Backstage At Big-Time Ballet

By Martha Duffy

Serve art and scrounge for money. Exploit talent, but be fair. Serve up the pyrotechnics, but keep an eye on all those overstressed knees and feet. It isn't easy to run a ballet company.

Being a professional ballet dancer is tough too, and the challenge must be met during adolescence. There is, of course, the need to develop perfection of technique. Add to that the care of one's body, the avoidance of drugs and drink, rent payment and roommate control. Most important, however, is the reinvention of oneself as an alluring theatrical image that rewards the eye -- and blinds it to the charms of the next performer in line.

Two years ago, journalist John Fraser and photographer Eve Arnold undertook to cover a season (1986-87) with the American Ballet Theatre: the rehearsals, the tour, the filming of the Herbert Ross movie Dancers in Italy. Their achievement is that they manage to animate the dailiness of backstage life from the point of view of both the artistic management, led by Mikhail Baryshnikov, and the dancers. Fraser's prose may be gushy at times, and Arnold's photos are grainy, but both beat with life and explode with candor. The arias of shop talk, the revelation of fears and jealousies, as well as the wry wisdom and humor, are riveting and give the blithe impression of being uncut.

All cameras love Baryshnikov, but the key to this book's success is Fraser's total sympathy with this complex artist. Fraser helped Baryshnikov break away from a Soviet tour group in 1974, and he seems to have won his complete trust. Usually reticent, Baryshnikov speaks with stinging intimacy of his mother's suicide when he was twelve, broods about women (he loves American women but has difficulty living under the same roof with one) and gripes about the toils of fund raising. He also talks -- without the least defensiveness -- about one of his several goals: to be a giant-screen pop entertainer. Not for nothing did he study Cagney.

But Baryshnikov's enduring commitment has been to the American Ballet Theatre. After several years of critical condescension -- and he does read and ! react to adverse reviews -- he is finally getting some respect for having greatly improved the level of performance, relying less on imported etoiles and instead nurturing young talent within the troupe.

All this sounds sensible, but what a tightrope walk it turns out to be! For an artistic director has strong stylistic preferences. Take the case of senior ballerina Martine van Hamel and what she calls "this age business." " 'I have tried to explain to her that she should perhaps no longer dance Kitri in Don Q((uixote)),' Baryshnikov said one day with genuine frustration. 'It happens . . . That's life.' " But to a ballerina, it's death. The still elegant star points rudely to Baryshnikov's young picks, all shorter and skinnier than she. Her verdict: "Chickens." Sighs the boss: "She's one damn tough cookie."

Without any debate, Baryshnikov is a performer of artistic genius, but no man is a hero to his corps de ballet. The big morale crisis in Private View involved the casting of the film Dancers, a modern gloss on the classic Giselle. Less than half the troupe's dancers were selected; for the rest, rejection amounted to a devastating appraisal of their entire season. When corps member Julie Kent, 17 and exquisite, won the ingenue role, angry charges of unfairness increased. Fraser notes that when the movie was finished and Kent's disastrous speaking voice squeaked through the land, tempers cooled. Comments Fraser: "Never underestimate the balm of sheer malice."

It is a necessary myth that the artistic director is a one-man band. But of course he has help, and Private View explains clearly how this bulky performing machine keeps going. Fund raiser Larry Lynn tracks Kimberly-Clark for $2,500 worth of free Kleenex. It is ballet mistress Elena Tchernichova who actually produces the"Baryshnikov ballerina." Fraser recognizes and describes the importance of Charles France, Baryshnikov's assistant, to his boss. A brilliant, obsessive fellow, France virtually handed his head, stuffed with dance scholarship and a phenomenal performance memory, to Baryshnikov on a plate. Often his erudition was crucial; a Soviet's knowledge of dance is necessarily parochial. Says the star: "I would not be where I am today without Charles. Period."

The importance of France is clear in rehearsal photos too, but elsewhere the reader could wish that Fraser and Arnold had checked in more with each other. The pictures show that ballet master David Richardson is part of the inner circle, but he doesn't figure in the text. The tart voice of corps member Ty Granaroli is invigorating, but there is no captioned picture of him. But then, some of the best shots are of dancers with their dogs, hauled along on the lonely tours. And the piles of pointe shoes, grubby, used-up torture instruments. A ballerina can go through three or four pairs a performance. A.B.T.'s yearly bill is more than $300,000, and that's not Kleenex.