Jewel in Its Proper Setting

In the four decades since George Balanchine left his native Russia, he has never had a theater to compare with the one he grew up in -- the grand Maryinsky in old St. Petersburg. With the desperate wit of a tenement boy playing stoop ball, he has fashioned his art to survive its locale -- and in New York, where Balanchine has lived and worked for the past 30 years, its locales have been dingy, gloomy, unfriendly or cramped. But when Balanchine's New York City Ballet opened its spring season in the crystal splendor of the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center last week, the jewel was at last in a proper setting. The new theater is magnificent, and so was the ballet.

"Papered with People." The opening achieved a kind of quiet beauty entirely new to New York (see color pages). The theater's columned entrance faces Philharmonic Hall across a wide plaza, and the two buildings reflect each other in scale and design as well as purpose.* With audiences arriving at each and the fountain splashing between, both buildings acquire an air of excitement that is beyond the reach of either alone. But where Philharmonic Hall evokes a modern age of icy grandeur, the New York State Theater is a warm and elegant restatement of traditional splendor -- reminiscent, in fact, of the old Maryinsky.

Architect Philip Johnson fully shared Balanchine's notion of what a ballet theater's mood should be: he designed the building, he says, to make everyone in it feel formally dressed whether he is or not. Two sweeping grand escaliers lead up to an immense promenade. There Johnson put carpets on the walls, gold leaf on the 200-ft. by 60-ft. ceiling, and patterns of travertine merlino rosso marble on the floors. Then he ringed the room with three inner balconies.

The promenade is within easy reach of everyone in the theater, and when the balconies fill with strollers at intermissions, the walls, as Johnson says, seem "papered with people." Intricate grilles along the balconies, crystal lights against the inner wall, and a golden bead curtain across the full sweep of the glass wall that faces the plaza give the room a noble, vaguely Venetian glow. It is the perfect place in which to pop a champagne cork.

The auditorium is ringed with five shallow balconies that stand out like golden horseshoes against the garnet walls; the orchestra seats stand in an island unbroken by aisles, European-style. Although the theater is as big as the acrophobia-inducing Metropolitan Opera House, it has a feeling of closeness and intimacy that makes it seem far smaller. Only 550 of the 2,729 seats are farther than 100 feet from the stage, and all but a few of the $1.05 seats at the top have a perfect sight line. Single seats are placed Indian-file along the balconies at an angle that encourages their occupants to lean out over the rail, as though fascinated to be present; again the walls appear decorated with people.

The Abandoned Mosque. The ballet presented an entire week of previews before getting around to its official opening--a dazzling, well-nigh perfect performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The first preview was for the workmen who built the theater, the next for patrons and balletomanes, one for friends of Lincoln Center, another to present the building to society, critics and politicians. The first preview opened with a twelve-tone trumpet fanfare composed for the occasion by Igor Stravinsky, and though it sounded like something to herald a recitation from The Bronx phone book, it was an acoustical triumph. The auditorium, as the rest of the week soon proved, has a superb sound--clean, warm and rich enough to make the Philharmonic across the way seem all the chillier.

The new theater is also the home of Richard Rodgers' new light-opera company, which will take it over in July with Rise Stevens in The King and I. The ballet will have the stage only 20 weeks a year, and will remain on the premises an additional 13 to 15 weeks to practice and rehearse. Still, the stage was clearly built with ballet in mind: instead of the turntables and elevators that are de rigueur in new musical theaters, it is a linoleum-covered wooden platform especially constructed to add spring to a dancer's steps. To judge from the unmixed delight of the dancers in their first moments on the new stage, Balanchine would have to chloroform them to get them back to their old, abandoned mosque on 55th Street.

The new stage has the width and depth ballet needs to unfold its patterns and gain its wings. "At the old theater," says Star Dancer Jacques d'Amboise, "I used to have a boy hold the curtain for me while I went down the hall to start back far enough to get the momentum I need for my entrance." With all its new elbowroom, the company danced with new grace and exuberance.

The first week's repertory relied heavily on brash and bouncy crowd pleasers, such as Western Symphony (cowboys and cowgirls) and Stars and Stripes (Old Glory unfurled to the music of Sousa). But the dancers also presented Agon, a work of great depth and sophistication, and Serenade, the company's signature piece. Serenade was the first ballet Balanchine created for American dancers, and it reflects the simple, untrained beauty he saw in them from the start. One of his first pupils fell, and another came late to rehearsal; Balanchine choreographed both episodes into the dance, and the work has served him as a copy book ever since.

Creative Classicism. A theater of his own is merely the latest godsend that has showered on Balanchine this winter in a monsoon of largesse. He achieved his undisputed stature as the world's leading choreographer (TIME cover, Jan. 25, 1954) while proceeding strictly in forma pauperis, and for years it was the fashion to cluck about what a pity it was that such a genius had to scuffle along with a crippling budget. Then last December the Ford Foundation gave a $7,700,000 grant to Balanchine and his artistic satellites, entrusting him with the future of classical dance in America. Now that he has new power to attract the best talents in the country to the splendors of his theater, the dance world outside Balanchine's orbit is all but unanimously against him.

Modern dance is almost spiritually opposed to the promulgation of ballet, but Balanchine's good fortune has caused real outrage among classical dancers too. They fear he will use his influence and power to impose his own "American style" on the entire U.S. dance world. Mrs. Rebekah Harkness Kean has just created a new company with a $2,000,000 endowment to resist just that possibility. But long before any grants, the New York City Ballet was the only American company that could be compared to Moscow's Bolshoi, Leningrad's Kirov, London's Royal Ballet and Copenhagen's Royal Danish.

Thanks almost entirely to Balanchine, it now compares favorably. When Balanchine took his two-year-old company on its first trip abroad in 1950, a London critic proposed a memorial to all the gallant Americans who fell at Covent Garden. Since then, on the strength of a repertory that consists more than two-thirds of Balanchine's own works, the company has been pronounced the most creative ballet group now dancing. In the lean, neoclassical style that is distinctly its own, it is indeed peerless.

Enviable Virility. Balanchine avoids the big storytelling ballets, such as Sleeping Beauty and Giselle, to concentrate on musical values: "I think that dancing to music is entertaining alone," he says. Parisians greeted New York dancing as "le style Frigidaire," but Balanchine's ballets are now being performed frequently by more than a dozen major companies. With 110 ballets to his credit since he left Russia--including such masterpieces as Serenade, Agon, Apollo, The Four Temperaments, Concerto Barocco and Symphony in C--he has no rival as a choreographer, but it is his special genius to convey his thoughts to his dancers. He is, they say, the world's greatest teacher.

Balanchine occupies an incredibly large place in the life of each of his 66 dancers. Even the 16-year-olds in the corps de ballet speak of him as if he were Yahweh. The entire ballet is on call from ten to twelve hours a day, six days a week, and the pace gives no one time to think of anything beyond living up to Balanchine's artistic wishes.

The master does little talking, even when teaching a new dance. "Now we shall work with arms," he will say, helpfully turning his own into overcooked asparagus. The dancers copy. "Isn't it selfish of you," he will ask, "to expect 3,000 people to sit and watch you lift your leg if you're not going to do it beautifully?"

Many of the dancers quite seriously believe that leaving Balanchine's company would be as disastrously stupid as skipping Mozart's piano classes in Vienna, and every dancer states the same ambition: "First to be in the corps, then a soloist, then a principal." The resuit of such spirit is a company amazingly deep in great dancers; the merest member of the corps, Balanchine insists, could have been a prima ballerina in imperial Russia.

The ballet has two dazzling male stars in Jacques d'Amboise and Edward Villella, and the powerful dancing of Conrad Ludlow and Arthur Mitchell has added a virility enviable anywhere in the dance world. Ranking ballerinas such as Melissa Hayden, Patricia Wilde, and Maria Tallchief have a sameness of excellence that assures every program of a dazzling performance, but much of the company's real excitement comes from younger dancers--Patricia McBride, Suzanne Farrell, Suki Schorer, Gloria Govrin.

Personal Vision. Balanchine, who lives pleasantly on royalties that reach $20,000 in a good year, has been working without salary, but he pays his dancers well over union scale. His selflessness is highly purposeful; a choreographer, he says, has to "use people." Lincoln Kirstein, Balanchine's patron and the general director of the company, calls him "Oriental, impersonal, even sinister," but points out that "Balanchine has imposed his personal vision on the world of theatrical dancing." This is quite a trick, for ballet, according to Kirstein, "has become a means for the extreme release of physical and mental capacity involving measure, melody, memory and money."

Balanchine is at his finest when a new conception strikes him and he sets to work on a ballet. "I listen, listen, listen to the music, and then it comes," he says. The music suggests how the ballet begins and ends, perhaps, the number of dancers, the costumes. "But only when the dancers are on the stage and I am with them can I begin. You have only the clay, and you work on it, molding it, changing it, shaping it until you have what you want."

What Balanchine wants is so much his private ideal that many of the ballet's best friends wonder if it can long outlive him. Ballet is an art that resides almost totally in the minds of its choreographers; since it resists notation, it cannot be passed along easily from one director to another. But even if the company fails to survive its master, the esthetic principle he has made it stand for certainly will: that there is only one thing of value in the dance, and that is the simple beauty of the body in motion.

* When the new Metropolitan Opera House opens on a third face of the plaza in 1966, the three houses will bring nightly audiences of more than 9,000--plus unimaginable traffic jams--to Lincoln Center.

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