George Balanchine with Tanquil’s Mourka
Let night come
with its austere grandeur,
ancient superstitions and fears.
It can do us no harm.
We’ll put some music on,
open the curtains, let things darken
as they will
— Steven Dunn, poet
Dear friends and readers,
I’ve written no content since October 19th because I’ve been that discouraged and disheartened: teaching is not going to be for me what I had hoped. I had not realized what a hard prescription is Robert Louis Stevenson’s: “There is indeed one element in human destiny that not blindness itself can controvert. Whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted. Our business is to continue to fail in good spirits.”
No one who reads this blog will believe I’ve been putting up a brave front, but I have. So I must fill this blog with other lives, other adventures.
One of Gary Arnold’s recommendations (from the Sunday once-a-month film club I’ve been attending) was Afternoon of a Faun. I watched it two nights — using a DVD from Netflix and want to recommend it strongly.
It’s the story of one of the central ballerinas of Balanchine’s life: at the height of Tanaquil’s powers, dancing extraordinarily at the American Ballet Theater, and married to Balanchine, she came down with polio. She spent time in an iron lung and never regained her ability to stand much less dance.
Dancing Afternoon of a Faun
A more classical ballet symphony
It’s very much a woman’s film: a sensitive retelling of this woman’s life from the time and milieu of the 1950s in NYC and the building of American ballet theater: Le Clercq had a ballet mother who had come from a middle class family and enrolled her daughter in the Manhattan ballet school at Juillard; Tanaquil caught Balanchine’s eye one day in the corridor after she had been thrown out of the class. He discovered the way she danced suited his ballets exquisitely well. She collapsed suddenly in one of the Scandanavian countries. She was 26. After this terrifying ordeal, from which she came back in part sufficiently to sit comfortably in a wheelchair and allow him to try to manipulate her into standing, dancing once more. She could not. Surprisingly (to others), Balanchine was far more loyal to her than one might expect, stayed with her much longer,
but eventually he tired of trying to bring her back, saw it could not be, and moved on — as they say — to Suzanne Farrell. Took Farrell over, married her; yes Tanaquil was very hurt. She then lived alone for 25 years, never remarried. The story of the movie is done partly through interviews with those who remained her friends, including a rival of Balanchine’s, Jerome Robins; a loyal friend, Patricia McBride, another Barbara Horgan. Exquisitely appropriate film clips as it moves back and forth through older memories and then forward through her life. Tanaquil did have enough money to live a physically comfortable life in a fine apartment in Manhattan; we see her at a picnic with friends; and she publishes a book on her life with her cat,
reminding me of Doris Lessing, Olivia Manning, Marge Piercy, Elsa Morante and Remedios Varo, and their books and poetry and pictures of cats, only the photos I could find were all of Balanchine and Mourka.
Late in life the African-American dancer turned choreographer, Arthur Mitchell, who ran the Harlem ballet theatre was willing to give her a job teaching ballet classes and mentoring individual ballerinas there — from her chair.
It’s the story of a disabled woman’s life. She is photographed in all its stages across the film, and looks as poignant in her later years with her hair thinning and her body increasingly frail as she does at the start. There was something ethereal about her wiry strength when she was young, and when she ages there is something plangently ethereal yet strong from her waist up and through her arms when she ages.
A touching and yet real account of the life of artist bereft of her gift. Gary Arnold connected it to the film Casa Verdi — the realities of lives in the “high culture” theater and the aftermath when they can no longer exercise their talent.
How difficult it is to claim one’s right
to living honestly. The honesty
you taught was nothing quite as true
as death, but neither was it final
—–Rafael Campo, poet
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A absurdist funny (if you are not involved) story of a friend’s fence. Let’s call her Sharon: Sharon lives in one of these controlled “developments” of townhouses which allows a Homeowners Association’s petty tyrants to reign supreme over all that can be seen outside of the houses. Sharon and Don’s fence needed replacement and because they have cats, they decided to have a fence precisely 6 feet high (the highest allowed) to try to keep the cats inside their back garden/terrace. After it was built with a shed attached to one corner, one of the people in the area snuck round and measured said fence and discovered it was 6 feet 3 inches or so and reported this to the HOA. You’d think Sharon and Don had committed a felony. What power the HOA has over them I don’t know. All this is about more than property values (money); it’s about insisting on a narrow image of middle class respectability. It’s about those given petty power.
The situation was most people have fences of 5 feet and the previous fence had been 5 feet. So this was daringly unconventional. Sharon’s mother-in-law was actually going to go round the fences in the compound and measure others to show others were slightly over 6 feet. That is, she was willing to think and act the way this HOA did. But such measurings got nowhere. So should they pay to cut it by 5 inches along the top — expensive. Finally it was decided to bring in dirt to raise the level of the ground.
I’ve been told there are communities where you are not allowed to have a line of rope to hang your clothes out in your backyard on a sunny afternoon. Rules for how many bushes and how high and where. If you can have a basketball circle. It seems to me this kind of thing also shows insecurity about class, for the higher and richer and bigger the houses, the less you see people allowing others to police them in this way.
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Why I wanted to escape experience is nobody’s business but my own,
but I always believed I could if I couldput experience into words
Now I know better.
Now I know words are experience
—– Vijay Seshadri, poet
And pictures and colors. Don’t miss Michael Gorra deep into green.
Remedios Varo
Miss Drake
Under the Sign of Sylvia II 
Loved the fence story — kind of flies in the face or Frost’s poem,no? It reminded me of a case here last year when a couple got done for having a beautiful vegetable garden in the front of their suburban home. The town counsel was called upon and the had to stop the practice, conform to the boring uniformity of the neighbourhood. It really is sad how petty people can be.
Your story is more to the point than mine — or makes it more clearly. It could be argued that higher fences will drive property values down since many people might not like such fences and not want to buy into a neighborhood that has them; or that these are anti-social. But to remove a beautiful vegetable garden can be for no other reason that “man, proud man, Dress’d in a little brief authority, Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d” (some such words from Isabella scorning a mean magistrate in shakespeare’s Measure for Measure).
More thought makes me realize just how much of a woman’s film this is. The plot-design and images circular and repetitive. The whole interest in a disabled woman’s life, in what happens to beauty, for after all she came down with polio when she was 26 and lived another 60+ years.