Holding On to the Air -- Excerpt 2
When Diana Adams told Balanchine that she couldn’t do the premiere of “Movements,” he was apparently deeply shaken. Now he had a dilemma: cancel the premiere of a much awaited piece of music by his friend Igor Stravinsky (who was to attend the performance) or do the ballet with someone else. But his vision of “Movements” included Diana, and he couldn’t see it without her. He was on the point of canceling the ballet when Jacques d’Amboise, who was aware of what was at stake, made a bold suggestion: “Let me teach Suzaahn.” Jacques already believed in me, and after he had taught me the “Midsummer” pas de deux six weeks earlier, he knew that I could learn quickly. Balanchine rejected the idea, but Jacques persisted, and finally Balanchine skeptically agreed to let Jacques try. It was at this point that Jacques rushed me to Diana’s.
We found her stretched out on the couch under a blanket in her tiny living room. There was no use changing into practice clothes, so I wore my street clothes and bare feet. Climbing onto pointe on Diana’s slippery parquet floor could only have left me beside her on the couch with a broken foot, and no “Movements” in sight. Along with the rest of the world, I had never heard the music, and between Jacques’and Diana’s grunting, clapping, and singing, I didn’t manage to learn it. I did learn the important counts, but most of the ballet was uncountable, and I was told to listen for “the big boom,” “the second crash,” “the sixth silent note,” or “the sort of pretty music after the messy music.” I thought I was going crazy, but I kept trying to remember the steps, the angles, the upside-down lifts, and complicated stage directions: “Now you run quickly down here, stage right only farther over than in the last section. . .” I couldn’t do any of it physically, of course, because Diana’s living room was ten feet by twelve and had a couch and coffee table in the middle of it.
Despite all this, after about two hours I managed, somehow, to learn the whole ballet. There were enough steps to fill a four-act “Swan Lake,” only they seemed to be danced backward and upside down. My head was swimming in a sea of développés, crouches, lunges, and strange musical cues, but my body hadn’t yet executed one of them. I went home and tried writing it all down in my math notebook (I was also studying for a big algebra exam at Rhodes at the time) before I forgot it, but after filling up twenty or so pages with hieroglyphics and stick-figure diagrams I gave up the literary approach; I had complete only the first of the five sections of the ballet. Writing down steps didn’t help and never would in a three-dimensional profession.
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