When Elizabeth Kendall was in her early twenties, she didn't think there would be anything for her in a balannging ballet.
And I thought it would be old fashioned because it was ballet, and the ballet in my childhood was old fashioned. So I resisted going to the New York City Ballet for quite some time, sort of a decent amount of time.
It was the nineteen seventies. Elizabeth was a dance writer in New York. She was young, ballet was old. She loved postmodern, avant garde dance. She believed art should be challenging, angry, Even good art questioned what came before it exposed hypocrisy. She hadn't been in New York long, and she was still finding her way as a writer and as a person. She was trying to move past a family tragedy. Her mother had recently died in a car accident.
I was the driver of the car that killed my mother. So a lot of stuff to bear, a lot of healing that had to go on. But I think a healthy psyche heels itself by numbing itself as much as possible.
Now, two years later, she was in New York writing about dance another critic told her she had to see Balangine, so she finally dragged herself to the New York State Theater to see Balanjin's Ramonda variations. Elizabeth had a press seat and a perfect view. The lights went down and the music began, and.
I just remember a unique kind of orchestral sound, harps and flutes and strings mingling, so it sounds a little like Heaven might sound.
At first glance, it was classic traditional ballet, a man and a woman dancing a pot of da many women on point wearing pink and blue tutus that flounced like clouds as they moved.
But what I saw in the stage wasn't anything like the ballet from my young childhood. This wasn't about old manners. There were these people jumping and leaping and whirling around in formation that animated this stage as a sort of magic box that manufactured volume and excitement. The music and the ballet steps glomed together to make us fear in which everything was alive, and the effect was of three D music, music that surrounded you and you were inside it.
And I remember very distinctly feeling in the audience this is a party, and I'm a guest, I've been invited, and for some reason that thought was terribly moving and terribly inclusive, and the thing came over me. This is a gift, this is joy, this is celebration. I suddenly realized not only that this was worth returning to again and again because something had reached me in the soul, but it also let me know that art did not
have to be stern and challenging. Art could be something that was purely nourishing and purely exhilarating, that was ecstatic and tragic at the same time.
After that night, Elizabeth started going to balancing ballets a lot.
But I would go back and I would experiment a little. I would go to the theater and the lights would go down, and I would say, Okay, I'm going to give you my mood. I'm going to give you all these troubles and you do something with it, said I to the stage, and then I would walk out and I felt like somebody had rinsed me. That sounds suspiciously like baptism talk, but it's all to say that I was in fact receiving something that I deeply needed, and
I hadn't known what form I needed it. In a some kind of a ceremony, some kind of a ritual, kind of healing.
From my heart podcasts in Rococoa Punch. This is the Turning Room of Mirrors America Lance Part two, Ritual Healing.
Balancing was not a guy who put on airs. So when I began to see the New York City Ballet, I would sometimes run into Balancing at a fruit stand on the street in the Upper West Side where he lived, and I would like to give a little bow, and he would give an exaggeratedly courteous bow because he was an admirer of women.
That was the extent of their interaction until she was on assignment for the Ford Foundation. She got the chance to interview him one on one.
And I dressed up to look nice, and there I was presenting myself at his office at the New York State Theater. And he was very courtly. He was casually but beautifully dressed, a gentleman, and you could see that he moved well. He was light on his feet.
Elizabeth sat down with Balancing in his office.
He was interested in just having a young, attractively dressed, bursting with nerves and vitality, person of the female presentation in front of him, and he just talked. And the first thing he said was, so, what we have to talk about is boring, yes, And I said, oh, mister Valancine, I agree, it's going to be boring. And I don't really want to even take your time. I don't need this interview horribly, and I can leave. And he said, no, no, no,
He said, we do interview and then we talk. He really thought about questions and answered I'd gotten to the end. I said, okay, that's the last question. And he said, do you know what I did in the revolution And I said no, no, I don't. And he said what I did to eat? He said, I sewed saddles and he showed me the sewing gestures. He sewed leather saddles together for horses.
Balanjinge started to tell Elizabeth the story of his life. He told a tale that felt like folklore from a place in time, far from the man sitting with her in his office in New York in nineteen eighty. This encounter would launch Elizabeth down a path of deep exploration
into Balancine's life. She learned to write fluently in Russian and travel to Saint Peteg to piece together a picture of how this man came to popularize ballet in America, how he created work that would so deeply move her in a theater in New York that it helped her heal after trauma. This is that story. Balancine was born in nineteen oh four. His name was Georgy Melatanovich Balanshevatza. Gyorgy lived in Saint Petersburg, Russia. From the beginning, he
was steeped in music. His mom played piano, his dad was a Georgian opera singer and composer. But they had limited resources.
Then the extraordinary event happened that they won a lot of money, a fortune in a lottery. Or that's the story. It can't exactly be proved.
Balanchine's family rose to a sort of merchant skilled class, one that required a certain level of wealth.
So Balancine's childhood was privileged. She had a nanny, and then the father, who didn't have any idea what to do with all this money, lost it all because he listened to people. He gave him bad advice, and which meant that the Valanchines gave up their city apartment and had no more money.
They moved to the forests of Finland, and they settled in a datcha or a summerhouse. They started to live in the summerhouse year round. Even through the harsh winners in this remote area, Valancine's mother worried about her kid's education. That's when she thought of the Imperial Theater School, which included the Czar's School of Ballet. It would be a chance that of free education.
The Imperial Theater School was directly managed as part of the Tsar's household, and the students had some contact with the rural family, you know, with teas, and they would sometimes visit backstage or whatever.
At the time, being a ballerina often meant more than just being a dance.
Ballet was a very strange beast in Imperial Saint Petersburg because it was both an art form and an erotic market for the grandees and the nobles who attended the show and would pick out their mistresses from the dancers
on the stage. Saint Petersburg, in terms of its social organization was much like Paris, so it had a demi monde, which in Russian is called half existence are half light, which means that a wealthy man or a nobleman, well born might have two households, two lives, two sets of restaurants, two sets of clothing, two banks. It was accepted to have another shadow wife.
Being a shadow wife could give a dancer status or financial security. So Balancine's mother wanted her eldest daughter to become a ballet star.
It's funny to think of a mother wanting her daughter to enter into this illicit other world. But this world offered its own rewards.
To enter this world, dancers started training his children. Balanchine's sister went into audition, and Balanjing tagged along. When they got there, though, he was pulled into the audition process and something about him stood out to the judges. When he was walking in a line of boys, a judge singled him out and had him walk alone.
The sister did not get accepted into the school.
But Balanjing did. He was only nine years old.
Which was very confusing, no doubt for a nine year old, because he knew how much his older sister wanted the post and he got it, and he didn't want it at all.
He hated dancing, and just like that, George Balanjin was dropped into the world of ballet.
His mother dealing with her own disappointment about the daughter, and the daughter's disappointment left him there because it was a week before the school year started, and he didn't expect to be left, and I think that marked his entire life.
Balanjing wasn't happy. He even ran away to his aunt's house during his first weeks at the boarding school, but he was returned to the school and all the intensity that their ballet training required. The students woke early every morning to the sound of a bell. They were rushed out of bed. They didn't even take the time to make their beds. That was left for the servants. They'd have a quick wash in cold water, put on their uniforms, and add another bell. Line up for inspection.
They never went out except for one hour a day. They walked around the block.
They took the walk in two lines, their one chance to see the outside world. From ten to eleven thirty, Balanchine started the day with ballet class. Boys and girls were separated, boys on the higher floor in front of a long wall of mirrors opposite the bar. Valanchine said he spent a year learning how the foot touches the floor after a jump like a bird landing. He said.
After his beady lunch, students did their academic study, then dinner, followed by evening classes ballroom dance, pantomime, posture, and fencing for the older boy, and then after that they take music lessons. The students could pick violin or piano. Balancine chose piano. With all this work and skill building, Valancine's world now revolved around the theater.
His family had been blotted out in his own mind. The curtain was closed on the family and the curtain was open on the world of the theater.
Elizabeth believes he would carry this hurt from being abandoned for the rest of his life.
He himself said that he felt like someone had abandoned a dog. I think he was incredibly furious, but a child of nine can't distinguish grief from anger. I imagine that his psyche is shut down or closed off to his family, and therefore had to open itself to his new world, the theater and the theater people. And also in an extraordinary letter, he wrote, I hope you understand how alone I am. Ever, since my family left me
in the school at age nine, I've been alone. When I found that letter recently, I realized that that feeling of having only the theater for a family and a world and a tribe was deeply at the center of him.
The only connection he had left to his family was music.
That was the one constant, that was his link to the past. He couldn't emotionally connect anymore. They'd done this horrible thing, They'd abandon him. But music could somehow connect his whole self. I imagine that that's why he had this eerie facility with matching steps to music, because he lived those steps. They were his language in his innermost dialogue with himself. It was ballet steps, not words and music.
Elizabeth says, Balanchine's teachers saw him as an independent boy who was courteous, detached, and eerily self confident. Although Balanjing initially disliked the school, he grew to love ballet. He had a revelation on stage, dancing and sleeping beauty. With all of the music, the lights, the costumes. He realized he was in the middle of a thing of beauty. And then, Elizabeth says, ballet almost died in nineteen seventeen, a bullet burst through the theater school window and almost
hit a student. Days later, a crowd in military uniforms rushed through the school halls. It was late at night. They were searching for monarchists in the dormitories, peering under beds. The Russian Revolution had been in October. The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, took control of the country. The Bolsheviks envisioned a world where workers would hold the power. The Tsar and his family were murdered, nobility was abolished, Aristocrats
fled or were killed. The Bolshevik Party would eventually become the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The Tsarist Romanov dynasty was over. The Bolsheviks wanted to wipe out any whiff of the old aristocracy, and no one knew what that meant for Ballet. Valentine was thirteen years old. His school closed, and life in Saint Petersburg changed dramatically.
The city of Saint Petersburg suffered after the revolution.
Saint Petersburg had been the capital of the Russian Empire under the Tsar. Now, with Lenin in power, the government moved to Moscow, essentially abandoning Saint Petersburg.
And the resources, which were very few after the revol all flowed to Moscow. Leaving Saint Petersburg to starve and freeze. There was no heat, there was no fuel, very little food. All rationed.
Balanchine School was turned into barracks for guards that winter. In nineteen seventeen and nineteen eighteen, it was hard to even find bread in a shop. Thirteen year old Balanchine and his friend stole fish at night from local barges before he could find a job. But then came some hope for ballet. It had to do with Lenin's Minister of Education, who also oversaw culture and arts.
Lenin's Minister of Culture had a vision of all the arts existing simultaneously and the people learning all about the high arts that they'd been deprived of, and Ballet's new meaning was up for grabs.
Valancine's ballet school reopened with a new mission.
Which is to make dances for a utopia, the Bolshevik utopia.
Now, the theater would welcome laborers, soldiers, and sailors into the audience got free tickets from their factories and labor units. Meanwhile, half the city's population was gone. They were dead from disease or off to villages in search of food. One Russian described people who passed each other in the gray, cold city as phantoms and oblivious silence.
In those conditions, the ballet school started up again with utopian aims and visions, utopian excitement and no heat and no food, which can sharpen your senses to your art and impact your health. And it did both with balancing.
The children at ballet school had boils for malnutrition and lice that carried typhus. On cold nights, the boys and girls moved their beds from separate dormitory rooms to the old infirmary to stay warm. They suffered, but they bonded and they felt immersed in art.
After the Revolution, all the social meetings of the art fell away, and they concentrated on the pure art, on ballets just as a pure art.
Since the seventeen hundreds under the Czar, ballets performed in Russia had been filled with romantic storylines in royal courts or epic tales of castles, princes and maidens. But that was going away.
Now. They had a little trouble making new ballets because what were they going to be about? It was also new Now ballet could be both grand and intimate and revealed the private emotions of people in a way that it never had been before.
Balancine was a teenager. Now he grew his hair long and wore eyeliner to make his eyes look soulful. He also started to experiment with his own choreography.
And what it did I think for Balancine was it broke any lingering narrative associations that the steps held. So you know, an Arabesque didn't automatically mean a noble shape. It could mean anything that the choreographer wanted it to mean. Same with all the other steps. They were severed from that art that was the czar's family's favorite art. So it impacted him on an artistic level deeply. It was making an art new he was in on the ground floor.
But there was one tradition Balanchine would never do away with worshiping the ballerina. Growing up in the school, he lived in the world of the ballerina, the world of these girls and women whom men watched with awe.
Those little boys in the school were conditioned to worship the presiding ballerinas of the day, just like the nobles and the grandees and the businessmen in the front row worshiped them. Then Balanchine realized when he was an adolescent that there were some of his own classmates who were beautiful and worth falling in love with, and he fell in love with a young woman in the class below him named Tomorrow Jevorgeeva.
Also known as Tamara Gieva. She was thirteen when they met. At the time, the school had a faction of traditionalists, and they warned her against Balancine and his weird choreographic ideas. But when Balancine approached her and asked if she wanted to work with him, she said of course. He started to choreograph for Tomorrow and she began to dance his pieces. One of the first she danced with him was a PoTA de potada means step of two in French. It means a duet, usually between a man and a woman.
This duet ended with what Tomorrow called a revolutionary moment. Balanchine knelt, she stood on one foot on point, She held one leg in the air behind her in an arabesque, and she balanced herself by pressing her mouth against his Tamora later said this moment was considered terribly erotic. She said every time Balancin coreographed, he tried to see how much he could get away with. He never seemed to
doubt himself. She wondered if his religious belief made him feel he was destined for greatness, like he was channeling God. Balancing and Tamora decided to get married. They were young. There are different reports on exactly when it happened, but Balanging was probably eighteen and Tamora fifteen. They performed in
little theaters together. They got paid in food more than money, and then in nineteen twenty four, when Balanchine was just twenty years old, he and Tamara had a chance to leave Russia, and it was ballet that would let them do it. Around nineteen twenty four, tomorrow, Jieva and George Balancin met a croupier, a guy who worked at the gambling tables at a local casino. His name was Vladimir.
Vladimir made a lot of money working at high stakes table, and he convinced the government to let him finance a European ballet tour.
They got out of Russia by asking permission to go give a tour in Germany, and they got out.
Jim Steichen is a historian who studied Balancine well.
Once they got to Germany, they got picked up by Serge Diaglov, the really creative impresaria that founded the Ballet Roofs in Paris.
Diagolovi had created one of the most influential ballet companies ever, the Ballet m For.
Twenty years, the Ballet russ really defined the new face of ballet.
Diagolov worked with famous composers like ravel Stravinsky, W. C. Prokofief and Satis. Painters like Matis and Picasso made sets. Koco Chanelle was one designer who created costumes. Balancin walked into all of this as a dancer, but soon Diagolov let him choreograph too. Balancing started to play with and push the old school Russian style he had learned growing up.
Balanchine took that technique and made it new. He would introduce more acrobatic moves and loved making giant daisy chains out of his dancers, utterly untraditional moments where people look like they're swimming in mid air, like they're doing somersaults, Like, oh my god, what is that. I've never seen that before.
Balancing was finding his legs as a choreographer, and then came nineteen twenty nine DIAGOIV, the head of the ballet Russ.
Died, the stock market crashed, World War Two began to eventually heat up in a very real way.
Balancing needed to figure out what to do next. The answer came in the form of a wealthy.
American enter Lincoln Kurstine. This young American who's really interested in art.
Lincoln Curstine came from a family with money. He was in his twenties and obsessed with all kinds of art, So when he met balancing on a trip to London, he was enamored.
Balancing had a nickname when he was a youngster. He was called the Rat. He kind of had like a kind of a snaggle tooth. He wasn't like a movie theater actor kind of iconic beauty that way. He was on the shorter side, a man of few words. It seems, he was very social. He loved to cook.
Even in his twenties. Balancing oozed creativity, which Lincoln Kirstine loved. Because he wanted to do something big, he invited Balanging to join him in the US to build a ballet company.
Lincoln Kurstine decided that he was going to make it his next big project to create a dance school and company in America that would synthesize the best of the Russian ballet traditions, the Italian and French traditions, and make it a thoroughly American enterprise.
They would start a school to train American dancers. Tuition would be free so that students could be admitted based on quote their perfect possibilities. In exchange, students would agree to appear exclusively in school performances for five years so they wouldn't get snapped up by Broadway or Hollywood. Once they were trained and balancing could make his experimental ballets. He arrived in New York and started by teaching dancers his previous works or making versions of them, but he
had to make something original. In nineteen thirty four, it was time to choreograph a new piece, his first in the United States. The music would be Tchaikowsky's Serenade for Strings. Balanchine told Kirsty the day of the first rehearsal, his head was a blank. Pray for me, he said. They started off with their usual dance class, and then Balancine gathered the dancers who were there that day, seventeen of them. He lined them up by height, then started to arrange
them on the floor. It was a sunny day, one dancer, said, Balanchine started slowly to compose a hymn to ward off the sun. When he was done arranging, the dancers were in an unusual pattern, later called the orange grove, two diamonds side by side.
The opening is a magical moment in theater. The music starts before the curtain rises.
When the curtain does rise, you see this orange grove of dancers on stage, but they're not dancing. They're completely still.
And they each have one hand raised up.
Like they're trying to shield their eyes from the sun.
They hold that position for a mysteriously long time. Through eight measures.
More than a minute has passed. The music sores, but the dancers still haven't moved. Then finally they move, but just a little.
They start to move one hand.
Almost in slow motion, as Balanchine said, the wrist breaks as if the wrists were tired, and the hand comes down, and then they.
Move the other arm. They bring their arms together in a circle.
And that's when the feet pop open. To make first position.
They push their feet to the side, and too ballet turnout the most basic position of ballet. It's almost like the first exercises of a ballet class slowed down. You would think it'd be boring, but instead it feels profound. It's like you see seventeen dancers wake up their bodies to dance for the first time, like they're learning in front of you that their bodies can hold music. They start with the most basic shapes of ballet, a line, a circle, a flowing arm.
It's just beautiful.
Over the daisy choreographed. The rehearsal process was ragtag. Balancing didn't know how many dancers would show up, so he choreographed for whoever was there one day, for some the next day, nine, then six. Historically, when you'd choreograph a ballet, there would be a libretto or a description of what would happen in the ballet, the plot.
And this time there wasn't anything. There was just the music the dancers.
In balancing, Balancing let his dancers inspire him. He created the first pose when he saw a dancer who shielded her eyes from the sun. When a dancer ran in late, he made it a part of the ballet. When a dancer fell, he wove that in two. The ballet spun off into beautiful, swift, wild dance.
He has them swooping in formation, in circles, in squares, closing, opening, rushing around. You cannot see this marvelous work without falling under its spell because the music has such a sweep and urgency, and so does the dancing.
The dancers at rehearsal came from such varied styles and backgrounds that this was how Balancine could mold them as his dancers, making his shapes his unique style.
It was a way to make dancers with disparate trainings and backgrounds all feel like they can be part of a harmonious, beautiful whole.
He called it Serenad. Sarahad would become a pillar for Balanchine's dancers when they'd return to again and again.
That ballet is this important symbol of his arrival in America and his starting this new chapter in his artistic life. And it is a gorgeous ballet. It's one of his best. It's like a desert island ballet, if you could even have a desert island ballet. It is this beautiful ritual.
It does feel like a ritual, and as the ballet unfolds, it has images that feel full of meaning, like myths layered on top of each other, tropes and narratives you can't quite grasp.
The story of the ballet doesn't really have a story. It has many stories, but I think the stories are kind of buried. We have images that are very powerful.
As a dance historian, Lynn Garifola knows that balancing is famous for making ballets without narratives. His ballets are about movement and the music. But she sees something more.
What you might call a private resonance or a personal echo. This is something deeply personal.
And she sees this in Sarahad. There's one moment that always moves her in a deep, even terrible way.
What happens in that moment is that there is a man with two women dancing together, and it's clear that there's a profound feeling among all of those three people love eroticism, but that there's also danger. Someone is going to be left behind and he's going to make a choice.
They dance furiously, then one of the women falls back into his arms that he doesn't lift her up again. Instead, he lowers her slowly, inching downward until she's flat on the floor. She reaches up to him, but he stands up and the other dancer leads him away. He has made his choice.
The moment when the man walks off the other woman is terrible. It never ceases to touch me with the sense that the man is very much a stand in for balancing, and also the sense of the trail and abandonment. He moves on and leaves the other weeping on the floor.
Next time, on.
The Turning, there are no windows. We don't need windows because the outside world doesn't matter. He was God in the theater, ever observing, ever present. Are you a patriot? Are you a citizen? Are you willing to do whatever I ask you to do?
The Turning is a production of Rococo Punch and iHeart Podcasts. It's written and produced by Alan Lance Lesser and Me. Our story editor is Emily Foreman. Fixing and sound designed by James Trout. Jessica Crisa is our assistant producer. Andrea Assuage is our digital producer. Fact checking by Andrea Lopez Crusado. Special thanks to Elizabeth Kendall, Jim Steichen, and Lynn Garifola. Their books on this topic are fascinating, so go check
out their work. Our executive producers are John Paratti and Jessica El at Rococo Punch at Katrina Norvel and Nikki Etoor at iHeart Podcasts. For photos and more details on the series, follow us on Instagram at Rococo Punch, and you can reach out via email The Turning at rococo punch dot com. I'm Erica Lance. Thanks for listening.