Cultural revelation: in 1962 George Balanchine returned to the Soviet Union after an absence of thirty-eight years, bringing his New York City Ballet and a handful of his works to audiences that had been cut off from Western culture for decades

Dance Magazine, Jan, 1994 by Nancy Reynolds

There seems little doubt that New York City Ballet's tour of the Soviet Union in 1962-Balanchine's first visit to his homeland since leaving in 1924--was an event of particular significance to both sides. New York City Ballet was the first American company to appear on the Bolshoi stage. Although there is some debate as to whether or not Balanchine--a staunch anti-communist--initially approved to the trip, once he arrived, his excitement was evident. In Leningrad, according to friends and colleagues, he could hardly wait to show off the ballet academy on Theater Street. In Georgia, his spritual home (although he was a native of St. Petersburg), he enjoyed the nonstop speeches, toasts, and banquets that welcomed him. At the same time, it was a profoundly traumatic experience for Balanchine; he was depressed by the shabbiness all around him and by the constant suspicion of being shadowed. The general populace--and he would have been one of them, had he stayed--lived in fear. That, and the back-breaking hours of daily work, had aged people incredibly; most looked twenty years older than they were. At one point the emotional strain became so great that Balanchine left the tour and went back to New York for a week.

During the early 1960s, the Soviet Union, under premier Nikita Khrushchev, was experiencing a modest thaw that permitted limited exposure to the rest of the world. Moreover, in dance circles, a breakthrough toward more "dancey" ballents had been achieved, visible in the work of Yuri Grigorovitch, Igor Belsky, and Oleg Vinogradov. For the previous thirty years, however, the country had been completely cut off. Even those few--such as diplomats or artists touring abroad--who had seen more were not supposed to talk about anything foreign, much less to praise it. The lumbering drambayet--the evening-length story ballet with an uplifting message conveyed largely in pantomine--monopolized the Soviet stage. Thus, it was not surprising to hear Vinogradov tell me in a 1989 interview in his Kirov office that before the tour Balanchine was very little known. Just two of his ballets had been performed in the Soviet Union: Symphomy in C by Paris Opera Ballet in 1958 and Theme and Variations by American Ballet Theatre in 1960. Nonetheless, New York City Ballet performances everywhere were sold out in advance.

By all reports, including John Martin's eyewitness accounts published in the New York Times, the general public was thrilled by many of the works, and audiences were not inhibited about showing their feelings. They often applauded at length, shouted, and threw flowers; some of the most devoted followed the company from city to city (even when such traveling was officially forbidden). In Moscow, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, when the State Department feared a hostile demonstration, the company received instead a prolonged ovation (Balanchine had to come out on stage and ask the audience to go home). In Tbilisi, a group that had been unable to get tickets forced its way into the theater and was allowed to stay.

Today, those who saw the company then talk freely about their experiences. For Moscow dance historian Elizabeth Souritz, "Balanchine was a relevation of something new, which promised to bring new blood, new life to our ballet." The distinguished St. Peterburg scholor Vera Krasovskaya confides in a letter: "My reaction on seeing him and his ballets could be expressed in a very few words--the shock one receives when one meets a genius. As soon as the curtain went up and revealed on the old Maryinsky stage the girls shielding their eyes from the moonlight of Tchaikovsky's music, I was sent into a state of happy bewilderment. The sheer delight of looking at the dance that comes out of nothing but music, out of the very dept of it!" In a recent speech, the critic and essayist Vadim Gayevsky proclaimed that, with Symphony in C, "we were witnessing a completely new choreographic genre that immediately ranked as classic." And Elena Kunikova, who now teaches at Barnard and stages Russian ballets in this country but was a ten-year-old preballet student in 1962, still remembers the general excitement surrounding the visit. At home in St. Petersburg, her mother has kept all the programs.

But expressing oneself in print at the time was much more tricky. As Souritz puts it now, "We couldn't really say all that we felt." Aside from a possible lack of background with which tro approach his work (due to decades of isolation), they dared not show excessive enthusiasm for Balanchine--or anything else that was foreign--for this might imply that the analogous Soviet product was inferior; and, considering how often Soviet artists had been officially denounced for "formalism," it stands to reason that the critics were not about to praise abstraction. For those adhering closely to party ideology--that dance must contain "subject matter, a dance plot, kinship with the people, and realism," in the words of hard-liner Rostislav Zakharov (choreographer of Fountain of Bakhisarai)--Balanchine provided an easy target for disapproval. He had brought an uncompromising repertorie, including such plotless works as Agon, Episodes, Concerto Barocco, Serenade, Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux, Symphony in C, and Allegro Brillante. He also gave an interview in which he put his philosophy into words--for him the rarest of occurrences. For the record, Balanchine said: "Ballet ... should not be an illustrator of even ... the most substantive of literary sources. It will speak for itself. The ballet is flowers, beauty, poetry.... I am, if you please, an advocate of pure art." Insight critics were quick to point out that, in common with many great creative artists, he broke his own rules when he saw fit, but, while many were impressed with his powers of invention, most still had difficulty with the fact that his ballets offered no characters for the dancers to develop; that many of his movements were "ugly" and came from outside and classical lexicon; and that his ballets lacked a clear moral point. The noted historian Natalia Roslavleva, author of Era of the Russian Ballet, complained that Balanchine's "nonprogrammatic" ballets were "deprived not only of content but of idea. Expert and master of classical dance, he drew from original combinations his form of complex, choreographic pictures, in which the eye of the audience was struck by his skill in subtly elaborate rhythmic lines and his excellent sense of proportion. He visualized the musical composition with faultless taste and absolute musicality. But how does this go with thoughts, changes of mind, or feelings used by the composer in the moment of composition, reflecting his understanding of the world and his relation to it?" The composer Aram Khachaturian state flatly that "without an idea, without a subject, there cannot be true emotional art."