Revisiting A Virtuoso
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A wealth of rare footage makes Video Artists International’s new DVD, “Jacques d’Amboise: Portrait of a Great American Dancer,” essential viewing. For 30 years, Mr. d’Amboise was a star of the New York City Ballet under George Balanchine, who made many roles for Mr. d’Amboise and cast the versatile dancer throughout his repertory. VAI’s compilation, drawn from American and Canadian television performances, enables us to see Mr. d’Amboise at his best, performing with some of the greatest ballerinas of his day — legendary Balanchine muses who were, like Mr. d’Amboise himself, exemplary interpreters of Balanchine’s work.
As Mr. d’Amboise explains in an interview appended to the performance footage, he came from a working-class family, presided over by a mother determined that her four children would reap the benefits of cultural improvement. Therefore, unlike so many male dancers of the day, he started ballet lessons as a child, training at Balanchine’s School of American Ballet. Before he had entered his teens he was performing with Ballet Society, the forerunner of NYCB; at 15, he dropped out of high school and joined the company. NYCB badly needed a young virtuoso male, as well as a tall partner for Balanchine’s long-stemmed ballerinas; Mr. d’Amboise was dancing leading roles well before he was out his teens.
Mr. d’Amboise’s performing showcases his agility — rare in men of his height, a notably high and easy jump, and the soft landings of a big cat. His performing also demonstrates a particularly jazzy style to his arms. That style is inherent to the bulk of Balanchine’s choreography, but here seems to be a direct emulation of the way Balanchine himself often used his arms when demonstrating or teaching, as is visible in any footage of Balanchine at work.
The earliest footage shows Mr. d’Amboise as Mack in Lew Christensen’s “Filling Station,” a role originally danced by Christensen in 1938. When NYCB revived the work in 1953, d’Amboise’s performance gave his career a big push forward. A year later, the ballet was performed for television’s “Max Liebman Presents.”
“Filling Station” chronicles, in knockabout fashion, a night in the life of a gas station attendant. There are motorists and truck drivers and an inebriated pair of socialites, exuberantly brought to life by a host of essential NYCB personnel of that era, including Janet Reed and Todd Bolender — dance comedians of the first rank — as the revelers. “Filling Station” is utterly delightful, and exposes itself as a missing link, as crucial an example of balletic Americana as “Rodeo,” “Fancy Free,” or “Billy the Kid.” Mr. Christensen creates such a completely believable balletic realm that we never question why a man is performing cabrioles next to a gas pump. Mr. d’Amboise’s nonchalant style here finds its perfect youthful fruition.
Jerome Robbins’s “Afternoon of a Faun,” performed in 1955 by Mr. d’Amboise opposite Tanaquil LeClercq, is a magical and mesmerizing episode. LeClercq had created the ballet two years earlier with Francisco Moncion, a very different kind of dancer from Mr. d’Amboise. Moncion was a danceactor and an evocative presence rather than a technician and leading man. Nijinsky’s faun, reclining in the sun of a mythic landscape, now was envisioned as a young ballet dancer relaxing in a ballet studio.
Mr. d’Amboise as the modern-day faun is strikingly colloquial as he watches LeClercq appraisingly while she preens before the studio mirror. But it is her presence that enables him — more easily than one would have suspected — to reference its wellsprings in Mallarmé’s poetry and the Arcadian landscape to which it paid tribute.
A year after this “Faun” was filmed, LeClercq was stricken by polio and never walked or danced again; all one need do is watch this segment to realize this was not only a hideous personal tragedy but an equally catastrophic event for NYCB. LeClerq was the most prismatic of NYCB’s ballerinas; here in “Faun” she shifts continuously between enigmatic remoteness and sexually provocative reality.
Another great and much longer-lasting partnership for Mr. d’Amboise was his relationship with Melissa Hayden, who danced until age 50, retired in 1973, and died just this past August. She came to ballet only in her teens and to Balanchine even later, joining NYCB after having becoming an established soloist at Ballet Theatre (now American Ballet Theatre). Three excerpts with Hayden enable us to see a more faceted performer than the image of a dynamic virtuoso with which her name is today synonymous. She and Mr. d’Amboise are triumphant in an adagio set to the Snow Queen music from Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker,” choreographed in 1965 by Mr. d’Amboise himself (from time to time he also contributed works to NYCB’s repertory). Hayden’s understanding of gesture allows her, even at her most vehement and assertive, to manifest a grandeur and poetry not second nature to her.
In 1956, the pair danced Bolender’s “The Still Point” when it was first introduced into NYCB’s repertory. Here they are shown six years later performing a rather Tudor-esque duet from Bolender’s ballet that isn’t overly derivative, and, in fact, holds up very well indeed. Hayden is tender and passionate, but muted, impersonating one of the repressed heroines who populated narrative ballet in the 1940s and ’50s. The two also performed the roles they had first danced in Balanchine’s “Stars and Stripes” in 1958. Their pas de deux is a send-up as well as a celebration of flag-waving boosterism, which also becomes both a satire of the exhibition pas de deux, as well as a pyrotechnical and updated corollary to it.
“Jacques d’Amboise” contains one excerpt outside of his repertory at NYCB: the “Black Swan” pas de deux from “Swan Lake.” In this 1960 performance, Mr. d’Amboise partners Chilean ballerina Lupe Serrano, then a star of Ballet Theatre. A steely virtuoso, Ms. Serrano also finds varied and interesting ways to soften her bravura. But as a classical prince, Mr. d’Amboise seems slightly miscast.
By contrast, he is completely convincing as a young divinity of Balanchine’s imagining in the title role of “Apollo,” performed in 1960. He thrashes through the birth and maturation throes of Balanchine’s wild child but always keeps his sights set on the summit of a suggested Olympus. His Terpsichore is Diana Adams, a member of the Balanchine pantheon who, like Hayden, came to NYCB from the very different world of Ballet Theatre. There is a severity to Adams that almost evokes the righteousness of the aesthetic as well as religious convert, but there is redoubtable grace and authority as well. One feels that Adams, almost more than any other Balanchine ballerina, is intent on doing exactly what Balanchine wanted, and that this was both onus and fulfillment.
VAI’s “Jacques d’Amboise,” one of the most important recent dance releases in years, functions both as a celebration of an outstanding performer and as a window on an entire epoch of American dance.