Is there a Ford in your past?

One of the many things to which I intend to devote my old age is to discover the meaning of epiphany, or rather -- for I actually know it can mean the sudden perception of God or the divine spirit -- what people today seem to think it means. Nowadays I find it is used rather loosely to imply a chance configuration of events leading to some kind of revelation, usually of a pattern. So let's leave it at that, and let me say that the other day I had a sort of epiphany -- a series of jumbled events and thoughts that led me to a personal insight descrying some order in the seemingly disordered world of American dance.

What exactly happened? Well, first I read an advance copy of Kate O'Neill's article in this issue relating to Henry Ford and old-fashioned or country dance [page 50]. It's a fascinating piece. I had no idea that Ford was not only interested in country dancing, but commissioned a book on it, employed a teacher for his executives, and generally threw himself and his wife into this excursion into America's dancing past.

Ford and dancing -- it took me back to 1963 and those controversial Ford Foundation grants to America's dancing future. And then by chance I found myself at the Juilliard Theater attending this year's annual workshop performance of the School of American Ballet -- the principal Ford beneficiary all those years ago -- and finally scooting out at the end of that performance to wander over to the Metropolitan Opera House to see two of SAB's most distinguished young alumni, Paloma Herrera and Ethan Stiefel, dance the Black Swan Pas de Deux from Act III of Swan Lake. On the way home I think I had it -- my epiphany, or what I think people nowadays think of as an epiphany, if you see what I mean.

Mr. and Mrs. Ford doing some highly square square dancing and the more or less straight line between them and Herrera and Stiefel tearing through Petipa to the strains of Tchaikovsky. And in between the two, George Balanchine and Peter Martins, the strained, high-powered visions of Lincoln Kirstein and W. McNeil Lowry. and all the rest.

All the fuss. Isadora Duncan complaining to Henry Ford, Martha Graham (not to mention Lucia Chase) complaining to Lincoln Kirstein, and all the time American dance history being explored in the one instance and made in the other. As I think they said, or at least nearly said, in Brave New World by Aldous Huxley: "Give us this day, our daily Ford." I told you it was an epiphany. You should have believed me.

Those Ford Foundation grants! The trouble they caused and the benefits they achieved! I cannot imagine that Henry himself, though he tripped the light fantastic, had much use for ballet dancing or any kind of theatrical performance. But the Ford Foundation -- now that was a horse of a very different color. Not that this was the first time that dance had found a Ford in its future, nor for that matter was the Ford Foundation the first to subsidize dance companies.

The Ford Motor Company's first involvement with dance came in the spring of 1940. The year before, with optimism in spite of the war clouds in Europe, a World's Fair had been organized in New York City's Flushing Meadow. The Ford people had built a very handsome pavilion that included a modern theater seating about 500.

What they did the first year I don't know, but in 1940 the designer of the pavilion, Walter Dorwin Teague, approached Kirstein with the idea of staging a short ballet that showed the fate of Old Dobbin being replaced by the modern Ford automobile. Kirstein -- whose Ballet Caravan, one of New York City Ballet's several predecessors, was financially on the ropes -- agreed, and Teague's ballet was given story and lyrics by Edward Mabley, music by Tom Bennett, and choreography by William Dollar.

But let Kirstein himself tell you the story: "The pretext for our dancing was the fate of the horse in the path of the automobile. It added nothing to the history of the dance, but it was an agreeable exercise and had important consequences. We never knew whether or not it sold a dozen automobiles, but for six months it provided food and rent for forty dancers in two teams that performed an eighteen-minute ballet entitled A Thousand Times Neigh! every hour on the hour, twelve times a day. Dobbin, the horse, was made up of two boys, head and tail. He executed a soft-hoof bit of tapping."

The following year Kirstein tried to capitalize on his newly found Ford connection. He was invited to the private dining room of that same Ford Pavilion for a luncheon given in honor of his friend, Nelson Rockefeller, by Henry's son, Edsel Ford. Kirstein, never backward when it came to the fund-raising crunch, tried to persuade the two millionaires to back an all-american ballet company. No luck.

Later that year, however, when President Franklin Roosevelt appointed Rockefeller the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, Rockefeller arranged for Ballet Caravan to undertake a six-month South American tour-for which Balanchine choreographed Concerto Barocco and Ballet Imperial and for which Rockefeller was later attacked in Congress for spending money "on ballets rather than bullets."

But it was not Ford, nor the Ford Foundation -- which began its arts program in 1957 -- but the Rockefeller Foundation (established in 1913) that first provided money for dance. Between 1953 and 1960 it gave a total of $417,150 to organizations and individuals in dance. A drop in the bucket, perhaps, but a first drop going into the right bucket. Although much later Norman Lloyd, Rockefeller's arts administrator, and his successor, Howard Klein, did a lot more for dance, the Rockefeller's overall arts budget was never vast. It was nothing compared with the millions that the Ford Foundation was about to parlay.

In 1957, when the Ford people entered the arts field, they first initiated a full-scale inquiry on the "economic and social positions of the arts at this point in American history." Lowry was singing Kirstein's kind of tune. So what happened?

Next month -- hopefully the epiphany sustaining -- I'll try to tell you. Or, at least, what I think happened.

Clive Barnes, a senior editor of Dance Magazine, is dance and theater critic of the New York Post. He has contributed to this magazine since 1958.