Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism

6. Balanchine and Black Dance

6 Bolonchine and Block Dance In 1967, at the peak of his career and at the very beginning of the dance boom, George Balanchine choreographed Jewels, an enormously popular evening-length ballet. Its three sections constituted a sampler of ballet styles: Emeralds, to music by Gabriel Faure, danced by women in long tutus, evoked the perfumed elegance oflate nineteenth-century Paris; Diamonds, to Tchaikovsky, was a glittering celebration ofPetipa's Imperial Russian ballet. However, the middle section, Rubies, set to music by Stravinsky, Balanchine's closest collaborator, was a primer of a distinctive Balanchinian style. Critics saw it as the American section of the triptych, and it encapsulated a style Balanchine had invented. Rubies set forth his canon ofmodern neoclassical ballet, with its speed, broken lines, off-center weight placement, intertwining bodies, and syncopated accents. Both the critics and the dancers also saw this section as a near relative of black jazz dancing. Deborah Jowitt has described Balanchine's typical" 'Stravinsky' steps" in Rubies in terms that invoke black style: "the jutting hips, the legs that swing down and up like scythes, the paw-hands, the prances, the big, quick lunges, the flexed feet, the heel-walks."l Robert Garis wrote that "[Marnee1Morris's provocative poses in the opening section are like sexy show-dancing of the twenties and thirties" and noted "the powerful thrust down toward the floor."2 Dancer Suki Schorer reported that Rubies was "tricky ... half jazz, half elegant."3 Another dancer, Edward Villella, also noted the jazz connection.4 A French critic, observing Balanchine's way of "stopping movements abruptly and letting his dancers freeze," unwittingly described a typical African-American dance movement.5 And Clive Barnes noticed a number of black dance features, such as flat-footed stepping and the Charleston, when he wrote, "The dancing is sharply accented, with a quirky yet quite unforced kind of invention. Legs fly out at high and unexpected angles, feet that you expected pointed are made flat, and flirtation is given an edge of delicate and even urbane malice.... At one moment a girl with India-rubber legs is diverting the attention of four suitors...."6 More recently, Joseph Mazo has written that Rubies "suggests Choreography and Dance 3/3 (1993). 53 54 The lu ro-American Avant-Garde jazz dancing with its brisk attack and sharp changes; its changing accents; its turned-in legs and thrust-out hips; its joyously outrageous show-dancer exiness; and - very importantly- its humor."7 o little attention has been paid to the influence ofAfrican-American dance on Balanchine's work that, taking these remarks together, one has no context in which to interpret them. One might ask first whether these dancers and commentator noticed the black dance connection because the late sixties was also a time when the dramatic struggle for civil rights and black power took center tage in American culture. Or one might ask whether Balanchine included these elements ofAfrican-American popular dancing because it was timely to do so and because he came, at the height of his choreographic power , to appreciate a different genre of dance enough to quote it in his own work. One might even wonder whether he embraced black culture then as a political gesture.8 But obviously, if this ballet set forth a Balanchinian canon, these elements were not new, nor does anything in Balanchine's biography lead u to think that they were suddenly produced as agit-prop for civil right. Indeed, these borrowings from black dance were long-standing corHelene Alexopoulos and K ipling Houston inGeorge Bolanchine's Four Temperaments. (1'11010: Paul K oInik.l To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book Balanchine and Black Dance nerstones of the modernist strand of his choreography and had been noticed by critics previously.9 This strand had a very important impact on the technique in which his dancers were trained. And yet while this aspect of his work has been noted frequently in passing, it has never been closely examined. The purpose of this essay is to initiate such an examination. It is well known that Balanchine loved things American, from Western movies to jazz music. Even before he moved to the United States he was inspired by black dance styles, to which he was probably exposed even in his youth in Russia, and which he must have seen in Paris during the jazzera...