Dying Swans and Madmen: Ballet, the Body, and Narrative Cinema

Chapter 5: The Second Act Will Be Quite Different: Cinema, Culture, and Ballet in the 1950s

172 5 The Second Act Will Be Quite Different Cinema, Culture, and Ballet in the 1950s I can’t—I can’t go on—my legs . . . I can’t move—I’m paralyzed! —Limelight, 1952 It isn’t as if you have to be cooperative and reasonable like a normal human being. You’re a ballerina—you’re not supposed to be normal. —Meet Me in Las Vegas, 1956 AMERICAN BALLET: Dance spectacle as performed by native dancers in New York City, through our provinces and the world entire in an international (melting-pot) manner, combining elements of the more suave and acrobatic Russian Imperial and Soviet Academies . . . pushed into a sharp, percussive, hard, clean accent, athletic and metrical which seems when exported to South America, Europe or the Orient, heartless , anti-theatrical (i.e. antipantomimic), under-clad, ill-decorated and relentlessly ingenious in its insistence on the academic classic dance as a propulsive or compulsive basis. . . . . . . We appear to the rest of the world exasperatingly capable of anything , good and bad. But there are not any paths of invention or range of performance that our home-grown dancers of energy find shut to them. This now happens to be untrue anywhere else in the world. —Lincoln Kirstein, What Ballet Is About: An American Glossary, 1959 On October 9, 199, the Sadler’s Wells Ballet opened its first American season ever at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, with its own opulent full-length production of Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty. Ninette de Valois’ British company was presented by impresario Sol Hurok, who had long been a supporter of ballet as popular entertainment but who had lately been having some bad luck with the companies he handled in the United States. According to one eyewitness chronicler of the event, dance historian Mary Clarke, the “Sadler’s Wells in New York was more than a smash hit. It was the greatest ballet success ever known in that city, and rivalled the musical South Pacific in popularity and box-office takings (the Press, in fact, called the ballet North Atlantic).”1 Variety placed the company’s success on its front page in a banner headline: “Ballet Bowls over Broadway.” It was reputedly the first time ballet had been headlined in this way since Variety’s founding in 1905.2 The Sadler’s Wells Ballet was not already a well-known company in America, where audiences and some critics kept calling it the “Sadler Wells.” The primary reason that tickets were selling out a full four months before the curtain would rise on the first scene of The Sleeping Beauty—indeed, the reason the tickets were put on sale four months in advance anyway (“for the first time in American theatrical history,” according to Clarke)—was the presence of a single ballerina.3 Not Margot Fonteyn, the company’s official prima ballerina, but Moira Shearer, relegated that night to a third-act divertissement. For many years since, Shearer’s impact on the success of the Sadler’s Wells in America has been dismissed either with a brief nod to the fact that “The Red Shoes had enjoyed great popularity in America” (Clarke’s words)5 or as something that the company’s real success quickly obliterated and rendered moot. Because Margot Fonteyn herself did, in fact, dazzle audiences and critics that hot October Sunday night in 199 in the starring role of Princess Aurora (while Shearer performed only in the “Blue Bird” pas de deux), whatever expectations Shearer’s presence in the company might have generated quickly fell away or were abrogated by Fonteyn’s triumphs.6 The initial American season of the Sadler’s Wells—which was followed by a second, and much more extensive, season and tour from 1950 to 1951 (when they visited thirty-two towns in the United States and Canada in the space of nineteen weeks)—was laid figuratively, then, at the feet of de Valois’ prot égée, Margot Fonteyn.7 It was Fonteyn who appeared on the cover of Time, not Shearer;8 it was Fonteyn who starred in the prime evening presentations of the company’s other remarked-upon glories, its full-length classics (especially Swan Lake and, in the second tour, Giselle), as well as new ballets choreographed by the company’s resident genius, Frederick Ashton. This is not to take anything away from Fonteyn’s abilities or her stature —which was indeed elevated tremendously by her...