Balanchine, Teacher: ‘I Forced Everyone’

The setting is a ballet class and the year is 1974. George Balanchine raises his arms in anger when he sees a dancer taking a wrong step at the bar. We may not see him and what he did wrong, but we feel how hard Balanchine is struggling. It’s not just his words – “that’s bad” – the accentuated, agile, lively punctuation of his body.

His hands hit his hips. He raises his arm like a stiff twig to show how much a leg needs to be lifted. not high; is parallel to the ground.

“To go sufficient” he says, before lifting a few inches. “To go up later. To see? Because if you go up you’ll fall.”

His arm falls, hitting his leg. Then zinger: “Newton’s Law.”

new movie “Balanchine’s Class” Directed by Connie Hochman, the film focuses on the groundbreaking choreographer’s teaching and how it infuses his New York City Ballet dances with an articulated, musical brilliance. It’s both fascinating and heartbreaking. Loving Balanchine is loving this movie; To love this movie is to love ballet, especially Balanchine’s genre and its dancer genre: daring, fast, powerful, free, combined with music. Each one is different from the next. This was important to him.

“What do you see?” he says in a tone of voice. “You see someone doing this. This person is not the other. This special person. This particular leg is raised or the neck is bent. I care about these people, you know?”

Balanchine is irreplaceable. His ballets are still most regularly performed by City Ballet, the company he founded with Lincoln Kirstein, but are they performed the same way? It is this question that makes the movie heartbreaking. every year since Balanchine’s death in 1983, his legacy has become more vulnerable. The pandemic has accelerated it.

In many ways, “In Balanchine’s Classroom” is a call to action, an opportunity to examine what he left behind, his teaching that was the foundation of everything that followed. It not only revolutionized ballet, but also allowed it to reflect the sense of time while giving it a sense of timelessness.

“I feel sadness too,” said Hochman, a dancer who attended City Ballet’s American Ballet School as a child in the 1960s. “But I always like to remember that Balanchine was very optimistic.”

“She sometimes pulled her hair to show her purpose,” she added, “but she stuck with it because she truly believed in her dancers and loved them so much.”

Since Hochman began working on the documentary more than 10 years ago, several dancers he has interviewed, among them Jacques d’Amboise, died. Distinguished teachers like Suki Schorer, a former principal at the School of American Ballet, who began teaching at Balanchine’s request in the early 1960s, are aging. It’s invaluable that the movie retains its sounds and more. (Hochman also builds up an archive of dozens of dancers he interviewed for the film. available online.)

Merrill Ashley, a former principal featured in the film, said that Balanchine is remembered more for her teaching than for her ballets. “I don’t think it’s happening, but I think it should,” he said in an interview. “I think this will be an important tool to show the world how he teaches and is important to him. He was the teacher.”

And he did not teach through counts and images alone. What this movie clearly shows is how the philosophy of movement lives inside his body. Rare archival footage of them teaching and rehearsing showcases not only his speed and accuracy, but also the generosity of his own dancing body while showing off what he wants. Balanchine is clean, but not polite. It swallows space.

One of Hochman’s biggest challenges was producing the movie Balanchine. Class materials come from Jerome Robbins and Christine Redpath, who was then a dancer with the company and is now a repertory director. Hochman scanned the metadata as he entered the digital collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. If he found something with words like “Rehearsal” and “Balanchine works with the dancer,” he took notes.

One piece of material he found is extraordinary: images from a shooting in 1981 TV production of “The Spellbound Child” or “L’Enfant et les Sortilèges” set to Ravel. Hochman said the rehearsal was filmed, which meant “for hours Balanchine worked on that ballet.” “They were making a plan of the dancers’ path and camera angles. It was great.”

A fantasy ballet filled with creatures and objects that come to life; Balanchine, who created the first version for the Opéra de Monte-Carlo in 1925, revived it for the City Ballet’s Ravel Festival in 1975. At a rehearsal, he asks the dancer “can he run forever”. Not sure what you mean – who will it be? – so he points it out, jumps to the ground and moves slightly back and forth as if he’s about to take off, but an invisible force prevents him from doing so.

“Something like that,” he says.

Balanchine is an energetic force here and in class shots: The film may be blurry or grainy, but that’s not the intention. “Have you ever seen a moth in your life?” suddenly asks a group before setting off with a serpentine raid as if it were a moonlit night. Buzz! He is very fast, very urgent. Everything is all the more fascinating in the digitized films of the teacher class, as flickering lights make it ghostly, otherworldly.

“This is so magical,” Hochman said. “But when you watch it, I think, on a subconscious level, you feel that it barely captures what happened, because the dance evaporates – everything goes, but we only have this little clue. Distortion actually adds to the meaning of that.”

Why would a dancer who has never learned from Balanchine want to make a movie about her teaching? Hochman, who went on to become a member of the Pennsylvania Ballet, enjoyed class. And when the Pennsylvania Ballet was going to perform in New York, her old teacher, Schorer, would come to see her dance.

“I did a solo in ‘Raymonda Variations’ and Suki came backstage,” Hochman said. “She was very cheerful and very frank and said: ‘It was very nice, Connie, but you don’t understand. It’s about the opposition.’ And right there in the dressing room, he started telling me what variation was all about. Balanchine dancers knew something I didn’t. It was like fog.”

He wanted to get to the bottom of it for himself. And more importantly, she wanted to preserve the dancers’ perspective on Balanchine and her training, and show how Balanchine values ​​the individuality of her dancers.

Even if you didn’t have the luxury of seeing the company on that mission (sadly I didn’t), the dancers in “In Balanchine’s Classroom” show that she will do anything to make it more sensitive, stronger, more musical, and more. themselves. “I wanted to have a certain way of dancing,” she says in another voiceover. “I want to have clean dancers. That’s why I pushed everyone away.”

From the age of 9, Balanchine was born in St. She studied at the Imperial Ballet School in St. Petersburg (left the Soviet Union in 1924.) Ashley said that classical training passed to them. “When people say she doesn’t teach classical ballet, it’s just ridiculous,” she said. “It goes back to the essence of ballet.”

What happens when there’s no one left to fix the myths? Ashley isn’t alone in worrying about her legacy as a teacher and the misunderstandings surrounding some of her ideas: She wanted the hand to be round and the fingers parted like petals, but sometimes it looks like a claw. And there’s an idea that he doesn’t want his dancers to put weight on their heels while dancing. What Balanchine really wanted was for the dancers to feel like there was nothing but an onion peel between the heel and the floor. “A piece of paper, that’s it,” Ashley said. “Your heel can touch the ground, but your weight cannot be on the heel.”

While City Ballet may still feel like a gorgeous bouquet – Balanchine used to say that dancers are like flowers blooming at different times to create a garden – it’s not hard to imagine how today’s dancers can turn into something transcendent. “This is how I see it: He chose people who had strong personalities and that he enjoyed,” Hochman said. “The difficulties of ballet technique could not silence them.”

Hochman reveals some of these personalities: How did they become so loyal? What was my spark? There is one thing that particularly impresses Heather Watts’ story. Watts, a free spirit from California, said in an interview that she called him my little flower child. It was a problem – “discipline wasn’t my middle name,” he admits in the movie – but he didn’t give up on it.

One day, when she was late for the costume assembly, Balanchine told her it was her last chance. She starred in “Serenade” at the time, and after the performance Balanchine said the words that changed her focus: “You were fine.”

Watts says in the film: “At that moment, it’s the only voice in my head that can lead me to what I want most.”

Hochman shows Watts (and others) coaching young dancers: he conveys the knowledge that there is no such thing as safe in Balanchine ballet. Watts sometimes notices that the dancers he works with are recovering, but then settle into a safe place. “You must continue,” he said. “And that’s what he did to us.”

Dancers today love to use the phrase that the choreography is on their bodies. For Watts, that means trouble. “You’re not dancing on the edge of a volcano,” he said. “And you don’t get stuck on that note like your life depends on it.”

He’s considering his role as Dewdrop in “The Nutcracker.” In it, Balanchine challenged him to run as fast as he could, stoop and fly as much as possible—not touching the ground.

“He dared me to touch the ground,” Watts said. “This is very exciting. It’s exciting courage.”