Celestial Bodies

“IN ORDER TO DANCE WELL, SIR,” WROTE THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ballet master Jean-George Noverre, who for a time taught Marie Antoinette, “nothing is so important as the turning outwards of the thigh, and nothing is so natural to men as the contrary position.” This is why first attempts at first position catch us under the buttock and leave us flailing like Lucille Ball. Turnout is not natural.⁷

Done correctly, turnout is generated in the pelvis—as is all human life—and specifically in the hips, where the ball at the top of the femur must rotate outward in its socket. This doozy of a sentence, found in Anatole Chujoy and P. W. Manchester’s The Dance Encyclopedia, explains it anatomically: “If the leg is turned out, the big trochanter recedes and the brim of the acetabulum meets the flat side-surface of the hip-neck.” By extension, the top of the knee, ankle, and metatarsals also turn outward, resulting in a smooth linear channel that allows power to flow freely and elegantly all the way down through the toes. In Rameau’s time, the turned-out feet of first position looked like a V opened to 90 degrees. Today, dancers work toward the more extreme ideal of feet turned out to 180 degrees. Muscles in the hip, haunch, and groin must adjust to support this acute rotation of the femurs in their sockets, a process of years that can’t be forced or faked.

But why move in this artificial way?

We could ask the same question of the equestrians who practice dressage, which dates back to ancient Greece, became a classical art during the Renaissance, and has its own array of pirouettes and fancy footwork. The answer has to do with the concept of “collection.” When horses in the wild collect, whether for play, courtship, or competition, they lift in the chest, arch the neck (which draws in the head), and pull in their hindquarters. This concentration not only makes them appear larger, it allows them to move instantly in any direction, especially upward, in rears and bucks. In the art of dressage, horse and rider collect together, performing harmonious moves of poised precision and technical bravura. The mantra of dressage is “maximum performance with minimum effort.”

Turnout is the basis of theatrical dancing, and when it is employed, Rameau tells us, “the body appears more erect.” This means taller, but also, as John Milton put it in Book IV of Paradise Lost, more marvelously human. Describing Adam and Eve in Eden, he writes: “Two of far nobler shape, erect and tall, God-like erect… seemed lords of all.” Turnout’s symmetrical torque in the hips engages energy and concentrates it, so that the dancer is always collected.

Tadasana, the feet-parallel Mountain Pose of yoga, is a solemnly rooted position, a grounding that feels for the heart of the earth through the soles of the feet, drawing primal power up into the body. It is worshipful and weighted. Turnout, which finds five different expressions in the five positions, has more in common with the double helix—life dynamically coiled and ready to leap. In a split second the ballet dancer can shoot, skip, step, or slide in any direction. Turnout also meant that at court one could glide forward, backward, or sideways while continuing to face the king. Life in the stratosphere of Louis XIV was itself a form of theater.

It just so happens that turnout is also beautiful. During the reign of Louis XIV women’s legs were still hidden under long skirts, but for men, a shapely or “well-turned” leg was such a source of pride that men with thin calves might fill out their stockings with lamb’s wool. When the feet are turned outward into first position, the legs come suddenly into profile, the curves and volumes of the muscles are more fully dimensional, and the inner plane of the thigh, usually hidden from view, is presented with panache. The dancer’s body becomes an open book and his turned-out legs offer more for the audience to read. There’s the shape of the foot and the slimness of the ankle. There’s the silhouetted S line of the leg: the relationship of swell to swell as the line curves over the thigh and under the calf. We expect classical proportions from classical dancers, and turnout lets us see the sculpted musculature of our species displayed without self-consciousness.

“I wasn’t naked,” the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, arrested in a police raid at Minsky’s, once claimed. “I was completely covered by a blue spotlight.” Even in the scantiest costume the ballet dancer isn’t naked: he or she is completely covered by the classical technique, which means turnout.

So turnout is the key. When a dancer assumes first position, it’s as if two doors swing open on a kingdom with its own forms, symbols, and senses, an alternate universe where movement itself has been restructured. The feet, once blinkered like eyes, are now like ears, able to “hear” what is all around, a sweep of 360 degrees. Feet can’t hear, of course, but in assuming first position the toes, the feet, the legs—the whole body—become more listening, more responsive, more sensitive to space.

“Turnout makes the difference,” we read in Chujoy and Manchester, “between a limited number of steps on one plane and the possibility of control of all dance movements in space.” One plane versus all space! Where before turnout a person stands on a path, after turnout a dancer exists in a sphere. Within that sphere the dancer trains daily on curves and circuits. Like the legs of a compass, the supporting turned-out leg is stationary while the working turned-out leg reaches from the hip socket to draw circles and semicircles on the floor, ringlets and upwellings in the air. These are ronds de jambe, “rounds of the leg.”

Volynsky, eloquent on the subject, sees turnout in music, poetry, and painting. “The principle of turnout prevails where human creation is present,” he writes. “The creative act is by its very nature an act of turnout.” And so we turn to George Balanchine and his first creative act in America.⁸

“SERENADE WAS MY FIRST BALLET IN THE UNITED STATES,” Balanchine, the greatest choreographer of the twentieth century, tells us in Balanchine’s Complete Stories of the Great Ballets. “Soon after my arrival in America, Lincoln Kirstein, Edward M. M. Warburg, and I opened the School of American Ballet in New York. As part of the school curriculum, I started an evening ballet class in stage technique, to give students some idea of how dancing on stage differs from classwork. Serenade evolved from the lessons I gave.”

The year was 1934 and Balanchine was thirty. Born in St. Petersburg in 1904, a graduate of the czar’s Imperial Theater School, Balanchine left Russia in 1924. He soon joined Sergei Diaghilev’s legendary company, the Ballets Russes, and there he made his first masterpieces, Apollo in 1928 and The Prodigal Son in 1929. When Diaghilev died three months after the premiere of Prodigal, Balanchine began freelancing, moving between Paris, London, Copenhagen, and Monte Carlo. In 1933, a young American named Lincoln Kirstein—Harvard-educated, wealthy, and mad for ballet—made Balanchine an intriguing offer: come to America and start a ballet company. “Yes, but first a school,” Balanchine famously replied. He knew he was not just starting fresh in America, he was starting from scratch—from first position. In 1934, when Balanchine began work on Serenade, his American students were not yet artists; they were hardly dancers.⁹

The curtain comes up on a stage containing seventeen young women, because that’s how many girls were in class the day Balanchine began. They are wearing long tutus of palest blue—the lighting onstage is the milky blue of moonlight—and they are arranged in a pattern of two diamonds linked in the center by one girl. Perfectly symmetrical, this pattern suggests a pair of wings (the downstage edge forms a W, the upstage edge an M). Poems in which the line lengths take the form of their subject are called “pattern,” “shape,” or “concrete” poems, and there is something of pattern poetry in this opening image. In “Easter Wings,” George Herbert’s poem of 1633, words are arranged in line lengths that look like two wings on the page. Ballet is an art of pattern poetry, especially in the arrangements contrived for the corps de ballet.

The young women are standing normally, their feet parallel and close together, insteps touching. Their right arms are raised on an angle, and their right hands, fingers together, seem to salute the moon. One’s thoughts run back to 1653 and Le Ballet de la Nuit.

In unison, on a swell in the music—Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings, op. 48—the women turn their faces away from the moon and pull the top of that raised hand in toward the right temple, a gesture that unites them in emotion. But what emotion? World-weariness? A lapse into dream? The right hand then lowers to meet the left, both arms curved downward to form parentheses around the hips, the site of turnout. On a cue in the music that only these women hear, their feet snap open into first position.

In this moment we realize that Balanchine’s floor pattern, his semblance of wings, is also an enlarged expression of first position: symmetrical, serene, yet ready to fly. Each girl slides her right foot out to the side, toes pointed—a step called tendu—and then slides it back so that it is fully in front of the left foot: fifth position. Opening their arms to the audience and letting their heads fall back in shared rapture, they look like gulls gliding into mist.

“You start in parallel,” says Deborah Wingert, a Balanchine dancer who has taught Serenade countless times, “and you’re standing as a human being. As you turn out into first position you’ve entered the world of ballet. Then you breathe and do the first, best tendu ever. And then close into fifth, which is home base for ballet. As you open the face, the arms, the chest, it’s like you’re saying, I’m ready to dance now, I’m beginning to dance. So that sense of opening in the arms and in the heart allows for the art to come through. All the mechanics, all of the vocabulary are there.”¹⁰

Serenade’s snap into first position is a lock springing on a secret society, a sylvan sorority whose members move in this special way. They whirl like the wind and flow forth in waves. They gather into groupings reminiscent of the sculptures that surround royal fountains; they form sisterly cliques and Old World allées. Everything they do has a point of reference in one of the five positions, for as the ballet teacher Muriel Stuart writes, “All leg movements proceed from these five basic positions and have their logical termination in them.” When Lincoln Kirstein writes that the five positions “are a kind of net or comb through which dance movement must accommodate itself in a ceaseless shift,” he could be describing the ceaseless ebb and flow of Serenade.¹¹

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