Earlier today Dale posted the next cast list for New York City Ballet. There, near the top of the page, was a quote attributed to Balanchine: "Classicism is enduring because it is impersonal."

Okay. I thought I know what he meant. Then I thought again ... and wasn't sure.

What WAS Balanchine trying to say? Does anyone know the context in which he said it? Why would NYCB turn this dictum into an epigraph -- or defining principle? -- for their current program?

Edited to add: They must keep changing the epigraph. I just went back to re-check the wording and something entirely different was in its place.

Just a guess, but that sounds to me like something Kirstein would have written for Balanchine. Certainly it's something Kirstein believed, as we know from "A Ballet Master's Belief" and his ongoing intellectual quarrel w/ Martha Graham, whose work he thought was insufficiently rooted in codified discipline and too reliant on personality. In the quarterly "Parabola" in 1988 he is quoted as saying that "the word itself is impersonal, but a person can infuse it with almost anything. In modern dance all you hear is the accent, not the language. But ballet is like the King's English. You shouldn't hear any accent at all." When asked later about the ideal performer he speaks of "a transcendent morality" (Balanchine's "La danse, Madame, c'est une question morale"), and of a dancer who can "truly illuminate a gesture, instead of just performing it. And all without imposing personality". Personality can't really be passed on, but the precise gesture can be.

I don't ever take this sort of thing very seriously. Unless classicism is the single only thing that ever lasted, other things lasted as well. These things are said in order to direct focus on something one has deemed 'more important' as well as just 'important'. Is Balanchine's own personality invisible in his works when performed most reverently? Of course not. You see it. If his isn't, it's unrealistic to say that the performer's would be either. Such statements denote something to aim for, in that one tries to be godlike. It's the right way to state it, it's of no importance that its application is strictly limited. This is all about concentrating on one kind of attitude as opposed to another one. If by 'classicism', there is meant 'not romanticism', you already have something in romanticism that lasted quite as much as did 'classicism' unless you decide 'romanticism' was a subsidiary of 'classicism'. Otherwise, classicism has to be everything that did last.

Personality, if it was Martha Graham's, lasted as well. All you have to do is see her company 10 years after her death. These kinds of delimitings are necessary to produce a domain that sets itself off and they are concerned with matters of value and taste more than any kind of truth that would really be inclusive enough to apply to more than what is within the domain itself.

Also, worth is not purely determined by its enduring properties, because many things could be said to have endured, but not nearly as long as much more longer-lasting things. Fo example, Homer is not necessarily greater than Beethoven, but it thus far is far more enduring. I don't know if one terms Homer 'classical' in the same sense as Haydn and Mozart.

As kfw said, this was a belief of Lincoln Kirstein's, but it's been a principle of the classical point of view in aesthetics, going back to the Greeks (at least). One way to think of it is that nonclassical art IS personal -- often confessional. It's "Something terrible happened to me and I'm going to tell you all about it," and that can be done very artfully. It advocates realism, content. (In painting, think of Ingres versus Delacroix, or Carraci versus Carravagio.) The classical point of view is objective rather than subjective, giving an outside rather than inside view, if you will. In ballet it means that the choreography itself is impersonal; it's a codified system of steps and combinations and rules that's brought to life by the dancers. Graham's was a personal style created out of her own body -- and then codified, but the impetus was personal. The modern dancers, back in the day, almost always started their careers with solos while working out their theory. What was dance? Contraction and release? Fall and recovery? Classicism doesn't have those theories. Not saying either is right or wrong, good or bad, but it's a big divide in Western art.

Interesting that the epigraphs change -- I can't help but thinking that that would be quite a chore!

I think the key distinction in what I quoted of Kirstein is illumination vs. imposition. One learns the language, and then it's not that one's personality doesn't come through in speaking that language, it's that it each personality shows us the beauty of that language in its individual way. I think of Balanchine telling Darci Kistler not to act. She didn't have to act like a swan queen, she just had to dance the swan queen's steps and she'd be one, one like had never quite been seen before. In passing on the steps, he gave her a way to illuminate her individuality.

I wonder if Kirstein actually had Balanchine in mind when he expressed that opinion, given that Balanchine's style is very personal and not at all codified. It has an extremely thick "accent," to use his expression.

Given that Balanchine was an intensely (Diaghilev might have said morbidly) religious man, steeped in the theology and mysticism of Russian Orthodoxy, and given the frequency with which he called attention to this ("the real world is not here," "only God creates - I assemble" among many other statements) it seems to me that, whether mediated by Kirstein or not, this is a fairly recognizable Balanchine religious notion rather than an aesthetic or critical one. I realize how very irritating this is of Mr. B, to put his admirers and critics at the disadvantage of having to deal with his beliefs, since I expect they are shared by relatively few of us in the dance lovers' community. All of our responses so far have been purely historical, critical or aesthetic, so let me make the case for the statement as theology.

Balanchine often referred to his dancers as angels, by which he did not mean lovely, ethereal creatures, but messengers of the divine. "I know God because I can see the face of Christ," he once said, and he saw his dancers, in one important way at least, as able to be the physical manifestation of that divinity. The most physical of the arts to Balanchine could be the powerful road to the world that "is not here." Through his choreography, rooted, almost monastically, in the discipline of classical dancing, his 'angels' could become the messengers of transcendence. "La dance, c'est une question morale" whose beauty is itself an enduring message, but it can't be delivered by vessels that are so full of themselves they crowd out the transcendence. In order to be filled with light, the vessel must empty itself and submit. Only in that way does the dancer become completely him/her self, the religious paradox that might explain why artists who made themselves as impersonal as they could had some of the strongest, most individual personalities ever seen on a dance stage. I really don't think one can make the statement, however it was put into words, into a logical, rational critical belief without doing violence to Balanchine's often-expressed religious passions.

Yes, and it's now too late for me to go back and change my first sentence--obviously I do take such remarks seriously, just not literally, for the reasons outlined. They are important and serious because they demarcate and protect, but the 'endure' part is not literal in either the sense that nothing else endured in quite the same way (enduring is enough in itself, and this other styles and sensibilities did also last), and also that the 'impersonality' may not be the only reason why classicism does endure. I had mentioned the aim toward being godlike, and this is inevitable; it is peculiarly human to strive for--and achieve--the godlike. But there is always the less advantageous side to the 'impersonal eternal' of the gods, which is what the Ring Cycle is all about, with Wotan at the center of the decision-making process, having built Valhalla on corrupt 'funding', having to defer to Fricka because her defense of marriage is stronger than the products of his lechery and adultery, viz., the Volsung Siegmund; followed by Brunnhilde's inability, even as instrument of his will, to carry it out when it comes to destroying all love just because 'Fricka is right' about the uncleanness of Siegmund's and Sieglinde's incest, i.e., she won't kill Siegmund just because it worked within the laws of the all-too-human greedy gods. It is interesting that this towering epic, much like the Bible in its ambitions, has at its core the limitations of gold.

So that the divide is always there, as you point out, and it needs to be. And those on either side of the divide must cultivate their art by opposing the other side--this is not a matter of fairness and being democratic about someone else's work when you are in the hot places of actually creating it. What occurred to me when kfw first brought up Balanchine/Kirstein and Graham was ways this divide has presented itself in music in the 20th century, not yet far back enough in time for it to seem as clear as when we look all the way back to the 19th century. When the high modernists like Boulez and Stockhausen were at their hottest, their evolution from the Viennese School seemed to be the only thing worth talking about in the 50s and 60s, it was the vanguard. I've recently been getting familiar with large amounts of Britten and Michael Tippett and, when I hear it with no received wisdom (or have minimized it as much as possible), I cannot find it to be less important music. But these great British composers were not using the techniques of the high serial composers, it went along in its own mostly separate tradition. By contrast, some of it like Britten's 'Spring Symphony' and Tippett's 'Midsummer Marriage' and Piano Concerto, are very romantic by comparison to the severe and impersonal serialism in Boulez's Le Marteau sans Maitre as well as all of his piano sonatas. I've even played the Second Sonata of Boulez in public. But even that familiarity was as nothing to when I heard Tippett's concerto: There was a cerebral excitement to the more severe music, but it is never enough to sustain one. When I worked on the Boulez, I enjoyed only playing it, but I never wanted to listen to it; but in the last 3 weeks I've listened to the Tippett concerto perhaps 12 times....these are just some related thoughts about the dialectic of personal/impersonal, classical/romantic.



Definitely agree with Hans on this, which again bolsters my contention that statements like this are not so much literal, but are very important for buttressing and fortifying the battlements of a school.

Hans, given that SAB does have a syllabus and that there is such a thing as Balanchine technique, I don't understand what you mean when you say his style isn't codified. Yes Balanchine is "neo-classical," but then there is his retort upon first returning to Russia that "the home of classic ballet is now America."

I think most of Balanchine's quotes, varied and many, are about his own work. Surely this 'home of classic ballet now in Ameica' is his work being talked about. Similarly, nad more egregiously (because the previous may have been the case for a period of decades anyway), when he talks about 'between Lehar and Beethoven, I prefer Lehar, he is more interesting, less boring', he is talking about how Lehar is more suitable for his purposes as a choreographer. Only the most die-hard fans, with little interest in musical content as a thing in itself, would take it as a serious criticism of Beethoven. In fact, the more I hear of some of his quips, the less impressed I am--his wisdom displays itself considerably more in his metier, which is not letters. And this remark about America as home to classical ballet would not resonate very much based on the Peter Martins NYCB--especially for those of us who just saw the Kirov, nevermind that we saw it in America.

I am really learning from this discussion. Thank you, all. It may take a while for me to put it together in my head and post on my own. I did, however, print out the discussion and read it -- underlinging, circling, and writing margin notes -- during a meeting devoted to an entirely different subject. (I hope others thought I was just being conscientious.)

Patrick first post raises an important point. Discussion of ballet aesthetics does seem to lack a clear, defined, and universally shared vocabulary. That means we often get into trouble because we use important terms differently. "Style," "language" (or "idiom"), etc., are especially difficult in this regard.

On another aspect of the topic, I just Googled the entire sentence and came up with an answer to the question about its origins. Anna Kissselgoff, discussing New York City Ballet's 50th Anniversary in 1998, wrote in the NY Times:Given Balanchine's limited grasp of English at the time -- and his dependency, really, on Lincoln Kirstein as his guide to what was literally a New World -- it does indeed seem likely that Kirstein may have chosen the words that froze Balanchine's phlosophy into a brief epigram that strikes me as being intentionally provocative and sybilline.

He Kisselgoff article is here:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html...752C1A96E958260

It's an ambitious piece and a thoughtful one -- qualities I don't usually associate with Kisselgoff's regular reviews. (But that's another thread.)

Thanks for finding the origin of the quote, bart!

One historical note -- Balanchine would not have been under Kirstein's influence in 1933. Perhaps he spoke in French. Whatever the origin, his statement reflects the philosophy and aesthetics that he would have been taught at the Mariinsky, where aesthetics, and the idea that ballet is a philosophy, dating back to the first dancing masters, was taught. There's a lot written about ballet aesthetics, actually, but most of us don't have access to it, and it's certainly not in the popular press!

A thought that strikes me too is that B is echoing the "cool modernism" of the neoclassicals (Stravinsky, T.S. Eliot), who were pushing back against what they must have seen as the neo-Romantic excesses of self-expressive (read: personal) "hot" modernists like Isadora. In other words, as Alexandra suggests, it's a quip with quite a past!

Ray, you gotta write a book: A Quip with a Past. (I love that phrase!)

Actually, I do have to write a book That's probably why I'm posting so much!

I agree. It's a great phrase for an important idea. Possible sub-title: "Nothing New Under the Sun?"

Alexandra, I certainly agree with your point that it is unlikely that Balanchine was under Kirstein's "influence" in any intellectual or aesthetic sense.

However, given Balanchine's leap of faith in crossing the Atlantic primarily on the basis of what Kirstein told him he would find here, and Kirstein's promises of what he would do to help, "dependency" does seem to me to ring a little true.

When I think about Balanchine's first months in New York City, I can hardly imagine how difficult and disorienting they must have been. The U.S. -- even cosmopolitan New York -- were removed from Europe (often definiing itself specifically in opposition to Europe) in ways we cannot imagine today.

I hadn't been specific, but when I was talking about his kind of statement (which is not exclusively theological nor religious in any case), I was pointing to a kind of faith in beliefs of some sacred kind when talking about how they were necessary to protect a domain that is considered sacred. Theology would therefore explain why certain of his remarks were developed into such forms they took. But to assess them objectively, they have to be placed next to the opposing aesthetics, because the realm is first ART, and if religion and theology play a major part (as they obviously did with Balanchine), they are still necessarily subsumed to the World of Art in a way that is not the case with the church itself and singularly religious pursuits as with convents, monasteries, etc. That's why they are equally meaningful and powerful even if not literally factual--which they are not, because classicism is not the only thing to either endure nor is it nearly always impersonal. Is 'Le Nozze di Figaro' classical? I think so. So that it may also be possible that classicism has to mean something that applies to all arts, or at least all the very related ones, surely music and opera and theater, to mean anything. To make a universal assumption on classical ballet alone or classical music alone is much too circumscribed, and probably nobody has ever even tried to do it; whereas classicism in music and dance can have some resonance.

All of which is perfectly true, and you and other BT analysts have covered this territory beautifully. But sheer comprehensivesness isn't quite what I meant to claim - only to consider some of Balanchine's specific religious ideas which I think play an essential part in his statement and that I think perhaps get a little suffocated under all the critical-aesthetic-historical links. It doesn't mean that they even begin to exhaust his statement - obviously they do not. But maybe we ought to include them more than we do, especially as they were so much a part of this particular genius's mind and art.

Agree that's a good point, especially like 'God assembles, man creates', which I find is one of the remarks these days I find myself increasingly attracted to. I first saw it in a cookbook by one of his former dancers! I don't believe it all the time, but I do know what it means some of the time.

Edited to add: I obviously don't understand it all the time: It's 'Man assembles, God creates' or these two in reverse order.

I am late to this discussion and I haven't read all the comments (aside from the first port) but my sense is the meaning is as follows.

Classicism is a vocabulary of aesthetic components, and rules for joining them. It's very much like the concept of constructing meaningful sentences from words and rules of grammar. I suspect this is true for architecture, art, ballet and music for example. Other "isms" have different "rules" and components or elements of style. You can recognise whether a work of art neatly fits in the that particular "ism" by how faithfully it follows the rules.

Classical ballet's rules are the steps, movements, positions, costumes and even body types. It has nothing to do with the personality of the dancers, much the way the paint is not what painting is about as much as it is the forms, shapes etc. (until some modernists decided any rule worth breaking is up for grabs).

Were classicism or any "ism" to be "personal" it would mean that the individual and their interpretation were more important than the rules. If personality becomes so powerful it crushes the rules, over comes them and it becomes about the person and not the "ism"

What I find so interesting about ballet is that the incredibly artistry of dancers is restrained inside of ballet rules and classicism and conceptually, at least, there is very little leeway for them to bust out. Yes there is plenty of room for excellence, perfection, virtuosity, but there seems to be hardly any room for "self expression" and improvisation. You can't change the notes to Beethoven but you can "do things" which give it some level of individualism and personality or make it non impersonal.

The Balanchine statement, I believe, was meant to recognize how rule bounded classicism is and rules are impersonal (rigid and constant), aren't they?

But on the other hand, when we consider Balanchine's long record of using Mozart as a choreographic floor, maybe all he meant was, "I like Wolfgang."

That's so Romantic...and Personal

Popularlibrary, you bring another hugely important piece to the debate. You also explain the role played by religious faith -- and especially that version of it, both mystical and highly ritualistic, that he found in Russian Orthodoxy.

I wonder whether this needs to be an either-or situation. Religious inspiration was indeed the source of much of Balanchine's creativity, but it was not something he spoke or wrote of all that often. More often, he used secular language that would have been quite understandable to those of his peers and critics who were also engaged in the aesthetic debates of his time, especially in regard to dance.

A slightly off-topic thought inspired by popularlibrary's post -- Balanchine may have been, in his belief in a God-centered calling, only the "asssembler." But in practical terms in the studio he couldl not avoid acting as the Creator. He was certainly willing to factor in a dancer's individuality when choreographing or restaging, and made frequent choreographic changes in many (but not all) of his ballets to accomodate new casts. But Balanchine always remained in control. (A cynic might say he was a master in the art of emotional manipulation.) Telling the dancers to consider themselves as servants of their Art: isn't that another way of telling them, the Father knows best?

I think so too, but no one ever says that part; it won't work if you verbalize it, because doesn't sound lofty. Or maybe he didn't know he thought of himself as 'the Father', but rather thought God was. But since, as you say, practical considerations demand to be attended to, he was formulating the best combination of theology-ideology and praxis that could have been found for his project. So he just went about whatever it was he was doing and saying, and it doesn't matter if it doesn't all hold together if one tries to dissect it too closely. His remarks sound profound and philosophical sometimes, but they don't seem as profound as the works--not by a long shot. In fact, the disconnect is interesting.

So bart...after all this profound discussion, did you finally get your answer...?
Feeling just a bit curious...

It could be, but not necessarily if he saw himself as another servant. I think the question is wrapped up in his old-fashioned view of gender roles. For example, when we read what he told John Gruen (as published in "The Private World of Ballet"), that men are great poets because men have to write beautiful poetry for woman," that "man is the servant - a good servant," and that in ballet "woman is first" and "I have dedicated my art to her," we recognize the sexism today, but it's doubtful he recognized it himself. We know he had an ego, we know he could be manipulative, but when he says he's a servant, he sounds sincere to me.

kfw, I suspect that you have devoted more time and thought than most of us to Balanchine's aesthetics. I am curious to know your take on Patrick's point that there appears to be a "disconnect" between the ideas and the real career (and esepcially the works).

Perhaps such a disconnect is inevitable. If so, it certainly doesn't invalidate the usefulness, importance, and even the beauty of Balanchine's statements about ballet. But, it may be a warning to those of us (and I am speaking for myself) who tend to look at statements made in interviews and books, even isolated sentences and especially powerful phrases, and imagine that we are reading real game plans for the man's life and career.

Another thing: is it possible that Balanchine, many of whose statements appear to be intentionally cryptic and even provocative, was trying to stimulate thought rather than express a cohesive theory?

Bart, perhaps the fact that I see no disconnection shows that I've thought less or less well. But I don't, and I also think that, for all the fun it is to speculate, there is limited value in using Balanchine's statements to probe and reimagine the psyche of a man -- and this is partly to Patrick's point -- whose primary means of expression was visual and not verbal. His biographer Bernard Taper complained that he had so little to go on in regards to his subject's inner life -- fewer letters than ballets, for example. I suspect that the closer we stay to face value, the more accurate a picture we have. As Balanchine replied to Taper, "you should think of your task as if you were writing the biography of a racehorse. A racehorse doesn't keep a diary." And a racehorse acts by training and instinct, not by calculation.

Also, I'm not Russian Orthodox, but as someone steeped in the Biblical conceptions of God as Father and humankind as created in his image -- created to, among other things, create -- Balanchine's assertion that God creates and man assembles sounds sincere. Or to put it another way, God Created, and then Balanchine created. That's "profound" to me. So, Patrick, when you write that


my hunch is that the former flows naturally into the latter. I have really enjoyed everyone's thought on this thread, and thanks especially to popularlibrary for deepening and widening the ideas under consideration.

There's not necessarily a disconnect between the ideas and the dance works, but rather a disconnect between the verbal statements in any literal sense. That's the obvious place, and it's not fault-finding, but rather that it would be impossible to do a perfect verbal reflection. Those are secondary, and they are the privilege of someone who has achieved something important in a domain which is, as kfw says, an entirely different form. They could even be said to be 'dancer-words', which like 'musician-words' are not the purest form of words in terms of comprehensibility and clarity as would be those of a writer (any more than a musician's or writer's movements would be the pure form of dance, but they'd still reflect the style and being of the writer and/or musician and reflect those more concentrated identities.)



Even if he wasn't trying to do this, that is what the statements do, stemming as they do from his real authority as a ballet artist. This happens quite as much with the ones I dislike (the Lehar/Beethoven, which has a toffee-nosed sound to it, but still forces you to make a decision about Beethoven--which Balanchine obviously knows is the serious issue more then Lehar) as the ones I do, such as this one about classicism, which makes you look at the pros and cons of the personal and impersonal (you can't really arrive anywhere, because both of them persist no matter what one 'likes.')

Kfw's idea of theology flowing into the 'World of Art', as I had termed it, would naturally do so, of course, but the subsuming is only the matter of the material: The material in Balanchine's case is Dance. Therefore, even if it theologically informed, it is always compared to other dance and other art, not other theology; in the same way that his verbal statements can be profoundly philosophical, but they are not compared to Nietzsche or Spinoza, but rather more likely to things that would be said by Picasso, Graham, Stravinsky, etc.

Earlier, Cristian asked whether we had answered the original question. I'm one who tends to value the quest and sometimes loses sight of the goal. Nevertheless, I have the feeling on this one, that the mystery still eludes us. (After all, Orthodoxy is a religion of mystery, poetry, and ritual as much as of dogma.)

As I've read everyone's contributions, I've found myself beginning to suspect that the answer to Cristian's question is, for me at least: There's no answer. Instead, doors to other intriguing questions keep popping up. So do new word images. Kfw, I will never forget "A race horse doesn't keep a diary." Patrick, ditto re your point about "dancer-words." I kick myself for sometimes forgetting the difference between those and, let's say, "logician words."

I just came across the following in Arlene Croce's Afterimages. It seems relevant to the gist of our discussion. She says of classical style
However, I don't know if I agree with "Better not to try."

I do love discussions like this! We go so many interesting places. I think Balanchine's statements (like those of most great artists) are not only far lesser things than his works, but have to be taken quite individually to avoid collapsing into silliness. When he told Danilova that the Dark Angel (I don't know if he ever called her that, but never mind) in Serenade was married to her charge, the two of them just going through life together, and of course he left that other girl because she was a foolish creature who had too many affairs, we can agree he was either joking or in one of his contrarian moods. We might also agree that he had a very feline streak and didn't mind being provocative or mischievous.

But - but - some of his comments are worth considering, and I think the one about Russia as the home of the romantic ballet may be one of them. On the Arlene Croce thread we were speaking of a review she wrote called Makarova on Broadway (collected in Going to the Dance) comparing the pre and post Soviet Mariinsky/Kirov. Here is the core of it:

...The most immediately striking discrepancy between the post-Imperial-style Paquita set by Danilova and the latter-day Kirov-style one set by Makarova is that Makarova's has a great many more complicated and difficult steps (further complicated by different tempos). Danilova's version has dance architecture; Makarova's has none. Danilova's has bouyancy; Makarova's has drive. Danilova's looks choreographically bald; in Makarova's, the dancers split hairs. ...

I would add that it seems to me Balanchine was speaking of the Soviet era in which the dancer became primary, the technique acquired an almost baroque sensationalism, and its point was, to a very large degree, to serve the performer, and the performer's personal expression. In his (and Danilova's) time, the dancer served the classical body of technique, which in turn served the choreographer, and as Croce points out, the overarching logic and architecture of any given set of steps. Expressing oneself came through the work itself and was not a principle existing to some extent outside what was being performed. The Kirov (et al.) concept of self-expression, on the other hand, is, I think, a product of the Romantic concept of the artist, and it seems to have been foreign to Balanchine, who - I agree - saw himself as a servant, a conduit and a professional, and expected his dancers to see themselves similarly. So I think his comment expressed his sense not of the quality of Russian ballet but of its underlying principles and I tend to agree that these can be fairly labeled as Romantic, as opposed to what he was doing in America, which, if not exactly 'impersonal', could probably be called classical in the traditional sense of the term, and in his mind very probably the basic grounds for its endurance.

My sense of the current state of the Mariinsky (given that I can't go see them and have to rely on filmed performances) is that the foundations are still far more Romantic than Classical, but that choreographic architecture's loss of the battle to choreographic decoration may have had the ironic side effect of deadening personal dramatic and emotional expression instead of enhancing it - an effect Youskevitcvh pointed out some time ago about Baryshnikov's Albrecht. Oh well, it is a tangled subject with many facets, so I'll leave off before I collapse into silliness myself.

Popularlibrary, you give us a lot to chew on. Thank you so much.


I am especially intrigued by the next sentence, which I've taken the liberty of putting in italics.

This idea of Balanchine commenting on and reacting against the ballet of the Soviete era is something I never thought of, especiallys since he left the Soviet Union relatively early, but it really does make one wonder. Much of what he says certainly sounds like a criticism of, and corrective to, the aesthetic excesses of Soviet ballet.

You describe Soviet ballet, up to today, as expressing a "romantic concept of the artist" and add that this "seems to have been foreign to Balanchine." I know only a little about Soviet ballet, but what you write certainly has the ring of truth. I especially like the way you pinpoint a Romantic/Classiscal divide as one a possible key to our puzzle about Balanchine's use of the term "impersonal."
Alexandra? Leonid? Can you offer some of your own thoughts on this?

If SAB has a syllabus, this is the first I've heard of it, and I was an advanced student there. As far as Balanchine's style being a technique, I'm afraid I do not agree with that. The teachers on BTfD have had several discussions about it, and I as well as others feel that while the Balanchine style is fine for professionals to learn, it is not a method (such as the Vaganova method, Cecchetti method, &c) to be used for training children.

Thanks for the explanation, Hans.

I feel that I must back Hans up on this one. SAB has no syllabus; it has a sort of curriculum, based on the presence of hierarchic stratified class levels, but there is no place I know of to which someone (not necessarily everyone) may go to find out what standards and vocabulary and degrees of expertise are adhered to in the various levels. Mystique is part of the Balanchine legacy. There is supposed to be a "hidden knowledge", a gnosticism, involved with how the teaching and the technical standard work. The closest I can see to standardization is for a faculty to be assembled of fairly synoptic teachers, and the teaching to carry on from that point. That there is no unified "Balanchine technique" is a statement warranted by the lack of a distinctive vocabulary, the school and company making use of nomenclature based on Cecchetti as modified by the Imperial Russians. The Paris Opéra School is just as secretive, but it at least maintains a set of distinctive nomenclatures, consistent within itself. Balanchine is a style; it needs codification by as great a genius as Balanchine in the pedagogical field. No candidate for this office has yet emerged, or even seems to be riding out there on the horizon.

That is most interesting and elucidates much. Thanks.

Yes indeed. Thanks, Mel. What about Suki Schorer's book and the Balanchine technique videos with Ashley (not that those are exhaustive)?

Very helpful. And very, very clearly expressed. Thank you, Hans. The better we learn to define our terms, the clearer our thinking on these matters becomes.
So true! Thanks, Mel.

Like kfw, I would like to hear your thoughts on the Suki Schorer book and the videos on Balanchine technique. Each goes so deeply into the subject-matter. I was amazed -- as a non-dancer who started class late in life just to see what it felt like -- by how fascinating I became with both.

With all personal respect to those ladies and others, as has been pointed out, their works are rather localized, and don't begin to address the larger issues of establishing a true technique and a complete curriculum for training with its attendant syllabi. Everybody out there is operating on "the last time I talked to Him about this," and the very strangest of them maintain that He still talks to them, AND THEY'RE NOT KIDDING! Mme. Blavatsky would be soooo happy!

Hey, if Tchaikovsky was able to talk to Balanchine, . . .

Yes, those are strange, and very solemn, I'd venture to guess. Inner sanctums always hypnotize.

As currently immersed in Kirkland's "Dancing on my grave", i came across some quotes that i think would be interesting to include in this profound thread in which philosophical reasoning, inner meaning and rational interpretation are playing a key factor. Here they are:

"We thought he had all the answers. In fact, he did not have to worry about the answers as long as he kept both the dancers and the audience asking the wrong questions". Kirkland.

"Its very difficult to explain why i do what i do. I can teach and explain to pupils what to do better, but not because there's a reason". Balanchine.

"As if the faculty or reason were a dangerous threat, he encouraged his dancers not to think". Kirkland.

"You have to be very careful when you use your mind, or you will get into trouble". Balanchine.

I'd be cautious about Kirkland's descriptions and opinions of Balanchine. He certainly had faults, but her viewpoint is very skewed.

I agree with Leigh, but I do think there's a lot of truth in the quote: "You have to be very careful when you use your mind, or you will get into trouble". Balanchine. Performance has to be beyond thinking. You don't want to listen to a pianist playing a very difficult concerto thinking about scales, worrying which key s/he is in at the moment and when the arpeggio passage is coming up and how that relates to the melody hiding in the harmony for a few minutes and STRUCTURE! Where are we in sonata form?

For those of us who watch or think or write about ballet from the outside, too, it can be very easy to draw conclusions from the smallest clue and extrapolate from these conclusions, add on a few assumptions we've misoverheard or misread, and come up with some pretty impressive(ly wrong) theories!

The things you've noted are not eligible during performance--worrying about scales and doing theory analysis--but 'beyond thinking' does not mean you are not using your mind. You're using it more than ever in an inspired performance. That's why "You have to be very careful when you use your mind, or you will get into trouble" can go either way; but it's phrased in such a way as to make it seem at least a bit suspect to 'use your mind', or it possibly indicates you should use it or not according to the one stating it--and for this, the only solution is to make up your mind, since listening to Balanchine reverently is definitely for some and not for all. Therefore, the remark is a bit suspect and Gelsey's suspicions also have some truth. Obviously Balanchine ruled. And technical considerations are not totally ruled out on stage, of course; it's just that they become second nature, rather than anything obsessive. I like some of Gelsey's remarks, even if they're exaggerated. It's good to question, and nobody doesn't get questioned.

Yes. But there is a problem with juxtaposing this quotation with the one just before it:Kirkland, it seems to me, may have personalized and misinterpreted what Balanchine was saying to fit her own view of the ballet world at that stage of her life. She was not, perhaps, the most objective observer of her ballet milieu at the time she wrote this book.

This is veering off into Kirkland, but there exists the possibility she assumed that what Balanchine said to her he said to everyone else, and he may not have. And if there ever was a dancer who overthought just about everything, it was Kirkland.

Oh, i didn't came out with the yuxtaposition...that was just how Kirkland wrote it...The whole paragraph is as fallows:

"With his own ballets as the testing ground, he was the only judge of talent. He set the style. His monopoly on taste and creative control was absolute. If anyone dared mention the unusual fashion of the emperor's new clothes, the hapless soul was banished from Mr. B's little empire. As if the faculty of reason were a dangerous threat, he encouraged his dancers not to think: "You have to be vary careful when you use your mind...or you will get into trouble"

Now, my own quote:
"I'll have to be very careful when i use some quotations here...or i will get into trouble too" .Cristian.

Just trying to add some spice, people...nothing else. (Plus i'm loving the book, BTW)

Ah, what I've heard called "displacement activity!" My commiserations!

I love it when she refers to her trysts with Peter Martins, after giving some detail, as 'Modern Romance'. That's the name of an old American pulp magazine that perished in the 60s.(unless it was Modern Romances.)