As I’m sitting here writing, I’m watching the balcony pas de deux from Romeo and Juliet, danced by Maria Tallchief, on Youtube. The choreography is really similar to the Romeo and Juliet pas de deux that I danced which is also on Youtube. And now that I think about it, that’s kind of a huge honor, considering how amazing of a dancer she is and how few videos there are of this ballet. Romeo and Juliet is a great ballet to judge a dancer’s dancing, mainly because not only do you need technique, but you also have to be able to project emotion to the top of the balcony. Maria’s facial expressions tell a story, this story is painful and tragic. She just really pulls it off. I like to think I was also good at projecting emotion and telling a story on stage. I used to tell myself that when I didn’t get more technical roles or had a bad day in rehearsal. And although this ballet was danced about 50 years ago, I feel I can connect with her because I was there, not at Lincoln Center where she danced, but on a stage in Hartford, Connecticut. I still remember and miss that feeling.
Maria Tallchief was a ballerina in an era that, to young dancers today, has almost been forgotten. Sheer athleticism has taken over the sport, and the broadway-esque performances that made the strange, new European style of dance popular in America in the 40s and 50s are boring compared to tales of the first woman that completed five pirouettes on stage. The Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo is no different from the Ballet Russe, and names like Diaghelev, Fokine, and Nijinsky just represent the choreography that you wished you didn’t get cast in because it would mean they didn’t trust you to do those five pirouettes. Tallchief joined the Ballets Russe de Monte Carlo after they moved to America after World War II and was immediately recognized for her performances in innovative productions by female American choreographers, especially my favorite, Rodeo, by Agnes Demille. From there she became a favorite dancer of George Balanchine and even married him, in a move not scandalous by any means in the dance world, in the 1950s.
It seems sad today that the ballets from this forgotten era have survived, only to be met with much criticism from modern ballerinas; the performers who created the beauty on stage are merely myth if they are thought of at all. I never met Maria Tallchief, but I had the opportunity to train under a woman that knew her quite well and I can imagine was very much like her. She would walk into class with an air about her that one would expect to see about an old movie star. Rehearsals were stopped so she could not only tell us we were doing it wrong but so she could gaze in the mirror, hum the music, and waltz around the studio while stopping to say “when I danced this with Rudy [Nureyev]…” There were many stories about “Rudy”
Although dancers are no longer stars to the outside world, and they no longer perform in movies and dance 6 shows a week while traveling the country by train; if it weren’t for people like Tallchief and her contemporaries who shaped American Ballet, we would all still be dancing classical pieces in long white tutus.
Maria Tallchief passed away recently, just this past April [2013]. I knew instantly because everyone on my Facebook decided to post articles about it. I don’t think most of them had even known her. But perhaps they did in a sense, the sense that anyone who has danced professionally or semi-professionally has experienced something special and unique. Watching Romeo and Juliet made me want to dance and I gave myself an impromptu ballet class holding onto the back of a chair in my living room. Even though I haven’t performed in three years, I still think of myself as a ballerina. I still think of myself dancing the lead role on stage like Maria Tallchief. I can’t escape it. I think I will probably always be a ballerina.
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