On Dance
JACOBS, LAURA
On Dance REMEMBERING FONTEYN AND GRAHAM BY LAURA JACOBS Two important chapters in the history of dance closed during the early months of 1991 when Margot Fonteyn and Martha Graham, a Dame...
...Of course, she also benefited from the fact that she made her American debut in the Royal's 1949 production of Beauty, remembered as much for its astonishing timing and near planetary scope as for her performance...
...Born Margaret (Peggy) Hookham, she emerged from the chrysalis as something mysterious...
...and England...
...Of the two, Fonteyn is the more beloved...
...Nevertheless, Fonteyn maintained her unadorned style and composed her own true melody without diminishing the spirit of the scene...
...the surname was formed from her mother's Brazilian maiden name, Fontes, and shivered with elegance, although Brits in their no-nonsense way often pronounced it "fon-ten...
...At a special Dance Critics Association seminar on The Sleeping Beauty a few years ago, she was the touchstone and stopping block—no one could imagine the part after her...
...As she shrank in her blazing Halston caftans, her huge hemisphere of hair loomed larger than ever...
...Frederick Ashton, the company's budding choreographer, would eventually be knighted for the brilliance he drew out of himself and his young dancer...
...The titles alone suggest the nether aspect he saw in her dancing, the sensation of something just beyond reach...
...I realize now that there was none...
...ver time her face betrayed the effort...
...She became an icon: daughter of Isadora, sister of Picasso (they shared a penchant for Minotaurs), earth mother of modern dance...
...I do remember the first time I realized what that could mean for a dancer...
...they wrestle with abstraction, hoping to evoke the intangible...
...Her first partner, Robert Helpmann, once observed, "She had this strange quality of making you want to cry...
...She taunted the superego, honored the id...
...As one friend put it, "When Margot danced in New York, it was like a state visit...
...Ninette de Valois gave Fonteyn her first solo in The Haunted Ballroom...
...Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor are two of the giants who sprang from her brow...
...Rather, she chose to accentuate the understatement in classicism, and her dancing had a steady déliberateness about it...
...Her virtues were those of the English—perseverance, discipline, truthfulness...
...In the weeks following her death at age 71, I found myself trying to pinpoint the instant I became aware of her...
...Fonteyn's most important triumph was unquestionably Princess Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty...
...slim, well-shaped arms that remained taut as she aged...
...Perhaps no dancer in this century has so ceaselessly fought, cajoled, bent, and obeyed her own nerve and muscle...
...Moreover, Fonteyn's resemblance in profile to the young Queen Elizabeth II sent keen reverberations through the role of Aurora that made the ballet palpably relevant...
...Like no dancer before her, Graham made it her life's task to stare down the devil and the flesh...
...She attended small schools in the London area, then studied with a Russian dancer while living in China...
...Apparitions, Nocturne, Daphnis and Chloe, Sylvia, La Peri, and Ondine are only a few of the works Ashton created for Fonteyn from the '30s to the '50s...
...Contraction" became the great sad noun of her vocabulary: It stood for shame, pain, want...
...That sweet gesture, so much Fonteyn's own, says all we need to know about Aurora's heart, the day's brightness and the kingdom's hope for everlasting light...
...Will anyone again offer dances of such searing conviction to the sun, the moon and the solar plexus...
...She was the last great ballerina who looked as if she could take tea with the Queen and feel at home...
...L ucifer was not a great Graham work, but it bore her signature sexuality as well as her heavy cargo of hightension human folly...
...Indeed, every great ballerina epitomizes her country and her era...
...Who will tend her fires now...
...Upon returning to England in her teens, she entered the school attached to London's Vic-Wells Ballet, where she came under the influence of two formidable talents...
...Fonteyn, however, I simply sensed: Shewas a dark-eyed presence in a pearl choker, the discreet and definitive ballerina...
...Graham went on to make dances about heroines who mirrored her own ambitions, frustrations and renunciations—the Brontë sisters, for instance, Joan of Arc, Emily Dickinson—and about mythological figures webbed in mortal intrigue...
...I never saw Margot Fonteyn dance...
...Even in this physically inappropriate role, Fonteyn scanned...
...Graham took her curtain calls without fail, at times needing men on both sides to support her...
...Her first works were based on the pride of the outsider, the movement of the unmoving individual...
...Tamara Toumanova, "the black pearl of Russia," was a sultry still in Balletomane's Scrapbook...
...By today's standards, Fonteyn seems prim and docile in photos, perhaps even a bit matronly despite being fine-boned...
...But they both began their ascent in the '30s, were blessed with fruitful longevity, and redefined the terms of their art...
...He was right, although that quality is not communicated by the black and white photographs in ballet books...
...Fonteyn's blossoming prefigured the Royal Ballet's...
...On Dance REMEMBERING FONTEYN AND GRAHAM BY LAURA JACOBS Two important chapters in the history of dance closed during the early months of 1991 when Margot Fonteyn and Martha Graham, a Dame and a grande dame, died...
...The two women did not have much to do with each other...
...Yet the womanliness that seemed oldfashioned in stills was, in motion, Fonteyn's most exquisite feature...
...There have been many superlative Auroras, but balletomanes recall with the most delight the Kirov's Iriana Kolpakova and the Royal'sFonteyn...
...Her new first name rhymed with a great wine...
...When first we glimpse her in the early studies of the 1920s, she has the long facial bones of a gazelle and dewy eyes with curling lashes...
...Here was a dancer's "line" in its purest form, and it enabled one to make the leap: Line was the essence of character, a window on the dancer's soul...
...In the period following World War II, Marius Petipa's ballet about civilization recovering itself and the victory of good over evil summed up all that was dear to the U.S...
...later, she let in men...
...With their departure the waning 20th century darkened a little more...
...That is, like most of my generation, I never saw her in a live performance...
...Heretic, Lamentation and Primitive Mysteries do not sweepingly cover ground...
...What we see there is a straight, very English upper body...
...She began as a rebel in a bodystocking, unhappy with the overly academic and foreign choices before her...
...At the Actor's Studio, Graham taught stars of stage and screen ho w to move so that their bodies would not lie...
...and beautifully tapered legs that appeared shorter than they actually were...
...Her Juliet was chaste to the end, and as a consequence especially solemn and touching...
...and was a leggy lightning bolt—lovably feminine and alarmingly overscaled...
...Suzanne Farrell, on a tour stop in my native Chicago, danced "The Man I Love" in Who Cares...
...Her proportions were perfect, even if they lacked the exaggerated lengths or arches characteristic of modern bodies...
...In a film of The Sleeping Beauty she punctuates a flawless execution of the tricky Act I diagonal—a series of wickedly difficult steps into arabesque, dipped down into penchée—by teasing the ceremony of the moment and raising her face to catch the sun...
...Kenneth MacMillan's florid and passionate choreography had been created originally for the baroque manner of Lynn Seymour...
...Her directness could be heartbreaking...
...The consuming dialogue Graham held with her body ended this spring— she was 96...
...Her ballet training was exotic, too...
...Dame Margot matched deep concentration with simplicity of execution...
...Her cultivated but natural aura enabled her to mature with elegance—and because she avoided ballerina airs, when she allowed herself a girlish demeanor, the effect was fresh and genuine...
...Out of emotion comes form...
...It was while watching the Act III bedroom scene of a taped performance of Romeo and Juliet starring Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev...
...To begin with there was her name, with its wondrous balance of gravity and glamour...
...In fact, they represented a polarity in dance—Margot's classicism opposed Martha's modernism...
...She was never a hothouse automaton, one of those interchangeable dancers driven by technique...
...She worked on a grand scale, forcing the body not only to extend outward but to withdraw deeply inward...
...In the 1970s, while enjoying her late-blooming partnership with Rudolf Nureyev, Fonteyn performed in a star vehicle made for the twosome called Lucifer...
...Maria Tallchief I discovered in her autobiography, plucked randomly from a library shelf...
...She codified a technique that in her bones felt like honesty and to traditionalists seemed like anarchy...
...Initially Graham formed a company of women...
...For a classical dancer, the craggy psychosexual terrain of Graham modernism was truly the underworld...
...Lucifer was choreographed by Martha Graham, not the first woman to defy the angelic codes of ballet, yet certainly the most stubborn, solitary, glittering, grave, high-toned, shrewd, even lewd...
...Evidently she did not much care for the dance, and it is easy to guess why...
...By the time she achieved the stature of a high priestess in the '40s, a position for which she crowned herself with a black bun the size of a cantaloupe, her face had stiffened into a Kabuki mask, her skin had become as white as the bleached bones of a Georgia O'Keeffe painting, and her crimson mouth had hardened around periodic and oracular pronouncements: "The body never lies...
Vol. 74 • April 1991 • No. 5
