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Chapter 6: Turning Points: Ballet and Its Bodies in the “Post-Studio” Era
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215 6 Turning Points Ballet and Its Bodies in the “Post-Studio” Era Ballet is an adolescent passion. . . . It gave me only turned-out feet and anemia. —Leslie Caron, 1963 If you’re going to make a big commercial movie about Nijinsky, you better stick to terms that can be understood by even the dimmest member of the audience, someone who still thinks of ballet as a lot of odd people wearing tights and tutus and clomping around on their toes. —Review of Nijinsky, 1980 This is a film—this is forever. —Dancers, 1987 Hip-hop can’t take you the places that ballet can. —Honey, 2003 In 1965 and again in 1968, Time magazine devoted cover stories to ballet.1 In the first case, the focus was on Rudolf Nureyev, who had defected in 1961 and had rapidly become one of the biggest male ballet stars the world had seen. His partnership with Britain’s reigning but “aging” prima ballerina assoluta, Margot Fonteyn, made them “the hottest little team in show biz,” the article reports, he a “glittering young prince in the first bloom of creative life,” she the “alabaster beauty of elegant refinement,” a “dying swan in the last flutter of a shining career.” As superstars, Fonteyn and Nureyev attracted “scores of people to the ballet who would not know a pirouette from a pratfall,” and they thus “symbolize, in fact, a major resurgence in the dance, long culture’s most neglected child.” The figures that Time cites to demonstrate dance’s increasing presence are the growth from 75 dance companies across 216 DY ING SWA NS A ND M A DMEN the United States in the mid-1950s to 225 “amateur, semiprofessional, and professional” companies a decade later. Although Time quotes Balanchine’s oft-repeated edict that “ballet is woman,” the focus of the piece is on the men, the “resurgence of the male virtuoso” who belies the image of the male dancer as “pansy,” replacing it with, say, that of Jacques d’Amboise, who could “pass as a halfback for the New York Giants rather than what he is, a principal dancer for the New York City Ballet.” In the 1968 feature story the attention is again on male dancers and choreographers, particularly those who, like Robert Joffrey or Gerald Arpino or Paul Taylor, were “far out, flashy, mod, mind-bending. Not even the new cinema,” the article continues, “has done as much as dance has to free itself from the rules, clichés and conventions of the past.” Balanchine and the New York City Ballet, and American Ballet Theatre, still maintained certain romantic classics in their repertoire—The Nutcracker was a Christmas staple of Balanchine’s company, and American Ballet Theatre frequently mounted a full-length Swan Lake. But one company director, Brian Macdonald, is quoted as claiming, “The days of Swan Lake and Giselle are gone forever.” Europe, Time adds, might still be operating “pretty much in the shadow of Petipa and Fokine,” but in the United States ballet had become an “eclectic hybrid: it borrows what it needs from classical ballet, modern dance, jazz, rock ‘n’ roll and pop art—and it goes on from there.” Moreover, while the popularity of ballet had become such that the country was developing “more female dancers than it can productively use,” there were still not enough men to go around—this even though the “percentage of homosexuals” in ballet was “diminishing,” from “about 90%” to a “ratio [of] about 60 to 0.” That this “new” ballet was creating and depending on “new” kinds of ballet bodies is clear from the 1968 Time story as well. Not only did the “line of hopefuls” now stretch around the block when the School of American Ballet held auditions, but those who were accepted were “properly proud and even a little haughty.” In the words of Nanette Glushak, then a seventeen -year-old SAB student, “We saw a movie of Pavlova the other day, and I can tell you that she was pretty bad. I don’t think she’d get accepted here today. She just wasn’t good enough.” And in another sign of dance’s purported social acceptance in the three years since the publication of the 1965 cover story—in addition to the “proliferating schools” in big cities (“They’re like bookies—there’s one in every basement,” reported one Manhattan teacher)—the number of professional and semiprofessional companies in the United States had risen...