Dances under glass

Léon Bakst at Harvard, NYCB in New York

by Marcia B. Siegel

"THE ART OF LÉON BAKST," From the Harvard Theatre Collection, in the Edward Sheldon Exhibition Rooms of the Nathan Marsh Pusey Library, weekdays through September 18.

"DANCE FOR A CITY -- FIFTY YEARS OF THE NEW YORK CITY BALLET," At the New York Historical Society, 2 West 77th Street, through August 15.

We often think of dance as irredeemably temporal -- a momentary and elusive pleasure. But as two exhibitions this summer show, dance can yield many by-products that have deeper reverberations -- that is, if the particular dance is important enough. Or maybe it's the existence of those durable by-products that confer importance.

The expansive but short-lived "Dance for a City," curated by dance historian Lynn Garafola and historian of American culture Eric Foner, celebrates New York City Ballet's 50th anniversary as a municipal institution. "The Art of Léon Bakst" displays 31 drawings and other items from Harvard's holdings related to the flamboyant designer for the early Diaghilev Ballets Russes. The shows are vastly different in scope and intent, but they both provoke reflection about ballets and dancers we once knew, or never imagined.

Serge Diaghilev's terrific success in pre-World War I Paris and London depended on an inspired reinvention of the classical ballet that had reached its apex in Russia. You could almost say his modernism was defined by compression. Into a single act, less than an hour long, choreographer Michel Fokine fitted all the essentials of plot, action, and spectacle that used to consume whole evenings in the old story ballets. With the establishment of the one-act ballet, Fokine traded the leisurely narratives of the 19th century for an entertainment that was efficient, stylistically chic, and scaled for subtle thrills.

Léon Bakst's scenery and costumes for this compact classicism replaced chandeliers and dusty draperies with fantastic blasts of color and line. Bakst wasn't reproducing naturalistic scenes, like the nostalgic Alexandre Benois, another early designer for Diaghilev, and neither was he nosing into abstraction like the proto-constructivist Natalia Goncharova. I think of him as an illustrator of fairy tales in the aesthetic style of his contemporaries Arthur Rackham, Kay Nielsen, and Edmund Dulac. All of them worked in indulgent color, fine-lined detail, and sensuous exaggeration.

When the curtain went up on a Bakst ballet, the audience looked at a page from a storybook, a whole atmosphere, not just a generic palace or marketplace. Daphnis and Chloe was set in an impressionistic painted antiquity, with attenuated trees and purposely flat waterfalls and the landscape rolling away in Chinese perspective. The harem girls in Scheherazade reclined on voluptuous orange cushions under a billowing tent of saturated green silk. And in the Biedermeier miniature Le Spectre de la Rose, the romantic young girl's boudoir was furnished in meticulous, tasteful detail. Probably Bakst is best known today for his erotic costume designs. When he worked with the human body, he went all out. No actual dancers could have had such elongated torsos, such bulbous thighs and breasts, such tiny exotic heads. They couldn't have danced in the auras of veils and feathers and beads that swirl around them on paper. But photographs, and an occasional reconstruction, show how that graphic sexiness did translate to the stage, in the flowing but revealing lines, the cutouts in suggestive spots, the elegant fabrics and decorations. Other artists then tried to capture these apparitions in paint, bronze, porcelain figurines, and caricature.

The culmination of all Bakst's decorative gifts was probably the 1921 Sleeping Beauty, a great financial disaster for Diaghilev and to some critics his greatest artistic achievement. By that time, the 19th century was still old hat, but exposed bodies and barbaric behavior were no longer novel enough to intrigue the audience. New modernisms were invading the theater. George Balanchine arrived from Russia in 1924, and by the time Diaghilev died in 1929, La Chatte, Apollo, Prodigal Son, and Le Bal had taken ballet on to the next phase.

It was nearly 20 years before Balanchine acquired a permanent company in America. By then he had tried out more styles and venues, created more masterpieces (Serenade, Concerto Barocco, Theme and Variations), and, through the extraordinary energies of Lincoln Kirstein, connected to the structures of power and money that make big culture happen. "Dance for a City" documents the many facets of New York City Ballet's career since 1948. It's striking to realize how few American dance organizations have even existed that long, let alone become a fixture in the great cultural center of a world metropolis.

It would take more than one museum show to tell this story, and Garafola and Foner don't try to do that. In a more or less chronological sequence from room to room, they do summarize the early days -- Balanchine & Kirstein's School of American Ballet and the successive companies that evolved into New York City Ballet -- and NYCB's trajectory from the City Center to Lincoln Center, from a "people's ballet" to the establishment that has survived its founders and now plays five months in New York and a month at its summer home, the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, and has to tour only under the most prestigious circumstances.

The success story here has two nearly independent but mutually essential ingredients: the creative genius of Balanchine and the strategic supporting maneuvers of Kirstein. The ballets are represented in photographs, designs, costumes, and video clips and musical selections that run continuously. The Kirstein component is less conspicuous. I don't remember seeing any evidence of Kirstein's extensive writing, in which, directly and indirectly, he implanted an aesthetic and a credibility for Balanchine's work over the years. But there is memorabilia about the buildings he patiently schemed for -- Mecca Temple (City Center) on 55th Street, the first home of City Ballet; and the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, which opened in 1964 -- and a subtext hinting at the support system Kirstein coaxed along, beginning with his wealthy, art-loving friends at Harvard and extending to politicians, funders, critical arbiters, and even subscribers.

There are on-stage and off-stage pictures of dancers and teachers, rehearsals and performances, the parties for the audience that the company knew so well how to throw, and the designers, composers, and techies who got the ballets on the stage. There's a good amount of attention given to Jerome Robbins's big contribution to the repertory, and to other noted choreographers who passed through. The myth of no-costumes-no-scenery is thoroughly debunked with evidence of production numbers like Union Jack and The Nutcracker, and forgotten surrealist escapades like Dorothea Tanning's fantastic designs for Night Shadow.

There's a 1960 letter from Eugenie Ouroussow, head of the School of American Ballet, offering a scholarship to Mrs. Ficker's daughter, who was soon to become Suzanne Farrell. And a 1954 page from the score for the Dance of the Little Swans, the first ballet to be written in Labanotation, by Ann Hutchinson. There are copies of mass magazines with ballerinas on the cover, and arty posed shots of the principals by fashion photographers.

I'm not sure the show really establishes New York City Ballet as the dance for a city, as Garafola and Foner must have intended. Perhaps no one dance style or company could do that, now or ever. But the exhibition does range much further than the usual portrayals of NYCB as a neoclassical, streamlined platform for whizbang "pure" dancing.

Even more deconstructive is the handsome companion book published by Columbia University Press. This is less a catalogue of the show than a rather offbeat collection of essays by Garafola and several cultural commentators that meditate freely around the subject. If the book has a point of view, it's that New York City Ballet was never the single-minded, exclusive ballet enclave that's usually pictured by elitist critics. I'm not sure modern dance had as big an impact on ballet as dance historian Sally Banes asserts, but her thoughtful essay brings up a lot of things the purists don't consider -- Merce Cunningham's early relations with the company, for instance. Homoeroticism is still a pretty taboo subject around ballet, so art historian Jonathan Weinberg's discussion of the photos of George Platt Lynes lets in a lot of fresh air. Thomas Bender and Richard Sennett talk about ballet's connections with the New York intellectuals of the '50s and '60s. There's a fine photo section and chronology devoted to the NYCB's real populist, Jerome Robbins. And Garafola's own essay situates Balanchine and Kirstein's enterprise alongside the ongoing cultural politics of New York City.

"Dance for a City," the book and the show, proposes a healthy revisionism, a more balanced way to look at the company's history and its public than what we read elsewhere. Perhaps NYCB, after losing all its prime movers, is a shade of its former self, as the aesthetes are complaining, but "Dance for a City" makes us think differently about what its former self was, and perhaps about what kind of a future this unique organization might create for itself.