The Secret Life of Dancing

Abstract

The Secret Life of Dancing Jay Rogoff (bio) Violette Verdy, the great French ballerina who danced twenty years with the New York City Ballet, died February 8 at eighty-two. She had the wonderful gift of unselfconsciousness, which of course is a balletic illusion. Sometimes ballerinas express feeling with a presentational style, bonding with the audience through technical excellence and vivacious charisma. Their big smiles telegraph their secret, that we’ll love this next set of pirouettes or tours jetés, and those intimations give their performances a thrill. Verdy could show off as much as anyone—George Balanchine made for her his virtuosic, can-you-top-this delight, the 1960 Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux—but more often her talents projected introspection, and that’s how Balanchine mostly used her. In Liebeslieder Walzer, also from 1960, and Emeralds, the opening ballet of the 1967 full-evening Jewels, the precision of her technique—“a certain clarity in the articulation of the feet and legs,” she once put it, though she could have added the lush intelligence of her port de bras—made audiences believe they had eavesdropped on the private intimacy of her dancing. She communed with her partner in Emeralds and Liebeslieder, and interacted with Liebeslieder’s three other couples, but most strikingly she created an apparition of psychological depth and erotic feeling so that her movements seemed emanations of a deeply seated, secret soul. Balanchine certainly had Verdy in mind when he remarked that in Liebeslieder’s “first act, it is the real people who are dancing. In the second act, it is their souls.” Last winter I caught both these romantic Balanchine masterpieces made on Verdy (a record New York blizzard wiped out a performance of a third, 1981’s Mozartiana, made on Suzanne Farrell). The New York City Ballet has an excellent Liebeslieder cast, which I saw at Lincoln Center in January; a week later, in Florida, the Sarasota Ballet danced its first-ever Emeralds at the intimate Mertz Theater, part of Florida State University’s arts complex. Both companies also went presentational with story ballets, Sarasota including on the same bill Ninette de Valois’s The Rake’s Progress, her 1935 work inspired by Hogarth’s satiric sequence, and, in mid-February, NYCB dancing the world premiere of The Most Incredible Thing, the first story ballet by the marvelous young Justin Peck. The hour-long Liebeslieder Walzer, for four couples, uses both sets of Brahms’s songs to evoke lovers’ public demeanor and private feelings. The elegant 1869 Opus 52 displays the women in ankle-length ball gowns and low dancing pumps, the men in black tails and white gloves, in an interwoven succession of duets and ensembles. For the dreamier Opus 65, from 1874, the women switch to toe shoes and mid-calf Romantic tutus, and the men remove their gloves. Elegance becomes ethereal. Even though we see more of the women’s legs now, that physicality entirely serves ballet: We recognize legs and toe shoes as symbols and feel transported into a more spiritual world, where we watch an extended apotheosis. [End Page 442] Part one unfolds in continual motion, in circles, rotations and revolutions of dancers around each other, a galaxy of flotation. The human couples, swathed in elegance and etiquette, seem to aspire to pure form, anticipating part two. A lively duet for Rebecca Krohn and Russell Janzen looks social but also idiosyncratic, as he lifts her with his right arm supporting her left. Then, in a big lift, a huge rond de jambe floats her gown’s fabric through the air, bestowing sudden glimpses of ankle; both dancers appear slightly startled as well, so when Janzen whirls Krohn, she suddenly gazes at him more deeply. In another duet, when Janzen repeatedly whispers in her ear, she actively listens, and their dance fills with erotic play. She leans back from him as he rotates her; she wraps her arms around his head; she waltzes, suspended from his shoulder, coyly dodging that hand seeking hers. He promenades her, leg pointing forward in little circles, and finally floats her in a lift, her feet lightly crossed. Their dance becomes an experiment in communicating passion...