My position within the company seemed to be consolidated when I was chosen for the title role of Mr. B’s new version of Stravinsky’s pre-World War I ballet Firebird, first choreographed by the rebellious Russian, Michel Fokine. With this memorable dance, the world was suddenly at my feet, beneath a tightrope stretched by the media.
Shortly after the production opened at the New York State Theater, May 28, 1970, I was startled to see myself spread out across six pages of Life magazine, yielding the honors of the cover to Nixon’s old pal, Bebe Rebozo. Featured coverage followed with Dance Magazine, Forbes, Seventeen, Saturday Review, Women’s Wear Daily, and so on, snippets of human interest and dance news, fashion and feminism. Everyone seemed to have an angle on me except me. The Life article was fraught with romantic illusions:
Gelsey Kirkland has huge, luminous blue eyes, clear pale skin and a body so frail-looking that the great choreographer George Balanchine could visualize her in the role of ‘a little golden bird’ — the demanding Firebird of Stravinsky’s ballet. At 17, scarcely more than a little girl herself, she is already the embodiment of every little girl’s secret dream of glory… the youngest member in the company ever to have a principal role choreographed for her… Almost as if she feared pressing fortune, Gelsey speaks of learning and improving, not of applause… Her whole world is the world of ballet — difficult and unforgiving, flowing with loveliness.
My side of the story was lost somehow. I would have had no way to tell my version back then. I had never actually learned to speak or write. I did not think my opinions were worth repeating.
I was first informed that I had been cast as the Firebird by a stage manager. I assumed he had to be mistaken until I read my name on the posted schedule. That meant it had to be true. The very idea that Mr. B wanted to choreograph a ballet on me was enough to make me dizzy with excitement.
Though never my favorite ballet, the part of the Firebird offered an extraordinary challenge, for which I did not feel prepared. I had grown up seeing both Melissa Hayden and Violette Verdy dance in an older, more dramatic version of the same ballet. They had been favorably compared to Maria Tallchief, who had established the character in Balanchine’s 1949 renovation after Fokine. The original Firebird, by default, had been Tamara Karsavina, who had received the historical opportunity when Anna Pavlova rejected the role. Pavlova apparently hated the music. I would soon discover how wise she had been, how well she knew the score.
The 1970 choreography was a remake undertaken by Balanchine with some help from Jerome Robbins, whose Broadway background and even broader outlook on ballet made him a match for Mr. B. Their egos always seemed to mesh, thanks to the contrast of their concerns and preferences, minimizing personal competition, helped along with the deference paid by the younger Robbins to the acknowledged master. Robbins, who had his own company and served as associate artistic director at the New York City Ballet, brought the sensibility of West Side Story and Fiddler on the Roof into the popular arena Balanchine had already constructed for ballet. Mr. B had done his stint on Broadway in the thirties.
In this new production of Firebird, elaborate sets and costumes, using original designs by Marc Chagall, almost took precedence over the dancers. For Mr. B, emphasizing the design and score must have seemed consistent with the dictum formulated by his early mentor, Diaghilev, the first producer of the ballet, who stated, ‘The perfect ballet can only be created by the closest fusion of the three elements of dancing, painting, and music.’ Perfection for the dancer and the audience would depend on the kind of fusion that took place.
In Firebird, I found myself working for, and often against, three men ranked among the brightest artistic lights of the century: Balanchine the choreographer, Stravinsky the composer, and Chagall the painter. Their individual visions and common Russian heritage fused within the production, though Balanchine was the only one on the scene, constantly overseeing the synthesis. The role of the American, Robbins, was limited to secondary contributions, notably the comic monsters who appeared in the Danse Infernale.
Three Russian men against one American girl was not exactly a fair fight, and I consider myself lucky to have won a draw, or perhaps drawn a lesson from my defeat. I was fighting as always to give Mr. B what I thought he wanted. I limped through rehearsals, still suffering with tendinitis. My legs were often bandaged to the knee and covered with leg-warmers. I usually went home at night hoping to crawl inside one of my toe shoes and fall asleep forever.
A conflict emerged during the rehearsals. It was never put into words. Mr. B wanted me to play a bird, and I wanted to play a creature who would be something more. I was determined to endow the bird with character, with human compassion and strength. The story, as I remembered it, seemed to call for those qualities.
For the most part unspoken and unconscious, our antagonism became a clash of interpretations and personalities. According to the conventional code, the dancer had no right to challenge choreographic authority. My headstrong and instinctual defiance first took the outward form of supreme cooperation. On the conscious level, I was quite sincere in my commitment to deliver whatever he asked. But what he asked for ran against my grain to the point of constant frustration and intense pain. How could this wonderful man, with his two kindred spirits in the wings, have been asking me to relinquish those qualities within the dance that I had come to identify as being most human?
In an interview with Dance Magazine, Balanchine reflected on the process through which he supposedly created the character and the dancer:
For this ballet, I wanted a small dancer, a child, but with good elevation, so I trained Gelsey. She is not yet grown but she is well-trained, out of our School. There are many fine dancers in the company but I chose this one. Gelsey will grow to a woman and who know what she will be then? But for now she is my Firebird.
As for the training, one of my early teachers at the School, Elise Reiman, in a published interview, came closer to the truth:
Gelsey Kirkland was eight years old when she started in my class. I don’t think we can take credit for Gelsey. She is self-taught. She was a very difficult child who resisted…
Through the rehearsal process, I was only dimly aware that my resistance was a struggle to retain my as yet undefined dignity. Because I was unable to say why I disagreed with him, my convictions had to be denied. I tried to keep my anger bottled up inside me. I tried not to ask dumb questions. How could I defy his genius? There had to be something wrong with me. I began to identify my best impulses as the symptoms of a disease. I was somehow sick or wicked for thinking and working as I did.
As the opening drew near, I continued to be mystified by what Balanchine envisioned for my character. He was annoyed when I stopped in the middle of a solo variation to ask for his help: ‘Mr. B, what am I supposed to do with my arms?’
After flapping his own for a moment, he spluttered, ‘You know, dear, normal. Like canary.’
His attitude intimidated me. He saw me only as a tiny bird who could move fast, with high elevation. From his point of view, it was not necessary to built any specific quality into my arms or my body as a whole, so long as I delivered the illusion of flight, speed, grace, soaring, and so forth. To have followed his instructions to the letter would have required little on my part in the way of character. He had to want something more; he was just not saying so.
Balanchine’s image of me as a bird became a crisis by the time I tried on the costume. Karinska, the lady in blue, had executed Chagall’s design, rendering what I saw as a flaming gold and red abomination. It was like something an overgrown canary might wear, not something that a ballerina should ever have to put on, or dance in. The plumage was crippling. There was a gold bodice and red Miss America banner, no panties, and a long chiffon tail. Stepping into this contraption, I was a little ball of rage, not a Firebird. As the fitting session was prolonged for photographers, I spent the time glaring over my shoulder at Mr. B, giving him the old evil eye.
He took me aside, informing me with nasally muted tones, ‘You know, dear, I think you wear black page boy wig, like in original Chagall. Is way it should be.’ Unable to control my sobbing, begging him to reconsider, I was silenced suddenly when he grabbed me by the ears. He then did his best to console me on the wig. ‘Don’t worry, dear. You’ll see. Will be good.’ I took scant pleasure in his final decision to leave out the hairpiece.
Just before opening night, a costume parade was staged in the Promenade of the New York State Theater, attended by the paparazzi, who are always present for such events at Lincoln Center. This was part of the company’s publicity campaign, in which I was to be introduced as the new Firebird. After marching in and about, I gravitated with the cast to one of the tables that had been laid out with hors d’oeuvre, to look if not to eat. With photographers and celebrities elbowing each other for my attention, Mr. B rushed into my immediate circle, grabbed me by my shoulders with some force, and lunged with his face toward mine, as if to plant a kiss on my lips.
I was too fast. To his considerable embarrassment, I turned my head away in time to avoid him. Looking over his shoulder, I saw my two friends, Ricky Weiss and Cathy Haigney, stunned by my behavior. How could anyone, any dancer, do such a thing, even think of doing such a thing, to George Balanchine?
My deliberate faux pas could be smoothed over, but my performance in Firebird could not. My trouble with the dance derived initially from Balanchine’s neglect to tell any of the dancers what the ballet was about. In his pan of the opening performance for the Times, Clive Barnes noted, ‘Not even the story is fully told.’ It was apparently not meant to be told.
As is well known in the ballet world, Firebird originated with an old Russian fairy tale which appeared in countless variations. The story concerned a magical bird who rescued a Prince and his beloved Princess from an enchanted forest of an evil magician. The plot went as follows:
The hero, Prince Ivan, first captured the Firebird. Out of pity, he released her and, in return for his kindness, received one of the bird’s feathers for a gift. This magical feather was to bring the Firebird to his rescue if the need should ever arise. The Prince then fell in love with a beautiful Princess, captive of an evil magician. In fighting the magician and his legion of monsters, the Prince pulled out the feather to call for the Firebird, who arrived, as promised, to save the day. The Prince and Princess married and presumably lived happily ever after, and the bird of fire flew away. Mr. B actually identified the hero with Stalin, at the same time ruling out any hidden meaning. So much for fairy tales.
Unlike his 1949 treatment, Balanchine had decided to abstract the story to bring the elements of the dance into harmony with the symbols of the music and the painting. I did attempt to give him the kind of bird he requested for the first performance. At the same time, I continued to work out my own version of the character and the drama, as indicated by Byron Belt’s subsequent review, among others:
In the handsome new ‘Firebird,’ Gelsey Kirkland’s third performance was warmer and more effective, particularly in the ‘Dying Swan’ use of her lovely arms.
After the production premiered, I performed the part throughout the year. I added touches to the character, as in the Firebird’s final solo, endowing the dance more and more with her personal struggle to know her own nature, her own power an integrity. Through the deliberate placement of her steps, my character resisted the possibilities of defeat within the music. I found a way to allow my soul to soar above the hostile environment that enclosed me.
I did not change the steps that Mr. B had choreographed, but filled them with my own fire. I instilled her jetés, when she arrived to save the day, with the speed and strength necessary to distinguish the forces at work in the clash between the monsters and the human characters. To establish the trust between the Prince and the Firebird, I invested those subtle qualities in the movement that would allow him to depend on her to return, to have faith that she would answer his summons.
The last touch was especially important because Balanchine had removed the plot device of the feather that the Prince initially used to call for her help. The revision was noted by Clive Barnes:
I did not notice that Ivan, when threatened by the evil magician, Kotschei [sic]. pulled out the magic feather to summon the Firebird, and without that incident the purpose of the narrative loses its continuity.
I continued to build the character through a long run of performances, playing off the qualities of the three leading men, Peter Martins, Jacques d’Amboise, and Jean-Pierre Bonnefous, who alternately danced the role of the hero, Prince Ivan. My favorite teacher at the school, Stanley Williams, private complimented my performance to Mr. B. Stanley told him that I had made a unique contribution to the role. I learned that Mr. B reacted with furious silence. In the end, he would take that part away from me.
Our ways of looking at the world must have been irreconcilable almost from the beginning. I never knew what to do with my love for him. Peter the Great was famous for his ‘windows on the West.’ As a Westerner, I wanted to peer from my side through those windows; I was especially curious about the Russian ballet. In pursuing my approach to art, I would turn eventually to an older and broader classical tradition. Mr. B had already rejected that tradition, including most of the Russian repertory. It should have come as no surprise that I would find myself in deep trouble. Perhaps neither of us could see that we were moving in opposite directions.
Our cultural contention was complicated by our artistic temperaments. Without a shared vision, the making of art can be an explosive affair. The working relationships are volatile in a theatrical production. Each artist invests images and ideas with passion. Egos shatter with each disagreement. Contrary opinions threaten the integrity of the company. Balanchine solved these problems by forbidding dissent. That was his prerogative. But he abused that privilege to the point of discouraging even the most innocent question. He often invited those who did not approve of the way he ran his theatre to leave. The problem was, there seemed to be no place else to go.
In fairness to the many admirers of Balanchine, as critical as I may sound at times, I believe just as strongly in their right to challenge me, to make their own judgments, to allow our ideas to develop through passionate interplay and free discussion. I love to argue, to match wits, to test whatever wisdom I have managed to gather in life. The problem I have experienced in the world of ballet is that free discussion has been inhibited by idol worship and prejudice, by the pressures for success, by the fears of failure within the profession of dance.
I am sorry that Mr. B is gone. I have the feeling that we might be able to talk now. His disciples can defend him, but they cannot answer my questions with his inimitable voice. With time, my curiosity has sharpened. The difficulty with Balanchine, as with many of the Russian men I have known, was that he did not think women were capable of engaging him with ideas, or that Americans were capable of understanding his Russian homeland. We hurt each other in so many ways.
Within the context of the ballet, my efforts toward dramatic continuity were doomed to fail. As the heroine, I simply could not overcome a ballet that was not meant to be interpreted by experienced. I was caught, like my character, in the torrent of savage rhythm, in the flood of Chagall’s floating images.
My first impression of Stravinsky’s music caused me literally to place cotton in my ears. Mr. B revered the beauty of the music as tantamount to the ritual of an Orthodox service. He looked up to Stravinsky as a father figure, an ultimate intellectual authority. For the scores of his ballets, Balanchine turned to Stravinsky more than to any other composer. They shared faith in Russian Orthodoxy and a fierce allegiance to their Russian homeland. Regarding Mr. B’s version of Firebird, Stravinsky raved, ‘I prefer Balanchine’s choreography… to the whole Fokine ballet.’
Stravinsky transformed the method of classical composition in music in much the same way that Balanchine has transformed the classical ballet. They were bird of a modern feather. Though I tried, I simply could not adopt their approach. Their paradigm for the mind of the artist was a technical formula that I sensed limited the scope of my creativity. According to their aesthetic code, the human condition was reflected primarily through animal and mechanical imagery, to be realized through the senses by way of instinct and imitation. As Stravinsky put it, ‘An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.’
His music was intended to arouse primeval instincts. His career changed the course of musical history in our century and, by way of rhythmic invasion, altered the sensibility and dynamic of ballet. My instincts filled me with doubt. I dreaded most the final wedding ceremony of the Prince and Princess, when no dancer was allowed to move or distract from the music, as it rolled over the audience with wave after wave of Stravinsky magic.
As a dancer I rebelled against rhythm. I did not care for its effects. Rather than an expression of freedom or release, I felt rhythm obscured meaning and constrained my movement. In longing to tell a story through my dance, I was frustrated by music that appealed only to my sense of time and tempo. I needed more than the propulsion of a beat.
Stravinsky replaced the thematic development of classical music with a range of sensations that alternately jolted or lulled the mind. According to Roman Vlad’s critical account, ‘Some of Stravinsky’s works are designed as an opiate or a means of escape from reality.’ Such was the design of Firebird, though its effect on me was perhaps opposite from that intended by the composer. My desire for clarity caused me to impose my own musical concept on the dance. It was as if I provided my own accompaniment, interpreting the score with a set of physical accents which allowed me to move and maintain conscious control. I danced with a passion to spite the music.
What was the special quality that I brought to the stage that seemed inappropriate for Balanchine and Stravinsky? Why was I out of place? Why was I confounded by their steps and notes? The answers are all one: without knowing it, I was trying to be a classical artist on a modern stage.
I had already begun to address the problem of thematic development that is the key to my art. In each ballet, I would seize upon a theme, an idea that could be translated into a physical image. In the deepest sense, for a classical dancer, each note or step in context becomes a moment in the transformation of a theme, a continuous process toward the realization of an ideal voice. I was trying to speak through the dance.
The stage design was ultimately as insurmountable as the stumbling blocks in the music. I had vertigo when I looked at the set. Chagall’s alteration of perspective caused an almost surreal sense of disorientation. I found an obstacle course rigged to trip the dancer at every turn. With each step, I could never be sure that my foot would meet a solid floor. I thought at any moment that I might plunge through the stage, that a trapdoor might drop beneath me. The danger of a fall was more real than the dreams that filled the theatre.
To prevail against such a backdrop seemed to require that I dance on air. The field of vision, the projection of our three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional surface, was obscured through the violent juxtaposition of colors — what Chagall called his ‘Fourth-Dimension’. He invited the spectators to surrender to his haunting nightmare images, to his symbols of hallucinatory sexuality. Yet for me, as overwhelmed as I was, there was something missing in his painting, an omission that threw me off balance. My secure frame of reference vanished.
As a dancer I find my way and keep my balance by means of light and gravity. Chagall chose not to conceive of light as a unifying principle of perspective; along the same liens, he painted in defiance of gravity. He was drawn to illusion, celebrating its triumph over reality. I kept losing my bearings.
I learned quickly how to recover my balance in a hazardous environment, how to make an accident look intentional. I owe that in part to Chagall. Thanks to him, as well as Stravinsky and Balanchine, I became expert in the art of getting out of a jam. But there were serious drawbacks in distinguishing myself from such authorities. I was learning who I might be on the stage only by learning who I was not. Without developing a positive sense of identity, without support for my ideas an aspirations, I was never really sure who I was from one moment to the next.
~Gelsey Kirkland [buy]