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PARTISAN REVIEW
play music. " Similarly, Balanchine's dancers are there to exhibit his
choreography, not vice versa. Furthermore, the Balanchine dancer
is not called upon to subjectively "interpret" the work, but merely to
"carry out" (in the military sense of the term) his instructions.
Baryshnikov has said of the title role in
Apollo,
"The challenge is in
doing the steps as they are set, without any adornment, without
special emphasis." And Susanne Farrell in a recent interview argues
that the Balanchine dancer upon whom a work is being set must be
careful not to bring too many preconceived notions to the rehearsal.
The danger, she suggests, is that the dancer will paint the choreogra–
pher into a corner rather than "being the paint" with which he works.
Ultimately, the same sort of "impersonality" is demanded of
Balanchine's audience as well . His dances are intended to draw us
"out of ourselves," away from our personal and habitual ways of
behaving. For example, this is how Balanchine defended his choice
of the Webern score for
Episodes:
[WebernJleaves the mind free to see the dancing. In listening to
composers like Beethoven and Brahms, every listener has his
own ideas, paints his own picture of what the music represents .. .
Now how can I , a choreographer, try to squeeze a dancing body
into a picture that already exists in someone's mind? It simply
won't work. But it will with Webern. This kind of music, which
Mozart and Stravinsky have also written, is like a rose : You can
admire it deeply, but you cannot inject your personal feelings
into it.
By preventing us from "injecting our personal feelings" into the
work, Balanchine forces us to transcend our own "personal" ex–
periences, thereby entering a shared and
public
realm. Louis Botto,
in a famous interview, quotes Balanchine as saying:
A lot of people go to the theater to see their own life, their own
experience . We don't give them that at the ballet. . ..
Balanchine then goes on to defend the cool, impersonal tone of his
work, arguing that a passionate emotional identification with the
dancer often amounts to little more than a wallowing in one's own
emotions:
Some people think you have to cry to have emotions. Suppose
you don't. Then people believe you're cold and have no heart. . . .
