Holding On to the Air -- Excerpt 1
The stage is dark, but in one corner, in the shadows, kneels the curved, still body of a man. His silhouette shows his face buried in his palms, as if in anguish, as if remembering. . . or as if dreaming. Out of the darkness behind him, in a single shaft of light, steps the figure of a young girl. Her hair is loose, her white gown is flowing and translucent. She reaches toward the man, but he cannot see her until she stands over him and peels his hands from his face. The stage brightens as the man rises, and it is revealed that his hair is graying at the temples and his movement is not as elastic as it once might have been.
The two figures begin to move together, quietly at first, then with such passion, tenderness, and reckless desire that if this were fiction it might endure, but if it were life it could not. She appears to lead, and he to follow, desperately trying to catch up with and seize her youth, her beauty. She is his destiny, he is hers, but fate intervenes and separates them. They end as they began; he kneels and she replaces each hand and then each finger across his eyes. He cannot see her now, but she is yearning, reaching for him even as she backs away into the shaft of light, into the shadows. The curtain falls.
“Meditation,” danced to the sad heightened strains of a Tschaikovsky violin, was the first ballet George Balanchine made on me. I was eighteen, Balanchine was fifty-nine. Critics were shocked that the “cool,” “calculating” master choreographer of Stravinsky’s neoclassical chords could be so blatently emotional, so romantic, so tragic, so vulnerable. They even accused him of “Russian” sentimentality. But those who knew him weren’t surprised; he didn’t stop being Russian when he became American. I certainly wasn’t surprised that my boss had feelings, even the need to love and be loved. I was, however, very much surprised to learn that it was I who inspired these feelings – onstage and off.
I was very backward. All my energies had gone into dancing. By the time I turned eighteen, my love life consisted of one date with my best friend’s brother when I was fourteen; but as I towered over him by several inches, there was little room for romance. There were, a few years later, two kisses, but I felt little for either of the men. My first love affair began when I was eighteen and was the longest, most complex, most productive, and most important of my life. It was also the most passionate and tumultuous, although it did not begin with a kiss but with a ballet. Kisses came several years later, but they signified little that was not already apparent. Within a few months it seemed as if the whole world was talking, guessing about, predicting, and lamenting our alliance, and they seemed to know a great deal more about it than I, one of the principal players. But Balanchine made his feelings about me public long before he declared them in private. The prededent was set for the next twenty years of our lives.
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