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The Tutu’s Tale: A Cultural History Of Ballet’s ‘Angels’
Ms. HOMANS: One of the great ballerinas once told me: When you start to have a dialogue in your head when you’re performing, that’s when you know it’s going wrong. In a way, you want to get rid of those words and sort of enter a kind of different way of existing for the time that you’re on stage. So instead of thinking about…
GROSS: A way of thinking about your music and movement?
Ms. HOMANS: That’s right. You know, so instead of thinking about what you’re going to have for dinner that night, which you could do because dancers know their steps so well, and they are so second nature that your mind can wander. But, you know, to sort of shift into another dimension, as it were, so that you’re not thinking about that, but you’re in a kind of close synchrony with music.
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GROSS: If there was an authoritarian side to Balanchine’s company it sounds like there was also a very spiritual side. He was Russian Orthodox and you say that partly because of his faith, he believed that music and dance were sacred arts and that one finds God through the senses. Did you experience that when you were dancing?
Ms. HOMANS: Oh, very much so. I mean that was the - that was the reason to dance, and that’s the main thing that one experienced on a sort of daily basis. You know, there is something almost religious about ballet and about being a dancer. It’s a commitment, the ritual of going to class everyday, of being with people and performing these great works. And when you work very hard and you achieve a kind of coordination and skill in the body, there is a way in which it sets you free. And, you know, if you’re doing these beautiful movements to music and you manage to get it all right, which doesn’t happen all the time, but when you do, it is an extraordinary and transcendent experience.
GROSS: And you say that Balanchine had this uncompromising emphasis on now, not holding back, doing it all, giving your all now. What did that mean for you as a dancer?
Ms. HOMANS: You know, as a dancer it was really a kind of concentration. It’s much harder than it sounds to focus your energy now and not be thinking about what I’m going to do in five minutes or in five hours or what happened before and was it OK or, you know, so-and-so made me angry or wasn’t that a nice thing for them to say, to just put everything aside, focus on this movement here, now and really sort of throw your full self into it, in a way that’s not just throwing but intelligent, is quite a discipline. So, you know, there was that side of it.
Jennifer Homans on Fresh Air interviewed by Terry Gross
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