HERE IT IS IN FULL!
“At the Birth of Modern Ballet: Where ballet training once focused on strength and stamina, Balanchine insisted on tall, light and fast dancers—Patricia Wilde was the prototype”
By Judith Flanders [Aug. 12, 2016 3:51 p.m. ET]
The life and work of George Balanchine, founder of the New York City Ballet and choreographer of genius, is hardly unknown territory: The Library of Congress catalog lists nearly 300 titles exploring his art, his dance company, his life and even his cat. (Mourka was trained to leap balletically, and a book illustrating her photogenic skills has duly been cat-alogued.) Joel Lobenthal, associate editor of Ballet Review, has seemingly followed a more conventional path: “Wilde Times” is ostensibly a biography of an early Balanchine dancer, Patricia Wilde. But in truth the author uses her career to chart the unfolding of the New York City Ballet’s signature style and the creation of the prototypical “Balanchine dancer.”
Without belaboring the point, Mr. Lobenthal portrays a dance world that has vanished. Wilde, by birth Canadian, moved to New York to study dance at the shatteringly young age of 14, following the path set by her sister Nora, soon to join the Ballet Russe. By 1945, the 17-year-old Ms. Wilde had joined the same company. Ms. Wilde’s adolescent experience with the Ballet Russe saw her on a 79-city tour, during which it was entirely routine to give both matinee and evening performances, before rehearsing after the final curtain, and then traveling to a new city the next morning.
More importantly for her future, in the summer of 1945 Ms. Wilde worked with a pickup company Balanchine took to Mexico City, where she danced in “Apollo,” a seminal work in the Balanchine canon. “Balanchine taught class every morning at ten o’clock and conducted rehearsals late into the afternoon—without, unlike most of the city, a siesta break,” Mr. Lobenthal recounts. The dancers recalled this as a never-again-matched period of close collaboration with the choreographer.
Still, the New York City Ballet, founded in 1948 by Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein, must have seemed like just one more ephemeral group when Ms. Wilde joined it in 1950. Balanchine’s prodigious, untamed talent would ensure its longevity, and then its institutional status. Ms. Wilde was part of that transformation: Balanchine, as Mr. Lobenthal so astutely notes, uniquely blended his own desire for dance pared back to its essence with the theatricality that the Ballet Russe instilled into dancers like Ms. Wilde and Maria Tallchief (later to become one of the many Mrs. Balanchines). This is the author’s gift: The ability to take an impermanent visual art and anatomize it for his readers, showing what makes a dancer, or a piece, or a style, so special. For instance, he uses Ms. Wilde’s technical strengths—her speed, her precision, and her fearless, almost ferocious attack—to detail the difference between older dance training, focused on “strength, stamina, and control” and the more modern choices of height, lightness, speed and turnout. These choices were, in great part, established through Balanchine’s own preferences.
But while we read of Balanchine’s endless supply of creativity, turned into visual reality by Ms. Wilde and her coevals, there is another story in the background. Balanchine’s towering artistic gift was not matched by an equivalent love of humanity, or even the milk of human kindness. He was frequently unforgiving and ruthless. Dancers were set at odds with one another; some were banished for daring to have private lives. Sometimes, suggests Mr. Lobenthal, the choreographer deliberately created an aura of uncertainty, even fear, simply to increase his own enjoyment of a piece of which he had begun to tire.
The two sides of the choreographer are mirrored elsewhere. Ticket prices were kept deliberately low, to ensure the widest possible audiences. That is, of course, laudable, but without other sources of funding, also an institutional weakness: On tour the dancers were forced to go into debt, their per diem payments well below subsistence level. Mr. Lobenthal fails to connect these two points, even as he recounts both. There are other conclusions, too, that he fails to draw.
Ms. Wilde’s toughness is one of these. Dancers are frequently spoken of, and to, as children: They do what they’re told without the diva-dom of opera singers, or the independence of actors. Yet many of the greatest dancers worked as adults, as Ms. Wilde did, from early adolescence, and they had the survival skills that came with it. In 1953, Ms. Wilde married George Bardyguine, yet when, after decades of marriage and two children, he became ill and unreliable in his post as technical director of the Pittsburgh Ballet Theater, it was Ms. Wilde, then its artistic director, who told him he had to go. It appears that she learned more than just choreography from Balanchine.
The book’s starting-point, hundreds of hours of interviews with Wilde, perhaps prevents the author from drawing these conclusions. Instead of the banal observations that interviewees are prone to make—does it tell us anything to know that people Ms. Wilde stayed with were “Exceedingly nice”?—more of Mr. Lobenthal’s astute analyses would have been of far greater value. Nonetheless, Mr. Lobenthal has created a new way of seeing an old subject, and it is very welcome indeed.