Ballet Lives

Choura, Prima Ballerina Alexandra Danilova’s exciting autobiography about her early life in Imperial Russia, her escape from Soviet Russia, and her subsequent career in the West. Today’s juice: A blend of oranges, grapefruit, and golden beet.

I’m not really a balletomane, I’m much too biased to one ballet company – the New York City Ballet – to be one. And these days, when I’m living outside the city and have a young son, I rarely make it to see even them. In lieu of seeing live performances however, I’ve picked up the habit of reading dancers’ autobiographies. My favorites are Choura and Holding On to the Air. Both books were written by Balanchine ballerinas, the first one by Alexandra “Choura” Danilova and the second by Suzanne Farrell. Danilova and Farrell’s careers can be said to have bookended Balanchine’s: Danilova’s at the beginning of it, and Farrell’s at the tail end.

I’m too young to have seen the New York City Ballet when its creator and main choreographer Balanchine was still the director. When I came to the States, he had passed on and been replaced by Peter Martins. Danilova too, was no longer alive, and Suzanne Farrell had retired. There was a new collection of dancers, even though the same ballets were being performed. Dance critics were not all that impressed, but I had nothing with which to compare what I saw. To me, the New York City Ballet was, and is, as exciting as it gets. And it is all because of George Balanchine (1904-1983), one of the most prolific choreographers of the 21^st century, and the one who gave birth to the “neoclassical style” that is so appealing in its mix of the classical and the modern.

Balanchine’s choreography is deeply satisfying to me. Leaning over the balustrade up in the fourth ring of the New York State Theater, watching his ballets was like watching the solution of some intricate geometric problem. A relief. I felt purged and pure upon leaving. As if a clean slate had been offered me, and I could start life anew, with a fresh understanding. My favorite ballets were Movement for Piano and Orchestra and Concerto Barocco, but almost any Balanchine ballet would do. It wasn’t just the choreography, of course, it was all that wonderful music also: Stravinsky, Bach, Tchaikovsky…

The book Choura tells about the very beginning of George Balanchine, from the eyes of Choura, Alexandra Danilova, herself. She and Balanchine were contemporaries, as children they were both boarders at the prestigious Imperial Ballet School in Russia’s St. Petersburg, as colleagues they left Soviet Russia together, and at one point they were even married. In her later years, Danilova taught at Balanchine’s School of American Ballet in New York City. Though Balanchine disposed of her as his wife in a very rude way, she remained loyal to him.

The gorgeous Suzanne Farrell was Balanchine’s last muse and quite possibly his favorite ballerina. About her, he said: “She never resists.” She, on her hand, wrote the following about him: “(…) if he thought I could do something, I would believe him, often against my own reasoning. I trusted him not to let me be a fool but rather a tool, an instrument in his hand. In short, I trusted him with my life." When Farrell, whom Balanchine was in love with, married another dancer, she was promptly fired. Years later, when his anger and sadness had abated, Balanchine accepted her back into the company, and choreographed some of his last masterpieces on her.

I suppose it’s this utter dedication in the Balanchine ballerinas, this allegiance to him as a choreographer that so fascinates me. It’s exotic and foreign. As is their mysterious sense of dedication, discipline, and patience, neither of which were thought of as important when I grew up in the slackness that was Sweden in the 1970’s. How I wish I had been given some of it though; discipline is very difficult to pick up later in life.

Danilova and Farrell gave their lives to ballet, and in some respect perhaps to Balanchine. Neither of them had children. But, as Danilova writes poignantly at the end of her book:

“I sacrificed marriage, children, and country to be a ballerina, and there was never any misunderstanding on my part – I knew the price. I put my dancing first, before my allegiances to friends, lovers, even husbands, before my home. It is possible to be a ballerina and give only fifty or seventy-five percent of yourself to your art, to conserve the rest and make of it a life for yourself, apart from the stage. But that was not for me. I gave one hundred percent of myself to my art, and my art has repaid me.”