballet world has been a kind of jubilee, with festivals, symposiums, telecasts, tours -- even a new Boris Eifman ballet -- keeping the man’s image dancing before our eyes.

But Balanchine needs no hoopla to confirm his primacy in 2004. His choreography, the troupe he cofounded, his vision of classical dance have all gone beyond triumph to become emblems of our culture: evidence that America in the last half of the 20th century could radically transform and enrich perhaps the most conservative of all the performing arts.

Balanchine’s company, New York City Ballet, comes to the Southland on Wednesday for two weeks of performances that artistic director Peter Martins says will remind us of how contemporary Balanchine’s neoclassic body of work now seems compared with the formerly dominant approaches to ballet that have grown increasingly outmoded.

“When I arrived in this country about 30 years ago, Balanchine’s aesthetic was an acquired taste,” Martins explains. “Little by little, it became accepted and sought after. Now it’s much more than an accepted technique. It’s become in many people’s minds the way to dance.”

You can explore the process in detail in the many books about Balanchine, or online, and learn how he was born Georgi Balanchivadze in St. Petersburg of Georgian parents; how his name was Frenchified by impresario Sergei Diaghilev in the 1920s, when he achieved his first widespread renown as a choreographer; and how he came to the U.S. in the 1930s, after Diaghilev’s death, and began building an ensemble that would evolve a decade later into New York City Ballet.

“Serenade,” his first creation in America, represents a different kind of historical document, something you might call a reality ballet. When an odd number of dancers showed up for rehearsal, that’s how many ended up in the finished work. When a dancer arrived late, or accidentally fell, he incorporated those events too.

Look at “Serenade” now -- audiences will have three opportunities to do that during the City Ballet engagements in Orange County and downtown L.A. -- and the dance’s documentary and imagined actions all seem to occur in a gauzy dream. You could argue that its very theme is the poetic transformation of reality. In the opening section, for instance, the women’s corps stands with feet parallel (a normal, everyday stance) and then those feet suddenly, miraculously, open out into one of the stylized classical positions that Balanchine learned at the Imperial Theatre School in St. Petersburg.

Indeed, you might consider Balanchine’s whole career a statement about the poetic transformation of reality. “He always said that poetry was the highest form of art,” recalls Maria Tallchief, the American star ballerina who was the third of his four wives, from 1946 to 1951.

“The way he explained things to dancers -- asking us to imagine looking over a balustrade into a lake, for example -- it made you utilize your whole body, and the effect became magical. The important thing was to know exactly what he wanted, his approach to things -- the sense of poetry.”

Yet the secret of Balanchine’s enduring power as a choreographer, and the essence of his style, arguably lies in the expression of that sensibility through what every Balanchine dancer recognizes as his profound musicality. “It’s beyond smart,” says current City Ballet star Nikolaj Hubbe. “The music and steps are glued together so inevitably, there are no two ways around it. There’s a completely natural, organic flow through the body, even if it’s hard technically.”

Former company ballerina Merrill Ashley, now on the rehearsal staff at New York City Ballet, still savors “the special pleasure you got when he thought up something that suited your body and the music so perfectly. Sometimes you couldn’t believe how well the steps fit the music. Everything he did had visual poetry.”

American culture’s influence

But let’s step back for a moment to correct a prevalent misunderstanding about Balanchine’s musicality. Because he was trained as a classical dancer and worked with classical music for most of his career, it’s widely assumed that he simply expanded and abstracted the heritage of Marius Petipa (choreographer of “The Sleeping Beauty” and other 19th century ballet masterworks).

That assumption, however, ignores the effect of American culture on Balanchine’s style, his creative experiments on Broadway (“On Your Toes,” with its groundbreaking “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” jazz ballet) and in Hollywood (“The Goldwyn Follies” and “I Was an Adventuress,” movies in which he enhanced the stylization of ballet with inventive film effects). Above all, making him merely Petipa’s artistic heir ignores his fascination with the syncopations of pop music.

“He loved jazz,” declares Arthur Mitchell, a former Balanchine dancer best known as cofounder and artistic director of Dance Theatre of Harlem. “That’s often what’s missing when you see foreign companies dance his ballets. He had an eye to see the unique quality of each dancer, and he learned to use the speed, energy, physical freedom and sense of rhythm he found in America.”

Mitchell, Martins and other Balanchine specialists find jazz influences underpinning even such classical choreographies as “Divertimento No. 15” (to Mozart) and “La Valse” (to Ravel). But these influences became more overt in Balanchine’s collaborations with Igor Stravinsky, another master of neoclassicism with an underappreciated love of jazz.

Legendary ballerina Alicia Alonso worked with Balanchine at American Ballet Theatre in the 1940s, before she founded National Ballet of Cuba, and remembers that the choreographer wanted her to play with the music when she danced his “Apollo.” But she found the Stravinsky score “very hard to understand,” she says. “So he would take my arm, mark the time for me with his fingers, and help me work it out.”

Pressing Stravinsky’s pulse into her veins, Balanchine made Alonso into one more convert, and she still carries his lessons with her (“Good things you don’t forget”). In such encounters, he accomplished his revolution quietly, dancer by dancer, work by work, until this year, more than 100 companies worldwide have requested his ballets, according to Barbara Horgan.

Balanchine’s personal assistant during his lifetime and now the managing director of the George Balanchine Trust, Horgan licenses his works and arranges for them to receive authoritative stagings. Balanchine died in 1983, and there’s a touch of irony to all the current interest in his choreography, since -- as Horgan points out -- “he always said that his ballets wouldn’t last 20 years after his death. And he didn’t care. His satisfaction was being able to choreograph as long as he could.”

Those privileged to dance for the ballet icon referred to as Mr. B still recall with wonder the speed and surety of a Balanchine rehearsal. “It was amazing to be in the room when he was creating things,” says Helgi Tomasson, who went on to become artistic director of San Francisco Ballet. “He knew exactly what he wanted, and I had to concentrate to keep up with him.”

“How easily the steps came to him,” Alonso confirms. “But when you started performing the ballets, that’s when you realized you were doing something wonderful.”

Gone are the days

Today nearly all the dancers in New York City Ballet are too young to have met or worked with Balanchine, so a gulf inevitably exists between them and their predecessors. “I think about him every day,” says current principal Wendy Whelan, “and I’ve always wondered whether he would like me and what he would say to me. It’s taken me 20 years to feel that I have a real, honest grip on his choreography. And in that time, I’ve gone from an emphasis on athleticism to more of a spiritual quality -- you never stop growing in his work or seeing something new.”

“There’s a strange stigma to my generation” of Balanchine dancers, Hubbe says. “We feel that somehow we were never ordained by the master himself, and I find myself asking how to keep the works alive. How do I connect with the feelings that they have? It’s such a personal thing.”

Martins acknowledges that young artists face the challenge of dancing Balanchine in a new way. “They get my approval and not his, and there’s a big difference,” he says. “But I can’t believe how good these kids are -- much better than when I danced. It’s their job and achievement to perform his ballets they way he envisioned them but very seldom got to see.

“He was a true modernist, and his greatest fear was to be considered old-fashioned. So to dance Balanchine the way he wished, you have to articulate every movement with great precision but without taking away the spontaneity of the moment. It has to be alive, it cannot be merely correct. Everything has to be energized. And that kind of dancing is never dated.”

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Speaking of Balanchine

“Even when he was dying, he had a tiny little radio next to him in the hospital, and he was moving his fingers to the music. I asked him, ‘George, what are you doing?’ And he said, ‘I am making steps.’ ” -- Maria Tallchief, ex-wife and former star ballerina

“I think when you see a Balanchine ballet, you have to be changed for the better. You just can’t see something like that and go out in the world and not be inspired or blessed or enriched or willing to improve.” -- Suzanne Farrell, former ballerina and major Balanchine muse

“The first time I saw his work, I couldn’t sleep for several nights. He was 10 heads higher than any Russian choreographer working at that time, and everyone was shocked by the freshness of his ideas.” -- Oleg Vinogradov, Russian choreographer and former artistic director of the Kirov Ballet

“The ideal Balanchine dancer is a conglomeration of all the women he worked with. They’re every size and shape, but they all have a certain sophistication in their presentation.” -- Wendy Whelan, New York City Ballet principal dancer

“His ballets mean different things to different people -- your imagination is allowed to run free -- but they always have an energy, dynamism and incredible feats of expertise that make them emotionally involving to watch.” -- Merrill Ashley, ballet mistress at New York City Ballet and former ballerina

“He would always work it out musically before he did the choreography. Everything would evolve out of that....He said to me, ‘You don’t dance to the music, you are the music.’ ” -- Arthur Mitchell, Director of Dance Theatre of Harlem and former New York City Ballet dancer

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Balanchine on video

“George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker”

New York City Ballet

Released by Warner Bros. Family Entertainment, 1993

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream”

Pacific Northwest Ballet

Opus Arte Media Productions, 2001 (DVD only)

“Choreography by George Balanchine”

“Tzigane,” Andante from “Divertimento No. 15” and “The Four Temperaments”

New York City Ballet

Released by Nonesuch Records, 1995

“Choreography by George Balanchine”

“Chaconne” and “Prodigal Son”

New York City Ballet

Released by Nonesuch Records, 1995

“Choreography by George Balanchine”

“Robert Schumann’s Davidsbundlertanze”

New York City Ballet

Released by Nonesuch Records, 1995

“Choreography by George Balanchine”

“Stravinsky Violin Concerto” and selections from “Jewels”

New York City Ballet

Released by Nonesuch Records, 1996

“Balanchine Celebration,” Part One

Selections from “Apollo,” “Scherzo a la Russe” (complete), “Square Dance,” “Theme and Variations,” “Union Jack,” “Vienna Waltzes” and “Walpurgisnacht Ballet”

New York City Ballet

Released by Nonesuch Records, 1996

“Balanchine Celebration,” Part Two

Selections from “Agon,” “Stars and Stripes,” “Western Symphony” and “Who Cares?”

New York City Ballet

Released by Nonesuch Records, 1996

“Suzanne Farrell: Elusive Muse”

Released by Winstar, 1997

“Dancing for Mr. B -- Six Balanchine Ballerinas”

Released by Nonesuch Records, 1995 (VHS only)

“Balanchine,” “American Masters” biography, 1984

Released by Kultur Home Video, 2004