Lucking Out (29 page)

Elitist and reactionary to its detractors, it also lay on the wrong side of the class struggle, stroking its sable fur. In 1969, a professor of literature at MIT named Louis Kampf rabble-roused student radicals to cry havoc and unleash the dungs of war. Defile the cultural temples! Convert Lincoln Center into a field latrine! “Not a performance should go without disruption,” declared Kampf. “The fountains should be dried with calcium chloride, the statuary pissed on, the walls smeared with shit.” Kampf was more than just another fist-shaking, faculty-lounge, pocket-edition Lenin: he was then president of the Modern Language Association, so his preachings carried reverb. The revolutionary moment came and went without the New York Philharmonic or Metropolitan Opera coming under urinary attack from full-bladdered revolutionaries, and by the early seventies New York already reeked of enough shit and piss that manufacturing more of it to make a political statement would have seemed redundant. Further defilement was the last thing this rock pile needed, and what was solacing even to cynics about Lincoln Center was that it seemed to have earned a temporary restraining order against entropy; its blocky architectural sterility—more than one detractor referred to it as a cultural mausoleum—was a kind of comfort zone, a non-wild life refuge. True, the underpass that connected the uptown side of the IRT station at Sixty-sixth Street to Lincoln Center leaked from the ceiling and reeked from the puddled floor and back-splashed walls, such a dysentery stretch that even panhandlers shunned it, but once you sniffed prison freedom, it was as if the pause button had been hit on the fall of civilization. You could sit at the edge of the illuminated fountain, moisturized by the misty spray, and not fear for your life about a nearby drug deal gone bad or a psychotic breakdown in progress. You might see Balanchine himself strolling toward the State Theater, his head and neckerchief jauntily yachting across a choppy sea of mundane heads belonging to non-geniuses patronizing the sidewalk. It was an inspiriting sight, just knowing he was briskly alive, that Robbins was alive, Bernstein was alive, Martha Graham was alive, Agnes de Mille was alive—they hadn’t forsaken us.

And what I grew to learn about the ballet world was that, once inside, it was like every other subculture high and low in Manhattan in the seventies. It looked like a members-only society only if you lacked the nerve and desire to enter; it wasn’t warm and welcoming—what was?—but it offered its own gradations of grudging acceptance, based not on money, breeding, boarding-school connections, Ivy League affiliation, the right address, or the ability to wield a salad fork like a neurosurgeon’s scalpel but on the measure of knowledge, passion, and dogged curiosity for seeing what was out there to see because there was always something new to see even in things you had seen so many times before, a fresh interpretation that blew off the chalk dust. It made you come to it, rise to the challenging occasion. Piddlers need not apply. I went to modern dance performances, saw Cunningham’s company, and attended a few events on the outskirts of the Village that seemed to belong to the Soviet bloc where the venues were inadequately ventilated (you left coughing coal dust) to give those avant-gardenias a try, but for me they didn’t take root in the sky, seize the sun.

Perhaps ballet personified all of the nice things denied me up to then (by no one in particular, by the luck of the draw), things I thought I didn’t feel I deserved, and in certain moods still don’t. Without realizing it until the fug was washed off my windshield, I had grown up Beauty-deprived, a word I’m capitalizing to differentiate it from the beauty of a flower or the beauty of a sunset or the beauty of a smiling face or any of those other Kodak moments to paste in our memory books and tell ourselves are enough; and they’re not. They’re not genius-blessed. They’re not Bach, they’re not Balanchine, they’re not Geoffrey Beene, they’re not mind-woven enchantments of endlessly evolving, revolving fractals. No matter how Dewey decimalized your preferences and priorities may appear, you never know what you truly want in this pastiche world, because what you want is based on the tray of choices that were passed around during your upbringing, a limited selection that you believe is all that is available until a curtain parts, a light falls, and there something stands, in a state of expectancy, awaiting the cue. It would be leaning too hard on magnetic polarities to portray porn and ballet as the two opponents contending for my lapsed Catholic soul—a porn star perched on one shoulder, making lascivious mouth movements, Princess Aurora on the other, bourréeing to beat the band—but it would make a cool movie. Ballet was nearly everything I wasn’t, and what I wasn’t was what I must have wanted most. It also awakened the sensitive feminine side of me that had been lying dormant under all that Mailer and Peckinpah, an admission that I have usefully learned over the years can bring any conversation to a dead halt.

Classical ballet had its own rebel appeal. It stood perpendicular to the prevailing entertainment culture of the seventies, in a stance of stately opposition. Its conservatism, in retrospect, may have been the highest form of defiant resistance, a
Brideshead Revisited
breathing monument to faith, order, enduringness. Unlike Joffrey Ballet, which enjoyed a pop smash with its premiere of Twyla Tharp’s
Deuce Coupe
, set to the songs of the Beach Boys (and the template for every Broadway jukebox musical ever since, from
Mamma Mia!
to
Jersey Boys
), New York City Ballet remained a pennant-bannered Monaco moated and aloof from the nagging needlings of the Zeitgeist to be relevant, socially concerned, hip, happening, and in harmony with the vibrating moment, its few veerings in this direction winced at as flights of fancy that turned into instant dodos, such as Balanchine’s jet-age ode
PAMTGG
, pronounced “Pam-te-guh-guh.” To those few who saw it, “guh-guh” was gaga. Its title taken from Pan Am’s slogan jingle, “Pan Am Makes the Going Great,”
PAMTGG
flurried out female dancers in icicle-spiked helmets and male dancers in customized Speed Racer helmets on a mod set that included a loose pyramid of transparent Plexiglas luggage, and such cavorting they appear to do. From the relatively scarce photographs of the production, it isn’t commercial air travel being evoked at its most dashing chic, when stewardesses were the runway models of the plane aisle and the pilots in their uniforms looked like bronzed statues—it’s way spacier. It looks like the first
Star Trek
ballet, a galactic greeting card from some planet a-go-go. I suspect that even more then (1971, when the ballet premiered) than now, the audience overlap between ballet fans and
Star Trek
buffs was a tiny crescent, ditto among the critics, who were similarly aghast. (The grades given it by
Ballet Review
’s bull-pen regulars ran the gamut of E to F—E meaning “Not Worth Keeping,” F being “Insufferable.”)
PAMTGG
was beamed up to oblivion, never to be seen again. After that, NYCB never strayed into pop, and even flirting with avant-garde experiment was greeted with frosty suspicion by the parishioners, as if somebody were trying to sneak something fancy through the vestibule.

Not a lot of hospitality was shown to a new Balanchine ballet I saw shortly after it premiered called
Variations pour une Porte et un Soupir
(Variations for a Door and a Sigh), an allegorical duet set to a musique-concrète atonality of squawks, squeaks, honks, clunks, amplified exhales of weary breath, and assorted thuds that suggested a futuristic netherworld in need of a lube job. Pierre Henry’s score wasn’t an alien contraption to anyone who had gotten temporary tinnitus from a John Cage piece or for that matter “Revolution 9” from the Beatles’
White Album
, and pictorially
Door/Sigh
was mystico-majestic, the male figure enveloped and devoured by a black billowing skirt large as night (the shadow image of the endless white veil streaming like the etherealized scarf from Cyd Charisse in the dream ballet in
Singin’ in the Rain
), the victim of a she-serpent who conjures Louise Brooks’s Lulu in
Pandora’s Box
making a neat meal of her prey. Although the postgame wrap-ups in the lobby and later in print were undecided as to whether Balanchine was impishly showing he could beat the avant-gardists at their own racquetball game—see, here’s how it’s done, kids—or pulling an opaque Jovian prank, the reception was on the prickly side. This they weren’t willing to lap from the milk bowl. One woman near me, who had been knitting socks during intermission, cupped her hands to her ears during the performance to block the dissonant din while others snickered and giggled, and at the fade-out came a smattering of hisses and boos, most unusual. I bet
Ballet Review
gave it lousy grades, too.

Unlike so much else dished up in that spread-eagle decade, classical ballet was sexy without being “sexy.” It didn’t fondle and flaunt itself, peacocking like John Travolta’s Tony on the illuminated disco floor in
Saturday Night Fever
(authenticating Albert Goldman’s insight in his coffee-table monograph
Disco
that “the real thrust of disco culture is not toward love of another person but toward love of self—the principal object of desire in this age of closed-circuit, masturbatory vibrator sex”), or steering its hands along its curves as if auctioning itself off, à la the chesty hopeful in
A Chorus Line
’s T&A number who sang, “Orchestra and balcony/What they want is what cha see.” Both were Bob Fosse’s department. With its stiletto stalkings and snazzy indentations (the bowler-hat cockings, the cool-cat dropped wrists, the pelvic thrusts and assy ripostes), Fosse’s come-on choreography for the TV special
Liza with a Z
, the musicals
Cabaret
and
Chicago
, the revue
Dancin’
, and the Felliniesque film
All That Jazz
became the defining theater-cinema dance style of the seventies, sexing everything up with its witch doctor “magic hands.” When Fosse sexed up ballet itself, in a wet-dream fantasy set at the barre in the 1978 Broadway revue
Dancin’
between a shy bumpkin and a female classmate, releasing their inhibitions in a tumbling rhapsody of toes-pointed crotch-splits and scuba-diving cunnilingus, the only place I wanted to dive was under my seat. The worst lewd idea Fosse ever had (to be fair, he had loads of good lewd ideas too), it unwrapped like a
Penthouse
letter to the editor brought to purple fruition. It also reminded me of Gerard Damiano’s psychosexual opus
The Story of Joanna
, which featured a balletic interlude performed by its eponymous heroine, played by the trained dancer Terri Hall (her rib cage resembling a birdcage), that dispensed with simulation for its shoulder-riding, face-mounting maneuver. Did the soft-core origami of Fosse’s leotard lap dance have its origin in this hard-core divertissement? Perhaps not directly, but by that point porn had gone so viral that you could pick up its booty call in the prickling air just by walking around midtown without a hat.

All That Jazz
(1979), starring Roy Scheider as Fosse’s pill-popping, bed-hopping on-screen avatar, was shot in Times Square, and although it seldom spent time in the nasty streets, rotating from morning shower and first gulp of pills to rehearsal studio to editing room to home base day after day in a wheelhouse grind, the porniness of Eighth Avenue pitted the atmosphere of the film, the taste of cinders. One hotsy number, “Air Rotica,” staged as a promo for the only airline to offer in-flight orgies, plunged Balanchine’s
PAMTGG
into the polymorphously perverse, nose-diving into an orchestrated free-for-all bathed in a bathhouse fog presided over by a blond, bare-breasted Valkyrie named Sandahl Bergman, who, recumbent, lifted her left leg into a perfect forty-five-degree extension, her foot pointed at the ceiling like a pistol, making all men her slaves. It should have been a crowning image, the Christmas tree star, but the rest of the dance fell apart before your eyes, like a human pyramid sleepily buckling, tumbling into soft rubble. It was like the big bang with a boomerang effect. The inherent escalation in porn/erotica, the need to keep upping the kinky ante, had only so much room to multiply before the explosion of energy dispersed and diffused, leaving a dead core and a lot of mess for the maid to clean up afterward. Once you get to orgy, artistically there’s no place left to go.

Ballet delivered a better bang, one that sunflowered and fanned out into the future. When Mikhail Baryshnikov defected from the Kirov Ballet in 1974 (“Glimpses of Genius” was the title of Croce’s critical dispatch on Baryshnikov’s pre-defection performances in Montreal, just as word of Bruce Springsteen’s thundering thighs was traveling up from the Jersey shore) and made his U.S. debut with American Ballet Theatre in
Giselle
, it was not only a comet moment for ballet but one of the defining jolts to hit New York in the seventies. And this was a positive jolt, unlike the string of sucker punches that kept the city reeling from one
what-next?
crisis to another, stuck in a revolving turnstile of tabloid fright headlines, disappointment being a portion of our daily bread during the protracted death croak of the Nixon presidency. His thunderbolt arrival was a Lindbergh-landing morale lifter from where I sat, which was in the balcony of City Center on West Fifty-fifth, whose seats were a tight squeeze even before the great expansion of American butts spread across the vast prairie. It was there that I saw Baryshnikov’s first rabidly awaited performances and received a tutorial in star power as paradigm shifter. “Ballet is Woman,” goes the inevitable Balanchine maxim, and, as Elizabeth Kendall writes in a bio-historical work in progress about Balanchine, ballerinas were the drama initiators and primary interpreters onstage, the searchers and choosers—that’s what made them heroines to many young feminists, eager to climb out of their heads. But when it comes to the wider public, it is usually the herald infusion of male force, glamour, and elevation that socks dance to a new level of matador excitement and supplies critical mass. Now, Baryshnikov was no Rudolf Nureyev, whose defection to the West in 1961 struck a Byronic chord that cape-whipped through the decade, his dance partnership with Margot Fonteyn the closest thing ballet ever had to an ongoing royal wedding. Baryshnikov wasn’t dark, imperious, mercurial, and knightly; he didn’t possess a matinee idol profile, cruel amusement and passionate ardor playing about his lips. (We didn’t see the practiced-seducer panel of his personality until the 1977 movie
The Turning Point
, where his soulful dog eyes worked overtime.) He wasn’t tall, and unlike some other not-tall
danseurs nobles
he didn’t project cloud-stature. The altitude was in his jumps and whirlybird pirouettes, which seemed to have not only more air around them than other spring-boarders but a freeze-frame clarity even in fast motion; he achieved high-definition before our analog eyes. The impact on the audience was pandemonious, and when I left the theater, the night itself seemed in an excellent mood. New York nights are like that, acquiring an extra snap to remind you nowhere else will do. I made it a point to see every Baryshnikov performance I affordably could, which back then didn’t require ransoming off a hostage or two, and when Gelsey Kirkland joined ABT, he had a partner who transcended the rodeo tricks that some of the company’s stars were prone to reeling off to crashing waterfalls of ovation and bouquets crapping from the rafters.