D'Amboise and Gaite Parisienne DVDs from VAI

[Dale]

Jack, I can't account for live performing, but the videos I've seen of NYCB (and some other companies) in the 50s and early 60s do have a faster tempo. I think the tempos slowed down when extentions got higher - it takes time to unfurl those legs.

[bart]

I just viewed the "Portrait of a Great American Dancer" DVD and was enthralled. (It helps that my first sustained exposure to ballet was to d'Amboise, Hayden, and that generation of NYCB dancers in the late 50s. These were my heroes on so many levels. When I was a teenager, I would have given a great deal to be even a little bit like d'Amboise.)

I chose to watch Apollo last, maybe because I was afraid that this set of performances would not live up to my rose-colored memories. I started with Filing Station, silly, charming, fairly funny, with a touchingly young and slender d'Amboise at 20. Remarkable elevation and turns. At two different points he does 8 pirouettes with perfect control and picking up speed at the end. A bonus for those familar with the Balanchine's biography, Eddie Bigelow is sharp and catlike as one of the two truck-drivers.

I never saw LeClerq dance and was mesmerised by the Faun, despite the fuzziness of the old film. Her body was not what I expected: fuller thighs, shorter torso than the willowy ballerina I've always seen in my mind. More womanly. Her dancing was subtle, measured, flowing legato, and she combines in a strange way the sense that she is completely absorbed in the dance, but not really aware of the partner. Her reaction to the kiss was more more understated than many I've seen. She touches her cheek. And then does it again as she departs (almost like a distant echo of an echo). d'Amboise is a wonderful and very generous partner, even when checking himself out in the mirror.

Lupe Serrano is a very pleasant suprise as Odile in the pas de deux. Really wonderful. I wonder why we don't hear more about her when people talk about the dancers of that generation. Considering the cement floor and the slick painted surface (challenges discussed by d'Amboise at the end of the DVD) her technique and panache are first-class. A real star.

In The Still Point (Todd Bolender), Hayden expresses a quality of vulnerablity that she did not usually show in her other roles. (She was even a rather strong Odette.) This is lovely pas de deux (described as "Love Duet" in the brochure), and one of the rare filmed dances that actually benefits from closeup shots of the dancers' faces. I don't know if the whole ballet would still hold up, but something shlould be revived

And what about Apollo? This was a 1960 Canadian television production, with Diana Adams (Terpsichore), Jillana (Calliope), and Francia Russell (Polyhymnia). I've seen a number of Apollos over the years, from d'Amboise and Ludlow through Villella, Baryshnikov, and Martins, up to Boal and a few lesser known dancers recently. d'Amboise was my first. This is a stunning performance, dramatically and tehcnically -- one that moved me and interested me more than any other. (As to technique, there's a 9-piroutte combination, speeding up at the end, that staggers belief.)

d'Amboise is not really capable of moving all the way to true Godhead (something Martins did more imposingly). But he shows the beginnings and the transition with complexity and intensity. This is the long version, beginning with the birth. I repeated the scene of the unwrapping (unswaddling?) several times. Watch d'Amboise's face and the quality of his movements: there's shock, panic, a kind of rage at being awaked and deposited into an alien world, then a gradual and quite subtle calming down and coming to terms with the new world in which he finds himself. Adams is imposing and somewhat distant. Jillana (truly a forgotten dancer) is seductive and the one I personally would have chosen if I were Apollo. Russell does her best to keep up, but her epaulement, placement and facial sometimes seem to belong to a slightly different ballet -- not the one being performed by her fellows.

In the interview at the end, d'Amboise says pays tribute to the beautiful male dancers of today -- "they're better than me.... But when they do Apollo, they don't have Balanchine there to show them." "It should never be abrupt ... it stretches ... "

d'Amboise had Balanchine with him for many years. It shows.