Darci’s farewell performance

Darci Kistler dancing Swan Lake at her farewell performance June 27, 2010

The New York Times
June 28, 2010
By ALASTAIR MACAULAY

A Long Goodbye From the Last of Balanchine’s Ballerinas

On Sunday afternoon at the David H. Koch Theater, the ballerina Darci Kistler made her farewell to dancing onstage, at 46. Some in the audience remembered how she first burst into their lives 30 years before, when she danced the Swan Queen with the School of American Ballet. I cannot forget that when she joined New York City Ballet that same year, she already danced not like a flower in bud but like a full-blown rose, in her first solo role as a professional dancer. The company danced in Paris in September 1980, and she performed the Scherzo in Balanchine’s “Tchaikovsky Suite No. 3.” To choreography that had seemed among the master’s least distinguished she brought an easy hugeness of scale and a sparkling rapture that were intoxicating.

Surely not since the 1930s had a performer so youthful arrived on the scene with a dance character so fully formed. In November 1980 in New York, Ms. Kistler made her debut in the second movement of Balanchine’s “Symphony in C,” one of the great ballerina roles. To find such a combination of sweep and sweetness was startling. She had fearlessness, wit, delicacy, expansiveness and an irrepressible love of dancing. Her long, tapering limbs; remarkable breadth of shoulder; loveliness of facial features (and in particular her lips, whose beautiful outline registered in the theater with great distinction); the beautiful pliancy of her feet: all these aspects were already apparent.

There are tales of how Balanchine was delighted by her rhythmic freedom as she reaccentuated passages of old choreography and thereby rejuvenated them. When she appeared again in “Symphony in C,” 15 months after her debut, I marveled at how much more contrast she then found in it.

Jerome Robbins adored her dancing too. In the first performances of his “Gershwin Piano Concerto” (1982), she ate up space in a series of turns. But though Balanchine’s remaining time was short (he died in 1983), hers was shorter. Before she had been with the company two years, a severe ankle injury occurred and kept her offstage for years.

Only in 1987-90 did she start again to reconquer the ballerina repertory and acquire further roles. Though she never danced with the same easy attack again, her delight in dance did not fail, and her sensitivity and dance intelligence kept growing. And, most valuable of all, the freedom of her musicality remained, lighting up the Balanchine repertory.

In one physical respect, she had become only more remarkable: her hair. There are Balanchine and Robbins roles where the ballerina dances with loose hair, and Ms. Kistler’s now reached her hips: a fair, voluminous cascade. When she sped across the stage in a series of turns in “Walpurgisnacht,” her face now invisible beneath the released locks, this mane became a traveling vortex.

The film “George Balanchine’s ‘The Nutcracker,’ ” in which she appeared as the Sugar Plum Fairy, suggests that her glory lasted until at least 1993. But my memory is that by 1992, her dancing had become scaled down, polite and musically safe. Since then her career has been a long, slow fade.

The sweetness of her presence remains. Sunday’s performance began with Balanchine’s pair of Stravinsky ballets, “Monumentum pro Gesualdo” and “Movements for Piano and Orchestra.” The most affecting moments came from the turn of her head, now to her partner, now to the audience, now to the wide space before her. Though her hair is darker and shorter, the light still falls beautifully on the planes of her face.

After the first intermission, she returned as Titania in Balanchine’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” dancing the Nocturne scene when the fairy queen becomes enamored of Bottom in his ass’s disguise. Titania had been one of her earliest roles, and, again, her sweetness of manner made its old impression.

The company then performed “Danses Concertantes,” the ballet whose 1989 revival she had so distinguished. Finally, after the second intermission, she danced the final act of the production of “Swan Lake” by her husband, Peter Martins. Thirty years after her School of American Ballet Swan Queen, and 29 years after Balanchine coached her as the Swan Queen in his different one-act “Swan Lake,” now she was giving us her Swan Queen as a swan song.

Who is to judge the twilight of a ballerina? My life was changed by the 56-year-old Margot Fonteyn, but there were people who could not bear to see her dancing anymore, just because it had once meant so much to them. This season I have seen momentary glimmers of what I once loved — the twinkle of Ms. Kistler’s feet to the music in some lifts in Mr. Martins’s “Morgen,” and her poise and line in his “Thou Swell.”

After Sunday’s performance I had coffee with a balletgoer who had become a devotee of New York City Ballet in 1996. I was hoping that he would tell me how the later Kistler had meant to him something of what Fonteyn once meant to me. But in all those years, Ms. Kistler’s dancing had never been one of his reasons to follow the company. Her pale autumn has lasted far longer than her bright spring and summer combined, and I cannot see that since 1992 she has been a good role model for the young. Often her mane of hair has been a mere shtick. Her solo dancing in the Stravinsky ballets was wretched, flicking lightly at steps that require a rigor she lost long ago.

At curtain calls, sweetness was all. Her partners that afternoon — Charles Askegard (“Monumentum”), Sébastien Marcovici (“Movements”), Henry Seth (“Midsummer” and, in “Swan Lake,” Rothbart) and Jared Angle (her “Swan Lake” prince) — brought her flowers, embraces, laughter. The excellent conductor (Clotilde Otranto), Ms. Kistler’s former partners, other dancers, her husband, her daughter and three of her brothers were among those who joined her onstage. Confetti fell in showers. With the retirement of this last Balanchine ballerina, we have all moved one generation on in history.

Personal comment: I thought about not posting this because it’s so sad, but it’s not as though it isn’t already out there and I decided I needed to have a record of Darci’s last perf on my blog. Sigh!

The Red Shoes - Part II

Title from the 1948 film

The New York Times
November 8, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist

Ballet’s Mean Streets

By MAUREEN DOWD

Some movies you have to watch whenever they’re on.

One of those, for me, is “The Red Shoes.” Like its doomed heroine, I’m pulled inexorably along by the bewitched crimson ballet slippers into a lush, swirling landscape that turns into an inescapable, bloody hell.

There are many great works of art about obsession, from Heathcliff’s wailing to Ahab’s whaling, but this is surely the most gorgeously haunting. The destructive obsession portrayed here is not with a lover or outside object of desire. It’s about the tyranny of creativity.

As the white-skinned, blue-blooded ballerina Vicky Page, Moira Shearer dons the red slippers and is forced to choose between love and art.

There was never a screen pairing more magical than Moira and Technicolor. The flame-haired Scottish dancer is so radiant in the Criterion DVD of the 1948 classic directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger that it’s impossible to believe she could glow more brightly. But in the lovingly polished version of the British movie that debuted at Cannes and is now showing at Film Forum in New York, Moira is even more incandescent.

The original backers of the movie had so little confidence that a stylized tragic ballet film could do well that they didn’t even give it an official London premiere.

Now Martin Scorsese calls “The Red Shoes” “one of the true miracles of film history.” He long ago began an obsessive campaign to restore Powell’s reputation. His Film Foundation and the UCLA Film and Television Archive have taken the lead in digitally alchemizing the movie from cracked, shrunk, moldy negatives.

Scorsese fell in love with the movies of Powell and Pressburger when he was an asthmatic kid living in a four-room tenement apartment in New York, watching “Million Dollar Movie” on TV and going to theaters with his dad.

“They have a flair and flamboyance you don’t usually find in films being made at that time,” he told me. “And a fearlessness about emotion. They create worlds that take no prisoners.”

In “Black Narcissus,” their 1947 movie about a lustful nun in the Himalayas, played by Deborah Kerr — they seemed drawn to redheads for Technicolor — the sister faints from sexual desire and the screen goes orange. “That’s such a wonderful way to express desire,” Scorsese marveled.

In a letter to Kerr in the early ’40s, Pressburger laid out their manifesto, including: “No artist believes in escapism. And we secretly believe that no audience does. We have proved, at any rate, that they will pay to see the truth, for no other reason than her nakedness.”

In the early ’70s, Scorsese tracked down the broke and discredited Powell in London and took him to a pub.

“Michael was very surprised to hear that his films had thrilled a younger audience and given fuel to the imagination of myself and Brian De Palma and Francis Coppola,” Scorsese once recalled. “He went home that night and recorded in his diary that he felt his blood course through his veins again after meeting us in the bar.”

In 1980, Coppola invited Powell to become a consultant at Zoetrope Studios. He moved to America and married Scorsese’s film editor, Thelma Schoonmaker.

It is interesting that Powell twice counseled Scorsese against the color red. He didn’t like the red boxing gloves in the early rushes of “Raging Bull” and urged Scorsese to switch to a black-and-white film. (He did.) Powell told him “Mean Streets” had too much red lighting and he should take some out. (He didn’t.)

“The Red Shoes” is based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale of the same name about a little girl who becomes vain about her red shoes and gets confused about her priorities. As in the movie, the shoes force the girl to dance day and night, and then she dies. But the fable has an even grimmer coda: The girl asks an executioner to cut off her feet.

The shimmering Moira Shearer could never take off the red shoes, either.

“To be constantly associated with that one film is really quite dismaying,” she once said. “It’s as though I’d done nothing else in my life. I mean, it’s odd, when you’re 61, to be haunted by something you’ve done when you were 21!”

She resisted doing the movie, finding the script “silly and banal”; she feared it would deflect her from a classical ballet career. And when she died at 80 in 2006, her husband dismissively called her film work “a bit of a distraction.”

Shearer said she faced hostility when she returned to the ballet world from some who considered her overnight movie fame frivolous. She always worried that she was succeeding more for her looks than her dancing.

She was eclipsed by Margot Fonteyn, married, had four children and receded. She wrote a book about her experiences with George Balanchine. As Clive Barnes wrote in Dance Magazine, “She had a disappointing and disappointed dance career.”

In later years, Shearer was asked to give her occupation in “Who’s Who.”

“Writer,” she replied.

Personal comment: It would be interesting to know what Shearer’s career would have been like in classical ballet if she had not done the film. Dame Nanette de Valois the founder of Sadler’s Wells Ballet as the company was known at the time of the film could be every bit as emperious as Boris Lermontov and Margot Fonteyn was the star. Many incredably talented women languished in Fonteyn’s shadow during her too long career with de Valois’s companies. When the company toured the U.S. after The Red Shoes became a huge hit in America everyone wanted to see Shearer dance rather than Fonteyn and management, and one presumes Fonteyn, were not happy. Here is The Red Shoes trailer from the un-restored original film.

Ballerina birth control before the pill

The Prentif cavity rim cervical cap

Ballet boots and Prentif: In addition to UDP (a premium service) at the ranch we offer fantasy ballet encounters with our ballet dancers from Central Europe in standard studio, dressing room or salon settings. Or, we will create a custom setting for the encounter if the client can stand the cost. On request the girls will wear some of the older styles of contraceptive barriers and the Prentif cap is a particular favorite of men who want to recreate the 1930s – 1950s milieu right down to the exact contraception that was widely used by dancers in Europe in the years before the pill became available. Ballet boots that button rather than lace up never really caught on, but the nightclubs, especially in Germany and Austria – between the wars - were deep into ballet related fetishes. The Viennese fetish boot (circa 1900), which sported a heel that was actually longer than the sole of the shoe, thus making standing and/or walking impossible was the ancester of the ballet boot. A creative and enteerprising balletgirl shortened the heels of her Viennese fetish boots and a new style was born that only became resurgent again in the 1980s.

Fetish boots and shoes: A client can choose what fetish footwear his partner will wear. Ballet boots are available in ankle, calf, knee or thigh lengths that the client can help her lace up. In addition, for men with a pointe shoe sole design fetish the following makers pointes are available: Freed, Capezio, Bloch, Gamba, Chacott, Grishko, Russian Pointe, Merlet and Schachtner and pointes from other makers can be worn with two weeks advance notice. At her client’s request his partner will wear a particular maker’s shoes and style so the men can admire the sole patterns on their pointes, or even suck on the platforms, while she is on her back with her feet in the air taking his thrusts against the soft thick latex dome of her Prentif..

In the European cabarets where fetish was king between the great wars abortions were common for unplanned pregnancies that resulted from failed barrier contraceptive methods when oil based lubes were routinely used with latex barriers by unsuspecting women which caused frequent failures especially for new users who hadn’t been properly warned. Of course there were also the tricks where a dancer would arrange for her rivals birth control to fail by slipping punctured condoms into the rivals purse or dance bag when it was known she would be entertaining her lover for a quickie and unlikely to be as careful as she should. The recovery time from the physical, and occasionally mental, effects of an abortion guaranteed that the pregnant woman would be off stage for weeks as she regained her strength and confidence giving a rival an opportunity to steal her roles. We still see some of that today with school girls exchanging a rival’s pills with a dummy pack causing her to get her period or knocked up. Of course with Plan B and Mifeprex that sort of thing is quickly resolved today as little more than a minor inconvenience with very little worry.

Soft rubber caps: In the early 1900s there were custom made metal cervical caps of silver or gold, but those were very expensive and rarely used by performers, unless paid for by a wealthy lover. The answer to failed condoms for most women who wanted to control their own fertility was to wear a latex cervical cap that was rugged enough that it wouldn’t fail immediately even if it was used with Vaseline or another petroleum product. That way the woman could check for leaks, apply spermicide and insert in privacy where no one could tamper with her cap. And, if an oil based lube was used the Prentif while beginning to experience damage wouldn’t leak during the encounter nor while providing at least eight hours of protection afterward while her partner’s sperm died in her belly. The soft rubber dome of the Prentif also provides sensation for a man of average size who wants to thrust into his partner’s cervix while providing her with a modest amount of thrust buffering by distributing the energy of his thrusts equally around the walls at the base of the cervix.

Wearing a cavity rim cap dry: Actually, a well fitting Prentif, just like a well fitting Oves cap can be worn ‘dry’, that is w/o spermicide in the dome. Of course that means that if it should dislodge there is no backup contraception, but with a well fitting Prentif or Oves the likelihood of it dislodging is very remote, unless worn during the woman’s period when it could fill with her menstrual flow and ‘float’ off her cervix. A FemCap, the only cap generally available in the U.S. at the moment, can not be safely worn w/o using spermicide in the dome and also in the channel on the outside of the cap at the base of the brim. After a few cycles, when I was sure of its excellent fit, I wore my Prentif dry and have done the same with my Oves caps (once I became confident of their strong suction on my cervix) for more than seven years, that’s ninety-three cycles, with no pregnancy scares. And for someone who is as sexually active as I am that is an amazing tribute to the tiny bit of .25mm thick transparent silicone rubber that keeps me well protected by sucking on my cervix. Occasionally a casual lover will want me to give him one of my Oves caps, but they are not souvenirs. I think they are such an intimate part of me that I burn my old Oves caps along with my dead pointe shoes so that nothing so intimate as my cervical protection is ever given away.

Ballerina’s with children: From the ascendancy of women in classical ballet through the 1940s when personal discipline and sacrifice for the art of classical ballet was expected and enforced – by ballet management – women did not have children and expect to continue as a ballet dancer. Stars as famous as the British ballerina Margot Fonteyn, after an unintended pregnancy and abortion, had her tubes tied and managed to hush it up to continue dancing. Today, ballet dancers, if they are good enough so they are not easily replaced by management, can have children and a career as well. Darcey Bussell (British Royal Ballet retired), Julie Kent (ABT) and Alessandra Ferri (ABT retired) to name a few all had their families in their 30s after their careers as ballet Principals were well established and returned to dancing afterward. Cyd Charisse the lovely long legged MGM ballet dancer was offered the female lead in An American in Paris if she would have an abortion. She refused to abort her son with her husband Tony Martin and Leslie Caron took her place beside Gene Kelly in the 1951 musical. We’ve come a long way baby! Sigh!