Balanchine's guide to a young choreographer.

Gloria Contreras has been the artistic director and founder of her company, Taller Coreografico de la Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico in Mexico City, for twenty-six years. In her university theater, Contreras presents a new program from the repertoire of over seventy of her 111 original works, each week during nine months of the year to sold-out houses. Astoundingly, each year her university school also provides dance classes given by fourteen teachers in 4,158 hours to 1200 students.

As a young student at the School of American Ballet in New York City, Contreras showed her early works to George Balanchine, whose advice became her lifelong guide. The following are excerpts from her diary of conversations with Balanchine about choreography. It was disclosed for the first time at a recent Balanchine seminar at Lincoln Center.

August 1958 After watching a run-through of Contreras's Hunpango and El Mercado, with students from SAB, Balanchine told her: "The choreography demonstrates your love of dance and how happy you are to dance. But that is not all. You must produce for the public and not only for yourself. Take an idea, analyze it, and make thousands of variations for each theme. Create an image, and turn it inside out. Give your dance a motive. For example: A man who can't separate his other self from his ego. From the moment he enters from the flies [wings], he is wrapped in this other body, and no matter how hard he wrestles, he simply can't separate himself from it. With this idea you can suggest a lot to your audience. A person will imagine he's the spouse you hate and from whom you can't separate. Another, that it's the bad part of himself from which he can't rid himself, even though he wants to. Someone else will think that this is what he needs--someone at his side every instant, who won't let him feel lonely.

"Something else you might develop is a pas de deux in which neither of the dancers can take the other by the hand. Create a handicap for yourself and in the struggle to resolve it you will find drawings never used before. What is a glissade? An arabesque? Anyone can use these and create choreography. But you don't want to do that. You are the new generation. I am the old. You should find the expression of your generation through choreography. You could sell this work, but what good would it do? None. You already dominate in drawing. You know how to put a group of ballerinas together. You have a good ear and you're very musical. But you have a mind, and talent that demands that you do a work at a level well above that of others.

"Don't compose over the melody. Harmony. Rhythm. This is the atmosphere, the richness over which you should develop your inventions."

Contreras's small early group then danced her El Mercado. Balanchine found this work more pleasing because she had invented more steps that were not based upon class technique. He asked her why she wanted to choreograph and was pleased when she answered that she found it fascinating to work with bodies and to mold them, corresponding to their personalities. He told her that in his company there were several dancers who had approached him and said that they wanted to choreograph because they knew that they couldn't do any more as ballerinas and thought being a choreographer was a "good job."

Choreography for him was a career that began when he was fifteen years old and demanded his entire life. He abhorred performers who thought producing choreography was simply the culmination of a long career in dance. He told Contreras to create her own language and the choreography of her generation. "Create and throw," he said. "Develop yourself through work and experience. Show me everything you produce and promise me not to sell anything that isn't going to last on its own artistic merits." He then admonished her to guard against "the enemies of fame, name, and money." He recommended work and modesty.

The ballets produced in other countries--France, England, Russia--were not to his liking because, to him, none of their choreographers understood that dance is dance. "They want to turn dance into a bastard brother of the arts. They can't accept dance that doesn't describe something. What is Mozart? Music. Simply music. Dance is the same. Simply dance.

There's nothing worse, "he added," than a bad ballet. People are being diplomatic when they say that they don't like to go to the ballet because they don't understand it. No, they're simply bored by it, because a succession of movements without motive only puts a spectator to sleep."

Contreras summed up Balanchine's counsel in her diary:

1. A choreographer should always know more than the dancers so that he or she will be able to lift them to a higher level.

2. Music is the heart of a dance. A choreographer ought to know this art professionally so that he or she can analyze the works and not only use the most obvious part--the melody--but all of its structural charactertistics.

3. A knowledge of plastic arts is necessary because each moment of a dance should be a perfect picture. The choreographer should know sculpture, from the most ancient to the most modern.

4. Place a "handicap" in the construction of every dance. Never accept the easy ideas that arrive first off. Instead, struggle, poke around inside yourself, and contribute new discoveries.

5. Run away from perfect dancers because they make it easy for a choreographer to find a resolution to a problem without thinking it through. If the dancer isn't perfect or totally beautiful, the choreographer will have to create ten ideas from which one is selected.

6. A choreographer should create for the temperament and best facets of an ethnic group by putting himself or herself in that person's place.

7. Take the audience into account. "Their presence is essential to the development and durability of a company, and you must give them the kind of work from which they can extract some benefit. A ballet can offer emotion or simply beauty. Give them a highly intellectual work or one that's basically simple, depending upon that audience."

8. "For a ballet to be good," he said, "the dance itself must capture attention. If you have to read a story line or explanation to understand it, it's because the dance itself doesn't communicate."

9. He recommended that I learn from him and that I not fear "borrowing." He said: "I am your family." For him, choreography was like poetry. "The poet doesn't invent words; he selects them, puts them together, and gives them a rhythm. With these he produces images and atmospheres. A leg is a leg, and an arabesque has been around for 400 years. What is important is how one creates and interweaves the movements, whether these are related to the music or not, and if the spectators see something in the ballet that transforms them or leaves them indifferent."

10. "Triumph lies in developing knowledge, not in money." Nevertheless, Balanchine understood that money was necessary to develop art. "To do an Agon, you have to do a Nutcracker."

11. "You don't have to sell anything," he said. " Never become a salesman."

12. He recommended that I pay attention to the opinions of one or two people in relation to my work. "Don't listen to the applause or the insults," he said. "The critics have to eat, but you don't have to read them."

Balanchine was magnanimous in sharing his discoveries as a choreographer and was simple and paternal in directing Contreras. He gave her space within his world by allowing her to watch him create, rehearse, and struggle to be better every day.

His greatest compliment to her was: "If I have to sign a certificate that says you are a choreographer, I will do it. Your work is grammatically correct, but you want something more than grammar. You want to create poetry. It isn't the meaning of each isolated word that produces poetry, but the manner in which the words are put together. Well, then--create poetry, poetry in dance."

Many of Contreras's 305 ballets have also been performed by Joffrey, Royal Winnipeg, New York City ballets, and several Mexican, Latin American, and Russian ballet companies.

RECOMMENDED READING

Conversations with Choreographers by Svetlana McLee Grody and Dorothy Daniels Lister; Heinemann 361 Hanover Street Portsmouth, NH 03801-3912 [phone] ext. 140 fax [phone]