Balanchine's guide to a young choreographer - excerpts from diary of choreographer Gloria Contreras about conversations with choreographer George Balanchine

Dance Magazine, Dec, 1996 by Marian Horosko

Gloria Contreras has been the artistic director and founder of her company, Taller Coreografico de la Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico in Mexico City, for twenty-six years. In her university theater, Contreras presents a new program from the repertoire of over seventy of her 111 original works, each week during nine months of the year to sold-out houses. Astoundingly, each year her university school also provides dance classes given by fourteen teachers in 4,158 hours to 1200 students.

As a young student at the School of American Ballet in New York City, Contreras showed her early works to George Balanchine, whose advice became her lifelong guide. The following are excerpts from her diary of conversations with Balanchine about choreography. It was disclosed for the first time at a recent Balanchine seminar at Lincoln Center.

August 1958 After watching a run-through of Contreras's Hunpango and El Mercado, with students from SAB, Balanchine told her: "The choreography demonstrates your love of dance and how happy you are to dance. But that is not all. You must produce for the public and not only for yourself. Take an idea, analyze it, and make thousands of variations for each theme. Create an image, and turn it inside out. Give your dance a motive. For example: A man who can't separate his other self from his ego. From the moment he enters from the flies [wings], he is wrapped in this other body, and no matter how hard he wrestles, he simply can't separate himself from it. With this idea you can suggest a lot to your audience. A person will imagine he's the spouse you hate and from whom you can't separate. Another, that it's the bad part of himself from which he can't rid himself, even though he wants to. Someone else will think that this is what he needs--someone at his side every instant, who won't let him feel lonely.

"Something else you might develop is a pas de deux in which neither of the dancers can take the other by the hand. Create a handicap for yourself and in the struggle to resolve it you will find drawings never used before. What is a glissade? An arabesque? Anyone can use these and create choreography. But you don't want to do that. You are the new generation. I am the old. You should find the expression of your generation through choreography. You could sell this work, but what good would it do? None. You already dominate in drawing. You know how to put a group of ballerinas together. You have a good ear and you're very musical. But you have a mind, and talent that demands that you do a work at a level well above that of others.

"Don't compose over the melody. Harmony. Rhythm. This is the atmosphere, the richness over which you should develop your inventions."

Contreras's small early group then danced her El Mercado. Balanchine found this work more pleasing because she had invented more steps that were not based upon class technique. He asked her why she wanted to choreograph and was pleased when she answered that she found it fascinating to work with bodies and to mold them, corresponding to their personalities. He told her that in his company there were several dancers who had approached him and said that they wanted to choreograph because they knew that they couldn't do any more as ballerinas and thought being a choreographer was a "good job."

Choreography for him was a career that began when he was fifteen years old and demanded his entire life. He abhorred performers who thought producing choreography was simply the culmination of a long career in dance. He told Contreras to create her own language and the choreography of her generation. "Create and throw," he said. "Develop yourself through work and experience. Show me everything you produce and promise me not to sell anything that isn't going to last on its own artistic merits." He then admonished her to guard against "the enemies of fame, name, and money." He recommended work and modesty.

The ballets produced in other countries--France, England, Russia--were not to his liking because, to him, none of their choreographers understood that dance is dance. "They want to turn dance into a bastard brother of the arts. They can't accept dance that doesn't describe something. What is Mozart? Music. Simply music. Dance is the same. Simply dance.

There's nothing worse, "he added," than a bad ballet. People are being diplomatic when they say that they don't like to go to the ballet because they don't understand it. No, they're simply bored by it, because a succession of movements without motive only puts a spectator to sleep."

Contreras summed up Balanchine's counsel in her diary:

1. A choreographer should always know more than the dancers so that he or she will be able to lift them to a higher level.

2. Music is the heart of a dance. A choreographer ought to know this art professionally so that he or she can analyze the works and not only use the most obvious part--the melody--but all of its structural charactertistics.

3. A knowledge of plastic arts is necessary because each moment of a dance should be a perfect picture. The choreographer should know sculpture, from the most ancient to the most modern.