“ONLY GOD CREATES, I ASSEMBLE” (The Tablet 23 January 2004)
George Balanchine redefined classical ballet. Along with Igor Stravinsky he believed that creativity had divine roots.
George Balanchine was born in St Petersburg a hundred years ago this week. He ranks with Picasso and Stravinsky, with whom he collaborated, as one of the great artists of the twentieth century. He made more than 400 ballets, fundamentally reshaping the art. He crafted some of the century’s most memorable representations of women: sexy, sassy, rangy, commanding, yet highly feminine, a far cry from the fragile heroines of such nineteenth century ballets as Swan Lake and Giselle. Wearing only practice dress – Balanchine preferred a spare aesthetic – the dancers of the company he founded, New York City Ballet, devoured the stage, forging images as expressive of their time and place as the buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright.
Balanchine and Igor Stravinsky, his greatest collaborator, transformed the relationship between dance and music. Stravinsky loved ballet for its clarity and for setting itself ‘the tasks of beauty and nothing else’. For his part, Balanchine – an accomplished musician – insisted that dance should ‘show the music’, illuminating rather than merely decorating it. He believed that dance was its own justification and that it did not always need a storyline.
Balanchine left Russia in 1924 with a small group of fellow dancers from the Maryinsky Ballet to tour Western Europe. He did not return, instead joining Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Paris, where he met Stravinsky. They not only established an instant artistic rapport, but also shared a belief that creativity had its beginnings in God - in Balanchine’s phrase, “Only God creates, I assemble”. At the time they met, Stravinsky was rediscovering his need for religious faith. He immersed himself in the writings of the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, returned to his Orthodox faith and became a regular communicant.
Apollo, Balanchine and Stravinsky’s first great collaboration, was the fruit of the composer’s inner journey. The critic Richard Buckle described the score as ‘holy music’, and Balanchine’s choreographic images are equally profound. Apollo, the young god of music, is instructed by the muses of poetry, of mime, and of dance. The duet between Apollo and Terpsichore, the Muse of Dance, is one of the most eloquent in the ballet repertoire. They express their union with a finger touch, Balanchine deliberately evoking the touch of God and man on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling. The ballet is spare and lean, the choreography revealing the essence of the music.
Balanchine was fascinated by religious ritual. His uncle was the Archbishop of Tibilisi and as a boy, Balanchine took part in Orthodox liturgy, ‘playing church’ at home, and blessing objects in these private theatricals. There is a parallel here with another great choreographer, Frederick Ashton, former director of The Royal Ballet. Ashton served Mass as a boy for the Archbishop of Lima, an experience, which, he said, taught him the fundamentals of ritual, of proper timing, and of “the whole rightful measure of things.” Respect for gesture inspired Balanchine and Ashton with a lively sense of dance’s liturgical core and its ability to address the deepest questions.
Agon, part of the Royal Ballet’s forthcoming Balanchine programme, is a special kind of ritual. Agon – in Greek, a contest – is a racy twentieth century gloss on Renaissance court dances. The ballet is notable for another reason. For its first performance in 1957, Balanchine decided that Arthur Mitchell, New York City Ballet’s first black dancer, would partner Diana Adams in the ballet’s central pas-de-deux. One of the cast, Melissa Hayden, remembered, “It was really awesome to see a black hand touch a white skin. That’s where we were coming from in the fifties.” With Balanchine, sexual and racial equality were rehearsed on the ballet stage, long before they became accepted in American society.
Balanchine was not precious about his art, even calling himself a ‘circus man’. This was literally true. In 1942 Ringling Brothers Circus asked him to choreograph a ballet for its elephants. He agreed, as long as Stravinsky wrote the music. "What kind of music?" asked Stravinsky, "A polka," Balanchine replied. "For whom?" "Elephants." "How old?" "Young." "If they are very young, I'll do it.” The score's dedication reads: "For a young elephant." At the premiere in Madison Square Garden, Miss Modoc, the circus’s star elephant led a supporting cast of fifty elephants and fifty ballerinas, “all in fluffy pink.”
Balanchine’s The Prodigal Son, also part of the Royal Ballet’s programme, made soon after Apollo, powerfully characterises the returned son cradled in his father’s arms, everything else insignificant. But it is in one of his final works – Mozartiana – made in 1981, with death increasingly on his mind, that Balanchine particularly reveals himself. New York City Ballet’s Suzanne Farrell, who was Catholic, led the cast. Balanchine was deeply infatuated with Farrell. She resisted his advances, but rekindled his sense of the sacred. The curtain rises to Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus. Farrell spoke the words to Balanchine in rehearsal and they animate his choreography. Farrell opens her arms, palms upward, a pose from a statue of the Virgin at the nearby Catholic parish, which Balanchine knew Farrell attended. “I hovered about the stage in a series of simple quiet gestures of prayer”, Farrell remembers in her autobiography. “I was a metaphor for all the beauty in Balanchine’s soul. It was a hymn, an offering that could happen only in movement and music, not in words.”
George Balanchine died in 1983. Born in Tsarist Russia, he spent most of his life in New York. In his hands, the art of St Petersburg, his native city, came to express with great élan the style and pace of his adopted country.
Balanchine’s Agon, The Prodigal Son and Symphony in C at the Royal Opera House on 28th, 29th January and 4th, 19th, 21st, 23rd, 25th February.
.
George Balanchine redefined classical ballet. Along with Igor Stravinsky he believed that creativity had divine roots.
George Balanchine was born in St Petersburg a hundred years ago this week. He ranks with Picasso and Stravinsky, with whom he collaborated, as one of the great artists of the twentieth century. He made more than 400 ballets, fundamentally reshaping the art. He crafted some of the century’s most memorable representations of women: sexy, sassy, rangy, commanding, yet highly feminine, a far cry from the fragile heroines of such nineteenth century ballets as Swan Lake and Giselle. Wearing only practice dress – Balanchine preferred a spare aesthetic – the dancers of the company he founded, New York City Ballet, devoured the stage, forging images as expressive of their time and place as the buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright.
Balanchine and Igor Stravinsky, his greatest collaborator, transformed the relationship between dance and music. Stravinsky loved ballet for its clarity and for setting itself ‘the tasks of beauty and nothing else’. For his part, Balanchine – an accomplished musician – insisted that dance should ‘show the music’, illuminating rather than merely decorating it. He believed that dance was its own justification and that it did not always need a storyline.
Balanchine left Russia in 1924 with a small group of fellow dancers from the Maryinsky Ballet to tour Western Europe. He did not return, instead joining Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Paris, where he met Stravinsky. They not only established an instant artistic rapport, but also shared a belief that creativity had its beginnings in God - in Balanchine’s phrase, “Only God creates, I assemble”. At the time they met, Stravinsky was rediscovering his need for religious faith. He immersed himself in the writings of the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, returned to his Orthodox faith and became a regular communicant.
Apollo, Balanchine and Stravinsky’s first great collaboration, was the fruit of the composer’s inner journey. The critic Richard Buckle described the score as ‘holy music’, and Balanchine’s choreographic images are equally profound. Apollo, the young god of music, is instructed by the muses of poetry, of mime, and of dance. The duet between Apollo and Terpsichore, the Muse of Dance, is one of the most eloquent in the ballet repertoire. They express their union with a finger touch, Balanchine deliberately evoking the touch of God and man on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling. The ballet is spare and lean, the choreography revealing the essence of the music.
Balanchine was fascinated by religious ritual. His uncle was the Archbishop of Tibilisi and as a boy, Balanchine took part in Orthodox liturgy, ‘playing church’ at home, and blessing objects in these private theatricals. There is a parallel here with another great choreographer, Frederick Ashton, former director of The Royal Ballet. Ashton served Mass as a boy for the Archbishop of Lima, an experience, which, he said, taught him the fundamentals of ritual, of proper timing, and of “the whole rightful measure of things.” Respect for gesture inspired Balanchine and Ashton with a lively sense of dance’s liturgical core and its ability to address the deepest questions.
Agon, part of the Royal Ballet’s forthcoming Balanchine programme, is a special kind of ritual. Agon – in Greek, a contest – is a racy twentieth century gloss on Renaissance court dances. The ballet is notable for another reason. For its first performance in 1957, Balanchine decided that Arthur Mitchell, New York City Ballet’s first black dancer, would partner Diana Adams in the ballet’s central pas-de-deux. One of the cast, Melissa Hayden, remembered, “It was really awesome to see a black hand touch a white skin. That’s where we were coming from in the fifties.” With Balanchine, sexual and racial equality were rehearsed on the ballet stage, long before they became accepted in American society.
Balanchine was not precious about his art, even calling himself a ‘circus man’. This was literally true. In 1942 Ringling Brothers Circus asked him to choreograph a ballet for its elephants. He agreed, as long as Stravinsky wrote the music. "What kind of music?" asked Stravinsky, "A polka," Balanchine replied. "For whom?" "Elephants." "How old?" "Young." "If they are very young, I'll do it.” The score's dedication reads: "For a young elephant." At the premiere in Madison Square Garden, Miss Modoc, the circus’s star elephant led a supporting cast of fifty elephants and fifty ballerinas, “all in fluffy pink.”
Balanchine’s The Prodigal Son, also part of the Royal Ballet’s programme, made soon after Apollo, powerfully characterises the returned son cradled in his father’s arms, everything else insignificant. But it is in one of his final works – Mozartiana – made in 1981, with death increasingly on his mind, that Balanchine particularly reveals himself. New York City Ballet’s Suzanne Farrell, who was Catholic, led the cast. Balanchine was deeply infatuated with Farrell. She resisted his advances, but rekindled his sense of the sacred. The curtain rises to Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus. Farrell spoke the words to Balanchine in rehearsal and they animate his choreography. Farrell opens her arms, palms upward, a pose from a statue of the Virgin at the nearby Catholic parish, which Balanchine knew Farrell attended. “I hovered about the stage in a series of simple quiet gestures of prayer”, Farrell remembers in her autobiography. “I was a metaphor for all the beauty in Balanchine’s soul. It was a hymn, an offering that could happen only in movement and music, not in words.”
George Balanchine died in 1983. Born in Tsarist Russia, he spent most of his life in New York. In his hands, the art of St Petersburg, his native city, came to express with great élan the style and pace of his adopted country.
Balanchine’s Agon, The Prodigal Son and Symphony in C at the Royal Opera House on 28th, 29th January and 4th, 19th, 21st, 23rd, 25th February.
.
posted by Brendan McCarthy at 10:50 pm
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