The Complete Ballet Read online

  The Red Shoes is a movie made by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. It’s the story of a ballet impresario and a ballerina, a fictionalized portrait of Sergei Diaghilev and a young girl who becomes his star. The actual Diaghilev brought ballet into the twentieth century with the Ballets Russes, which he founded in 1909. Pavlova danced for him and Coco Chanel designed for him and Balanchine choreographed for him. Originally the movie was to be about Vaslav Nijinsky, the famous dancer who, like the girl in The Red Shoes, became the lover of the man who let him dance. In the movie, the ballerina, played by Moira Shearer, a real ballerina, doesn’t have sex with the impresario, but when she falls in love with someone else, Diaghilev, or the man who represents Diaghilev, can’t stand it. And we don’t know the sex lives of Nijinsky and Diaghilev, but they stayed together all those years because Diaghilev gave Nijinsky a way to think about dance. And think with dance. Nijinsky’s intelligence was not a typical intelligence. His mind, literally, was embedded in his muscles, which is why the ballets he choreographed for Diaghilev, The Afternoon of a Faun, and The Rite of Spring, were unlike any ballets anyone had ever seen. And because Diaghilev had the talented and attractive protégé he needed, the relationship lasted. It lasted until, on a tour to South America, Nijinsky met a woman, a twenty-two-year-old heiress who, like the girl with the movie posters in her bedroom, had decided that she would become Nijinsky’s wife. And did. And whatever his sexuality was, it was fluid enough to allow him to marry her and give her a child, a daughter, and Diaghilev, who heard the news via telegram, was too powerful to be heartbroken, but he was. He fired Nijinsky, who stopped performing with the company, and although he tried, like Pavlova, to perform on his own, gradually, because of war and family entanglements, and it was probably genetic. Nijinsky went mad. Or rather the madness that was in him, that had been released when he danced, having nowhere to go, ate away at his sanity. Asylums were tried and cures were prescribed but in the end his madness became inevitable, and he died in a clinic in London.

  At the betrothal celebrations Nikiya’s job is to perform and she does her job, but dolefully. She can’t help wishing that some event, an earthquake or fire, will stop the proceedings and Solor, holding hands with this other woman, will realize the mistake he’s making, and realize who really loves him. And Solor is watching her. He’s in the position of wanting her but also wanting Gamzatti, wanting everything he wants and not believing or not realizing or not acknowledging that someone is going to get hurt, and it’s going to be Nikiya but what can he do. He’s on a path, a path not picked by him because if he picked the path he would be able to love both women. He does love both women, and he still believes that somehow it might still be possible to be with both of them. And while he’s thinking this, in the wings, either Gamzatti’s maid or Gamzatti’s father conceals a snake in a basket of flowers. Nikiya’s big solo is filled with battements and grand arabesques, and because she sees Solor watching her, like Margot Fonteyn when she danced the part, aware that Nureyev was watching her, she fills her dancing with longing and passion and when the dance is over people throw roses and money and she’s given the basket of flowers. When the old maid tells her the flowers are from Solor she can’t help dancing an encore, an encore expressing the realization of a dream. She looks at Solor, then looks at the flowers, and Haskell reminds us that the face is as much a part of the dancer’s instrument as the feet and arms, and her face is dancing when, looking down to smell the flowers, the serpent rears its head. There’s a brief moment of stillness, and then there’s a long moment in which, no longer on point, she holds the snake at bay, almost embracing it, grabbing its body as the body slithers out of her hands and eventually the snake sinks its teeth into her neck. She swoons, falls to the floor, and she’s not quite dead when the nightclub owner rushes to her side, offering her an antidote. But accepting the antidote means accepting him, and she’d rather die than live without love. And so she dies.

  Water under the bridge. That’s what Cosmo told me a few days later. He was pouring us each another glass of scotch. We were sitting at a table in the empty Crazy Horse, our glasses on the table, an ashtray filled with dead cigarettes and the whiskey was going down easily. I knew from experience that if it goes down easily at first, it might not be so easy later, but I had to drink. We were having a rapprochement. The incident with Rachel, although nothing had happened, created a tension between us, like a wound, like an injured muscle we couldn’t touch because of the pain, but eventually we had to touch it, we were friends, and if we let it heal the wrong way, tight and constricted, our friendship would change, and because we liked the way it was, what we were doing, both of us, was trying to massage the muscle until it loosened, and the whiskey seemed to help because it loosened us. But the wound was tender. Which is why Rachel’s name didn’t come up. We were both leaning forward on the small square table, our forearms on the table edge, cigarettes hovering above the ashtray, hands hovering above the whiskey glasses, and when he reached over and patted my shoulder it was meant to show affection, no hard feelings, but where was Rachel? He wasn’t mentioning her, and I was wondering if he’d fired her, or if she’d quit, but I wasn’t asking because Cosmo, like a good magician, was directing my attention elsewhere, to another drink or another laugh. And because no mention of Rachel was made, each laugh became a little less real until, like the famous carriage turning into a pumpkin, I turned into someone who was wishing I was home, in bed, reading a book or sleeping. Only problem, the party can never end because if the party ended … I didn’t know what would happen, or what Cosmo was afraid might happen, but Rachel was there, between us, not like the haze of smoke encircling us, although that was there, but she was also in our minds. She was in mine when I asked about the Vienna number, how it was coming along, and I knew she was in Cosmo’s mind because he didn’t answer my question. Instead he took another drink, as I did, and I was doing it for ceremonial reasons. To bond with Cosmo. To mutually forget the person who came between us. And although the drunker we got the more forgetful we were supposed to become, Cosmo couldn’t do it. Things happen, he said. And I knew he was talking about Rachel. But what’s important. You know what’s important? He stood up, and I know he was partly talking about friendship, the bond between men that he must have felt, a cultural thing I didn’t feel. And as I say, he didn’t bring up Rachel’s name and I didn’t either, and then he said, Get over here, you. And when I stood up he did what he does when his feelings of affection conflict with his anger. He pretended to punch me. He expressed his feelings physically, and how can men be physical except by hitting each other? He locked his arm around my neck and jabbed at my head, not hard but persistently, and my instinct was to defend myself, which was a way of engaging with him, which is what he craved. And then he hit me a little harder, trying to reach my ribs, to hurt them but also to tickle them. He was using his left hand for punching, his right hand around my head, and when I twisted out of his grip he started slapping at me, using both his hands, still playful, like a dog playfully biting another dog, and although he didn’t say put up your dukes, I had to do that, to fend him off, using my arms to parry him but he kept coming, chin down, arms swinging, and the only thing I could really do, and probably what he wanted me to do, was hold him, the way boxers hold their opponents. They grab each other to stop the punching, pulling themselves into what looks like an embrace. And when I did that to Cosmo, he did it back to me, holding me until the intimacy of violence, even feigned violence, turned into its opposite, the intimacy of sorrow, hidden sorrow, and he wasn’t mentioning Rachel but there we were, swaying slightly because of the drinks we’d been drinking, not talking, until Cosmo must have felt the moment subside, and when we let go of each other, that’s when he said, let’s celebrate. He thought sorrow wouldn’t catch up to him if he was celebrating, and he took my hand, like a boyfriend taking his girl’s hand, and I didn’t mention my situation with the Commodore because what was my situation? That I was scared. It wasn’t that com
plicated. And anyway, he couldn’t listen to me because he was busy being happy, or trying to be happy, trying to let his bygones leave him alone.

  In the movie version of The Red Shoes, the Diaghilev character is mounting a new ballet called The Red Shoes. It’s based on a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen. It’s about a girl who falls in love with a pair of shoes, a pair of ballet slippers hanging in a window. The shoemaker is something of a sorcerer, and she makes a deal with him in exchange for the shoes, and she wears the shoes to the grand ball and all goes well. And the ballerina character in the movie makes a similar deal with the Diaghilev-like impresario. She can dance as long as she stays devoted to the man who allows her to dance, which is him. And because dancing is what she lives for, she’s happy agreeing to that. And all goes well until she meets someone. When she starts falling in love with the ballet’s composer, because she’s falling in love with something other than him, the Diaghilev character can’t stand it. At one point, receiving a telegram in which she asks for her freedom, he walks to the mirror above the fireplace, the crumpled telegram in his fist, and punches the mirror. We see his face reflected in the broken glass, the glass reflecting his broken heart, and he refuses to let her go. He demands that she keep rehearsing, that she not see anyone but him, that she become the girl in the story who, at the end of the evening, is tired. She wants to go home but the red shoes won’t let her go home. They aren’t tired. The red shoes never get tired. According to Andersen, They dance her out into the streets. They dance her over the mountains and valleys, through fields and forests, through night and day. Time rushes by. Love rushes by. Life rushes by. But the red shoes dance on. And at the end of the story the girl dies.

  A depressed Solor wanders the empty streets, not quite knowing what happened to him but vaguely aware that he is responsible for causing the death of Nikiya. He’s more staggering than dancing, and he staggers into a spotlight in the middle of the empty stage, sits on a carpet next to an opium pipe, and lying on his side like an odalisque, he puts the opium pipe to his mouth. Inhaling the smoke and holding it in his lungs, in his euphoria, he has a vision of Nikiya. She’s fogbound, a white figure gamboling in the high Himalayan snow. This is the famous scene in which not only Nikiya, but every member of the extended corps de ballet, flutters down, all dressed in white, and the dance is called the Kingdom of the Shades. These delicate beings are meant to be ghosts, peaceful ghosts unlike the Wilis, and the stage is so crowded with them they’re almost amorphous, ebbing and eddying and coalescing around Nikiya. It’s a dream so anything can happen, and being Solor’s dream, he and Nikiya are drawn together. The music shifts from a languid adagio into an allegro that has him rising, taking her hand, and surrounded by ghosts, he begins partnering her, running with her the way dancers run, in an ever-widening circle, lifting her and sustaining the lift, dancing a dance of reconciliation and understanding. At one point he almost wakes up. But waking up would end the dream, a dream he realizes now he can’t live without and so he holds the dream, and holds her, in his mind. And it’s a long scene, but it can’t be long enough because when it’s over she’ll be gone, and the music builds to the moment when she makes her final leap into the air, and he catches her, and as he lowers her, his face coming close enough to hers to kiss her lips, that’s when he wakes up. Or a squire wakes him up. He’s about to get married, and the wedding, when it happens, happens on the steps leading up to the great stone temple. One of the things I remember from school is the names of the old Greek columns. Doric, Ionic, Corinthian. But because ballet is a fantasy, the columns of the temple are crowned with all of them, and with flowers and with statues of elephants. All of it speaks of wealth and grandeur and Solor has come to make his vow, and vow comes from votum, to vote. Gamzatti is there with her father, and the nightclub owner is there, and Nikiya is dead but Solor, standing beside his fiancée, looking over the crowd of spectators, sees Nikiya. Her tiny, fluttering steps give her the appearance of weightlessness, and she keeps her distance, unseen by the Rajah who’s walking his daughter down the aisle, and the nightclub owner doesn’t see her but Solor sees nothing else. He’s supposed to look at the face of his wife-to-be, into her eyes, to take her hand and vow to her with words he knows but because he can’t say them the wedding stops. The music fades and the guests make muffled murmurs. They’re waiting, and Solor is waiting, and the ring is in his pocket, and since he’s already gone this far he might as well take out the ring and slip it on her finger. But if your excuse is that you’ve already gone too far, when do you ever stop? Now is the only possible time to stop. But now he’s gone too far and he looks, not at Gamzatti but down at his fingers, watching the ring slide over her knuckles, and once he’s gone that far it’s over. That’s when the power Nikiya wished for, the power that is hers in death, finally appears. It comes from above, descending into her and then, like a breath, rising out of her, and whether it’s coincidence or whether the power she feels is actually the power of the world, the temple starts to shake. The carved elephants crumble, the thick columns crack and fall, and the guests of the wedding, standing under those columns, are crushed. And killed. Including Solor. And if the theater has the right equipment, although he’s dead, he’s able to rise from the rubble, join Nikiya, and the two of them, as the lights fade, are borne aloft.

  ACT FOUR

  Swan Lake

  Swan Lake is about someone getting older. Prince Siegfried is heir to the kingdom, and when the ballet begins he’s having a birthday party, with wine and food and his friends have come to celebrate on the palace lawn. The problem is, he doesn’t want to be getting older. He’s grown up in a rarefied world of violin lessons and hunting expeditions, and he knows a man his age is supposed to be married, that’s what they tell him, or his mother tells him, and he has nothing against marriage, and he likes the companionship of pretty girls, but none of the girls he knows excite him. Some of them used to, but now he’s adrift, craving not excitement as much as intensity, a deep emotional bond with another person, and never having found it he’s learned to do without it. Benno, his best friend, is drinking more wine than he normally does, enough to provoke him to mention the girl Siegfried used to take fencing classes with, but she’s long gone. Another girl, a dancer, was extremely beautiful, but either he was dating someone else, or she was, or he never worked up the nerve to take her in his hand, and now she’s gone, and the girls at the party are nice but that’s about all. Benno, seeing his friend getting depressed, in an effort to distract him, pretends to be a donkey. He puts on an orange leotard, and when he sticks out his butt he’s taunting the others to chase him and catch him, and someone has a fox tail attached to a needle, and that’s when Siegfried’s mother appears. And when she does the festivities stop. Her face is unsmiling, full of disapproval. She doesn’t have to say she finds the levity inappropriate, they know what she thinks, about them and about their influence on her boy, her only child. This is fine for children, she says, but you, she directs a reproach to her son, if you don’t get your life in order, my boy, make the changes we expect you to make, that you must want to make, then … and she gestures a gesture of something like life, some fluid thing trickling through her fingers. Tomorrow, she reminds him, is his formal birthday ball. That’s when he will have to act, have to choose the smartest or the prettiest, or whatever he wants, to be his wife. And of course he’s agreed to this, how could he not. All his tailors and horses and theater tickets are purchased with her money, making him, in an unspoken way, indebted to her. And worried. He’s worried that he won’t be able to pay her back, that he won’t and can’t and shouldn’t pretend to love someone he doesn’t love, which is what she wants. But he’s agreed to try, tomorrow night. That’s when he’ll face the decision to either obey his mother or obey his heart, and he’s afraid he’s going to submit to her, resign himself to a world without love, and maybe he’s not even capable of love, just good at simulating love, good at giving attention to people, and how can you be so enraptur
ed with another person that you care more for that person than yourself? I felt that way, at moments, with my daughter, but she was my child and Siegfried doesn’t have a child. He’s the one who’s always been a child, and is now, and although part of him questions the romantic notion of perfect monogamy, since he’s grown up in a world that promulgates that notion, and since his mother expects her loan to be paid back, there’s nothing to say. I’m not looking forward to it, he says, an expression of muted defiance. Be that as it may, his mother says. And although the full skirt she’s wearing is one that, when he was a child, he used to hide under, now the person wearing the skirt scares him. Not scares, but he dutifully accedes to her wishes. And when she leaves the party the guests, who were motionless when she was there, remain motionless until Benno, in an effort to raise his friend’s spirits, suggests a hunt, a great idea, and every one starts dancing.

  I didn’t have a comfortable chair in my house so I was on my bed, looking at an illustrated anatomy book when I heard the knock. I had no reason not to open the door, neighbors stopped by periodically, but when I did it wasn’t the neighbors. I hadn’t expected to see the men so soon. I was expecting to spend the day reading and eating, maybe riding my bike in the afternoon, but now here they were, Freddie, Seymour, the man who’d dealt the cards, and the silent crew-cut guy. And the Commodore. They all deferred to him. He was somewhere in his late fifties, early sixties, and his teeth were white in a way that didn’t look real. Seymour was the mouthpiece, the one who spoke first. Hiya, he said, as if we were old chums. He patted my back, stepped into the house, and as if it was his house he invited the rest of them in. He put his arm around my neck, gave me a friendly jab in the ribs and they were all acting friendly, too friendly. The Commodore was whispering to Freddie, who whispered to Seymour, whose wet saliva was spraying the hairs in my ear with the same talk at the same time. How you doing? Nice place you got here. Seymour had already checked out my apartment and now they were all doing it, sizing it up, eyeing my desk and the typewriter on my desk, and since they were all talking, to me or about me, I didn’t know who to give my answer to, or how to answer, except the Commodore was the boss, I knew that. When he suggested we take a walk, to give us an opportunity, he said, to sort things out, that’s what we did. I recommended the Coffee Table, an anonymous café a few blocks away, with sandwiches and pastries, and since it was almost lunchtime maybe they were hungry. I was happy we would be on neutral territory, and as we all walked out of my house, down my steps and down the driveway, I noticed a cloud in the sky. One cloud. And if it weren’t for the men I would’ve stopped, watched the cloud evaporate. But now I was walking with them up the narrow sidewalk, the Commodore and I leading the way, his footsteps longer than mine, mine like a little kid’s, trying to match his and catch up, and because we mostly walked in silence, it was a long walk.