Undimmed Lustre: The Life of Antony Tudor - Book Excerpt - Excerpt

Dance Magazine, May, 2002 by Muriel Topaz

EXCERPTED FROM Undimmed Lustre: The Life of Antony Tudor by Muriel Topaz. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group (Scarecrow Press, Inc., 4720 Boston Way, Lanham, MD 20706). 2002. 480 pages, illustrated. $39.50. ISBN: 0-8108-4128-2. Reprinted by permission. To order: 15200 NBN Way, P.O. Box 191, Blue Ridge Summit, PA 17214-0191, 800/462-6420, www.scarecrowpress.com.

Chapter 1

The ballet ended, the curtain closed. Absolute silence. "They are not clapping. It's a disaster," ballerina Nora Kaye whispered. Then the sound pierced the silence. The applause had started; it rose and swelled. As the crescendo began to wane, the choreographer signaled, "Now!" The dancers emerged from the wings to a burst of shouting "Bravo! Bravo!" from all over the theater. The uproar continued for about thirty curtain calls, an unheard-of tribute. The debut of Antony Tudor's great ballet Pillar of Fire, the first of several astonishing works he created in the United States, had taken place.

When Tudor emigrated from his native Britain to the United States in 1940, shortly after the outbreak of World War II, he had already choreographed a series of iconoclastic ballet masterpieces. The man's genius was a known fact; known, that is, by England's critics, cognoscenti, and a small coterie of that country's balletomanes. In the United States, however, he was an unknown quantity.

Although Tudor's fame has grown greatly both in America and throughout the world in the years that followed those first triumphs of the 1930s and 1940s, and although he became an icon for his most avid fans, he is still a vastly underrated choreographer. Even in the ballet world his extraordinary gifts have never achieved the celebrity of his contemporaries George Balanchine (1904-83) or Frederick Ashton (1904-88). As an example, his work was virtually unknown in Paris and Moscow until the 1990s.

Misconceptions about the man and his work abound. His public commonly believes that he never had his own company but, in fact, he founded and, for a year, directed the tiny London Ballet. He was an all-important force, a prime mover, in the early years of Ballet Theatre. One of several apocryphal legends speaks of his miniscule body of works, but he created more than fifty ballets, choreographed more than a dozen operas, and created many dances for theater, film, and television. Although by reputation he was universally hated by dancers, in actuality those who worked closely with him regard the man with great affection and respect.

Tudor's enigmatic personality, his English propriety mixed with his rapier-sharp, often vulgar wit, his overwhelming need for personal privacy, his insecurities, his total inability to compromise artistically, and his Zen Buddhism all made him a lonesome figure in the very communal dance world. While his work is subtle, detailed, and passionate, it eschews star turns and bravura displays of virtuosity. It demands great emotional and technical skills not always immediately obvious to the audience. He imbued the simplest gestures with profound meaning, bringing drama into "academic" ballet. He mixed everyday gesture with the classical vocabulary and incorporated the ideas of Freud and Stanislavsky into his dances. He adapted cinematic techniques to the ballet medium.

This biography reveals some of the reasons behind the series of misconceptions and contradictions that have attached themselves to Antony Tudor, one of the most creative forces of the twentieth century....

Chapter II

During the time that he choreographed all of this "dance on order" [nineteen works for television], another work stirred in Tudor's mind, a rather bold undertaking. Tudor had heard Gustav Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde at a concert and fallen in love with it. He was unable to locate a reduction instrumentally suitable for the small forces available at the Mercury Theatre [a small London theater converted from a church, with no orchestra pit]. However, he did find a piano reduction of another Mahler work, Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children). His idea of making a ballet on the theme of grieving for the loss of children did not win great popularity in 1937. The emphasis in ballet was still on fairies, sylphs, and glorious processions. Leonide Massine, who choreographed huge spectacle ballets in the Diaghilev tradition--grandiose, colorful, and fanciful--was the darling of London. The public flocked to see the very Massine ballets that Tudor so intensely disliked. Tudor refused to see them to avoid becoming "infected." The Massine ballets, so full of grandiosity and virtuosic displays, represented the antithesis of Tudor's balletic ideals. But even in the case of choreographers he admired, such as Kurt Jooss, Tudor avoided seeing too much in those early days, as he feared being unduly influenced. He wanted to go his own way. Only much, much later had he sufficient confidence in his choreographic path to see a great deal of dance.

`Tudor undertook this grieving theme, producing one of the most eloquent, moving ballets of all time. Dark Elegies is abstract in that it had no scenario, nor any specific reference to children except in the music itself. It explores the different aspects of grieving with its six soloists (five sections, the second one being a pas de deux). Much of the movement stems from the classical canon, using arabesques, turns in attitude, poses a la seconde, and the like. But the dance also encompasses a vocabulary more referential to modern dance than to ballet: suspensions, falls, skips, and knee work. Although a paradigm of structural clarity and thematic movement development, these devices never impinge on the dance's emotional impact.