Looking at Dance
By Edwin Denby
Balanchine’s Apollo is a ballet so simple in story, so rich in dance imagery, so exciting in invention, I should like to describe a little what happens.The piece calls for a sitting orchestra to play the Stravinsky score and for four superb dancers; it has beyond that only three small parts, no chorus, almost no scenery. It is quite unpretentious as theater. The scene is on Delos, Apollo’s birthplace, and the action begins a moment before his birth, with Leto, his mother, high on a rock in a sharp ray of light, tossing grandly to and fro in the labor of a goddess.Then Apollo appears standing wrapped rigid in swaddling clothes.Two nymphs bring him forward and he bawls infant-like.The nymphs begin to unwrap him, but with a godlike vigor before they are done he makes a ballet preparation and whoosh! Spins himself free. Free, he makes a grandly clumsy and baby-like thrust and curvet or two, and the prologue is over.
When the lights come on again, he is grown to boyhood and alone.The nymphs have brought him a long-necked lute and he tries to make it sing. But his solitary attempts, first entangled, then lyrical, then determined, look inconclusive.Three young Muses appear and the four of them dance together. They dance charmingly and a little stiffly, reminding you of the inexpressiveness seriousness and shy, naïve fancy of children. But as they end, the boy gives the three girls each a magic gift, a scroll of verse to one, a theater mask to the second, a lyre to the third. And holding these emblems of poetry, each seems to be inspired beyond her years.The first girl dances flowingly with an airy and lyric delight; the second bounds with dramatic speed, with sudden reversals of direction as if in mid-leap; just at the end one hand that has seemed all through to be holding a mask before her face seems to sweep the mask away, and she is herself again and frightened.The third muse,Terpsichore, invent the most brilliantly adventurous dance of all, boldly cutting her motions in startling divisions, as if isolating the elements of her art, without in these diamond-clear stops breaking the cumulative drive. She combines suspense with calm. And as she ends, Apollo gently touches her bright head. But, the dance over, she ducks away like a child and runs off.
Then Apollo, his strength awakened, dances by himself, leaping in complex virtuoso sequences, in a grandly sustained sweep of powerful motion. It is no show-off number, it is a masculine surge of full dance mastery. Terpsichore returns just as he ends and together they invent a series of adagio surprises, extremes of balance and extension, boldly large in line, boldly intimate in imagery, and ending with a tender and lovely “swimming lesson” that he gives her. And now all three Muses dance together in darting harmony and dance inspired by poetry’s power, swinging from Apollo like birds, curving from his body like a cluster of flowers, driven by him like an ardent charioteer, and ending, when immortal Zeus has called through the air, in three grand accents of immolation.Then calmly and soberly, in Indian file, all four ascend the rock of the island and a chariot comes through the sky down toward them as the curtain falls.They will go to Parnassus where they live ever after. You see as Apollo proceeds how from a kind of pantomimic opening., it becomes more and more a purely classic dance ballet. More and more it offers the eye an interplay of lines and rhythms, of changing architectural balances the edge of which becomes become keener and keener. In this sense Apollo conveys an image of increasing discipline, of increasing clarity of definition. It grows more and more civilized. But the rhythmic vitality of the dance, the abundance of vigor increases simultaneously so that you feel as if the heightening of discipline led to a heightening of power, to a freer, bolder range of imagination. Since the piece is about the gods of poetry, and how they learned their art, it seems, too, to be describing concretely the development of the creative imagination.
And as the dance images grow more disciplined, more large and more vigorous, they also grow grander in their sensuous connotations. As Apollo and the little Muses grow up, the intimate contact them between them seems to develop from an innocent childlike play to the firm audacity and tender inventiveness of maturity. Suggested in no sense mimically but purely by dance architecture, the range and richness of Apollo’s sensuous imagery is marvelous; and because of this consistent honest but unself-conscious sensuousness the “abstract” classicism is at no point dehumanized or out of character with the dramatic situation. So for example the taut ballet extension of a girl’s leg and toe – used in Apollo as an insignia of poetry itself – grows increasingly poignant to watch as the piece proceeds; and you experience everywhere the cool sensual luminosity of civilized art.
So Apollo can tell you how beautiful classic dancing is when it is correct and sincere; or how the power of poetry grows in our nature; or even that as man’s genius becomes more civilized, it grows more expressive, more ardent, more responsive, more beautiful. Balanchine has conveyed these large ideas really as modestly as possible, by means of three girls and a boy dancing together for a while.
But as the immediate excitement of watching does not depend on how you choose to rationalize it. Apollo is beautiful as dancing and gloriously danced.
Edwin Denby, Looking at the Dance, Horizon Press, New York, NY 1949back to Evolution