Balancing balanchine: a pas de deux with Robert Gottlieb, whose pocket-sized new biography on ballet master George Balanchine furthers the conversation on this 20th-century giant

Interview, Dec, 2004

As 2004 draws to a close, so too does the centenary of one of the 20th century's great creative geniuses, George Balanchine. To mark the occasion, two new biographies have recently been published: Terry Teachout's All in the Dances (Harcourt) and Robert Gottlieb's George Balanchine: The Ballet Maker (HarperCollins/Atlas). Interview editor in chief Ingrid Sischy speaks with writer, editor, and dance authority Gottlieb about Balanchine and his celebrated New York City Ballet, once characterized as nothing less than "our civilization."

INGRID SISCHY: You've devoted many years to George Balanchine, working alongside him in a number of capacities at the New York City Ballet and now writing this short biography. What is it about Balanchine that captured your imagination?

ROBERT GOTTLIEB: If you care about dance, and if you grew up, as we did, toward the end of the 20th century, and if you're available to the art of ballet, both at its most refined and its most inclusive, Balanchine is the one. There's really no other artist I can think of--maybe Bach--who both sums up everything that had happened in his art form and then moves it forward. It's as if Balanchine was both a classicist, like Mozart, and a revolutionary, like Beethoven, all wrapped up into one. Unlike Picasso, who had formidable rivals, there is no real rival to Balanchine: There's never been anyone with a mastery of the form to the extent that he had it. He understood everything about ballet--French Opera ballet, Russian classical ballet, modernist ballet. He understood tap, he understood Busby Berkeley. (He considered Fred Astaire the greatest dancer of his time.) People tend to forget that Balanchine choreographed many Broadway musicals, including four with Rodgers and Hart, and worked with Samuel Goldwyn in Hollywood.

IS: So, he wasn't a snob.

RG: In no way! His favorite television shows were westerns, and his favorite sandwich was melted cheese and tomato on toast. What he was, was an overwhelming genius, and an immensely disciplined one. As I try to show in the book, he didn't believe in romantic notions like "inspiration"; he didn't wait for "the moment," but just quickly and efficiently did whatever the job required. Yet he also would wait patiently for the right opportunity--he might have an idea brewing for decades until the circumstances were right. There was always something he wanted to do. As with Dickens or Verdi or Shakespeare, his art just poured out. He must have made 60 masterpieces, and you feel that if he hadn't made those 60, he would have made 60 others.

IS: Aha! He's a great paradigm for you.

RG: Well, for all of us. And on top of that, the New York City Ballet as an institution was itself a work of genius. But it wasn't easy getting there. From the start, Balanchine was opposed to importing Russian dancers and style to America. He saw Americans as having different bodies, different musical and rhythmic impulses--they were more athletic, more casual. His ideal American woman was Ginger Rogers. Because he saw a different potential for dancers here, he began, in 1934, by founding the School of American Ballet, with the emphasis on "American." He was determined to create the kind of dancers he knew he needed in order to make a true American ballet. Even after the founding of the New York City Ballet, in 1948, 15 years after his arrival in America, he had to use what was available and work with it. But by the mid-'50s, he had enough dancers coming out of his school so that it was no longer a question of making do; it was a question of taking the best of what he himself had created. The witty, elegant Tanaquil LeClercq--who was to be the last of his five wives, and who was tragically struck down by polio in 1956--was the first. Then came my friend Allegra Kent, and after that almost every woman in the company came out of the school.

IS: What about the men?

RG: The men tended to be imported, although his two most famous male dancers, Edward Villella and Jacques d'Amboise, were trained in the school. And just as important as his genius as a teacher was his infallible understanding of how you bring a dancer along. Just about every dancer who worked with him says something like, "He understood what I could do and what I couldn't do better than I did. He knew exactly where to help, knew how to push and not push. He knew what direction I could go in, directions that never occurred to me." Every dancer was developed in his or her own time and pace, just as the repertory was.

IS: How did he come up with the goods?

RG: Balanchine was a trained musician, and he'd make a piano reduction of the score and play it over and over until he understood the music thoroughly. Music was everything to him--the great influence in his life was that other modernist master Igor Stravinsky, with whom he happily collaborated for more than 40 years--they even did a ballet for elephants together, for the circus! When Balanchine went into the studio to choreograph, he didn't seem to have a formal plan but would respond to the individual bodies he had chosen to work with. He was also the fastest choreographer on record--he did it fast, and he could let it go fast. If something wasn't working, or the money to produce it failed to materialize, he just went on and did something else. When the company needed a hit, he'd make a hit--The Nutcracker is a prime example--and when things were more stable financially, he'd do something more daring. IS: Remind us how Balanchine came to be in New York in the first place.