Undimmed Lustre: The Life of Antony Tudor. (Book Excerpt).

EXCERPTED FROM Undimmed Lustre: The Life of Antony Tudor by Muriel Topaz. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group (Scarecrow Press, Inc., 4720 Boston Way, Lanham, MD 20706). 2002. 480 pages, illustrated. $39.50. ISBN: 0-8108-4128-2. Reprinted by permission. To order: 15200 NBN Way, P.O. Box 191, Blue Ridge Summit, PA 17214-0191, 800/462-6420, www.scarecrowpress.com.

Chapter 1

The ballet ended, the curtain closed. Absolute silence. "They are not clapping. It's a disaster," ballerina Nora Kaye whispered. Then the sound pierced the silence. The applause had started; it rose and swelled. As the crescendo began to wane, the choreographer signaled, "Now!" The dancers emerged from the wings to a burst of shouting "Bravo! Bravo!" from all over the theater. The uproar continued for about thirty curtain calls, an unheard-of tribute. The debut of Antony Tudor's great ballet Pillar of Fire, the first of several astonishing works he created in the United States, had taken place.

When Tudor emigrated from his native Britain to the United States in 1940, shortly after the outbreak of World War II, he had already choreographed a series of iconoclastic ballet masterpieces. The man's genius was a known fact; known, that is, by England's critics, cognoscenti, and a small coterie of that country's balletomanes. In the United States, however, he was an unknown quantity.

Although Tudor's fame has grown greatly both in America and throughout the world in the years that followed those first triumphs of the 1930s and 1940s, and although he became an icon for his most avid fans, he is still a vastly underrated choreographer. Even in the ballet world his extraordinary gifts have never achieved the celebrity of his contemporaries George Balanchine (1904-83) or Frederick Ashton (1904-88). As an example, his work was virtually unknown in Paris and Moscow until the 1990s.

Misconceptions about the man and his work abound. His public commonly believes that he never had his own company but, in fact, he founded and, for a year, directed the tiny London Ballet. He was an all-important force, a prime mover, in the early years of Ballet Theatre. One of several apocryphal legends speaks of his miniscule body of works, but he created more than fifty ballets, choreographed more than a dozen operas, and created many dances for theater, film, and television. Although by reputation he was universally hated by dancers, in actuality those who worked closely with him regard the man with great affection and respect.

Tudor's enigmatic personality, his English propriety mixed with his rapier-sharp, often vulgar wit, his overwhelming need for personal privacy, his insecurities, his total inability to compromise artistically, and his Zen Buddhism all made him a lonesome figure in the very communal dance world. While his work is subtle, detailed, and passionate, it eschews star turns and bravura displays of virtuosity. It demands great emotional and technical skills not always immediately obvious to the audience. He imbued the simplest gestures with profound meaning, bringing drama into "academic" ballet. He mixed everyday gesture with the classical vocabulary and incorporated the ideas of Freud and Stanislavsky into his dances. He adapted cinematic techniques to the ballet medium.

This biography reveals some of the reasons behind the series of misconceptions and contradictions that have attached themselves to Antony Tudor, one of the most creative forces of the twentieth century....

Chapter II

During the time that he choreographed all of this "dance on order" [nineteen works for television], another work stirred in Tudor's mind, a rather bold undertaking. Tudor had heard Gustav Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde at a concert and fallen in love with it. He was unable to locate a reduction instrumentally suitable for the small forces available at the Mercury Theatre [a small London theater converted from a church, with no orchestra pit]. However, he did find a piano reduction of another Mahler work, Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children). His idea of making a ballet on the theme of grieving for the loss of children did not win great popularity in 1937. The emphasis in ballet was still on fairies, sylphs, and glorious processions. Leonide Massine, who choreographed huge spectacle ballets in the Diaghilev tradition--grandiose, colorful, and fanciful--was the darling of London. The public flocked to see the very Massine ballets that Tudor so intensely disliked. Tudor refused to see them to avoid becoming "infected." The Massine ballets, so full of grandiosity and virtuosic displays, represented the antithesis of Tudor's balletic ideals. But even in the case of choreographers he admired, such as Kurt Jooss, Tudor avoided seeing too much in those early days, as he feared being unduly influenced. He wanted to go his own way. Only much, much later had he sufficient confidence in his choreographic path to see a great deal of dance.

`Tudor undertook this grieving theme, producing one of the most eloquent, moving ballets of all time. Dark Elegies is abstract in that it had no scenario, nor any specific reference to children except in the music itself. It explores the different aspects of grieving with its six soloists (five sections, the second one being a pas de deux). Much of the movement stems from the classical canon, using arabesques, turns in attitude, poses a la seconde, and the like. But the dance also encompasses a vocabulary more referential to modern dance than to ballet: suspensions, falls, skips, and knee work. Although a paradigm of structural clarity and thematic movement development, these devices never impinge on the dance's emotional impact.

The soloist in the first song explores her sadness in leaps, small forward-and-backward rocking steps, and undulating gestures for the arms. The corps remains seated ritualistically in a semi-circle around her, moving minimally in abstracted pain. The second song, the pas de deux, is one of the most poignant in all of dance literature. With tenderness the man tries to console the woman, to little avail. The amazingly inventive lifts do not seem acrobatic but rather tell this story of attempted consolation. A male soloist and six, then eight, corps members dance the third song. The corps performs adaptations of folk-dance like material: chains, circle dances, and crossing steps. The man expresses his grief in sharp, kicking sequences. The dignity of male grief is poignantly explored by alternating outbursts of frustration with consoling movements of group solidarity. The fourth song posits denial and introspection. This quietest of the solos shows a woman who grieves more internally than externally. One senses she cries only when alone. The last song, the fifth, shows a male soloist who begins his grieving by railing against fate. As he jumps and spins, the anger of the solo builds to an almost unendurable pitch. In a remarkable moment, a skip ends with the man turning on the floor on his shoulder. The very intensity of his anger leads to a cathartic moment of frenzy for the entire community.

Slowly the atmosphere transforms itself into one of acceptance and resignation. The ballet ends with a slow, dirgelike walk offstage by the entire cast. By the sense of community the group creates, it has managed to deal in the only way possible with such a catastrophe. The participants accept their fate, and move on.

[Marie] Rambert tried to persuade Tudor not to undertake the work because of its subject matter, but of course he was immovable. "I started to choreograph with the third dance," [he explained in an interview with dance writer Marilyn Hunt]. "They do a step which is basic to the work. It came from a tap dance step I learned at Max Rivers studio.... I don't think I ever explained what a movement meant in Dark Elegies. I think the movement should explain the whole dance. The movement together with the music complete a whole."

Maude Lloyd remembered working on the pas de deux in the small, downstairs studio at the Mercury one morning. It had no mirror and each time Tudor lifted her, she would touch the ceiling. She said it was "written" faster than any other piece of choreography he ever did; he never went back over it. He nearly finished it in a single session. Of course, they had no idea what it looked like. They showed it to the designer Nadia Benois and to Rambert. Benois insisted that Lloyd wear just what she was rehearsing in, except for the addition of a skirt. Thus, the ballet remained clothed in practice costumes, with the women wearing head scarves....

There is a lot of resignation in what Antony did. You accepted it, with outbreaks of pain," [Lloyd explained in a 1988 interview with Judith Chazin-Bennahum]. "They [the characters in Dark Elegies] try to get on with their ordinary life, but every now and again their emotion breaks through, and then they pull themselves back each time. They were people who had to go on living, fishing.... There are quiet moments broken with big outbreaks of despair, agony of loss.... You must feel it is really happening to you, and yet you have to be disciplined. You have to get the movement right.... The movements ... were part of your life, although some of them were sometimes odd. They weren't always natural but somehow they became natural. It's a rather frenetic moment after Hugh [Laing]'s song [the fifth song]. Then the music dies down and we all go in together. It is a marvelous moment. Such a sense of community. We close the circle, and we are all holding each other for comfort. It's the last scream, really, before resignation. Elegies is not a gloomy ballet. It's tremendously sad but it's not gloomy because all of the time they are accepting what's happening to them."

Tudor choreographed the fourth song for Agnes de Mille, off pointe. The way she danced the solo greatly pleased him. Rambert was not at all pleased, but Tudor fought her hostility and de Mille performed the role.

Celia Franca, a corps member in the original cast, also has strong memories of working on Dark Elegies. "In the first song he said, `Sit very simply, with your hands laid in your lap. No nail polish.' He explained that they were simple, peasant people. They were there looking out over the sea, into space. And, when his eyes did it, our eyes did it. He was very hypnotic. When he was choreographing the third song, he worked out some of the corps de ballet steps on me. I remember him asking if anybody knew any Irish dancing. I put my hand up and said, `I do.' ... In the second half [of the third song] that's where that heel and toe tap dance came from."

The most famous story about Dark Elegies took place on opening night. Tudor recounted [it to Hunt]: "On the morning of the performance I hadn't started on the last dance at all. I'd done a little section of it for [Hugh] the day before and some more early that morning. Hugh had learned his part only that A.M., so it went out of his mind right after the beginning. [While he was performing] he got desperate and would run to someone and say, `What do I do next?' He became demented. Toward the end he suddenly remembered that he had to get to this whipping [step]. He picked up then. He threw himself on the floor with such abandon he practically broke his back. [After the performance] he .just left the theater and went walking along the Embankment in total depression thinking he had ruined my ballet. He got the most marvelous reviews the next day." ...

De Mille remembers the cast coming onstage in kimonos before the curtain opened. While the audience, tickets in hand, waited half an hour, Tudor simply told the cast, "You go here and you go there, then bend over backwards and all walk offstage." Numbed, de Mille did what the girl beside her did, thinking, "God help us."

Of Tudor's working procedure Noel Goodwin wrote [in Dance and Dancers, 1988]: "Because Tudor's genius was in exploring the inward states of mind through the dance rather than just the outward emotions, it is understandable that he should not want his community ritual of shared sorrow to become too specific. He kept the dancers from understanding the verbal content of the Ruckert poems [that Mahler had set to music] for fear they might try to `interpret' the details."

All of the dancers realized, even during the rehearsals, that the work was extraordinary. Even Rambert relented, saying she wanted to take Tudor in her arms and protect him out of fear that something would happen to him before he finished this masterpiece. She admitted that she'd never seen a more beautiful ballet.

Cecil Bates, who danced Dark Elegies with the Ballet Rambert much later, reported a phenomenon unique to Tudor works. When the company was performing Dark Elegies, all banter and backstage chat would stop. Everyone was quiet. The whole company would come down to the wings to watch....

Dance Magazine contributor Muriel Topaz is the author and editor of several books, including Antony Tudor: The American Years. She is a former director of the Dance Notation Bureau and the Juilliard School Dance Division.