Elegy for Tanny - Tanaquil Le Clercq - Obituary

Dance Magazine, April, 2001 by Clive Barnes

Tanaquil Le Clercq: October 2, 1929-December 31, 2000. Typically, I had difficulty in finding the Church of St. Ignatius of Antioch on January 5 of this year in a snowbound New York, arriving just in time for the beginning of the sung requiem mass for Tanaquil Le Clercq and shuttling into a side pew at the back, with a fine view and feel of the proceedings, the music, the prayers, the incense, the solemnity and the communion. As the communicants came down the side aisle, I caught sight of Jacques d'Amboise, still oddly boyish at 66. As he passed, I had one of those Proustian moments, recalling exactly the last time I saw Tanny dance, prancing proudly, arm-in-arm with Jacques in the last movement of George Balanchine's Western Symphony.

There was a reception at the School of American Ballet after the service, but I didn't feel particularly up to it. I didn't really know Tanny--a few words here and there over the years, first when she was a young dancer, about to become Mrs. Balanchine, and later when, cruelly disabled with polio, she remained in the dance world, a presence, a memory and an icon. But, as many dance observers will testify, you don't really have to know dancers to know them. They so often dance surreptitiously naked, their personalities, perhaps even their souls, stretched out by the choreography, exposed by the music and illuminated by the necessity of that gold and silent communication dancers always offer, sometimes unwittingly. Every dance fan knows this and many dancers are aware of it, perhaps a little uneasily.

The death of Tanny hit me surprisingly hard, and I wanted to be alone to think about it. Of course, the death of Le Clercq as a dancer had come years ago---Copenhagen in 1956, cut short not by accident but by a then-crippling virus, which a few years later would be virtually conquered by a vaccine. That afternoon I largely spent looking Le Clercq up in my performance records. I first saw her dance on July 10, 1950--she was part of the leading quartet (the others being Todd Bolender, Francisco Moncion and Jerome Robbins) in Robbins's puzzlingly but, to me, wonderfully complex ballet to Leonard Bernstein's setting of W.H. Auden's dramatic eclogue, Age of Anxiety. It was the opening performance of New York City Ballet at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and the company's first excursion outside New York.

The program had started with Serenade and then, after a second intermission, we had Symphony in C, again with Le Clercq, this time in the adagio of that Bizet symphony, her long legs unfolding to a slow infinity of grace, so different from Tamara Toumanova, whom I had first seen dance the role in Paris. Indeed, it seemed almost a different work from the Paris Opera original, Le Palais de Cristal. As I joyfully wrote at the time in Richard Buckle's magazine Ballet, "the world of Balanchine ballets, like the world of Shakespearean comedy, is dominated by beautiful women." No one was more beautiful than Tanny. Or more chic--Mona Lisa as a Vogue model!

The last time I saw Le Clercq onstage was on July 8, 1955, in The Hague, dancing in Western Symphony. I wrote in Dance and Dancers of what was to prove that last glimpse: "When Le Clercq and d'Amboise come peacock-strutting in for the final rondo, we, like Isadora Duncan, can see `young America dancing.'" Little did I know that I was never to see Tanny dance again. The story has often been told how, in 1944, Balanchine created a little ballet to Mozart at the Waldorf-Astoria on behalf of the charity the March of Dimes. A classroom of ballet girls practiced classic steps until a monster in black, danced by Balanchine himself, intruded on the scene, touching and paralyzing one of the students. The girl was the 14-year-old Tanny, and Balanchine, of course, was supposed to be Polio. As she sat paralyzed in a chair, people threw silver coins at her until, miraculously, she rose and danced again. Nothing like that happened to real-life Tanny, and Balanchine, perhaps as superstitious as he was religious, eventually saw that incident as an awful omen of the future.

A dancer's career is in any case as brief as that of a spring flower--it buds, it blooms, it fades, leaving behind just the fleet fragrance of memories.

Le Clercq joined Ballet Society (the immediate predecessor to New York City Ballet) in 1946, and a year later created the role of Choleric in The Four Temperaments. Her last performance came in Copenhagen at the end of October 1956. Ten years. During those ten years she danced something like forty roles, most of them actually created on her, chiefly by Balanchine but also significantly by Robbins, and also one or two others--including Ashton, who made Sacred Love for her in Illuminations, with its marvelous Petipa homage to the Rose Adagio. And even Tudor, during his brief sojourn with City Ballet, gave her, very memorably, the Episode in His Past role in his revival of Jardin aux Lilas.

But, of course, it was really Balanchine and Robbins who provided her repertoire. Looking back, what do I best remember? Interestingly, I saw her dozens of times--in London in 1950 and 1952, when the company gave six-week seasons and I saw every performance, in the British provinces in 1950, at the Edinburgh Festival in 1952, in Amsterdam and The Hague in 1955. Dozens of times, but all packaged into comparatively short time spans. But seeing her over a few weeks about eight times in La Valse--tragically, her signature piece, where she has never been quite replaced--gave her performance in this, and many other ballets, a definition that sticks vividly in my memory to this very day.