“Anytime you see my name on the schedule, just go sit down in the corner and I’ll forget you’re even there,” Antony Tudor said to me in 1983 when I asked if I could watch his rehearsals.
He knew me by sight, from being around Tchernichova. And I think he really was being gracious. And yet, I must say, that eventually I neurotically reflected–Does he mean that I’m that forgettable?
No, I don’t think he did. But making you question yourself, stripping your defenses was something he knew how to do. Where the dancers were concerned, that meant that he enabled them to get past their superficial ego, to stop letting their eyes get peeled on their own glass ceiling. It’s probably a little uncomfortable to function that way, but with that vulnerability on the part of the performer, extraordinary things will happen, and they did in his ballets.
Dancers are always keyed-up before a performance, but it did seem to me that there was an extra quota of seriousness and intensity before one of his ballets was performed.
Of course sometimes his behavior was gratuitous: there are some awful stories about the way he treated people. I didn’t see cruelty; I saw intimations of a temper and will that were perhaps all the more daunting for not being completely deployed. (He was of course old and had had a heart attack.) But he did, invariably, get his point across.