Speaker 1: When Elizabeth Kendall was in her early twenties, she didn't
Speaker 1: think there would be anything for her in a balannging ballet.
Speaker 2: And I thought it would be old fashioned because it
Speaker 2: was ballet, and the ballet in my childhood was old fashioned.
Speaker 2: So I resisted going to the New York City Ballet
Speaker 2: for quite some time, sort of a decent amount of time.
Speaker 1: It was the nineteen seventies. Elizabeth was a dance writer
Speaker 1: in New York. She was young, ballet was old. She
Speaker 1: loved postmodern, avant garde dance. She believed art should be challenging, angry,
Speaker 1: Even good art questioned what came before it exposed hypocrisy.
Speaker 1: She hadn't been in New York long, and she was
Speaker 1: still finding her way as a writer and as a person.
Speaker 1: She was trying to move past a family tragedy. Her
Speaker 1: mother had recently died in a car accident.
Speaker 2: I was the driver of the car that killed my mother.
Speaker 2: So a lot of stuff to bear, a lot of
Speaker 2: healing that had to go on. But I think a
Speaker 2: healthy psyche heels itself by numbing itself as much as possible.
Speaker 1: Now, two years later, she was in New York writing
Speaker 1: about dance another critic told her she had to see Balangine,
Speaker 1: so she finally dragged herself to the New York State
Speaker 1: Theater to see Balanjin's Ramonda variations. Elizabeth had a press
Speaker 1: seat and a perfect view. The lights went down and
Speaker 1: the music began, and.
Speaker 2: I just remember a unique kind of orchestral sound, harps
Speaker 2: and flutes and strings mingling, so it sounds a little
Speaker 2: like Heaven might sound.
Speaker 1: At first glance, it was classic traditional ballet, a man
Speaker 1: and a woman dancing a pot of da many women
Speaker 1: on point wearing pink and blue tutus that flounced like
Speaker 1: clouds as they moved.
Speaker 2: But what I saw in the stage wasn't anything like
Speaker 2: the ballet from my young childhood. This wasn't about old manners.
Speaker 2: There were these people jumping and leaping and whirling around
Speaker 2: in formation that animated this stage as a sort of
Speaker 2: magic box that manufactured volume and excitement. The music and
Speaker 2: the ballet steps glomed together to make us fear in
Speaker 2: which everything was alive, and the effect was of three
Speaker 2: D music, music that surrounded you and you were inside it.
Speaker 2: And I remember very distinctly feeling in the audience this
Speaker 2: is a party, and I'm a guest, I've been invited,
Speaker 2: and for some reason that thought was terribly moving and
Speaker 2: terribly inclusive, and the thing came over me. This is
Speaker 2: a gift, this is joy, this is celebration. I suddenly
Speaker 2: realized not only that this was worth returning to again
Speaker 2: and again because something had reached me in the soul,
Speaker 2: but it also let me know that art did not
Speaker 2: have to be stern and challenging. Art could be something
Speaker 2: that was purely nourishing and purely exhilarating, that was ecstatic
Speaker 2: and tragic at the same time.
Speaker 1: After that night, Elizabeth started going to balancing ballets a lot.
Speaker 2: But I would go back and I would experiment a little.
Speaker 2: I would go to the theater and the lights would
Speaker 2: go down, and I would say, Okay, I'm going to
Speaker 2: give you my mood. I'm going to give you all
Speaker 2: these troubles and you do something with it, said I
Speaker 2: to the stage, and then I would walk out and
Speaker 2: I felt like somebody had rinsed me. That sounds suspiciously
Speaker 2: like baptism talk, but it's all to say that I
Speaker 2: was in fact receiving something that I deeply needed, and
Speaker 2: I hadn't known what form I needed it. In a
Speaker 2: some kind of a ceremony, some kind of a ritual,
Speaker 2: kind of healing.
Speaker 1: From my heart podcasts in Rococoa Punch. This is the
Speaker 1: Turning Room of Mirrors America Lance Part two, Ritual Healing.
Speaker 2: Balancing was not a guy who put on airs. So
Speaker 2: when I began to see the New York City Ballet,
Speaker 2: I would sometimes run into Balancing at a fruit stand
Speaker 2: on the street in the Upper West Side where he lived,
Speaker 2: and I would like to give a little bow, and
Speaker 2: he would give an exaggeratedly courteous bow because he was
Speaker 2: an admirer of women.
Speaker 1: That was the extent of their interaction until she was
Speaker 1: on assignment for the Ford Foundation. She got the chance
Speaker 1: to interview him one on one.
Speaker 2: And I dressed up to look nice, and there I
Speaker 2: was presenting myself at his office at the New York
Speaker 2: State Theater. And he was very courtly. He was casually
Speaker 2: but beautifully dressed, a gentleman, and you could see that
Speaker 2: he moved well. He was light on his feet.
Speaker 1: Elizabeth sat down with Balancing in his office.
Speaker 2: He was interested in just having a young, attractively dressed,
Speaker 2: bursting with nerves and vitality, person of the female presentation
Speaker 2: in front of him, and he just talked. And the
Speaker 2: first thing he said was, so, what we have to
Speaker 2: talk about is boring, yes, And I said, oh, mister Valancine,
Speaker 2: I agree, it's going to be boring. And I don't
Speaker 2: really want to even take your time. I don't need
Speaker 2: this interview horribly, and I can leave. And he said, no, no, no,
Speaker 2: He said, we do interview and then we talk. He
Speaker 2: really thought about questions and answered I'd gotten to the end.
Speaker 2: I said, okay, that's the last question. And he said,
Speaker 2: do you know what I did in the revolution And
Speaker 2: I said no, no, I don't. And he said what
Speaker 2: I did to eat? He said, I sewed saddles and
Speaker 2: he showed me the sewing gestures. He sewed leather saddles
Speaker 2: together for horses.
Speaker 1: Balanjinge started to tell Elizabeth the story of his life.
Speaker 1: He told a tale that felt like folklore from a
Speaker 1: place in time, far from the man sitting with her
Speaker 1: in his office in New York in nineteen eighty. This
Speaker 1: encounter would launch Elizabeth down a path of deep exploration
Speaker 1: into Balancine's life. She learned to write fluently in Russian
Speaker 1: and travel to Saint Peteg to piece together a picture
Speaker 1: of how this man came to popularize ballet in America,
Speaker 1: how he created work that would so deeply move her
Speaker 1: in a theater in New York that it helped her
Speaker 1: heal after trauma. This is that story. Balancine was born
Speaker 1: in nineteen oh four. His name was Georgy Melatanovich Balanshevatza.
Speaker 1: Gyorgy lived in Saint Petersburg, Russia. From the beginning, he
Speaker 1: was steeped in music. His mom played piano, his dad
Speaker 1: was a Georgian opera singer and composer. But they had
Speaker 1: limited resources.
Speaker 2: Then the extraordinary event happened that they won a lot
Speaker 2: of money, a fortune in a lottery. Or that's the story.
Speaker 2: It can't exactly be proved.
Speaker 1: Balanchine's family rose to a sort of merchant skilled class,
Speaker 1: one that required a certain level of wealth.
Speaker 2: So Balancine's childhood was privileged. She had a nanny, and
Speaker 2: then the father, who didn't have any idea what to
Speaker 2: do with all this money, lost it all because he
Speaker 2: listened to people. He gave him bad advice, and which
Speaker 2: meant that the Valanchines gave up their city apartment and
Speaker 2: had no more money.
Speaker 1: They moved to the forests of Finland, and they settled
Speaker 1: in a datcha or a summerhouse. They started to live
Speaker 1: in the summerhouse year round. Even through the harsh winners
Speaker 1: in this remote area, Valancine's mother worried about her kid's education.
Speaker 1: That's when she thought of the Imperial Theater School, which
Speaker 1: included the Czar's School of Ballet. It would be a
Speaker 1: chance that of free education.
Speaker 2: The Imperial Theater School was directly managed as part of
Speaker 2: the Tsar's household, and the students had some contact with
Speaker 2: the rural family, you know, with teas, and they would
Speaker 2: sometimes visit backstage or whatever.
Speaker 1: At the time, being a ballerina often meant more than
Speaker 1: just being a dance.
Speaker 2: Ballet was a very strange beast in Imperial Saint Petersburg
Speaker 2: because it was both an art form and an erotic
Speaker 2: market for the grandees and the nobles who attended the
Speaker 2: show and would pick out their mistresses from the dancers
Speaker 2: on the stage. Saint Petersburg, in terms of its social
Speaker 2: organization was much like Paris, so it had a demi monde,
Speaker 2: which in Russian is called half existence are half light,
Speaker 2: which means that a wealthy man or a nobleman, well
Speaker 2: born might have two households, two lives, two sets of restaurants,
Speaker 2: two sets of clothing, two banks. It was accepted to
Speaker 2: have another shadow wife.
Speaker 1: Being a shadow wife could give a dancer status or
Speaker 1: financial security. So Balancine's mother wanted her eldest daughter to
Speaker 1: become a ballet star.
Speaker 2: It's funny to think of a mother wanting her daughter
Speaker 2: to enter into this illicit other world. But this world
Speaker 2: offered its own rewards.
Speaker 1: To enter this world, dancers started training his children. Balanchine's
Speaker 1: sister went into audition, and Balanjing tagged along. When they
Speaker 1: got there, though, he was pulled into the audition process
Speaker 1: and something about him stood out to the judges. When
Speaker 1: he was walking in a line of boys, a judge
Speaker 1: singled him out and had him walk alone.
Speaker 2: The sister did not get accepted into the school.
Speaker 1: But Balanjing did. He was only nine years old.
Speaker 2: Which was very confusing, no doubt for a nine year old,
Speaker 2: because he knew how much his older sister wanted the
Speaker 2: post and he got it, and he didn't want it
Speaker 2: at all.
Speaker 3: He hated dancing, and just like that, George Balanjin was
Speaker 3: dropped into the world of ballet.
Speaker 2: His mother dealing with her own disappointment about the daughter,
Speaker 2: and the daughter's disappointment left him there because it was
Speaker 2: a week before the school year started, and he didn't
Speaker 2: expect to be left, and I think that marked his
Speaker 2: entire life.
Speaker 1: Balanjing wasn't happy. He even ran away to his aunt's
Speaker 1: house during his first weeks at the boarding school, but
Speaker 1: he was returned to the school and all the intensity
Speaker 1: that their ballet training required. The students woke early every
Speaker 1: morning to the sound of a bell. They were rushed
Speaker 1: out of bed. They didn't even take the time to
Speaker 1: make their beds. That was left for the servants. They'd
Speaker 1: have a quick wash in cold water, put on their uniforms,
Speaker 1: and add another bell. Line up for inspection.
Speaker 2: They never went out except for one hour a day.
Speaker 2: They walked around the block.
Speaker 1: They took the walk in two lines, their one chance
Speaker 1: to see the outside world. From ten to eleven thirty,
Speaker 1: Balanchine started the day with ballet class. Boys and girls
Speaker 1: were separated, boys on the higher floor in front of
Speaker 1: a long wall of mirrors opposite the bar. Valanchine said
Speaker 1: he spent a year learning how the foot touches the
Speaker 1: floor after a jump like a bird landing. He said.
Speaker 1: After his beady lunch, students did their academic study, then dinner,
Speaker 1: followed by evening classes ballroom dance, pantomime, posture, and fencing
Speaker 1: for the older boy, and then after that they take
Speaker 1: music lessons. The students could pick violin or piano. Balancine
Speaker 1: chose piano. With all this work and skill building, Valancine's
Speaker 1: world now revolved around the theater.
Speaker 2: His family had been blotted out in his own mind.
Speaker 2: The curtain was closed on the family and the curtain
Speaker 2: was open on the world of the theater.
Speaker 1: Elizabeth believes he would carry this hurt from being abandoned
Speaker 1: for the rest of his life.
Speaker 2: He himself said that he felt like someone had abandoned
Speaker 2: a dog. I think he was incredibly furious, but a
Speaker 2: child of nine can't distinguish grief from anger. I imagine
Speaker 2: that his psyche is shut down or closed off to
Speaker 2: his family, and therefore had to open itself to his
Speaker 2: new world, the theater and the theater people. And also
Speaker 2: in an extraordinary letter, he wrote, I hope you understand
Speaker 2: how alone I am. Ever, since my family left me
Speaker 2: in the school at age nine, I've been alone. When
Speaker 2: I found that letter recently, I realized that that feeling
Speaker 2: of having only the theater for a family and a
Speaker 2: world and a tribe was deeply at the center of him.
Speaker 1: The only connection he had left to his family was music.
Speaker 2: That was the one constant, that was his link to
Speaker 2: the past. He couldn't emotionally connect anymore. They'd done this
Speaker 2: horrible thing, They'd abandon him. But music could somehow connect
Speaker 2: his whole self. I imagine that that's why he had this
Speaker 2: eerie facility with matching steps to music, because he lived
Speaker 2: those steps. They were his language in his innermost dialogue
Speaker 2: with himself. It was ballet steps, not words and music.
Speaker 1: Elizabeth says, Balanchine's teachers saw him as an independent boy
Speaker 1: who was courteous, detached, and eerily self confident. Although Balanjing
Speaker 1: initially disliked the school, he grew to love ballet. He
Speaker 1: had a revelation on stage, dancing and sleeping beauty. With
Speaker 1: all of the music, the lights, the costumes. He realized
Speaker 1: he was in the middle of a thing of beauty.
Speaker 1: And then, Elizabeth says, ballet almost died in nineteen seventeen,
Speaker 1: a bullet burst through the theater school window and almost
Speaker 1: hit a student. Days later, a crowd in military uniforms
Speaker 1: rushed through the school halls. It was late at night.
Speaker 1: They were searching for monarchists in the dormitories, peering under beds.
Speaker 1: The Russian Revolution had been in October. The Bolsheviks, led
Speaker 1: by Vladimir Lenin, took control of the country. The Bolsheviks
Speaker 1: envisioned a world where workers would hold the power. The
Speaker 1: Tsar and his family were murdered, nobility was abolished, Aristocrats
Speaker 1: fled or were killed. The Bolshevik Party would eventually become
Speaker 1: the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The Tsarist Romanov
Speaker 1: dynasty was over. The Bolsheviks wanted to wipe out any
Speaker 1: whiff of the old aristocracy, and no one knew what
Speaker 1: that meant for Ballet. Valentine was thirteen years old. His
Speaker 1: school closed, and life in Saint Petersburg changed dramatically.
Speaker 2: The city of Saint Petersburg suffered after the revolution.
Speaker 1: Saint Petersburg had been the capital of the Russian Empire
Speaker 1: under the Tsar. Now, with Lenin in power, the government
Speaker 1: moved to Moscow, essentially abandoning Saint Petersburg.
Speaker 2: And the resources, which were very few after the revol
Speaker 2: all flowed to Moscow. Leaving Saint Petersburg to starve and freeze.
Speaker 2: There was no heat, there was no fuel, very little food.
Speaker 2: All rationed.
Speaker 1: Balanchine School was turned into barracks for guards that winter.
Speaker 1: In nineteen seventeen and nineteen eighteen, it was hard to
Speaker 1: even find bread in a shop. Thirteen year old Balanchine
Speaker 1: and his friend stole fish at night from local barges
Speaker 1: before he could find a job. But then came some
Speaker 1: hope for ballet. It had to do with Lenin's Minister
Speaker 1: of Education, who also oversaw culture and arts.
Speaker 2: Lenin's Minister of Culture had a vision of all the
Speaker 2: arts existing simultaneously and the people learning all about the
Speaker 2: high arts that they'd been deprived of, and Ballet's new
Speaker 2: meaning was up for grabs.
Speaker 1: Valancine's ballet school reopened with a new mission.
Speaker 2: Which is to make dances for a utopia, the Bolshevik utopia.
Speaker 1: Now, the theater would welcome laborers, soldiers, and sailors into
Speaker 1: the audience got free tickets from their factories and labor units. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: half the city's population was gone. They were dead from
Speaker 1: disease or off to villages in search of food. One
Speaker 1: Russian described people who passed each other in the gray,
Speaker 1: cold city as phantoms and oblivious silence.
Speaker 2: In those conditions, the ballet school started up again with
Speaker 2: utopian aims and visions, utopian excitement and no heat and
Speaker 2: no food, which can sharpen your senses to your art
Speaker 2: and impact your health. And it did both with balancing.
Speaker 1: The children at ballet school had boils for malnutrition and
Speaker 1: lice that carried typhus. On cold nights, the boys and
Speaker 1: girls moved their beds from separate dormitory rooms to the
Speaker 1: old infirmary to stay warm. They suffered, but they bonded
Speaker 1: and they felt immersed in art.
Speaker 2: After the Revolution, all the social meetings of the art
Speaker 2: fell away, and they concentrated on the pure art, on
Speaker 2: ballets just as a pure art.
Speaker 1: Since the seventeen hundreds under the Czar, ballets performed in
Speaker 1: Russia had been filled with romantic storylines in royal courts
Speaker 1: or epic tales of castles, princes and maidens. But that
Speaker 1: was going away.
Speaker 2: Now. They had a little trouble making new ballets because
Speaker 2: what were they going to be about? It was also
Speaker 2: new Now ballet could be both grand and intimate and
Speaker 2: revealed the private emotions of people in a way that
Speaker 2: it never had been before.
Speaker 1: Balancine was a teenager. Now he grew his hair long
Speaker 1: and wore eyeliner to make his eyes look soulful. He
Speaker 1: also started to experiment with his own choreography.
Speaker 2: And what it did I think for Balancine was it
Speaker 2: broke any lingering narrative associations that the steps held. So
Speaker 2: you know, an Arabesque didn't automatically mean a noble shape.
Speaker 2: It could mean anything that the choreographer wanted it to mean.
Speaker 2: Same with all the other steps. They were severed from
Speaker 2: that art that was the czar's family's favorite art. So
Speaker 2: it impacted him on an artistic level deeply. It was
Speaker 2: making an art new he was in on the ground floor.
Speaker 1: But there was one tradition Balanchine would never do away
Speaker 1: with worshiping the ballerina. Growing up in the school, he
Speaker 1: lived in the world of the ballerina, the world of
Speaker 1: these girls and women whom men watched with awe.
Speaker 2: Those little boys in the school were conditioned to worship
Speaker 2: the presiding ballerinas of the day, just like the nobles
Speaker 2: and the grandees and the businessmen in the front row
Speaker 2: worshiped them. Then Balanchine realized when he was an adolescent
Speaker 2: that there were some of his own classmates who were
Speaker 2: beautiful and worth falling in love with, and he fell
Speaker 2: in love with a young woman in the class below
Speaker 2: him named Tomorrow Jevorgeeva.
Speaker 1: Also known as Tamara Gieva. She was thirteen when they met.
Speaker 1: At the time, the school had a faction of traditionalists,
Speaker 1: and they warned her against Balancine and his weird choreographic ideas.
Speaker 1: But when Balancine approached her and asked if she wanted
Speaker 1: to work with him, she said of course. He started
Speaker 1: to choreograph for Tomorrow and she began to dance his pieces.
Speaker 1: One of the first she danced with him was a
Speaker 1: PoTA de potada means step of two in French. It
Speaker 1: means a duet, usually between a man and a woman.
Speaker 1: This duet ended with what Tomorrow called a revolutionary moment.
Speaker 1: Balanchine knelt, she stood on one foot on point, She
Speaker 1: held one leg in the air behind her in an arabesque,
Speaker 1: and she balanced herself by pressing her mouth against his
Speaker 1: Tamora later said this moment was considered terribly erotic. She
Speaker 1: said every time Balancin coreographed, he tried to see how
Speaker 1: much he could get away with. He never seemed to
Speaker 1: doubt himself. She wondered if his religious belief made him
Speaker 1: feel he was destined for greatness, like he was channeling God.
Speaker 1: Balancing and Tamora decided to get married. They were young.
Speaker 1: There are different reports on exactly when it happened, but
Speaker 1: Balanging was probably eighteen and Tamora fifteen. They performed in
Speaker 1: little theaters together. They got paid in food more than money,
Speaker 1: and then in nineteen twenty four, when Balanchine was just
Speaker 1: twenty years old, he and Tamara had a chance to
Speaker 1: leave Russia, and it was ballet that would let them
Speaker 1: do it. Around nineteen twenty four, tomorrow, Jieva and George
Speaker 1: Balancin met a croupier, a guy who worked at the
Speaker 1: gambling tables at a local casino. His name was Vladimir.
Speaker 1: Vladimir made a lot of money working at high stakes table,
Speaker 1: and he convinced the government to let him finance a
Speaker 1: European ballet tour.
Speaker 4: They got out of Russia by asking permission to go
Speaker 4: give a tour in Germany, and they got out.
Speaker 1: Jim Steichen is a historian who studied Balancine well.
Speaker 4: Once they got to Germany, they got picked up by
Speaker 4: Serge Diaglov, the really creative impresaria that founded the Ballet
Speaker 4: Roofs in Paris.
Speaker 1: Diagolovi had created one of the most influential ballet companies ever,
Speaker 1: the Ballet m For.
Speaker 4: Twenty years, the Ballet russ really defined the new face
Speaker 4: of ballet.
Speaker 1: Diagolov worked with famous composers like ravel Stravinsky, W. C.
Speaker 1: Prokofief and Satis. Painters like Matis and Picasso made sets.
Speaker 1: Koco Chanelle was one designer who created costumes. Balancin walked
Speaker 1: into all of this as a dancer, but soon Diagolov
Speaker 1: let him choreograph too. Balancing started to play with and
Speaker 1: push the old school Russian style he had learned growing up.
Speaker 4: Balanchine took that technique and made it new. He would
Speaker 4: introduce more acrobatic moves and loved making giant daisy chains
Speaker 4: out of his dancers, utterly untraditional moments where people look
Speaker 4: like they're swimming in mid air, like they're doing somersaults, Like,
Speaker 4: oh my god, what is that. I've never seen that before.
Speaker 1: Balancing was finding his legs as a choreographer, and then
Speaker 1: came nineteen twenty nine DIAGOIV, the head of the ballet Russ.
Speaker 4: Died, the stock market crashed, World War Two began to
Speaker 4: eventually heat up in a very real way.
Speaker 1: Balancing needed to figure out what to do next. The
Speaker 1: answer came in the form of a wealthy.
Speaker 4: American enter Lincoln Kurstine. This young American who's really interested
Speaker 4: in art.
Speaker 1: Lincoln Curstine came from a family with money. He was
Speaker 1: in his twenties and obsessed with all kinds of art,
Speaker 1: So when he met balancing on a trip to London,
Speaker 1: he was enamored.
Speaker 4: Balancing had a nickname when he was a youngster. He
Speaker 4: was called the Rat. He kind of had like a
Speaker 4: kind of a snaggle tooth. He wasn't like a movie
Speaker 4: theater actor kind of iconic beauty that way. He was
Speaker 4: on the shorter side, a man of few words. It seems,
Speaker 4: he was very social. He loved to cook.
Speaker 1: Even in his twenties. Balancing oozed creativity, which Lincoln Kirstine loved.
Speaker 1: Because he wanted to do something big, he invited Balanging
Speaker 1: to join him in the US to build a ballet company.
Speaker 4: Lincoln Kurstine decided that he was going to make it
Speaker 4: his next big project to create a dance school and
Speaker 4: company in America that would synthesize the best of the
Speaker 4: Russian ballet traditions, the Italian and French traditions, and make
Speaker 4: it a thoroughly American enterprise.
Speaker 1: They would start a school to train American dancers. Tuition
Speaker 1: would be free so that students could be admitted based
Speaker 1: on quote their perfect possibilities. In exchange, students would agree
Speaker 1: to appear exclusively in school performances for five years so
Speaker 1: they wouldn't get snapped up by Broadway or Hollywood. Once
Speaker 1: they were trained and balancing could make his experimental ballets.
Speaker 1: He arrived in New York and started by teaching dancers
Speaker 1: his previous works or making versions of them, but he
Speaker 1: had to make something original. In nineteen thirty four, it
Speaker 1: was time to choreograph a new piece, his first in
Speaker 1: the United States. The music would be Tchaikowsky's Serenade for Strings.
Speaker 1: Balanchine told Kirsty the day of the first rehearsal, his
Speaker 1: head was a blank. Pray for me, he said. They
Speaker 1: started off with their usual dance class, and then Balancine
Speaker 1: gathered the dancers who were there that day, seventeen of them.
Speaker 1: He lined them up by height, then started to arrange
Speaker 1: them on the floor. It was a sunny day, one dancer, said,
Speaker 1: Balanchine started slowly to compose a hymn to ward off
Speaker 1: the sun. When he was done arranging, the dancers were
Speaker 1: in an unusual pattern, later called the orange grove, two
Speaker 1: diamonds side by side.
Speaker 4: The opening is a magical moment in theater. The music
Speaker 4: starts before the curtain rises.
Speaker 1: When the curtain does rise, you see this orange grove
Speaker 1: of dancers on stage, but they're not dancing. They're completely still.
Speaker 4: And they each have one hand raised up.
Speaker 1: Like they're trying to shield their eyes from the sun.
Speaker 2: They hold that position for a mysteriously long time. Through
Speaker 2: eight measures.
Speaker 1: More than a minute has passed. The music sores, but
Speaker 1: the dancers still haven't moved. Then finally they move, but
Speaker 1: just a little.
Speaker 4: They start to move one hand.
Speaker 2: Almost in slow motion, as Balanchine said, the wrist breaks
Speaker 2: as if the wrists were tired, and the hand comes down,
Speaker 2: and then they.
Speaker 1: Move the other arm. They bring their arms together in
Speaker 1: a circle.
Speaker 2: And that's when the feet pop open. To make first position.
Speaker 1: They push their feet to the side, and too ballet
Speaker 1: turnout the most basic position of ballet. It's almost like
Speaker 1: the first exercises of a ballet class slowed down. You
Speaker 1: would think it'd be boring, but instead it feels profound.
Speaker 1: It's like you see seventeen dancers wake up their bodies
Speaker 1: to dance for the first time, like they're learning in
Speaker 1: front of you that their bodies can hold music. They
Speaker 1: start with the most basic shapes of ballet, a line,
Speaker 1: a circle, a flowing arm.
Speaker 4: It's just beautiful.
Speaker 1: Over the daisy choreographed. The rehearsal process was ragtag. Balancing
Speaker 1: didn't know how many dancers would show up, so he
Speaker 1: choreographed for whoever was there one day, for some the
Speaker 1: next day, nine, then six. Historically, when you'd choreograph a ballet,
Speaker 1: there would be a libretto or a description of what
Speaker 1: would happen in the ballet, the plot.
Speaker 2: And this time there wasn't anything. There was just the
Speaker 2: music the dancers.
Speaker 1: In balancing, Balancing let his dancers inspire him. He created
Speaker 1: the first pose when he saw a dancer who shielded
Speaker 1: her eyes from the sun. When a dancer ran in late,
Speaker 1: he made it a part of the ballet. When a
Speaker 1: dancer fell, he wove that in two. The ballet spun
Speaker 1: off into beautiful, swift, wild dance.
Speaker 2: He has them swooping in formation, in circles, in squares, closing, opening,
Speaker 2: rushing around. You cannot see this marvelous work without falling
Speaker 2: under its spell because the music has such a sweep
Speaker 2: and urgency, and so does the dancing.
Speaker 1: The dancers at rehearsal came from such varied styles and
Speaker 1: backgrounds that this was how Balancine could mold them as
Speaker 1: his dancers, making his shapes his unique style.
Speaker 4: It was a way to make dancers with disparate trainings
Speaker 4: and backgrounds all feel like they can be part of
Speaker 4: a harmonious, beautiful whole.
Speaker 1: He called it Serenad. Sarahad would become a pillar for
Speaker 1: Balanchine's dancers when they'd return to again and again.
Speaker 4: That ballet is this important symbol of his arrival in
Speaker 4: America and his starting this new chapter in his artistic life.
Speaker 4: And it is a gorgeous ballet. It's one of his best.
Speaker 4: It's like a desert island ballet, if you could even
Speaker 4: have a desert island ballet. It is this beautiful ritual.
Speaker 1: It does feel like a ritual, and as the ballet unfolds,
Speaker 1: it has images that feel full of meaning, like myths
Speaker 1: layered on top of each other, tropes and narratives you
Speaker 1: can't quite grasp.
Speaker 5: The story of the ballet doesn't really have a story.
Speaker 5: It has many stories, but I think the stories are
Speaker 5: kind of buried. We have images that are very powerful.
Speaker 1: As a dance historian, Lynn Garifola knows that balancing is
Speaker 1: famous for making ballets without narratives. His ballets are about
Speaker 1: movement and the music. But she sees something more.
Speaker 5: What you might call a private resonance or a personal echo.
Speaker 5: This is something deeply personal.
Speaker 1: And she sees this in Sarahad. There's one moment that
Speaker 1: always moves her in a deep, even terrible way.
Speaker 5: What happens in that moment is that there is a
Speaker 5: man with two women dancing together, and it's clear that
Speaker 5: there's a profound feeling among all of those three people
Speaker 5: love eroticism, but that there's also danger. Someone is going
Speaker 5: to be left behind and he's going to make a choice.
Speaker 1: They dance furiously, then one of the women falls back
Speaker 1: into his arms that he doesn't lift her up again. Instead,
Speaker 1: he lowers her slowly, inching downward until she's flat on
Speaker 1: the floor. She reaches up to him, but he stands
Speaker 1: up and the other dancer leads him away. He has
Speaker 1: made his choice.
Speaker 5: The moment when the man walks off the other woman
Speaker 5: is terrible. It never ceases to touch me with the
Speaker 5: sense that the man is very much a stand in
Speaker 5: for balancing, and also the sense of the trail and abandonment.
Speaker 5: He moves on and leaves the other weeping on the floor.
Speaker 1: Next time, on.
Speaker 6: The Turning, there are no windows. We don't need windows
Speaker 6: because the outside world doesn't matter. He was God in
Speaker 6: the theater, ever observing, ever present. Are you a patriot?
Speaker 6: Are you a citizen? Are you willing to do whatever
Speaker 6: I ask you to do?
Speaker 1: The Turning is a production of Rococo Punch and iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 1: It's written and produced by Alan Lance Lesser and Me.
Speaker 1: Our story editor is Emily Foreman. Fixing and sound designed
Speaker 1: by James Trout. Jessica Crisa is our assistant producer. Andrea
Speaker 1: Assuage is our digital producer. Fact checking by Andrea Lopez Crusado.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to Elizabeth Kendall, Jim Steichen, and Lynn Garifola.
Speaker 1: Their books on this topic are fascinating, so go check
Speaker 1: out their work. Our executive producers are John Paratti and
Speaker 1: Jessica El at Rococo Punch at Katrina Norvel and Nikki
Speaker 1: Etoor at iHeart Podcasts. For photos and more details on
Speaker 1: the series, follow us on Instagram at Rococo Punch, and
Speaker 1: you can reach out via email The Turning at rococo
Speaker 1: punch dot com. I'm Erica Lance. Thanks for listening.