Hayden, Pnb Tune Into `Episodes' - Melissa Hayden, Francia Russell, and Nancy Reynolds prepare dancers for `Episodes' film - Brief Article

Dance Magazine, July, 2000 by Martha Ullman West

IT WAS QUITE a sight, quite a slice of history, to see Melissa Hayden, Francia Russell and Nancy Reynolds clustered around a video monitor in Pacific Northwest Ballet's main studio on a sunny April Saturday in Seattle, watching a tape of George Balanchine's Episodes, their feet, irrepressibly, marking the steps.

All three are former New York City Ballet dancers who were in the original 1959 production at New York City Center. Hayden, who now teaches at North Carolina School of the Arts, was to spend the better part of the weekend coaching and teaching PNB dancers selected by co-artistic director Russell in her roles in Episodes, Agon and Divertimento No. 15 for the George Balanchine Foundation's Interpreters Archive. Reynolds, the Foundation director of research and founder of the invaluable film archive, was supervising the filming. The archive pairs those who created various roles--e.g., Maria Tallchief as the Firebird--with today's dancers both in New York and elsewhere because, she says rightly, "It's not just City Ballet that does Balanchine."

Episodes, unlike Agon and Divertimento No. 15, is not in PNB's repertoire. So Hayden, who at 77 still bears traces of what Arlene Croce called her "coiled puma spring," got to work teaching PNB principals Jeffrey Stanton and Lisa Apple the intricate steps of the Ricercata section pas de deux as soon as her microphone was attached to her powder blue sweater. Russell chose Stanton and Apple because "both are not only gifted dancers, but especially quick learners and very musical, which I knew would be important for Episodes."

Counting, humming, interrupting herself, Hayden worked with pianist Allan Dameron to get the tempi of Anton Webern's orchestration of Bach's music precisely right the first two hours before filming began. That was just the beginning of hours of instruction and reminiscence for the record. "We have to make you comfortable," she said to Apple in the first fifteen minutes, and later, when coaching Agon's second pas de trois, she asked Louise Nadeau, Christophe Maraval and Oleg Gorboulev if they were comfortable. "With Mr. Balanchine, if it wasn't comfortable, it was wrong," Hayden said.

Other phrases that came up frequently were, "It's just a matter of timing," and "It's not wrong, it just wasn't done originally," said several times in the course of coaching Agon, which all three dancers had performed before.

The filming of Episodes was completed Sunday afternoon, after considerable adjustment of detail and position. "The problem is I don't always remember," Hayden said. The cameras rolled; Apple, her long legs piercing the air, soared through the role and Hayden cried, "Bravo! It was really good. It's a beautiful record."