GLR May-June 2023

There had been earlier attempts to find a home for ballet in the U.S., but—while Anna Pavlova (from 1910 to 1925) and a few other internationally famous stars had successfully drawn audiences—there had been few opportunities to study classical technique and a scant tradition of indigenous choreography. Kirstein insisted to Austin that the planned-for school “can be the basis of a national culture as intense as the great Russian Renaissance of Diaghilev. We must start small. But imagine it— we are exactly as if we were in 1910. ... Please, please, Chick, if

company. His detour to Broadway alarmed Kirstein, even as it gave him more of a chance to exercise his own talents. Picking from among some dozen dancers already attached to the Amer ican Ballet, he formed a touring company, Ballet Caravan, which toured the country for a few months of each year for four years. Kirstein’s conviction that Balanchine stood head-and shoulders above all other choreographers hadn’t weakened: the Caravan primarily performed and spread awareness of the mas ter’s genius. That genius, in Kirstein’s view, was uniquely cen

you have any love for anything we do both adore, rack your brains and try to make this all come true. It will mean a life work to all of us [and] incredible power in a few years.” He assured Austin that he was not being “ei ther over-enthusiastic or visionary.” But of course he was being both. Drunk on possibilities, perhaps feeling it might be now or never, Kirstein couldn’t help throw

tered on the virtuosic body in stark, swift motion, unconnected to sentimental narra tion, with movement an end in itself. At the same time, Kirstein initially hoped to include ballets that had at least the out lines of a traditional storyline, and, in par ticular, with identifiably American content that referenced everyday life. With Ballet Caravan under his exclusive control, it be

When in Europe during the summer of 1933, Kirstein— 26 at the time—met with Balanchine, and they talked about the possibility of an American ballet.

ing caution—along with absolute truthfulness—to the wind. Even if he’d been capable of a more modulated tone, it might not have appealed to Austin’s own audacious nature. Bravado and amplitude were mother’s milk to both men. If Austin was going to bite, the nervier the vision, the better. § I N THE FIRST FEW YEARS following Balanchine’s arrival in the U.S. late in 1933, Kirstein wholly immersed himself in the back-to-back crises, artistic and personal, that seemed to de scend without letup, and which threw into serious doubt the en tire notion of forming an American ballet. For much of the first year, Balanchine’s precarious health threatened to sink the ship; he himself tended to minimize the seriousness of his condition, but Kirstein knew better and had to constantly play nursemaid, ensuring Balanchine’s comfort, watching over his diet, shuttling him from one doctor’s office to the next—even as he puzzled over the specialists’ contradictory diagnoses. At one point a spe cialist found “two active but diminishing spots” on Balanchine’s lungs and prescribed injections of insulin that the previous spe cialist had advised against. To avoid alarming the patient, Kirstein—even while fretting over the contradictory diagnoses and elusive prescriptions—had to control his own, not incon siderable, mood swings. (Later in life, he’d be diagnosed with bipolar disorder. When W. H. Auden was at one point asked about Kirstein’s “erratic” behavior, Auden replied: “everyone has moods and Lincoln’s should be respected. Lincoln always means well ... he’s a very good man.”) When his health finally stabilized, Balanchine had a burst of creative energy, and no one was more thrilled than Kirstein. For three years in the early ’30s, Balanchine and the fledgling com pany (which called itself the American Ballet) provided the dance interludes at the Metropolitan Opera, which led to a full scale production of Balanchine’s Orpheus (with Tchelitchev’s set and costume designs). As a result, Balanchine started to get commercial offers and he signed on to do a Broadway show, On Your Toes , which proved an enormous success. That, in turn, led to still other assignments to choreograph musicals, includ ing Rodgers and Hart’s Babes in Arms . Despite this success, Balanchine’s prime interest remained what it always had been: creating an American ballet school and

came possible for Kirstein to commission works with a strong narrative line. Many of these ballets have become standards in the repertoire: Lew Christensen and Elliott Carter’s Pocahontas ; Eugene Loring and Paul Bowles’ Yankee Clipper ; Christensen and Virgil Thomson’s Filling Station ; and Loring and Aaron Copland’s Billy the Kid . Kirstein continued to value Balanchine’s genius, but, thanks to the new letters that have turned up, we now know that his ex perience in running the Caravan gave Kirstein a new confidence in his own judgment. In a letter to Tchelitchev, Kirstein vowed

and lesbian people in the Communist Party s personal history of gay Aptheker’ “Bettina y y

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Bettina Aptheker

May–June 2023

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