Holding On to the Air -- Excerpt 3
“Don Quixote” was a rite of passage for me on many levels – on dancing “off-balance,” on being a ballerina, and on being Balanchine’s ballerina – and I think it is interesting to note just how unorthodox my dance education was because I danced in George Balanchine’s company. While most ballet dancers in the world were performing the nineteenth-century classics – “Swan Lake,” “Giselle,” “The Sleeping Beauty” – I was dancing the twentieth-century classics – “Apollo,” “Symphony in C,” “Liebeslieder Walzer.” Because I worked for Balanchine I was never asked to fit into the mold of the world’s idea of a classical dancer with her grand demeanor, polite arabesque, and rounded elbows. Instead of perfecting a precedent, I was encouraged – as were all of Balanchine’s dancers – to set one, if I dared. We started breaking rules at the very first rehearsal. . . .
Balanchine found square, proper, academic dancing “boring as hell,” and one day as I fell out of a turn into a backbend lunge he said, “Can you do that again, can you fall more . . . lean more. . . bend more?” I said, “Let me try,” and he countered, “Is it impossible?” He always took into account the fact that he had never been on pointe himself and that he might be asking for something actually “impossible.” (In reality he know more about the physics of being on pointe than most dancers who have been up there all their lives.) By now I knew nothing was impossible, at least physically, and replied, “No, it’s not. Let me work on it.” If I couldn’t repeat the movement immediately, we would leave those places sketchy until the next day or the next rehearsal when I could. He never worried about etching steps in stone like some choreographers, because he was secure in his craft and knew that his medium, space, could not be carved or molded by an idea but only by the dynamics of the moment.
Mr. B wanted me to be “off-balance,” and it was surely one of the most unorthodox requests any well-trained ballet master could make. In “Don Quixote” we broke one rule after the other and climbed through the walls of balletic convention to discover a whole new place to inhabit. It was not the conventional space defined by dancers of up and down, left and right; it was a tilted, revolving circle. The air there was delightfully unpolluted, and best of all, there were no laws until we made them.
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