American Ballet Theatre: A Close-Up in Time

<v Speaker>Produced in New York by WNET. <v Speaker>This program was made possible by grants from the Andrew W. <v Speaker>Mellon Foundation. <v Speaker>The National Endowment for the Arts. <v Speaker>And the Ford Foundation. <v narrator>Dance is the oldest form of theater, a living art <v narrator>which summons up centuries of dance tradition. <v narrator>Each dancer must bring to each new performance a physical technique that <v narrator>costs a lifetime to develop and sustain. <v narrator>And a great ballet company must bring to the stage an excitement that lures us <v narrator>to each performance with fresh expectancy.

<v narrator>Swan Lake is classic ballet at its best. <v narrator>Vividly reflecting its origins in the imperial courts of 19th century Europe. <v narrator>In 20th century America, ballet started to explore new themes and styles. <v narrator>But America still had no major company of its own. <v narrator>Then in 1940, American Ballet Theater was formed. <v narrator>While its training and repertoire followed a direct line from the European roots of <v narrator>ballet, American Ballet Theater was conceived to nurture a vast repertoire <v narrator>of choreographic creativity. <v narrator>This dream appealed particularly to some of the company's young American artists looking <v narrator>for a place to develop their own ideas. <v narrator>Among them, Agnes de Mille.

<v narrator>Here she and other young choreographers opened traditional ballet to American styles <v narrator>and concepts. <v narrator>Another of the pioneers in ballet theater was Anthony Tudor, whose ballets opened <v narrator>a whole new vocabulary of dramatic movement in dance. <v narrator>Today, after three decades, the company has danced the works of more <v narrator>than 100 choreographers from de Mille and Tudor to Alvin Ailey. <v narrator>From Michel Fokine to Jose Limon. <v narrator>From the contemporary genius of Jerome Robbins back to the great European classics. <v narrator>The repertoire of American Ballet Theater is a marvel of versatility,

<v narrator>but one work has always had a special place in the heart of the company. <v narrator>Because on opening night, in 1940, when the curtain rose on the premiere <v narrator>performance, this was their opening work. <v narrator>The classic ballet Les Sylphides. <v Agnes de Mille>Well, of course, we began with Sylphides and we had several ballets of Michel Fokine's,

<v Agnes de Mille>we had we had two or three and actually he did the last ballet of his life, the American <v Agnes de Mille>Ballet Theater. But it was, of course, the intent to develop <v Agnes de Mille>new forms, new styles, new experiments. <v Agnes de Mille>I think the hallmark of American Ballet Theater is its catholicity, the enormous <v Agnes de Mille>range of its of its repertoire. <v Agnes de Mille>There is no repertoire in the world like this. <v Agnes de Mille>I would love to have composed myself a classic ballet, but I couldn't. <v Agnes de Mille>I'm contemporary. I'm American. <v Agnes de Mille>I come from my own background. I have to speak from my own background. <v Agnes de Mille>And that would be American vernacular. <v Agnes de Mille>I introduced some tap steps into it and so forth. <v Agnes de Mille>Well, that's part of our vernacular and we have to use that, its native. <v Agnes de Mille>It's our idiom. And the register <v Agnes de Mille>was a Russian. He rushed to the telephone and said, she's reducing this. <v Agnes de Mille>This ballet rehearsal to the status of a nightclub. <v Agnes de Mille>Well, he was talking in Russian. I couldn't understand him. <v Agnes de Mille>So it didn't make any difference at all. And I just went right on. <v Agnes de Mille>And then when it went to the riding movements, which are very difficult to

<v Agnes de Mille>do, they are not just a hobby horse movement. <v Agnes de Mille>They use the whole body the way any athletic exercise uses the entire body. <v Agnes de Mille>And by the way, I think that's one of the things the Americans do do. <v Agnes de Mille>And I made these men really use their backs the way a tennis player does, the <v Agnes de Mille>way a pitcher does in baseball. <v Agnes de Mille>The whole ballet of Rodale, I think, is very American. <v Agnes de Mille>Not only is it situation American, of course it's a genre study of the West, but <v Agnes de Mille>the style style is. <v Agnes de Mille>And I don't mean just the idiom of the dancers. <v Agnes de Mille>If you know anything about early 19th century American painting, you see America <v Agnes de Mille>has to do with great space, great land masses, great enormous space. <v Agnes de Mille>And a few people, even the Indians, will feel compared to the land. <v Agnes de Mille>And there is this in the music. <v Agnes de Mille>Aaron Copeland wasn't using authentic tonalities. <v Agnes de Mille>This has become the American sound because he struck certain cold, <v Agnes de Mille>rather penetrating and evocative intervals that suggests space

<v Agnes de Mille>to us. <v Agnes de Mille>Oliver Smith and his set stressed the space, the enormous great <v Agnes de Mille>masses of land and mountains and sky and a few little corral rails. <v Agnes de Mille>Now I use the people when they're quiet very still. <v Agnes de Mille>

<v Agnes de Mille>Antony Tudor is an English choreographer who came over.

<v Agnes de Mille>He was known somewhat in London, but he came over to America on the invitation of Lucia <v Agnes de Mille>Chase and he made his great name here. He became an international figure here. <v Agnes de Mille>Tudor is the most subtle analyst of human emotions working in this medium <v Agnes de Mille>that I know of. And he has absolutely illumined and translated <v Agnes de Mille>human gesture into human thinking. You don't know when people are doing arabesques and <v Agnes de Mille>doing the classic vocabulary. It is no longer an arabesque. <v Agnes de Mille>It's a question or a sigh. <v Antony Tudor>OK. That's not bad. <v Antony Tudor>I didn't have to open any boundaries with these ballets, I had to come back to <v Antony Tudor>the streets and the people I lived with. <v Antony Tudor>If I'm doing a drama in dance, I would only do it in an obvious <v Antony Tudor>way because I want to the- every single person in the audience from a 3 year <v Antony Tudor>old child to a 70 year old, whatever. <v Antony Tudor>To know exactly what it is and that it should be explicit. <v Antony Tudor>Well, of course, dramatic work immediately assumes you're talking about drama,

<v Antony Tudor>which we associate with spoken voice with a play. <v Antony Tudor>If I speak of the drama, I immediately think of <v Antony Tudor>almost anything from in the 19th century, 20th century theater. <v Antony Tudor>And of course, drama in ballet is the same thing without the voice <v Antony Tudor>and without anything that the voice could say rather better than it said and <v Antony Tudor>movement. I think in petrify or <v Antony Tudor>any of my good works are good sections of good works. <v Antony Tudor>I've expressed in movement something that says to an audience more <v Antony Tudor>than could be said. <v Antony Tudor>To that audience by the spoken word.