The Books: Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints, ‘Heroes and Hero Worship’, by Joan Acocella

On the essays shelf:

Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays by Joan Acocella. The next essay is called ‘Heroes and Hero Worship’, and it is about the legendary collaboration between Lincoln Kirstein and George Balanchine, the duo who created the New York City Ballet. It was published in The New York Review of Books in 1995.

Similar to her essays on certain writers in the early and mid 20th century, like Joseph Roth, Italo Svevo, or Stefan Zweig, Joan Acocella’s many essays on dance and profiles on choreographers and dancers have opened up a world to me that I know little about. It’s thrilling. There’s a certain kind of exhilaration when you read a confident writer, telling you, “Okay, listen up, this here is very important”, and then she can tell you why it is important. There are names that have reached me through osmosis, like Lincoln Kirstein, George Balanchine, and I certainly know their place in the world of American culture. You’d have to be ACTIVELY not paying attention to miss references to these men. But I haven’t read in-depth books about them, I don’t “follow” dance. It’s interesting: my friend Ted’s mother is a huge ballet fan, and is one of the members of the audience that Acocella talks about in this essay: that the New York City Ballet, in the 50s and 60s, was the place to be. It helped create the culture of New York, and the ballet dancers became celebrities. The audience felt themselves an active participant in the culture of NYCB, and dance critics argued in print for weeks following each production. It was a vital and vibrant time. There was no precedent for it. Ballet didn’t exist in this country before the New York City Ballet, not in any formal way. And, as Acocella breaks down in this in-depth essay, Balanchine (of course – even I knew this) was responsible for changing the artform entirely. He was not only influential. He was a pioneer, and a man ahead of his time. He saw the future, and moved towards it, often getting criticized for being out of step. It is a common issue for pioneers.

The essay should be read in its entirety, because my re-cap will not do it justice. Lincoln Kirstein (named after Abraham Lincoln), grew up in Boston in a very wealthy family (his father was an original investor in Filene’s), and was given an inheritance which helped set him up in life. He was rich. Art was one of his first loves, and over the course of his life, his resume is one of those daunting documents where you think, “Jeez, I have been such a SLACKER.” He did so much. He was an art patron, a voluminous critic, a mover and shaker, a fund-raiser, and also a visionary. He had very good taste, and very specific taste. Modernism and expressionism did nothing for him. He was a young man, circulating in a heady crowd, and he was the kind of guy who knew how to ask for help from wealthy people, and get things funded and off the ground. He was a genius. I am not sure where his interest in dance came from. But he had an idea: Ballet was a big deal in Europe. There were famous companies, like The Ballets Russes, which electrified the entire world. There were choreographers, like Serge Diaghilev (the maestro behind Ballets Russes), who revolutionized dance, bringing the classical ballet into the modern world (with the help of geniuses like Vaslav Nijinsky). Kirstein felt the lack of ballet in America. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to create, and since we are not a Socialist or Communist country, there is no such thing as a state-operated ballet company in the way there is in Russia. In many ways, those state-operated theatrical companies changed the entire world. It gave artists the freedom to create (although, of course, it made them beholden to the state in ways that we may find hard to comprehend), and it also created a sense of community and nationalism in their audiences. Even in the darkest days of the Cold War, Russia was proud of its world-famous ballet dancers (and it was an international event when they would defect). Kirstein felt the lack of ballet in American culture and wanted to do something about it.

This was his genius. To feel a lack, and to have the wherewithal (not to mention the funds) to go about creating it. He went to Paris in the 1930s, looking for a choreographer who could be his partner in this new exciting venture. He met a bunch of people, many of whom had once been proteges of the volatile Serge Diaghilev, and now were arguing with their former master in dance: “You think you know everything about ballet? Get a load of THIS.” That kind of professional rivalry may be unpleasant on the ground and in interpersonal relationships, but it sure can be the impetus to creating some great art. The anger at the tradition of the most-recent past, and the anger at who Diaghilev was, made his one-time proteges bust out independently, ferociously, to prove to the world that “Diaghilev ain’t the boss of me”. So there was a lot to see in Paris, a lot of brilliant choreographers running around. Kirstein tracked them all down, talked to people, watched the ballet. He was looking … looking … for what perhaps he did not know. What would a “partner” look like to Kirstein? What would an American ballet company look like? What would be their stamp? Ballet seemed to be entirely owned by disgruntled Russians. The Americans didn’t count at all. Kirstein, an ambitious man, wanted to change all that.

And that was how he met the young George Balanchine. Balanchine hailed from Russia. His father was a composer, as was one of his siblings. He grew up surrounded by art and music. At the age of 9, he was enrolled in the ballet school in St. Petersburg. This was 1913, so we can feel the giant events enclosing in upon this man, and on Russia as a whole. With the revolution in 1917, everything exploded. The ballet school was closed (it had been a favorite of the Czars, therefore it was out). Balanchine’s bright future had ended, and he was still a teenager. He made a scrappy living playing piano, but eventually had to flee the country. He had choreographed some works that were controversial. So this young man was thrust out into the wide world, and he was not alone. Many artist fled the Bolshevik takeover of their country, and this wandering group of exiles all eventually found each other, teamed up, and created their own revolution, an artistic one. Serge Diaghilev approached Balanchine to be a choreographer with the Ballets Russes. His work with the Ballets Russes started to make his name on an international stage. The company was famously stormy (if you want a great history of this company, see the recent documentary of the same name), and Balanchine eventually left. He worked with another company in Paris. And this is where Lincoln Kirstein found him.

Kirstein must have impressed upon him the glory of the plan he was percolating. America was a new country, in many ways, and still seen as “behind” the rest of the world, at least artistically. There was a vacuum in American culture, a big blank spot, where a national ballet company could fit. No one was working towards that. The field was theirs to own, if they wanted it. Balanchine would come on as head choreographer and ballet master. This pionnering project appealed to Balanchine, so he said yes, and he and Kirstein went back to America to start the hard work of making this company a reality.

Acocella goes into all of this in her essay. It was a fruitful partnership, although not a peaceful one. Originally, it would seem that Kirstein was the head honcho, since the whole thing was his idea. But, of course, we all know what happened: George Balanchine was such a dynamic personality, and had ideas of his own … he had such a sense of his own dominance that the New York City Ballet, created jointly by the two men, will always forever be associated with one name and one name only, and that is Balanchine’s. Kirstein still had a taste for the European style of ballet, which had more to do with pantomime and obvious indications of story (more along the lines of vaudeville sketches, or folk dances). Balanchine immediately set about saying, “No no no no no.” He wanted spare lines, classical purity. It was Balanchine who really created the ballet as we know it today: the slim leotards, the tutus, the lack of artifice between the dancer and the dance. He wanted nothing to come between the dance and the audience. This also led to some famously difficult relationships with composers, who really felt that the ballet was all about the MUSIC, that the dance was just filler. Balanchine said, “No no no no no.” He was autocratic, dictatorial, and had complete control over the New York City Ballet. It became HIS vision. It changed the world.

Kirstein may have had feelings about all of this (and his published words suggest that), but he stepped back, allowed Balanchine to take over, and threw himself into fund raising and marketing. You cannot have art in a capitalist country like ours without people like Lincoln Kirstein. Yes, artists will do their thing regardless, but without money, there is a limit. Without an overarching structure of support, artists can drown. Lincoln Kirstein became a patron of the highest order. This is the unsung part of the entertainment business. Balanchine got the glory. Kirstein provided the structure.


Lincoln Kirstein and George Balanchine

Clearly this is just an overview, and I am not an expert on such matters. But I am so thankful to Joan Acocella for introducing me to the intricacies of this particular relationship in her essay.

Here’s an excerpt. What I love most about Acocella’s work, and I say this as a novice in dance history, is her elegant providing of context. She helps me understand “what the big deal was”.

Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays, ‘After the Ball Was Over’, by Joan Acocella

It is possible, however, that for Kirstein in 1933 the choice of which choreographer was not as crucial as it seems to us today. Our notion of a choreographer as sole creator of a dance show, sole leader of a dance company, is based on a phenomenon that occurred later, the rise of the great midcentury American choreographers: Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, and, above all, Balanchine. The kind of position that Balanchine eventually carved out for himself – total control, artistic and otherwise, over a company of a hundred dancers that was not a government institution, not a state opera house – such power had never been achieved before in the history of dance, and it gave the word “choreographer” new meaning. In the twenties and thirties, the situation was different. Diaghilev bought and sold choreographers. Indeed, if he had to, he did without a choreographer, or a good one. His idea of ballet was always the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, a total-art show in which choreography was no more important, and often less, than libretto, score, and decor.

This is the kind of ballet on which Kirstein was raised, and which he intended to produce. His decors would be by “independent easel painters”; his ballets would have strong, exciting libretti, about American life. In a 1933 letter to his friend A. Everett Austin – a letter pleading for the funds to bring Balanchine over – he outlined the productions he was considering: Pochahontas, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Moby-Dick, Custer’s Last Stand. The last, he wrote, would be “after Currier and Ives, [with] the circling Indians; corps de ballet shooting at the chief dancers in the center. Ponies.”

Today, the idea of Balanchine creating such ballets seems absurd. It did not then. Both with the Diaghilev company and with Les Ballets 1933, Balanchine was accustomed to being handed detailed libretti, and he probably listened patiently to this enthusiastic American, with his ponies. Since his teens, however, Balanchine had been working toward a new type of ballet: no libretto, no set, just music and dancing. That type of ballet he eventually established as the norm at New York City Ballet – indeed, in the United States – but it was not what Kirstein expected or, in the beginning, wanted, and the transition was no doubt rocky. An example is the well-known story of the costumes for the 1946 Four Temperaments. The designer was the surrealist painter Kurt Seligmann, and the costumes he delivered were surrealist indeed. “I had a boulder on my head – a blob,” recalled NYCB dancer Francisco Moncion, who was part of the original cast. The costume for “Melancholic,” Moncion said, looked like an Eskimo Pie. Other dancers wore blinkers, tubes, bandages. At the dress rehearsal, Balanchine took one look at those outfits, called for a pair of scissors, and began cutting things off. One wonders what Kirstein thought as he watched the surgery take place. (It was his friend Tchelitchev who had suggested Seligmann.) Soon afterward, The Four Temperaments was recostumed in leotards, and from then on many of Balanchine’s ballets were dressed only in leotards or plain tunics. Very few had libretti.

In truth, the two men who together founded New York City Ballet had very different notions of dance. Balanchine took his inspiration from music; Kirstein cared little about music. Balanchine’s idea of ballet was lyrical and visionary; Kirstein’s was visual and narrative. (Once, Kirstein recalls, he invited Balanchine to go to a museum. “No, thanks,” Balanchine replied. “I’ve been to a museum.”) As Balanchine went ahead with his idea, Kirstein was able to participate less and less in the making of the ballets. Soon, as he put it bluntly in his New Yorker interview, “There was nothing except what [George] wished.”

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3 Responses to The Books: Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints, ‘Heroes and Hero Worship’, by Joan Acocella

  1. Melissa Sutherland says:

    Looks like I’m going to have to buy the book!

    BTW, starring on NH Chronicle tonight: Your Cousin Mike! I’m so glad I know who he is!

  2. Melissa Sutherland says:

    Hi, just watched the show, and your cousin Mike is adorable. Really handsome and seems to be so engaged by everything! The interview took place in Nashua and Portsmouth at the NH Film Festival. I love being in Keene, but realize how far west I am when something like the Festival takes place. Made it to Manchester to see Garrison Keiller live. I’m sure I spelled his name wrong. Oh well.

    Anyway, since you were kind enough to let us all know about Mike’s film opening the Festival, I thought you’d like to know that it was well promoted!

  3. sheila says:

    Melissa – that’s so cool! Yes, he is engaged by everything! I am so excited to hear that you saw this interview!!

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