The New York City Ballet is a special place. It’s not just a
ballet company, it’s one of the most important cultural institutions in the
city, perhaps in the world. If that sounds boring, you aren’t paying attention.
The first time I went doesn’t really count. A quintessential
New York day in early summer, 95 degrees Fahrenheit and 90 percent humidity. A
woman I had met at a party a few weeks earlier had an extra ticket. She was
taking dance classes at a studio on Broadway, a block or two uptown from the
Beacon Theater. I was to meet her there. The room wasn’t air conditioned,
temperature well over a hundred. I nearly passed out from the heat as I watched
the streamlined bodies, limbs and torsos glistening with sweat, men and women
moving through the air in ways I couldn’t imagine as possible.
I had never seen
anything like this, another form of existence, a shocking form of existence.
Many of the people there
were professional dancers. My friend Carla wasn’t.
The performance we went to was Midsummer Night’s Dream. I had recently discovered the Mendelssohn music
and enjoyed it. I remember that early on, a girl in the corps fell. It was as
if I had been slapped—I had always thought that dancers couldn’t fall, that it
was physically impossible, as if they had glue on their toe shoes, or were
protected by some invisible net, as at the circus. This made me pay attention
more closely. Afterwards, Carla, knowledgeable
about dance, was relatively dismissive of the performance. This was 1977, the
height of the dance boom. Balanchine was still alive,
and most performances
were sold out.
Fast forward to 1989. Balanchine has been dead six years.
The company is getting highly negative press, even in Vanity Fair. It’s not clear this enterprise will continue much
longer. I decide I need to go back. And I am riveted.
The piece that captured me, that made me an NYCB and
Balanchine devotee for life, was Episodes,
one of Balanchine’s modern, leotard ballets. Webern’s music is astringent,
seemingly without a beat. I felt that if someone could choreograph to this
music, the least danceable music imaginable, and make it come alive, they were
indeed a genius. Balanchine could still do this, six years after his death,
thanks to his dancers. When I look at
the program now, which I still have, I see that the cast included Maria Calegari, Diana White, Albert
Evans, and Wendy Whelan. The thing is, Episodes
is more striking, more modern, than nearly anything being created in 2014.
None of this proves anything, really. Except that truly
great art, art that catches the eye and captures the soul, is eternal. This is
something far beyond the comprehension of those whose business is the marketing
of art. There is, after all, a difference between Rembrandt and Jeff
Koons.
