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The Balanchine Archive Project
An Interview with Nancy Reynolds (byAlexandra Tomalonis)
Ballet Alert Number 1, October 1997

Editor’s Note: One of the best things that’s happened to American ballet in the past decade is the George Balanchine Foundation’s efforts to retrieve and preserve Balanchine’s choreography and approach to choreography. The impetus for the project came from writer and former NYCB dancer Nancy Reynolds (author of the invaluable Repertory in Review, among other books), who not only made an endowment to the Foundation in 1993 to make the project possible, but serves as Director of Research for the Foundation. We talked to Reynolds about her work, what she’s done and what she’s learned.

Nancy Reynolds: At the moment, there are two projects: the Archive of Lost Choreography and the Interpreter’s Archive. The Lost Choreography archive is the easiest to explain, in that I am attempting, where possible and practical and not too silly, to retrieve Balanchine choreography that is out of the current repertory and in danger of becoming lost. My notion was not to revive these ballets for performance. I’m not sure that it would be possible, and even if it were, I’m not a ballet company. Instead, often it’s a little jewel of a solo that might be recovered, and not the whole ballet.

I have two people who’ve been working on that. One was Dame Alicia Markova, who brought back a solo from the Song of the Nightingale in 1926, which I believe had not been danced since 1929. And the other is Freddie Franklin, who is, of course, very famous for doing this kind of thing, and was rehearsal master at the Ballet Russe. He’s got a fantastic memory. What he’s worked on so far is the two pas de deux from Le Baiser de la fee, the ballet that was done originally in 1937--not to be confused with the one in 1972.  And then he dug up, shall we say, a solo that was in the Raymonda of the Ballet Russe that I didn’t know anything about. That work didn’t last too long in the repertory, and there aren’t very many reviews.
    This solo was done actually for Franklin himself, and was not done when he didn’t do it, and it disappeared. Anyway, he did that with Nikolaj Hubbe. It’s a semicharacter classical part which was perfect for Nikolaj. Plenty of classical choreography, but with a vaguely Hungarian touch.
    I’m hoping he’ll do more; we’re talking about various things. And I hope Dame Alicia will do something else. She was fabulous. She chose her own dancer. She said, I have to find someone like me. It’s so hard. The sixteen-year-old Patty McBride would have been perfect, because at that time she was all legs and arms, and she could do the most astounding things. This role calls for some double sauts de basque, and some other things that the average dancer just can’t do.

Q: And Markova was very young when it was choreographed.

Reynolds: Oh, she was fourteen. Anyway, she found a lovely girl, who I don’t think was too much like her, but she was very small and very nice, and it was good to start with someone who wasn’t a, quote, "Balanchine dancer," because one of the ideas behind this project, I’m hoping, is to show that Balanchine is not exclusively danced at the New York City Ballet, that they’re not the only ones who can do it. And I thought to start with Markova, who was not greatly associated with Balanchine, was terrific.
    So that’s the Archive of Lost Choreography.
    The idea for the Interpreter’s Archive was to capture on videotape the dancers who had worked directly with Balanchine in the creation of a role. And this, it seemed to some, had a twofold goal. One was to get closer to Balanchine’s creative process, and the other was to glean from these original creators what he might have had on his mind at the first. We know very well that he, himself, often changed roles and that theirs is not necessarily the definitive interpretation, but it’s got to have some importance, because he selected these people.
    The idea of filming them teaching the roles was partly to get away from the talking head format, and also to have them lose themselves in the teaching process. The off-the-cuff remarks when they’re attempting to get more out of a dancer are something that you wouldn’t get from an interview.
    So the goal, which I tell them, is to set the choreography on a dancer as closely as you can remember as it was set on you. I’ve done a lot of work with Maria Tallchief, and she says, "Well, but it’s not like that any more." I said, "Look. Just for this project, I want it to be as close as possible as to what you did," in the full knowledge that maybe this has been changed, either by accident or design.
    I also have done some taping with Patricia Wilde, with Marie Jeanne, on whom he did Concerto Barocco, Ballet Imperial, and the Russian dance from Serenade. And I just completed Todd Bolender coaching the Phlegmatic variation from Four Temperaments.

Q: It sounds like fun.

Reynolds: The shooting is wonderful, because these older dancers are just fabulous, with their memories, and their devotion, and their interest in getting it right. They’re an inspiration.

Q: Do you think the young dancers have caught something from this?

Reynolds: I think so. Now, we’re very careful to say that we’re not coaching their variation for performance today because they may well have been taught something different. But they are, of course, very interested in coming in contact with these rather legendary people. Someone like a Maria Tallchief has a lot to say about what Balanchine did, what he wanted. And yes. I think they’re very much influenced by it, and they’re certainly inspired by it, and honored to have her expend that much attention and that much time on them.

Q: You mentioned that you hoped to show that Balanchine can be danced by people other than the New City Ballet. Could you talk about that?

Reynolds: I’m very interested in not having it be a New York City Ballet hot house type of thing--although we often use New York City Ballet dancers, who are fabulous. But yes. We’ve done some taping in Pittsburgh. Of course, we started with Dame Alicia in London, and we were recently in Fort Worth, Texas. I let the coach choose everything, really, the repertoire, the dancers, and what have you, and two of Maria Tallchief’s former pupils were dancing in Fort Worth, which is why we went there. And, of course, they have quite an extensive Balanchine rep there.

Q: Does Balanchine look like Balanchine in all of these places?

Reynolds: I think so. Maria Tallchief does teach the way she did it, and that doesn’t look exactly like what we see today. So I think it’s more a time thing than a geography thing.

Q: What are you planning next?

Reynolds: I definitely want to get some more men on board. I was very happy to get Todd and Freddie. I didn’t want it to be just Balanchine’s women. There are plenty of Balanchine men, and I want to make a big effort to include them.

Q: How far back have you gone?

Reynolds: Maria’s stuff is all ’40s and ’50s, and I hope to get to many, many other generations. Certainly a prime candidate would be Melissa Hayden, Jacques D’Amboise, et cetera, and then on up to the present. People ask me all the time why I haven’t gotten to Suzanne [Farrell]. Suzanne and I have talked about it, and I’ve said, "Look. I’m dying to do something with you, but"--and she understood perfectly. Allegra [Kent] and people like that have expressed an interest in participating. Of course, I’m very interested in them. But I just figure they’ll be around for awhile.

Q: What do you do when you have a conflict, where you have two different versions?

Reynolds: I haven’t got the capability to pass any judgments. I simply have to take what they say, and say, "This is what so-and-so says." We did have a case, with Baiser de la fee, where we had three ballet masters, and they all remembered differently. There was this little argument about certain passages.
    One of the things I should say, which is quite interesting, is that with Baiser and some other ballets, there are snatches of old film. But that’s very tricky, because the old films were about a minute or a minute-and-a-half long per reel. And so the photographer was constantly having to change film, and while that happened, people would continue to do steps. So it looks like they did, say, four chaine turns, and in fact, they did eight. But with splicing, you don’t see where the stop is So being a slavish imitator of old films is absolutely the road to incorrectness.

Q: Who do you hope will be the viewers of these films, and what do you hope they will see?

Reynolds: I think people who are doing the roles might be very interested to see how the original creators did them, and what they thought of them, any pointers, and so on. And some of these people are extremely detailed.
    But there is another goal, certainly, and that is to show, to some extent, the evolution of Balanchine’s style. Balanchine was not the same in the ’40s as he was in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. These things are, of course, very hard to put into words and haven’t really been addressed. Many of the major critics didn’t come to Balanchine until the ’70s. And so this will certainly permit people to see some evolution in his style, and in his point of view.
    This was not my original intent at all, but as I began getting these things down, I thought, "Wait a second. This is more than simply ‘What Balanchine said to me.’ It will show, to some extent, the evolution of Balanchine’s approach."
    I will say this. Some people ask me, "Why are you doing this? What’s your interest in these old ballets?" Because they think Balanchine is Now. This is Balanchine, and this is the way Balanchine crystallized his own view. The latest version is his latest thinking, so who cares what he did in the ’40s? Even he said, apparently, this ballet is not worth reviving any more, or things of that nature, and was certainly a person who wasÑat least he said, lived very much in the present. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know, but that was certainly his public posture, that whatever went before really wasn’t of interested.

Q: But you’re not trying to tell anybody that this is--

Reynolds: No. Exactly not. This is just a silent record. And made without comment. This is from a historian’s point of view. I’m not telling anybody what to do.

Q: You’re going to release the videos to libraries worldwide. Does this mean that, in addition to dancers, a fan who adores Balanchine will be able to go to a library and look at these tapes?

Reynolds: Oh, definitely. That was sort of a compromise, in that we felt that we couldn’t sell them, because we just don’t have the apparatus. But I wanted them to be seen, and Barbara Horgan, who is the director of the Trust and the Foundation, felt the same way. We want them to get around to people who want to see them.
    We’re just getting this part of the project off the ground. The Dance Heritage Coalition, which is a consortium of libraries, is handling this, and they are going to send out an offering letter to various libraries that we, all together, have identified as possibil-ities. For the cost of duplication, these libraries can have the tapes in their noncirculating collection. They’ll be open to the public. They just can’t be taken out.
    They are available for viewing at the Dance Collection. Whether they have been catalogued, et cetera, I couldn’t say. But they’re there, and they could be. The rest of the list is still not final, so it’s too early to name the other libraries.

Q: How do you do the filming?

Reynolds: We are using broadcast quality equipment because of all the duplicating, and I’ve learned unbelievable amounts about video since I started this. At the beginning, I thought you just took a video camera, stuck it in the corner, and let it roll. This is the way people record rehearsals, which is actually fine. But we talked to lots of people about what would last the longest, because we all know that video maybe can disintegrate in ten years, and what’s the point in making all this big effort and having it disappear?

Q: How much editing are you doing?

Reynolds: We do edit, but we do keep in plenty of repetition. We may take out the tenth time someone asks for something, but leave in the first nine, because that’s the nature of the coaching process. And also, it builds. It’s cumulative. Sometimes they don’t do everything the first time. But when you put it together, you say, "Ah, yes. Now I see."

Q: You really are doing this with a historian’s brain.

Reynolds: Well, and to a large extent, without comment, although obviously any editing decision is some comment. We also take out the major mistakes, if they do it on the wrong count, say, or something. We don’t see any point in perpetuating that. We don’t have to capture every minute in the process, especially when it leaves an impression that is incorrect. Or also, when they look awkward or there’s a bad camera angle, there are any number of reasons you might need to make a deletion.

Q: Are you shooting in color or black and white?

Reynolds: Color.

Q: Are you trying to do anything with costume?

Reynolds: Not really, no. For Markova, the girl was dressed in a kind of little silk top that looked vaguely like the Matisse tunic, a teddy, as they call it England. And if it’s a tutu ballet, then sometimes they wear tutus, practice tutus. But no. Basically no.

Q: Can you give me any examples of coaching that you found particularly helpful?

Reynolds: One of the things that surprised me was that Tallchief demonstrated such a tremendous knowledge of various styles. People sometimes think that a Balanchine dancer only knows one thing. And she kept saying, "Well, George taught me this," and "George taught me that," and George -- you know, coached all those things.
    For example, the crossing of the arms in Scotch Symphony. She demonstrated the way it would be for Giselle, which is holding the arms lower, sort of waist level, and in Scotch Symphony, where she’s looking at the cavalier, jumping back and forth, and surrounded by the corps men, it’s a higher cross.
    It’s fascinating what people bring out. I would say the thing that amazed me most about Tallchief is her concentration on port de bras. Tallchief is known as this dynamic technician. I happen to remember, since I did see Tallchief, that she always had a lovely port de bras, and that’s an unusual combination. The fiery types often don’t. But in those sessions, often almost all the comments were about the head and upper body, and very few on how to do the footwork.

Q: Did she say that Balanchine was interested in that with her, that he actually set that?

Reynolds: Yes. Oh, she had numerous examples of how he wanted the arms to be. One in particular I remember, she said, "All the time, eyes for arabesque, and all kinds of jumping steps, eyes one foot above your wrist"--this is when the arm is elongated. And then there was another position where you look over your arm, into the lake. "Over the balustrade, into the lake." So your head is tilted. It’s not looking down, and it’s not looking sort of diagonally forward, it’s looking -- your arm is curved in front of you, you look over your forearm, onto the floor, so it gives you a kind of an arc. That, I thought, was fascinating.
    So what Maria stressed was the port de bras. Marie-Jeanne stressed a very simple epaulement. Not a three dimensional, Baroque epaulement, but almost a two dimensional. A sim-plicity. Not a flinging of the arms. A very--she kept using the word "simple," which didn’t quite get it I can’t really put it quite right, but it was--when Terpsichore looks at Apollo, she doesn’t just lean over. It’s not a great contraction, or a great movement. It’s that she looks at him.
    And that kind of straightforwardness is what she brought to the port de bras and the epaulement of Barocco. Now, sometimes, they’re looking backward, practically. That kind of torsion in the torso, that was not her at all. She kept saying, "More simple. More simple. Lower ara-besque. Not an exaggeratedly forward torso." More -- if I say more square, that makes it sound like it’s grounded, and that’s not what she meant, but less of that overaccentuation that happened later.

Q: More classical?

Reynolds: Absolutely. And Maria, too. Her arms were extremely contained. Different, but there is a similarity that way.

Q: Is it that Balanchine used whatever people had?

Reynolds: But Maria also stressed that he used to give them exercises all the time. I mean, it wasn’t just that he found her to have nice arms, and used them. He trained the arms to be the way he wanted them.

Q: When did he stop?

Reynolds: When did he stop what? With arms? According to Merrill Ashley, never. It’s just that maybe some people were better pupils than others. And she goes on to quite some degree about arms. Another thing that Maria coached wonderfully was running. How you keep your knees straight. How your feet are in front of you. These are things that dancers perhaps know, but the audience doesn’t think of. But when you break it down right there on the tape, it’s very interesting.
    We try to have a before and after, but that’s not always possible, because sometimes the dancers can’t do it, especially after a session with Maria Tallchief. They’re on their knees. We can’t get the final run through, because they’ve had it. But we do try to make a reference point from which to start.

Q: Aren’t these people amazing, in their seventies and eighties, that they have this much energy?

Reynolds: Oh. But you know, they become wrapped up in something that had a tremendous meaning for them. Because, you know, somewhere inside them is a love of dance, even if they may not have done it for years. Once you get them onto something that once--maybe now, but certainly once--meant the world to them, and are able to tap that feeling, the floodgates will open, and they will probably have more energy than even they thought they had. And find more memories, and find more. It will become more vivid as the afternoon wears on.