The bon mots of Balanchine

George Balanchine (pictured here with Suzanne Farrell) had a mischievous sense of humor that came out at unusual times. Toasting Stravinsky he reminisced, "In Russia, we drink the health of the guy that died." When Balanchine was presented with the Handel Medallion he said, "I can't Handel it. . .so I'll Haydn it."

When Balanchine and Richard Rodgers embarked on the ballet "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue," the composer was unsure how the collaboration should proceed. "Did he devise his steps first and expect me to alter tempos wherever necessary?" The choreographer immediately set Rodgers's mind at ease. "You write it, I put on,"  he said. That was exactly the way they worked. "I don't think that our arranger, Hans Spialek, had to change more than thirty-two bars," Rodgers wrote. The result was a masterpiece.

My favorite Balanchine line: "I disagree with everybody, and I don't want to argue about it." -- DL

Comments

[Stacey]

Balanchine spoke many memorable lines. I'm not surprised by his remark to Rodgers. Balanchine was a musician first - an accomplished pianist - and always stressed that the music came first. He said that the demands of the music should set the pace for the dance. He once had to sub for a conductor who had become ill and one of the dancers said later that she had never had to dance so fast in her life. His advice to an aspiring choreographer: "Just keep making dances. Every now and then you'll make a good one." Good advice for poets too.

[Kathryn Levy]

I love this quote by Balanchine: "We, too exist and hope to be beautiful without words." I used it as the epigraph to a poem of mine called "Goodbye" that appeared in The Seattle Review last year. I also love: "Classicism is enduring because it is impersonal." I was lucky enough to work at New York City Ballet during the last ten years of Balanchine's life. Watching him at work taught me more about how to be a truly rigorous artist than any other experience I have ever had. Although he would have hated my use of the term "artist."