Like movie stars, ballerinas always used to get dressed up when they went out.
That point is driven home in an amazing montage of still photos of Tanaquil Le Clercq posted at youtube by a human who calls him/herself “Tamara Toumanova.” (The real Toumanova, of course left us in 1996.)
I’ve gone through a lot of Le Clercq photos in my time, and there are quite a few here that I’d never even seen before.
It’s been years since we could think of ballerinas, as a vocational class, as possessing chic. With those figures, they should, but somehow they rarely seem very stylish in real life. Of course, today, the popular entertainment stars can also seem all too clueless. . .
However, Le Clercq’s chic is impressive not only in the stage photos published here but in a shot of her eating with then-husband George Balanchine. Yes, she was the Grace Kelly/Audrey Hepburn of ballet. (An ex-colleague, however, found her most redolent of Carole Lombard.) And of course she was frequently asked to model clothes in photo shoots as well.
“She knew what to do with herself,” another ex-colleague recalled to me about the way Le Clercq put herself together. “She just was very knowing, and so bright.”
Nature or nurture, who knows? Her mother was also elegant, and liked to sew. When I interviewed Edith Le Clercq all those many years ago, she told me that as a girl Tanaquil would often sit and watch.
Fashion, ballet, the movies — each creates its own beauty, imagery, iconography. In ballet the fine-tuned muscular refinement is used to encompass, to represent that extra dimension beyond wordliness and actuality. Those weird, elongated lines and shapes can seem so familiar, so true, so meaningful, and yet they are so far from a literal representation of anything.
I remember reading how Balanchine at the end of his life in his New Yorker interviews with W. McNeil Lowry said something to the effect that Le Clercq “could dance like she was far away.” Undoubtedly, that’s why he was reportedly at one point entertaining the idea of staging Giselle for Le Clercq, even tall (for that era) as she was.