Re-view: John Gruen, The Private World of Ballet (1975)

April 23, 2011

Having rediscovered this collection of interviews of 20th-century ballet personalities last week, I was struck by the way the book—from the fact of its very existence to the subjects interviewed—engages Jennifer Homans’s expression of dismay about the future of the art in her history Apollo’s Angels.

Gruen’s subjects span 75 years of ballet—reaching back to the Diaghilev era (Lifar, Massine, and others) and "looking ahead" to choreographers such as Glen Tetley and Eliot Feld. But the greater part of the book is devoted to the "stars" (my term) of the 60s and 70s. The names that might even today (admittedly in certain circles) be considered "household" are there: Fonteyn, Nureyev; Balanchine; also a good selection of those every devoted balletomane will know: Markova, Farrell, Verdy, Baryshnikov, along with those for whom some may need first names: (Ivan) Nagy, (Allegra) Kent, (Monica) Mason, (Peter) Martins; and yet still others whom even the most devoted might have trouble recalling: (Michael) Coleman, (Dennis) Wayne, (Francesca) Corkle.

Gruen masterfully elicits information from his subjects. Dennis Wayne states that he "insisted that each year [Robert] Joffrey [also a subject] bring in a ballet for me…But each year it’s a fight." Ann Jenner (Royal Ballet) captures the rising anxiety that creeps in amidst the mundane tasks she performs as she prepares to make her entrance as Aurora in Sleeping Beauty. Most of the dancers’ responses (except perhaps for some of Balanchine’s, who is defensive, and whose ability to deflect a question is as good as any politician’s) seem candid and unguarded. Sallie Wilson, for example, reveals how she allowed herself to be cruelly manipulated by Antony Tudor. And one of the pleasures of the book is how Gruen cross-questions, allowing us to see that Wilson isn’t just trash-talking. Here is Tudor discussing a rehearsal of Shadowplay with Anthony Dowell. He tells Gruen, "We improvised quietly. I made him walk to the place where he comes upstage—back to the audience—and I said, ‘Now I want you to look up, and I want you to see the tree.’ He asked, ‘Which tree? What tree?’ I said, ‘There is a tree. Don’t you see the tree? I’d like you to tell me what kind of tree it was. So we left the rehearsal there. I mean, if he didn’t know what kind of tree it was, what use was it doing the ballet." (In fairness, Tudor seems to have it made it up to Dowell at the next rehearsal; nonetheless, the point was made.)

Enlightening as the interviews are (and they are), the book, seen from afar, offers a sobering perspective not only on individual fame (we know how that goes) but also on the waning of an entire aspect of artistic culture. This revisit of the ballet world of the early 1970s emphasized just how much more ballet and its artists seemed to matter back then and how little—not just ballet—but to an extent also classical music, opera, and indeed, books themselves, seem to matter today.