The often forgotten phenomenon that was Marie-Jeanne: Women’s History Month in Dance, 2021

Women’s History Month In Dance 10, 11, 12. To combine the lives of wife, mother, and ballerina has been more than many women could manage. For many who saw her dance, Marie-Jeanne (1920-2006) was the greatest of American ballerinas; for some, she was the only American ballerina. Yet her glory years - she also wrote two novels - were short, probably because she found it hard to unite ballerinadom and motherhood. There are too few photographs of her, and more or less no film. Three of the roles she created remain among the most exalted in ballet repertory - yet the name Marie-Jeanne is legendary now only to a few.

She was born Marie-Jeanne Pelus. When George Balanchine co-founded the School of American Ballet in 1934, he was immediately powerfully taken by her talent when she was still thirteen. (Lincoln Kirstein’s diaries record Vladimir Dimitriew’s concern that Balanchine was too preoccupied by this dancer, at that stage too young for a professional career. She remained one of the dancers for whom Balanchine, in 1934-1935, forecast greatness.) In June 1934, she was one of the seventeen girls or young women in the now famous opening formation of Balanchine’s Serenade” at its world premiere; that ballet was to her remain part of her history until at least 1948. In 1937, now named just Marie-Jeanne, she began to dance with Ballet Caravan, creating a role in Lew Christensen’s “Filling Station” (1938: commissioned score by Virgil Thomson, designs by Paul Cadmus), an all-American ballet occasionally revived, as in 2008 by San Francisco Ballet. The 1939 news clipping showing her with Christensen (photo 13) captures something of her personal glamour and chic.

In 1940, Balanchine staged “Serenade” for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, hiring Marie-Jeanne as guest ballerina. Only now did he add the Russian Dance (Tema Russo), the music’s final movement (he placed it before the Elegy); and he rearranged the solo sequences of the Waltz and Russian women for one ballerina - Marie-Jeanne. It was for her, in the Tema Russo, that he added the ballet’s hardest step, a striking ballonné battu (often simplified into an scissoring entrechat-trois). 

Although Balanchine had married Vera Zorina in 1938 and although Zorina’s infidelities have often been thought to caused Balanchine great heartbreak, he seems now to have begun an affair with Marie-Jeanne: one that continued intermittently to 1945 at least. (Balanchine almost certainly had other lovers during those years. Marie-Jeanne did, too. She later said her 1940-1941 relationship with him ended because “He knew I wanted children and he didn’t want children.” The wording is interesting: usually Balanchine said he didn’t like his ballerinas to have children - it interrupted and imperilled their already short careers - but here he is credited more definitely with not wanting children of his own.) 

In 1941, for the American Ballet’s (or American Ballet Caravan’s) tour of Latin America, Balanchine choreographed six new ballets, with leading roles for Marie-Jeanne in four. The two classics of these six were “Concerto Barocco” and “Ballet Imperial” (“Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto no 2”). Marie-Jeanne was the lead ballerina of both, creating the celebrated double sauts de basque that used to be a landmark of the “Ballet Imperial” third movement. She was also Terpsichore in his 1941 revival of “Apollo”; she danced the role again in 1945. (In the 1970s, she described Apollo as “a piss-elegant soccer player”. The role does have soccer imagery.)

Somehow amid this she found time to write a novel, “Yankee Ballerina - a story of a young American dancer” (1941). In 1942, she married a South American impresario, Alfonso de Quesada. They had a daughter; but in 1947, they were divorced. 

In 1945, she returned to dance for Balanchine, as Terpsichore in a Mexico City production of “Apollo” with the Apollo of Nicholas Magallanes; their Polyhymnia and Calliope, Patricia Wilde and Joy Williams, are still living. The four and Balanchine then joined the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, often dancing her old role in “Concerto Barocco”, though perhaps not returning to “Ballet Imperial”, where her role now belonged to Mary-Ellen Moylan. 

When Balanchine created “Night Shadow” (1946: the ballet is now performed as “La Sonnambula”), he gave Marie-Jeanne the role now danced by a man, the Harlequin. He teased her by choreographing into the role the way that she would clutch her back after an effortful jump. Joy Williams Brown, also in the original cast, always remembers how much subtler and funnier these gestures were with Marie-Jeanne. These were the years when Marie-Jeanne’s speed, fluency, clarity, beauty, and mystery created lasting impressions on New York audiences. She appeared with Ballet Society in 1948 when Balanchine created “The Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne”, to a new score by Vittorio Rieti. Almost sixty years later, Barbara Milberg Fisher (then a student at the School of American Ballet and soon to become a founder member of New York City Ballet) recalled the sweep with which Marie-Jeanne’s astounding jumps covered the stage. When Balanchine formed City Ballet in 1948, she was enlisted; and she was in the company’s first performances of “Serenade”.  Photograph 10 is by George Platt Lynes, Balanchine’s favourite photographer. (Does anyone know more about what role she is dancing?) And in 1948 she published her second novel, “Opera Ballerina” (photo 11). 

In the years that followed, she also danced in Europe with the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas. (Photo 12 was probably taken around 1953.) She also returned to City Ballet briefly, before retiring in 1954, in her mid-thirties. In 1957, she married again, the film-maker Dwight S. Godwin, by whom she had two sons. The family moved to Florida in the 1960s; her husband died in 1983. When she died, she left four grandchildren and five grandchildren. She had also taught ballet from the 1950s on in several parts of the States. For the Balanchine Foundation, she coached her roles in “Barocco” and “Ballet Imperial”, but observed that the ballets had changed beyond recognition. Of City Ballet dancers in “Barocco”, she commented “Lovely. Lovely dancing. But it’s not ‘Barocco’.” It’s likely that she was criticising not the changes to the ballets that had occurred after Balanchine’s death but those that the choreographer himself had encouraged over the decades.

The dancer Dick Beard -  a member of both American Ballet Theatre and New York City Ballet in the 1940s, and who maintained a friendship with Frederick Ashton (his lover in 1947-1948) and Margot Fonteyn for the rest of their lives - considered Marie-Jeanne the only true American ballerina until perhaps Gelsey Kirkland, and a ballerina to be mentioned in the same breath as other great ballerinas of her day, Alicia Markova, Alexandra Danilova, and Fonteyn; when I asked about Maria Tallchief, he shouted “Don’t make me laugh!” in contempt. His former partner Yvonne Mounsey, an important Balanchine dancer, voiced the same opinions but gently, without anger. Evidently Marie-Jeanne was an inspiring phenomenon: it’s sad - and perhaps revealing of the problems of women in twentieth-century ballet - that she did not sustain the dance glory that branded those who saw it.

Sunday 7 March

10. Marie-Jeanne: photograph by George Platt Lynes

11. Front cover of Marie-Jeanne’s second novel, “Opera Ballerina” (1948)

12. Marie-Jeanne, c.1953, the year before her retirement from the stage.

13. A 1939 news clipping showing Lew Christensen with Marie-Jeanne