The Dance of the Final Bow
First published online in the New York Times, June 10, 2007
AFTER the show the curtain falls, and there are those for whom it will not rise again. Some discover only in retrospect that they will no longer perform because of injury or illness. Others leave the stage quietly, telling nobody their plans until after their last performance. Some, however, choose the moment and the manner of their going and give advance notice to the world. There are never so many true ballerinas that it’s comfortable to say goodbye even to one of them, but coincidence has ordained that this month brings the formal farewell performances of four international ballerinas, all of whom have been admired in New York. Four!
On Friday the tall, blithe British ballerina Darcey Bussell, a dancer capable of effects on a colossal scale and yet amazingly innocent in manner, was scheduled to give her final performance at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, after a career of 20 years. Her role was the heroine of Kenneth MacMillan’s ballet “The Song of the Earth” (to Mahler’s song cycle).Today Pacific Northwest Ballet in Seattle stages a celebration of the blond and powerfully lyrical Patricia Barker, showcasing its departing prima ballerina in four of her best-known vehicles after a yet longer career: 26 years.
On June 22 Kyra Nichols, long and widely acknowledged as the world’s purest classicist, bids farewell to New York City Ballet. She appears in three poignant Balanchine ballets, all charged with various forms of farewell, after the longest career of these four: 30 years. Then the very next night Alessandra Ferri, whose career has lasted 27 years, gives her final performance with American Ballet Theater, dancing Juliet, a role she first danced with the Royal Ballet in 1984. The balletgoer feels like a character at the end of “Uncle Vanya,” saying goodbye, goodbye, goodbye and goodbye.
The emotion generated by such farewells goes deep. A ballerina represents beauty; is an exalted ideal; exerts authority over the world onstage and her audience; holds the key to the meaning of each ballet. That’s quite a list of virtues. And yet it doesn’t fully explain why the departure of a beloved ballerina affects her audience with a pang beyond the one felt at the departure of one of her male counterparts.
When Mikhail Baryshnikov dances, he is as much the spirit of the art as was Pavlova or Astaire or Fonteyn. Few ballerinas have been as remarkable as he. But a woman, more tellingly than any man, can demonstrate the particular potential that makes ballet so powerful a subsection of dance.
The original Italian word “ballerina” has none of the extra connotations with which generations of Russian, British and American devotees have encrusted it. It simply means “dancing girl/woman”: she who dances. But to non-Italians it has to come to mean “she who dances ballet”: she who exemplifies ballet. And the very thought of a ballerina reminds us of this genre’s singular nature.
Ballet is sexist, not in the crude sense of being biased against women (the opposite tends to be true) but in the sense that it is predicated upon gender distinctions. She, by going on point, will become transformed, ethereal, sublime; he must remain mortal. He may partner her; she may not return the favor. (Even those few ballets in which a man goes on point for character effect or a woman does some partnering of her man serve only as exceptions that reinforce the rule.)
When Mr. Baryshnikov danced ballet, he was a supreme artist, and yet part of his function was to serve his ballerina. And if she was not of the order of Natalia Makarova, Gelsey Kirkland or Patricia McBride, one felt the strangeness of the event (the more so since partnering could sometimes be the one slight chink in Mr. Baryshnikov’s armor).
Many heterosexual men in the ballet audience (there are many, by the way) watch ballerinas as gorgeous objects, and they’re not wrong to do so. Heterosexual desire and chivalry are writ deep into the ethos of this art. But it would be a shame to stop there. That ballerina onstage may be tremendous or angelic, but we nonetheless identify with her. Whether we are male or female, white or black, straight or gay, she is also dancing out a voice in our own heads.
And she does it to music. For those who saw them dance, some music is forever cast in the hue of Margot Fonteyn, Violette Verdy, Antoinette Sibley, Patricia McBride, Suzanne Farrell. This intimacy between a ballerina and her music goes back centuries. I love it that, as soon as the ballerina Marie-Anne Cupis de Camargo (1710-70; Nicolas Lancret’s exquisite portraits of her dancing hang on the walls of both the National Gallery in Washington and the Wallace Collection in London) made her debut at 16, she was praised by a Parisian critic for “la justesse de l’oreille,” the accuracy (the rightness) of her ear: the dance equivalent of perfect pitch.
That phrase came back to mind on the afternoon of May 27, when Ms. Nichols danced the first of two final performances of Balanchine’s “Mozartiana.” Stepping softly across the stage, planting her points onto the Mozart-Tchaikovsky beat with such calm decisiveness, opening her arms with the phrase, turning with its current, she was with and in the music on many levels. Of course we feel a pang. When will we see — hear, feel — such purity, such absorption, again? But Ms. Nichols’s performance, content and focused in the present tense, was not sorrowful. Her husband and two young children were in the audience, and it was easy to feel she was giving the performance to them as a present.
A ballerina appears onstage in three main ways: alone, with a man, in the company of others. Part of our emotional response is because in each of these circumstances she epitomizes the most intimate aspects of our own lives. You can’t get far with “Swan Lake” if you watch solely from the Prince’s view. You have to recognize that the Swan Queen is speaking for you too: now in isolation, now in contact with a partner, now as the leader of a flock. She is an exalted being, and yet we respond to her as if we are her.
Of the four departing ballerinas, Ms. Barker is the one I have seen the least, though I, like many, love the lyrical fluency she has brought to Titania in Balanchine’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” her most celebrated role. The other three ballerinas, however, feel like chapters of my life.
Ms. Nichols, then in her teens, was already dancing principal roles when I first visited New York in 1979; I can never forget her zephyrlike Spring in the premiere of Jerome Robbins’s “Four Seasons” or the glowing, athletic ease she brought to her first performances of Sanguinic in Balanchine’s “Four Temperaments.” I saw Ms. Ferri and Ms. Bussell in their Royal Ballet School graduation performances. Ms. Bussell, in 1987, danced what is routinely known as the “Black Swan” pas de deux from “Swan Lake,” a ballet she later made her own, which immediately showcased her technical command and easy radiance. Ms. Ferri, in 1980, danced the slow and far-from-flashy movement of MacMillan’s pure-dance ballet “Concerto.”
MacMillan had already created ballets for Lynn Seymour, Svetlana Beriosova, Merle Park and Ms. Sibley. Now he was quick to single out first Ms. Ferri, who danced the lead in his new “Valley of Shadows” in 1982, and then Ms. Bussell, making her the heroine of his final three-act ballet, “The Prince of the Pagodas,” which had its premiere not long after her 20th birthday in 1989. These two dancers were the last major muses of his career; he died in 1992.
Ms. Ferri, a captivating nymphet from the first, soon became a star in the sexy, histrionic dance-dramas for which MacMillan was best known. During her years with the Royal Ballet (1980-85) she was in danger of becoming its onstage Lolita, with less technical precision and strength than a complete ballerina needs. She was lucky that Mr. Baryshnikov invited her to join American Ballet Theater in 1985, and she repaid his faith: She soon became the Giselle of choice for many New York dancegoers, and her Nikiya in “La Bayadère” injected fiery spontaneity into a ballet that is often otherwise tepid.
Remembering the astoundingly liquid beauty of her graduation “Concerto” performance, I can’t help sighing for the pure-dance side of Ms. Ferri that her audience has never seen again. Her repertory has been composed of dance-dramas first to last. And yet what has become clearer over the years is that she has poured that early physical fluency into her acting roles. When the Royal Ballet marked the 10th anniversary of MacMillan’s death in the 2002-3 season and invited Ms. Ferri back to dance the role of Juliet, it was evident that while she hadn’t lost temperament since her 1984 debut in the role, she had gained poetry.
Unlike Ms. Ferri, Ms. Bussell is scarcely an actress at all, or even a coquette; for that reason she has regularly disappointed some sections of her audience at Covent Garden, which loves its dancers to beguile by means of acting and subtle flirtation. Instead Ms. Bussell has won hearts in much the same way as Ms. Nichols at New York City Ballet: by being herself and by applying her prodigious physical and technical skills across her repertory with an uncanny avoidance of affectation or mannerism. She doesn’t change from one role to the next, but she can be so absorbed in the world around her onstage that in roles like Cinderella or Juliet she is more touching than several who work harder to characterize the same parts.
In “The Prince of the Pagodas,” MacMillan gave Ms. Bussell steps that were unprecedented in the Royal Ballet lexicon for their vaulting complexity. And most of her role was choreographed when she was only 19, the first teenage ballerina to be made the heroine of a three-act ballet since Ms. Farrell in Balanchine’s “Don Quixote” in 1965. New Yorkers hailed her appearances with the Royal Ballet between 1991 and 2004. Her international career, which included guest appearances with the Kirov, peaked in the three spring seasons in which, unlike any previous British ballerina, she made guest appearances with New York City Ballet in Balanchine choreography. After MacMillan’s death she established another fruitfully creative partnership, this time with the choreographer Christopher Wheeldon in a series of new ballets made between 1996 and 2006.
Some ballerinas are freaks, bizarre extremes who make you see only the oddness of the art, but Ms. Bussell shows you its rightness, its proportion, its glory, all on an immense scale. No, she’s not an actress. She’s a force of nature, and an amazingly natural one.
So we come to Ms. Nichols. In the high summer of her technical powers in the 1980s and ’90s, she reached levels of virtuosity that have surely not been surpassed or even matched. As with Ms. Farrell and Mr. Baryshnikov there were individual performances in which she seemed as serene as ever, delivering steps or phrases of seemingly impossible skill. (I recall a 1982 “Apollo” in which, while remaining balanced on point, she brought down her raised front leg in stages, as if neither gravity nor time existed. Days later people were still agog.)
The greatest marvel of her career, however, has been its range. Regrettably, Balanchine did not live to make any new ballets for her, though Robbins was the first of many who did. But she has applied herself — both in Balanchine’s lifetime, when he coached her in several of his most exacting vehicles, and in the decades since — to the spectrum of roles he made over more than 50 years. Ballets that he made for drastically dissimilar ballerinas — spanning from tragic to comic emotion, from soft lyricism to scintillating bravura — she has taken on as if breathing them: the most diverse interpreter his repertory has ever known.
Ms. Nichols, without ever appearing to take on another character, just by dancing truthfully, has become the most unknowable of all ballerinas. That trait, though bewildering, has been part of her humanity. What human is ever fully known to any other? Ms. Nichols, that most selfless and modest of ballerinas, making herself transparent in role after role, is at once the girl next door and an endless enigma. You thought she wasn’t tragic? Comic? Glamorous? Impassioned? Vengeful? Watch her prove you wrong.
The ballerina Tamara Karsavina (1885-1978) liked to say, “Leave the stage before the stage leaves you.” That’s what these four are doing, and they leave us wanting more. Ballet as we know it, with women dancing on point, has been in existence fewer than 200 years, and it’s possible that one day it may come to an end, with working on point coming to seem as outmoded as binding women’s feet.
While it has lasted, however, and for those of us who have had a ballet appetite, these ballerinas have changed our lives. Dance is the art of the present tense, and they have made the present large by dancing in it.