ROGER COPELAND
Actually when people cry they are only thinking of themselves.
They think 'I'm poor, I'm unhappy, I'm lonely, why did my girl–
friend leave me?' And so, beautiful music that is sad or a stage
situation that is ethereal suddenly attaches itself to your personal
life and makes you cry.
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Many of Balanchine's and Kirstein's critics dote on the similar–
ities between The New York City Ballet and a military institution
like West Point- a comparison that Kirstein himself will readily and
cheerfully defend. ("The School of American Ballet," he wrote
recently, "was conceived to be a national service academy like the
Imperial School in St. Petersburg, which held parity with the military
and naval academies.") And Kirstein quips, "There are just three
rules. One, there is no justice. Two, don't complain. Three, shut up
or get out." Perhaps Arlene Croce was getting at something similar
when she wrote that "Balanchine has managed to get American girls
to stop thinking and start dancing."
Needless to say, this is precisely the attitude that so disturbs re–
cent writers like Joan Brady in
The Unmaking of a Dancer
or Suzanne
Gordon in
Off Balance: The Real World of Ballet.
Gordon for example
believes that:
Lincoln Kirstein and The School of American Ballet are in–
stituting military discipline to train dancers as obedient children.
Somewhere along the way, these creative people have been sold
this bill of goods that talent flourishes on misery.
Kirstein obviously takes a more positive view of these matters,
defending obedience, discipline, and sacrifice in a manner more
ascetic than aesthetic:
Balanchine's ballets can be read as icons for the laity, should we
grant dancers attributes of earthly angels. These have sworn to
disavow hedonism in a calling that demands transcendence of
worldliness and possessiveness, an abjuration and abandonment
of elementary self-indulgence. We can even discover in their
aura an animal innocence as one aspect of the Lamb of God
which takes away the sins of this world, for they sacrifice much
enjoyment in ordinary fun and games of their fellows . They are
schooled to serve paradigms of order-at least for the temporal
duration of their performing-which, if well done, seem mo–
mentarily to give their audience something approaching peace
of mind.
