| Reviews | Literary Calendar | Authors in town | Events by Location | Hot Links |

The way they were

Invaluable memoirs from Allegra Kent and Maria Tallchief

by Janine Parker

ONCE A DANCER . . . , by Allegra Kent. St. Martin's Press, 352 pages, $26.95.

MARIA TALLCHIEF: AMERICA'S PRIMA BALERINA, by Maria Tallchief with Larry Kaplan. Henry Holt, 358 pages, $27.50.

As this century begins the process of curling up into its historical cocoon, the ballet world can look back with pride at the past 100 years. Although it's true that -- at the close of the 19th century -- the passing of the prolific choreographer Marius Petipa (and, for that matter, classical ballet's greatest composer, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky) marked the end of the constituent Romantic and Classical eras that established ballet in the cultural limelight, the glory days were by no means over. Our century has seen the birth of the Sadler's Wells (now Royal) Ballet, Ballet Theatre (now American Ballet Theatre), and Ballet Society (now New York City Ballet), three eminent companies that can stand alongside the Bolshoi, the Kirov, and the Paris Opera. And among dancers (Baryshnikov, Bruhn, Bujones, Farrell, Fonteyn, Kirkland, Makarova, Nijinsky, Nureyev, Pavlova) and choreographers (Ashton, Balanchine, Cranko, de Mille, Fokine, Joffrey, Nijinska, Robbins, Tudor) are 20th-century names that will be forever written in the canons of ballet lore.

Of the latter group, it is George Balanchine who will go into the books as the pre-eminent choreographer of this century. Much has already been written about Mr B, who died in 1983. Biographies based directly on his work and life are numerous; the innumerable biographies and autobiographies of his dancers and other choreographers are rife with inferences and references to him. This is as it should be. Balanchine left a vast legacy, and there is much to say.

Allegra Kent, for 31 years one of the stars of New York City Ballet's glamorous heyday (which lasted nearly four decades, until Balanchine's death), danced like an exotic flower whose blossoms opened and closed, emerged and receded in mysteriously beautiful, previously unknown ways. And indeed she has always been fascinated by and drawn to flora. Following the lead of other NYCB stars, Kent has produced her own autobiography, Once a Dancer . . . , and in it she documents a lifelong passion: "I read rose catalogs and constructed dream gardens. In this imaginary landscape there would also be an iris named Allegra."

Ironically, there already is: on August 11, 1937, Allegra Kent was born -- as Iris Cohen. The name change was just the first of a series of superficial transformations that Iris would undergo. For all that Kent as a dancer and as a person is enigmatically unique, she has spent much of her life aligning and merging her personality with others'. In time, the psychological make-up of the characters she danced became likewise entangled with hers.

Balanchine's Night Shadow was on the program of the first ballet performance Kent attended. Later revived for her as La Sonnambula, it would become one of her signature roles at City Ballet, and uncannily metaphoric of her own nomadic life. "The woman who walks in her sleep has a deep disturbance in her life," Kent notes. "She seems to be searching for something she has lost. . . . In real life, I was a sleepwalker -- dance my only light."

The wandering was a family trait. Her parents divorced early on, but the change was barely discernible in the peculiar cadence of this family's lifestyle. Following the patterns of husband and father Harry, a traveling salesman, they spent years haphazardly traipsing back and forth across the country. Like a touring circus, they never accumulated anything that couldn't be easily packed up. Toys and adventures were creatively devised, whimsy out of scarcity: they put the fun in dysfunctional.

However, much folly darkened the frivolity. Paranoid about stereotypes, mother Shirley obliterated the Cohen; sister Barbara changed her name to Wendy and Iris became Allegra. Brother Gary remained Gary, but all three siblings, at the prompting of Mother, underwent facial cosmetic surgery to remove the last vestiges of their "Jewishness."

Despite this conformity, Kent emerged exuding a fey creatureliness, an aura that renders her definitively undefinable: the extreme artiste: "I was proud of my monkey-mad self. . . . I was a verdant creature of the woods, Peter Pan, a little boy-girl." Kent escaped complete domination of the fiercely protective and stifling Shirley by finding her own voice, the silent one of dance. "At the moment," she recalls, "I was her most important focus. . . . With ballet, I had finally found a way to express myself but not reveal my thoughts. . . . [I] needed something she couldn't touch."

And so, prompted in part by the mother/daughter struggle for power, Kent pursued ballet with a vengeance. She threw herself into dancing with passion and abandon; she added to those qualities a staunch will. By the time she was 15 years old, Kent was dancing with New York City Ballet. The accounts of her 30-plus years with NYCB are both heady and harrowing; Peter Pan was now in the real world. Cycles of hyperintensive work were followed by valleys of depression that she filled with voracious reading and eating, and very little sleep. The frayed edges were as much a part of her artistry as her fluidly tingling port de bras. "No one [else] brought such complexity to her roles," NYCB co-founder Lincoln Kirstein once told an interviewer. "Even her walk was complicated."

The surreal naïveté that made her artistry so special also made her vulnerable in the everyday arena outside the stage door. She married the first man she dated, and she had three -- count 'em, three -- babies in a profession that wanted its participants to remain children themselves. She was an original not-ready-for-prime-time player. It's a problem for the reader as well: she has a brilliant intellect, and her vision and observations can be breathtakingly poetic. At other times the tone of Once a Dancer . . . can seem jarringly contrived. Perhaps this is unavoidable. Should we seek autobiographies, explanations from those whose very art is finally ineffable and intangible?

In the prologue of the other new NYCB alumna offering, Maria Tallchief: America's Prima Ballerina, Tallchief addresses the very question of all this documentation. "With his [Balanchine's] death, an incredible dance epoch was ending. What would it mean for the future of ballet? . . . How would his dancers carry on without his guidance and his genius? Imagining the future was unbearable. All I could do was to try to summon the past."

Indeed, one could line up all these autobiographies in a certain chronological order and have the ultimate Balanchine biography -- an enviable panorama of the birth of ballet in America, and its proud papa. Tallchief was around during Ballet Society's childhood, and her autobiography is steeped in this area, offering some new insights while leading us over the now-familiar (but endlessly heady!) territory of Balanchine's and NYCB's early days in America. Discussing Four Temperaments, "a masterpiece destined to influence just about everything else that came after it," Tallchief notes an unlikely inspiration: "George adored [Fred] Astaire and the way his body moved and the connection between Astaire's dancing and the training George had as a boy stimulated his imagination. . . . his body moved just the way George wanted his dancers' bodies to move."

If Kent was Mr. B's wildflower, Tallchief was his carefully cultivated showcase rose, a true American Beauty. The tenor of her tale is clipped, so straightforward (and sometimes rather dry) that basic information can seem as startling as the cheapest gossip. At the age of 21, Tallchief became Balanchine's fourth wife. "We can get married and work together [Balanchine said to her], and if it lasts, if it's only for a few years, that's fine." Despite her youth, Tallchief seemed to understand that Balanchine sought much of his inspiration from a series of so-called muses, and when he found a new one, the benefits were always mutual. Balanchine, for his part, was as taken with Tallchief's Native American heritage (born in 1925, she had an Osage Indian father, and a mother from Kansas) as were her worldwide fans. "He claimed that by marrying me he finally felt he was a real American, and he compared us to John Smith and Pocahontas."

Unlike Kent's mother, Tallchief's family were secure about their background and blood; they did not hide or alter who they were. Her only exploitation (with the exception of one embarrassingly tacky stint with her dancing sister Marjorie) didn't concern her being Native American; it was the doing of an incompetent ballet teacher who had her dancing in pointe shoes at the absurdly -- and dangerously -- early age of three and a half. (Fortunately, Tallchief was "rescued" and given appropriate training.) A self-described "virtuoso" and "pyrotechnical" dancer, Tallchief danced with a confidence and strength that bespoke her level-headed upbringing. Whereas Kent inspired Mr. B to create a series of strange, possibly otherworldly creatures, Tallchief's roles were warmblooded, tangible, dependable.

The dependability was mutual, even after her marriage with Balanchine ended. " `You see, Maria, things will not change much if we separate," Mr. B told her. "You will still be the same dancer, will still have same roles. It will be okay." And, indeed, it was so: Balanchine, ever the paradigm of Buddha-like wisdom and calm, relieved Tallchief of her domestic services (with fairly little suffering, we can only surmise; within weeks he was working on Tanaquil LeClerq, who was to become his fifth wife) while retaining and rewarding her dancing services. Their dual loyalty is the raison d'être of Tallchief's tome: "I realize how fortunate we are in America that George chose to come here. . . . A very long time will pass before another Balanchine is in our midst." She cautions against this era's tendency to alter or discard the old to make room for the new. "Since his death, the importance of style seems to have gotten lost. I feel sorry for dancers today. But I suspect they don't even know what they're missing, and that makes me feel even worse."

Kent describes the moment when she crossed over from the mortal world of the "academic classroom dancer" into the realm of "ballerina space": "Pulled deeper into the spell of music and motion and lifted by magic, I changed form while staying the same -- like water into mist." This is art: a precious apparition of the spirit that cannot be pinned down, that is destined to evaporate, that must be remembered and longed for and sought again and again. George Balanchine was ballet's most important contributor in the 20th century. Do we need to debate the value of preserving his legacy?