50 Years Ago, Modernism Was Given a Name: ‘Agon’
<First published online in the New York Times on 25 November, 2007>
A MAN and a woman are alone onstage. He kneels, facing her, as if in fealty. She extends a leg high above his head like a sword, then rests it on his shoulder, perhaps in the traditional gesture with which a monarch dubs a squire a knight. (“Arise, Sir Arthur.”) But this scene isn’t medieval. She’s wearing black leotard and white tights; he has a white T-shirt over black tights. The music is 12-tone for strings playing without meter or pulse.
He duly rises — but with her leg, now extended upward at 45 degrees, still resting on his shoulder. Though we know a ballerina can raise her leg that high, there’s something in the way he shoulders its weight (and the leg is now pointed sideways) that creates a powerful tension between them. She’s on point now, kept upright by his supporting arm, and he steers her around until she is more or less facing the way she started. He, however, is now standing behind her. And that extended leg of hers, still resting on his shoulder, is now bent backward.
This woman, who at the beginning of this strange phrase was like a queen with her subject, is now — seconds later — like willing clay in his hands, opening up her body for maximum exposure. And the phrase carries on until she arches her head back so it almost touches that raised foot on his shoulder. If you can picture this, now add one more touch. Make the man black and the woman white.
This is just one passage among many in the long pas de deux that is the climax of “Agon,” a collaboration between the composer Igor Stravinsky and the choreographer George Balanchine that was new 50 years ago on Dec. 1. The combination of formality and intimacy has a charge both erotic and strenuous. To us watching, the dancers’ relationship keeps changing. Are they lovers? Sovereign and vassal? Muse and poet? Sculpture and sculptor?
And the pas de deux is just the most dramatic section of a ballet that was already astounding, full of shapes, phrases, rhythms, sounds that hadn’t been encountered before but embodied New York modernism itself. In 1957 “Agon” came as the climax of a Balanchine-Stravinsky “Greek” triple bill, following “Apollo” (1928) and “Orpheus” (1948). The audience at New York City Center went wild. Marcel Duchamp, according to the critic Edwin Denby, said he felt the way he had after the 1913 opening of “Le Sacre du Printemps.” Arlene Croce, later dance critic of The New Yorker, said she did not sleep for a week.
By 1957 ballet had been an art for modernist experiment for well over 40 years, but here was a work in which everyone could see that modernism had never gone so far before. The year of “West Side Story” and “On the Road” showed that ballet could be in the vanguard of experimentalism but still take its audience with it.
“Agon” remains a difficult ballet — I recently watched two American companies dance it — and nobody finds it easy to say what it is about. The sound world and the body language are full of conjunctions that baffle even while they excite. And yet it has become a central work of international repertory, danced by all the companies that have been central to ballet’s previous history: the Paris Opera Ballet, the Bolshoi in Moscow, the Royal Ballet in London. In recent decades New York City Ballet has often revived that “Apollo”-“Orpheus”-“Agon” trilogy. These ballets made the company historic.
Is any explanation now needed of how daring Balanchine was in his use of a black male dancer in 1957? (The recent movie “Hairspray,” with its drama about racial inequality set in Baltimore in 1962, is just one reminder.) In 1916 American critics had been shocked by the orgy scene in the ballet “Scheherazade” because it depicted black slaves (i.e., white dancers blacked up) making love to (i.e., feeding grapes to) the wives in an Arabian harem. In 1936 Balanchine had offended New York tastes when, in “The Ziegfeld Follies,” he showed Josephine Baker being partnered by four white men; for all her European fame, some of her white American co-stars shunned her.
But he and Lincoln Kirstein had been talking about using black dancers since they first set up the School of American Ballet in 1934, and when they established New York City Ballet in 1948, they soon included Arthur Bell, a black dancer, among its ranks. Leontyne Price and Grace Bumbry had not yet made it to opera-house stardom; only in 1955, after a 30-year career, had the black contralto Marian Anderson made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera House.
It’s possible that Balanchine introduced the black-and-white coloration of the “Agon” casting in response to Stravinsky’s atonal music. Himself an excellent pianist, he was dramatizing a new relation between the piano’s white and black notes. (Similarly, he responded to the 12 equally matched notes of its dodecaphonic composition by giving “Agon” a cast of 12 more or less equal dancers.)
He was already famous for the ease with which apparently definitive choreographic ideas poured from him, but when choreographing this pas de deux he spent days testing and rejecting material. It was apparent to all that he was unusually concerned with getting things right. Accounts of rehearsals suggest that he was especially interested in the precise juxtaposition of white and black skin tones: just where a hand held a wrist or an ankle.
Yet race was ever only one ingredient among many in “Agon.” The ballet’s most pointed statement on the subject came not in the pas de deux but in the male group dances. The ballet starts and ends with four male dancers, all equal: there is no distinction between the one black and the three whites. In any case Balanchine later supervised both all-black and all-white performances of the ballet. And the pas de deux featured just the first of several star roles he created for Arthur Mitchell, the outstandingly elegant and handsome black dancer of the original “Agon” (who later went on to found Dance Theater of Harlem).
When the curtain rises on “Agon,” those four men stand with their backs to the audience in silence. By turning to face us, they give the conductor the cue to start (and so silence becomes part of the ballet’s texture). At the close of the ballet the music stops with the four men braced to face each other in pairs, and then, in a final silence, they turn to face the backdrop again.
The all-male start and all-male end help “Agon” seem almost Kerouac-like: a “road” ballet. So does the dancers’ body language: walking on their heels, flexing their feet, swinging their arms, kicking backward into striking off-balance lunges that look impulsive. They are ready for action, light-years away from the traditionally noble roles of ballet, intensely American. These four guys wait, fill in time, charge hopefully round the stage, until suddenly here come the girls, eight of them, two for every man.
These women, dancing on point, let you know you’re watching a classical ballet, but their classicism is terse, fast, fragmented, explosive. They hurl legs forward not as part of a phrase but as one isolated stroke among many; they do single off-balance turns with bent knees that look like harder work than multiple spins with legs straight. Yet there are passages, scarcely different in tone, when they are mistresses of balance, turnout, stretch. Elsewhere, though, they slump and crouch: the “beat” look.
This is the New York world of “Agon”: where dancers now are poised, now aren’t; where the dance vocabulary now looks modern, now traditional; where supreme accomplishment exists on equal terms with movement that is labored or pedestrian or fractured. In its most brilliant solo, a dancer rides two rhythms at once and looks both “ballet” and Spanish.
In one passage both men and women are onstage in three simultaneous asymmetrical quartets: the density of the ensemble feels momentarily thunderous, but it’s also like ballet’s new-wave version of the “Dance at the Gym” in “West Side Story” (which had opened less than three months before). Everybody’s here now; something’s about to happen. But what?
And why had Balanchine and Stravinsky given “Agon” a Greek name? And why had they put it at the end of a program whose other two ballets, “Apollo” and “Orpheus,” are both, though modernist, mythological accounts of the making of art?
The word agon means debate or conflict (as in the antagonisms of Demosthenes); it also means contest (as in the Olympics or other Greek athletic games). Denby, Balanchine’s most insightful critic of the 1940s and ’50s, had in 1954 already written of Balanchine’s most advanced ballets, “The Four Temperaments” (1946) and “Ivesiana” (1954), as “a fight.”
The year before, he had written of how Balanchine’s plotless ballets “each express a subjective meaning” and compared the excitement of watching them to “reading a logically disjointed but explosively magnificent ode of Pindar.” Turn to Pindar’s odes (early fifth century B.C.), and you soon come across the word agon in its sense of athletic games.
All these things were in the New York air in the mid-1950s; “Agon” summed them up. People were starting to speak of the New York School of painters and (later) poets and composers. Perhaps they should also have been speaking of a New York School of dance. Today it is not hard to see that the choreographers Jerome Robbins, Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor, for all their immense differences, exhibited a new freedom in their use of stage space and a new eclecticism in combining features of ballet, modern dance and everyday pedestrian movement. And all three in a sense went to school; they all studied at close quarters the choreography of George and Martha, Balanchine and Graham. (Another influence was the British choreographer Antony Tudor, who had moved to New York in 1950.) Robbins’s “Afternoon of a Faun” (1953), Mr. Cunningham’s “Suite for Five” (1956) and Mr. Taylor’s “Aureole” (1962) were all early examples of this school.
But so was “Agon” itself. Here Balanchine and Stravinsky were as way out as anyone, as eclectic and as receptive to the mood of the city at the time. As Alex Ross notes in his new survey of 20th-century music, “The Rest Is Noise” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), you hear Stravinsky’s score better when you watch Balanchine’s choreography.
Ballet, so full of heritage and Italian-French-Russian association, was now an art both radical and American. Five years later, in 1962, Balanchine took New York City Ballet to his native Russia. “Welcome to Moscow, home of the classic ballet!” said an interviewer for Radio Moscow who met him at the airport. Balanchine replied: “I beg your pardon. Russia is the home of romantic ballet. The home of classic ballet is now America.”
@New York Times, 2007