The beloved Jacques d’Amboise, Balanchine’s Apollo, the wild boy made civilised by art

Jacques d’Amboise, always so energetic, so vital, so enthusiastic died, aged eighty-six, on May 2, 2021. He often told how George Balanchine described the role of Apollo as “a wild boy made civilised by art”; but there was little doubt that Jacques felt the same about himself. He had the wildness in him to take him in other, more dangerous directions, but ballet, above all George Balanchine, transformed him, introducing him to music, poetry and the other arts. Having discovered dance, he never let go of it.

Born in July 1934, he must have matured physically with uncommon speed. When he was only seventeen, Frederick Ashton singled him out in 1952 to be Tristram/Tristan to Diana Adams’s Iseult/Isolde in “Picnic at Tintagel”. D’Amboise was keenly aware not only that he had been chosen for a romantic leading role at an exceptionally early age but also that Balanchine, his beloved master, began to exhibit bad signs of professional jealousy, principally because Ashton, Balanchine’s exact contemporary, had chosen Adams for his ballerina. Balanchine would spy at keyholes and mess with rehearsal schedules until Ashton went to rebuke him: “When you came to Covent Garden, we gave you the pick of our finest dancers and our best rehearsal conditions - but here you keep taking my dancers away from rehearsals with me and making conditions impossible!” Another young man would have taken sides with one or other of the two master choreographers - but never Jacques, who delighted in them both. He admired “Picnic at Tintagel”; remembered how, after its premiere and Ashton’s departure, Balanchine undermined and diluted it with cast changes until it lost its essence; served Balanchine loyally; and always eagerly visited Ashton on his yearly visits to London.

The next year, 1953, d’Amboise, now eighteen, was the epitome of what Jerome Robbins wanted as the unclassically poetic young man in his “Afternoon of a Faun”; Balanchine’s longterm assistant, Barbara Horgan, joined the New York City Ballet enterprise that year and remembers that the role was intended more for D’Amboise than for Francisco Moncion (“a marvellous artist, but not youthful even then”). In 2017, I asked d’Amboise about this. “Jerry took so long to make a ballet, and I was a young man in a hurry. He planned to rehearse it with two casts: Tanny <Tanaquil Le Clercq> and Frank <Francisco Moncion>, another tall young woman called Irene Larson and me. But after one rehearsal, I went to Mr Balanchine to let me change the rehearsal schedule!” Jacques hardly lost thereby - though Larson did: while her career made little progress, Jacques was often cast in “Faun” with Le Clercq and other ballerinas over the next fifteen years. (Robbins experts tell me that the now famous 1955 Montreal television film of “Faun” with Le Clercq and d’Amboise should not be judged as representative: Robbins was not consulted, d’Amboise plays the sexy side of his role up for the camera, and Le Clercq responds to him with a far sexier interpretation than she did in the other film we have of her in the ballet.)

Balanchine created a great series of roles for Jacques from 1954 onwards: he was the lead man in the closing movement of “Western Symphony” (1954), originally opposite Le Clercq, he partnered Melissa Hayden as El Capitán to her Liberty Bell in “Stars and Stripes” (1957), he was opposite Adams in “Movements for Piano and Orchestra” (1963), he was Suzanne Farrell’s cavalier in “Diamonds” (1967), and he was the all-American Broadway Apollo of the Gershwin “Who Cares?” (1970), partnering Patricia McBride, Marnee Morris, and Karin von Aroldingen. He was still there for a wide range of new leading roles in the remainder of Balanchine’s life, including “Union Jack” (1976), and “Robert Schumann’s ‘Davidsbündlertänze’” (1980). When “Tschaikovsky pas de deux” (1960) was new, Balanchine made him his own variation. “But,” Jacques admitted around 2014, “I was lazy! After a while, I went to Mr B. and asked if I could cut one repeat in the music.” Coaching Daniel Ulbricht in the solo (“I’m restoring the cut for you!”), d’Amboise took him again and again through two points of style: rhythmically emphasising one retiré preparation, then underplaying the closing gesture with the most modest of low arm-openings. It’s fascinating now to consider how Balanchine trained D’Amboise and his more virtuoso contemporary Edward Villella to define American masculinity in classical dance. D’Amboise and Villella were equally vital, unaffected, clean, without academic prissiness or self-regard; d’Amboise was taller, longer-limbed, audaciously chivalrous while cleanly ideal for the most modernist experiments.

No role was a greater revelation to Jacques, though, than the title role of “Apollo” (1928). In 1951, Balanchine had staged it for his company with scenery (which no one remembers) and with André Eglevsky, an important dancer whose style influenced Jacques as did the Russian teacher Pierre Vladimirov. In 1957, preparing an all-Stravinsky program for the premiere of “Agon”, Balanchine cast d’Amboise for the highly influential new production of “Apollo” in which all scenery was pared away to a simple dual-purpose staircase. Jacques later wrote:

”Balanchine wanted me to dance the role of Apollo for this occasion. ’Before, Apollo was man with blond curls in Grecian tunic. Makes ballet look dated, old fashion. Today I want to make simple. No Mount Olympus scenery, no Greek tunic. Apollo will be simple, black and white, abstract. Just dancer and staircase, with blue sky behind.’

“This relieved me to hear, because Michael Arshansky, who worked with the dancers on hairstyles and makeup, had just described to me, if I danced the role, how he would dye my hair golden and give me a head of curls.

“Dancing Balanchine’s Apollo was a role every male dancer sought. It was equivalent to winning the gold medal at the Olympic games. For me, it became a challenge that would transform me as a dancer. I was launched on a new trajectory.

“Before Apollo, when I had a role or variation to perform, I would learn the dance movements, rehearse until I felt it was good enough to perform, and that was it, that was enough. But with Apollo, I started analyzing every step in a dance to find the optimum affect that would best present the dance movement.

“Alone in a studio, I took each step and practiced it over and over again at varied tempos, very slow, slow, fast, then faster. I rehearsed even my breathing, whether my lips would be parted or not. Sometime I practiced dancing an entire variation with my eyes shut.”

Balanchine, busy elsewhere, only began to coach d’Amboise a little before the premiere; but he then continued to coach him in the role throughout the remaining 1950s and 1960s. It was here above all that D’Amboise defined American style, high-charged, keen, with no academic self-regard; he blent wildness with civilisation, showing poetry in the making and filling it with imagery. Over the rest of his life, Jacques never ceased to marvel that Balanchine - whose manner was usually just to show movement and to leave the meanings to take care of themselves - showed a wealth of intention with “Apollo”. The eye of Zeus is on the young god from the first; when Apollo, in the prologue, has a tantrum, Zeus sends him a lure to soothe him, a toy from which he will learn. In his solos, especially the second, Apollo learns to be the eagle, king of birds, looking down on the world from his crag. But he’s also a soccer-player, an athlete, and he moves at times like the steeds sculpted on the Parthenon’s Elgin Marbles. At the end of the ballet, it is Apollo alone who hears his father Zeus’s call to Olympus; his playmates the muses try to hold onto him on the slopes of Parnassus, but finally follow him to watch him prepare to leave them behind.

Jacques tried to impart everything that Balanchine told him about “Apollo” not only to a series of dancers but even to me, over a series of lunches and conversations between 2007 and 2019. I was thrilled that he asked me to interview him when he coached five roles for the Balanchine Foundation, including “Apollo” and “Who Cares?”; I was privileged that, in 2018, he attended two days of the “Apollo” seminar - all filmed - that I convened at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. He spoke ideally, while being generous to and affectionate with the several other Balanchine dancers present. Robert Greskovic and I used many of his recorded words when we presented an “Apollo” event at the Library’s Bruno Walter Auditorium in October 2019. There was Jacques in the front row, beaming from ear to ear, excited like a young man not by his own history but by the importance of “Apollo” and George Balanchine. Afterwards, he burst into the green room to congratulate us and to continue his enthusiasm for that ballet.

Jacques himself admitted that he hung onto some roles too long. Whether he danced Apollo for all of twenty years (as he believed, though others do not), he always paid credit to his wife, the photographer and former dancer Carolyn George, for telling him finally to give that role up. In the last stage performances I watched him give (in “Davidsbündlertänze” in 1982 and 1983), he looked all the older for having his hair dyed black.

Which made it all the more surprising to meet him in 2007-2019: he was white-haired, made no secret about the crippled state of his knees, and yet was warm, youthful, engaged, enthusiastic, adorable. The importance of his wife and children often occurred in his conversations, as did his love of poetry. In his memoirs, full of good things but far from neat in organisation, he cannot bring himself to mention that his wife has died. Nonetheless I recommend those memoirs to everyone, not only to show how the role of Apollo fulfilled major currents in Jacques’s life but also to demonstrate, movingly, the good things achieved by his National Institute of Dance.

Another poignant thread in his memoirs is his rueful mixture of feelings about the state of New York City Ballet in the decades after George Balanchine’s death. He loved not only Balanchine but Lincoln Kirstein too, and knew how Balanchine seemed not to care about the future of the company they had founded while Kirstein desperately wanted it to survive him. Wryly, d’Amboise, writing while Peter Martins was running City Ballet, remarks that both Balanchine and Kirstein seem to have got their wish: the company was still running (as Kirstein had wanted) but unrecognisably (as Balanchine had predicted). He understood the bipolar nature of Kirstein, recounts in his memoirs an astounding anecdote of Kirstein telling Balanchine “You’re fired!”, and would tell how Kirstein would exclaim “You’re only here because I wanted to fuck Lew Christensen!” - a story Jacques told with no scorn but only with a mixture of amusement and kindness.

Yet Jacques was too naturally enthusiastic to go on speaking like that. In my time at the “New York Times”, he began to attend more and more performances by New York City Ballet, to befriend the generation of dancers who are now its principals, and to coach them where and when he could. He went elsewhere too, always with new details to impart: when Peter Boal, artistic director of Pacific Northwest Ballet, revived Balanchine’s “Jewels” in 2014 with most of its original principals having coached his dancers, d’Amboise impressed the “Diamonds” male principals by showing how Balanchine liked as much fingertip partnering as possible, giving only light and minimal support to the ballerina. When City Ballet’s fiftieth anniversary at Lincoln Center occurred in 2014, Peter Martins invited all the 1964 leading dancers to join him onstage. Jacques entered first, and immediately enfolded Martins in a warm and emotional embrace that seemed to cover and bypass decades of conflict and forgiveness.

His charm was colossal and effortless, his love for many people effusive and happy. I keep coming across poems and messages he sent me. They were signed “Your Jacques.” How lucky was I? Everyone who knew him has similar tales to tell. How lucky were we.

Monday 3 May