In the Hollywood film of Carousel, Jacques d’Amboise—hemmed in on both sides by lines of dancers—suddenly takes off into a sequence of four precisely placed double air turns and then, reorganizing his focus, streams aloft into a leap, his legs beating before him as he sails. This is virtuoso ballet dancing, by any measure. However, it is a different kind of virtuosity than d’Amboise’s colleague, Edward Villella, displays as, say, Oberon in the film of Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Both men are performing classical steps with the same exactitude, but they aren’t performing them to the same effect. In his memoir, I Was A Dancer, d’Amboise makes it clear how much he admired his colleague’s dancing; Villella was at once his brother-in-arms and a nonpareil standard. And, in the twenty-four roles that Balanchine created for d’Amboise, not to speak of his casting and coaching of the latter in the title role of Apollo (for some devoted members of the NYCB audience, he was the definitive Balanchine Apollo), Balanchine made it clear how important d’Amboise was to him.
D’Amboise was a head taller than Villella, longer boned and less visibly muscled: The comparison might be a quarterback against a boxer. (Villella was an actual welterweight boxing champion at the New York Maritime Academy; he also lettered in baseball.) They both jumped high and landed with buoyancy, but Villella, with a more compact physique, put more torque into his preparations for jumping and turning. And although both men achieved brilliant batterie (the beating legs), it took the dancer with longer limbs a nanosecond more time to perform the opening and closing of his legs than it did his colleague. Villella’s beats, now legendary even on film where (as Villella’s greatest chronicler, the critic Arlene Croce, could have put it) they read as a blur, were slightly faster in fact, and the power of his movement made them register as much faster in effect. Villella’s feet also pointed more sharply than d’Amboise’s, making Villella’s beats seem extra-clear. There was something else. Villella performed classical allégro combinations with a phrasing that arrested their momentum at the height or most complex part of the step, giving a flashing photographic moment of stillness in the midst of motion that seemed almost unreal. (Among Balanchine’s ballerinas, Merrill Ashley achieved that effect, too.) Yet d’Amboise did not “stop” mid-stream that way; he showed the poses beautifully, but he displayed them in the course of the dance current. He didn’t enunciate them. And he didn’t show the sculptural power involved in initiating classical steps. He performed steps as conversational gestures, as elements in a larger song—and the song, with its unpredictable counts and uninflected climaxes, was written by George Gershwin for his good pal Fred Astaire, even when Gershwin was channeling the fantastical imagination of Fauré, the clinical intelligence of Stravinsky, the melodic raptures of Tchaikovsky, and even when his onstage figure was trying to learn to walk on the way to Parnassus or to catch a Sylph on the fly or to wrangle a Gypsy momentarily transforming herself from a lion to a lamb. I have always thought that Balanchine himself, who loved theatrical surprise and magic, either once danced or wanted to dance that way, perpetrating the illusion nightly, on union time, that the physical work of dancing could be shielded from the audience, as the entrances of his ballerinas are so often shielded from sight until, Presto!, there they be at center stage.
With respect to d’Amboise’s skills and sensitivity as a partner, I’d like to quote the dance historian and critic Janet Light, a member of NYCB’s audience going back to the 1950s (and, as a child, a student at SAB). Since I only began to look at the company in the mid-1960s, I asked her for her longer-lived impression of d’Amboise’s stage relationship to his ballerinas. She wrote as follows:
“Remembering the irresistible Jacques d’Amboise, it’s the person onstage that lingers with me, rather than Jacques in any one ballet or role. I think it’s connected to how he partnered many of Balanchine’s important ballerinas. He could shift the focus of his own performance to his partner, and the dedication of his attentiveness let the audience know there was no place else he would rather be. He could hold his own with them all while remaining generous and true: Squiring the witty Tanaquil LeClerq in Western Symphony’s rousing Fourth Movement; tracing wondrously a luminous Allegra Kent’s loosened hair in the haunting Afternoon of a Faun; punctuating with his wide stance and arms thrown back Melissa Hayden’s steely arabesque balances in Stars and Stripes’ hold-your-breath Fifth Campaign. Jacques d’Amboise became a star but seemed onstage a real person, meeting the challenges of a great repertory that shaped him into an artist, and in turn, helped dance in America take flight.”
In his memoir, d’Amboise—frequently admired as a partner yet always extending praise—wrote: “I loved viewing Conrad Ludlow. . .and the poetry he brought to a pas de deux.”
Jacques d’Amboise was beloved by audiences and much-honored for his art as a dancer and choreographer. He was also central to his family, and he enjoyed the knowledge that his own children—two of the four became successful dancers—esteemed him for his art as well as for his affection. Even so, he wasn’t awarded a MacArthur Foundation (“Genius”) Fellowship in 1984, the year he retired from performing, for his stage achievements. He received it as a Dance Educator, the founder of the National Dance Institute. The laurel was given to d’Amboise, a high-school drop-out (at age fifteen, he left both SAB and academic studies to join NYCB) who had analyzed what dancing is beyond the lines and extreme poses and the superstructure of the steps with names. D’Amboise taught dance as full-bodied gesture, action, energy the dancer learns to regulate instantaneously (“Precision and exactness are steps toward truth.”), all in service of two principles: to teach individuals how to relate to one another through rules of engagement, also known as decorum and respect, and to transfer the civilization one’s generation inherited to the generation poised to receive it. He taught himself how to offer these core principles to children as small as infants and adults of all ages, traditions, and walks of life so that they understand them and, most wonderfully of all, want to inhabit them.
Poetry has been important to NDI’s teaching and the performances of its school children because d’Amboise cherished it; he also practiced writing it. D’Amboise’s memoir is peppered with references to poets—Yeats, Auden, Yevtushenko, Hafiz (the fourteenth-century Persian master of the ghazal). You can also see him in his poet’s mode while he’s teaching dance to small children affiliated with NDI in a 4’06” film, on Vimeo: Jacques d’Amboise—Whispering Poetry, one of eight film portraits that director Nick Davis made in 2016 as part of larger project, called “Eight over Eighty,” about productivity while aging. I actually saw d’Amboise teaching in person that way around that period in an elementary school in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood, as part of another project that I was up to. Even in 2016, his spine was curled forward as he walked, and I winced to see him hobble only a short distance.
Nevertheless, once he was demonstrating to the students what he wanted them to learn about arts and civilization, he was in the zone—alive, highly energized, sparking with ideas and imagery in an electrifying example of basic cultural pedagogy for elementary school beginners.
The Nick Davis film captures that transformation in four minutes through editing. Suddenly, d’Amboise is quoting, almost perfectly, Robert Burns: “See how Maria leads the dance! She’s life itself. / I never saw a foot so nimble and so eloquent. And the sweet, whispering Poetry it makes / Shames the musicians.” Or, suddenly, he’s showing a boy how gesture evolves from language. Pointing one of his little fingers to his own temple, he says, “In here, there’s a dream.” He lets the finger drift away from his body. Then, we’re watching him with the boy. Taking one of the boy’s hands, he points its little finger gently toward the child’s temple, saying, “In here, there’s a dream. Take it out (he guides the child’s hand around to where the boy can see it), “look at it” (the boy focuses on the tip of the finger, all at once a girl in the center of a circle focuses on her finger), and then d’Amboise whispers “and sending it up,” and we see an entire class, each student raising both arms carefully, hands with palms up, while she lifts her gaze toward them: Presto! Port de bras with a difference. D’Amboise begins a small peroration on why New York dancers are the best. The diverse class is entirely spellbound.
“I’ve always been happy,” d’Amboise ended his memoir. I’m not sure I believe him, but if that was the story that he told himself to function as the magician who enraptured those children with dancing and poetry, then who cares?
