The first dance will not be boring, not with more than half a century of American showbiz behind it. De Mille’s new work has the resonant quality of a folk tale, with Amanda McKerrow as a young girl drawn from her lover (Victor Barbee) toward a playful stranger with a mysterious power over her (Roger Van Fleteren). When the ballet was premiered earlier this month at Washington, D.C.’s, Kennedy Center, this beautifully danced story of love in the arms of death cast a rare spell over the crowded Opera House. Sometimes in the theater–though almost never in ballet-the audience is so caught up that it seems to breathe as one person; it happened that night in Washington. During the curtain call, the whole cast laid bouquets at the footlights in de Mille’s honor, and the audience stood to cheer her.
De Mille’s new ballet, which will be featured during ABT’s New York season beginning this month, is the latest work in one of the most extraordinary careers in the American theater. Raised in California, where her uncle Cecil B. and her father William, a writer, were working together to help invent the Hollywood movie, she was given a solid education interspersed with visits to movie sets. When the occasion warranted, de Mille has said, her mother would send a-note to school: “Gloria Swanson is being thrown to the lions and Agnes has to be excused from her classes.” These excursions were more than treats; they enabled de Mille to watch an indigenous popular theater being born.
By the time de Mille began choreographing ballets, in her 30s, she was fascinated by the human dimension that most choreographers ignored in favor of sheer technique. One of her earliest pieces was the astonishingly original “Rodeo” (1942). To encounter a ballet set in the American West was startling enough; to see male dancers looking jaunty and bowlegged, lurching rhythmically across the stage as if on horseback, was incredible. De Mille herself danced the lead-the Cowgirl who reluctantly quits being one of the boys-and in an archival film of the ballet’s final hoedown she can be seen, all pep and petticoats, delighted to be dancing like a girl.
After the success of “Rodeo,” Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein tapped de Mille for their new musical “Oklahoma!” and she made history once more. As she saw it, dancing should be more than just movable decor on the Broadway stage. Her work for a string of hits, including “Carousel” and “Brigadoon,” was sophisticated choreography thoroughly rooted in story and character. Apart from Jerome Robbins, nobody in the American musical theater has come close to her achievements in that greatly diminished venue.
In 1975 de Mille’s career came to a devastating halt when she suffered a massive stroke. She lost all feeling on her right side, and despite a remarkable recuperation she has choreographed only a few works since that time. But although she speaks with considerable effort and her demeanor is frail, her mind is as vigorous as ever. In the studio, rehearsing her new ballet from a wheelchair, she raps her ring sharply on the mirror behind her when she wants to get the dancers’ attention. “Do you play tennis?” she asks the men. “This is an overhead smash.” She sends her left arm sailing high. “It starts from the tail and it’s boom. " What she’s after are dance gestures as natural as life, though more beautiful; dance gestures that speak.
“These Ballet Theatre dancers are extraordinary” she says. “They’re much better technically than their equivalents a hundred years ago. But they’re more subdued as personalities. Can they walk out on a stage and say”-she raises her left arm in full view of an imaginary audience, lifts her chin, leans forward-” ‘Listen!’ " She sets her arm down. “I can, and I’m a cripple.”
Today de Mille spends much of her time in bed at her Greenwich Village apartment, surrounded by books and papers. Because the wheelchair makes travel difficult, she rarely gets to Broadway anymore. " Someone took me to see ‘Cats’," she says grimly. “It was the worst two hours I ever spent in the theater.” Happily, a new project is underway to document the choreography for “Oklahoma!” and “Carousel” on video, with de Mille on screen analyzing the dances. “When a dancer does this, for instance”-she gives a delicate little hoist to her torso-“she’s adjusting her corset.”
Long one of our greatest dance writers, de Mille is also at work on a new book-her 14th. Many are autobiographical, as artful and witty in their intertwining of life and dance as M.F.K. Fisher’s work on life and food. Her most recent book, published last year, is the widely praised biography “Martha,” a masterly portrayal of Martha Graham’s genius in its flower and decline. It’s hard not to contrast Graham’s late career with de Mille’s own: the former locked into artistic self-parody, her ego force-fed by sycophants; the latter daily renewing herself with work that takes an honest path straight to the heart. In the prelude to de Mille’s new ballet, the young woman whose story is about to unfold stands center stage wrapped in a crimson cloak. Slowly she lifts her head, flies lightly about the stage and then, with an agonized smile that seems to acknowledge her fate, dashes offstage to let the ballet begin. What matters in the face of death? de Mille might be asking. Simply life. Let the ballet begin.
