Commence to Dancing

The Senior Critics Award, delivered by David Vaughan at the Dance Critics Association at Dance New Amsterdam, New York City, on 17 June 2007

Click here to read Alastair Macauley's introduction of David Vaughan.

First of all, my title: my parents took me to the movies a lot when I was a child and I always loved it when the picture started with that jaunty little tune that meant it was going to be Laurel and Hardy. This is the song and dance they did in Way Out West (1937).

How did I get to be senior? That’s easy: I don’t know how it happened, but I turned 83 on my last birthday, one month ago today. How did I get to be a critic? And an archivist? That takes longer to answer. I’ve always been obsessed by dancing, ever since I can remember as well as the movies: my parents took me to the theatre, to the music hall, and of course to Christmas pantomimes.

In the pantomimes at the beautiful old Lyceum Theatre in London there was still a Harlequinade at the end, with Columbine in a tutu. In the movies, I liked anything with dancing in it: there was a picture called Dancing Sweeties (1930) which of course I wanted to see. Then there was Jessie Matthews, the English star. I believe that Balanchine must have seen “Dancing on the Ceiling,” her number in Rodgers and Hart’s Evergreen (1934), because there are steps in it that look like Serenade (1934). And of course the great series of movies with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

What puzzles me is why didn’t I know before they started coming out that Fred Astaire was playing in London in The Gay Divorce in 1934, and why didn’t I make my mother take me to see that? But I did see On Your Toes, with Vera Zorina, in about April 1937, and I said “the choreography is wonderful,” as if I knew anything about it. Well it was by Balanchine, so I wasn’t far wrong.

Inevitably, I began to be curious about the ballet, and later in 1937 I saw my first ballet performance, the Blum company (Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo) in a program of ballets by Michel Fokine: Les Elfes, Scheherazade, Le Spectre de la rose, and Ygrouchki, whatever that was. Then there was the Markova-Dolin Ballet, in what must have been one of its last performances. There was a ballet based on Oscar Wilde’s story The Nightingale and the Rose—long before Christopher Wheeldon’s version—by Dolin himself. And Nijinska’s The Beloved (La Bien-aimée): I remember that the dancers all came forward in a line across the stage; Freddie Franklin on the end in a red devil’s suit had to jump over a chair because the stage at my local theatre in Wimbledon wasn’t wide enough. (Freddie confirmed that this happened.)

Early in 1938 I went to Sadler’s Wells for the first time to see the Vic-Wells Ballet in, significantly, a program with three Ashton ballets: Façade, The Judgment of Paris, and, yes, Horoscope, plus Fokine’s Le Carnaval, in which Ashton may have been Pierrot. An Ashton ballet that made an even greater impression on me was the deliciously sophisticated, art-deco Les Masques, which I saw when I went to watch the Ballet Rambert in the little Mercury Theatre in Notting Hill Gate, in the summer of 1939. At school I painted a picture of the can-can dancers coming through the audience in Ninette de Valois’s Bar aux Folies-bergère which won a prize. I asked for Arnold Haskell’s Ballet Panorama (1938). I was already on the way to becoming a dance historian—I learned that the Haskell book had a lot of mistakes, and I used to spend hours copying out chronologies of the major ballet companies.

The first Ashton ballet at whose premiere I was present was The Wise Virgins in April 1940. I had a ticket for what was to be the first performance of Le Diable s’amuse by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo (the Massine company) in September 1939, but that of course never happened. World War II was on by then, but strangely enough one of my most intensive periods of ballet going was in the first years of the war: the summer of 1940 when there were still performances at the Wells, then when the Blitz put an end to those, the company started performing matinees at the New Theatre (now the Albery) in London’s West End. I was at school, of course, but I would go up every Saturday, see the Lunch Ballet by the combined Rambert and London Ballets at the Arts Theatre Club, then race down St Martin’s Lane to get to my seat in the gallery at the New in time for the matinee there.

On one such day I saw Ashton’s Foyer de danse and Andree Howard’s Lady Into Fox at the Arts, then Les Rendezvous, Ashton’s new ballet The Wanderer, and the third act of Coppélia at the New. It was heady stuff. This even continued after I was drafted into the British army because by sheer luck I was stationed in London for a while, first in a shorthand typing course and then as a clerk in the War Office. There were evening performances by then and I was there night after night, until they got wise to me and shipped me off to India. There of course I would go to see any dance performance that I could, even going off limits into a rather rough part of Calcutta to see an anti-British dance drama.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Naturally since I was dance mad I wanted to dance myself. At the age of eight my parents sent me to classes given by Biddy Pinchard in Brixton, where we lived—she was probably about 17 then but she later became a well-known ballet teacher. She arranged a number for me based on the nursery rhyme “Old King Cole,” but the night before the recital in which I was supposed to perform it I had a spectacular bilious attack (as we used to call it) brought on by stage fright, and that was the end of my dancing career, for the time being at least. But when I became a teenager and was going to leave school, I made known my wish to start studying ballet properly. My father was horrified. I was (to say the least) not robust, and no doubt he was aware of what Martin Duberman, in his recent biography of Lincoln Kirstein, calls “the standard equation of ballet with homosexuality,” though it was already too late to do anything about that.

So I obeyed my father’s wishes and went instead to Oxford, something he wanted for his sons since he had not been able to do so himself. As soon as I arrived in Oxford I discovered that there was a Ballet Club, which of course I joined and of which I became a leading light. And indeed this was to provide my entrée into the dance world, because I met people who came to lecture like Marie Rambert and Kay Ambrose, dancers like Celia Franca [L.A. Times Obituary] (to whom I suggested an idea for a ballet) and her then husband Leo Kersley, and other fans like Peter Brook and Cyril Frankel. We published a magazine called Arabesque in which my first dance writings appeared, including my first on Ashton, a review of The Quest. In vacations I began to take a few lessons with Marie Rambert. Later during my army stint in London I met A. V. Coton who published a mimeographed magazine called Dance Chronicle for which I wrote a few things. Lindsay Anderson, another Oxford friend, started a film magazine called Sequence for which I wrote dance-related pieces.

When I came out of the army after four and a half years I was still determined to dance, and now that I was of age nobody could stop me. I decided that I needed a teacher who was perhaps less inspirational but more analytical than Rambert. Fortunately someone, I think it was Kay Ambrose, suggested that I go to Audrey de Vos, a somewhat unorthodox teacher with a great knowledge of anatomy. I came out of the army still puny and underweight, not to mention the fact that I was by then 23, but she took me on anyway and—as she could—began to change my body, build me up, and make it possible for me to dance. De Vos believed that her students needed more than conventional ballet, and taught also a form of modern dance that she devised herself. I began to get dancing jobs. I was a chorus boy in a revue called Knights of Madness, starring the great comedians known as The Crazy Gang, when the New York City Ballet came to London for the first time in the summer of 1950 and I had the encounter with Lincoln Kirstein that changed my life (you can read about it in Duberman’s book).

That summer was when I got to know Balanchine’s work, though already the Marquis de Cuevas company had presented Concerto Barocco and Night Shadow (as La Sonnambula was called then), staged by Balanchine himself. But as I have tried to show it was Ashton’s work that I first loved and which formed my taste.

Anyway, I quit the show and left for New York in October 1950. Right away I knew I was where I wanted to be—I always had known, really. At the School of American Ballet (SAB) the teachers were still the old Russians, Vladimiroff and Dubrovska, and most important for me Anatole Obukhov. Also Muriel Stuart—Lincoln Kirstein gave me the job of working with her on her textbook The Classic Ballet, which I essentially edited for publication. And once a week at SAB, there was a class taught by Merce Cunningham, something unimaginable at today’s SAB, I fancy. As a Russian friend said, that was where my destiny lay, though I didn’t know it at the time. But I certainly knew about Merce; de Vos’s classes had got me interested in modern dance, and back in London I used to read every American dance publication I could get my hands on. I’ve already mentioned one of the subjects of this conference, Lincoln Kirstein, so I’ll mention the other: Katherine Dunham. When she came to London with her company in 1948 I rushed to see it, because it was a form of American modern dance, and wonderful.

Merce and John Cage went off on tour after a few months and didn’t come back to the American school. It was also at the school that I met Jimmy Waring. We became friends and I danced in his ballets, and we started a choreographers’ cooperative called Dance Associates. (I promise that my monograph on Jimmy will be finished, soon.)

After five years I went back to England for a year, ostensibly to decide where I wanted to live, though I knew perfectly well that it was here in New York City. During that year I wrote a series of articles for Dance and Dancers about what I had seen in America. Remy Charlip showed Merce what I had written about him, and when I came back I started taking his class again, and got to know him, which led to the association that has lasted ever since. When he opened a studio of his own in December 1959, in the Living Theater building on the corner of 14th Street and Sixth Avenue, he asked me to be the studio secretary, which I was, for $15 a week. I was the whole staff at that time. I immediately started organizing the programs and clippings which Merce, in time-honored fashion, used to throw into a cardboard box when he came back from tour. In 1976 Jean Rigg, by then the company’s chief administrator, secured a pilot grant from the NEA to employ me as archivist for two years, thus formalizing what I was doing for my own interest. Here it is thirty years later, and I’m still at it. Of course my book, Merce Cunningham/Fifty Years is a project of the archives—so too is the exhibition that opened at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts in June 2007, together with the NYPL Jerome Robbins Dance Division and the John Cage Trust.

It must have been shortly after I came back from the epoch-making world tour of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, in late 1964, that I received out of the blue a letter from dance critic Arlene Croce, asking if I was the David Vaughan whose film criticism she had read in Sight and Sound, and if so would I be interested in joining her in a project, to start a magazine that became Ballet Review. And of course I have written for it ever since. When I was in London with Merce I had finally met Frederick Ashton, and some time later I wrote to him to say that I should like to write a book about his ballets, and would he be willing to cooperate? He wrote back saying that now he had retired he could write his own book—but added, “if I change my mind I’ll think of you.” I decided this was a chink in the armor, and so I wrote a piece for BR about a couple of other books about him, really to show him how I would write about him. As it happened, the London publisher Adam and Charles Black had approached Mary Clarke, editor of Dancing Times, asking her if she could suggest someone who might write a book about Ashton. She showed them my piece and said, “I think this is your man.” So I was able to go back to Sir Fred and say that I had been commissioned to write such a book, and (politely of course) that I would do so with or without his cooperation. Rather reluctantly, I suspect, he did agree, and the book did get written.

Meanwhile, in 1973 I wrote a couple of pieces for Dance Magazine, and suddenly I found I was one of its regular critics, writing reviews every month until about 1986. The review section was edited first by Tobi Tobias and then by Joan Acocella, both of them exemplary editors, who never changed so much as a comma without consulting me. We did good work, I think. When Ballet News started up I began writing for that, too, a monthly column on dance on camera. And at the same time I was sending reviews of dance in America to the Financial Times in London.

Do I have such a thing as a credo as a critic? When I was at school one of my teachers introduced us to Practical Criticism (1929), a book by the English writer I. A. Richards that proposed a new theory of literary criticism, which, he said, should be based on “a close reading of the text.” It seems to me that some of us who began writing about dance in the 1960s and later were similarly attempting what I would call a close reading of the choreographic text. Our chief model of course was Edwin Denby—and also perhaps André Levinson. Denby’s essay on the Nijinsky photographs had impressed me years before when it first appeared in Dance Index: it was not only about how these images looked, it made you know how it felt to dance as Nijinsky had danced. Then Arlene herself, first in BR, then in DT, and most important of all week after week in The New Yorker, raised dance writing to a new level intellectually and analytically. We—people like myself, Dale Harris, Joan Acocella, Deborah Jowitt, Robert Greskovic, Marcia Siegel, Sally Banes, Alastair Macaulay—all tried in our various ways to follow in the footsteps of Edwin and Arlene.

There’s a wonderful essay by E. M. Forster called “The Raison d’être of Criticism in the Arts” (1947), in which he says

Just to love [music], or just to love anything or anybody is not enough. Love has to be clarified and controlled to give full value, and here is where criticism may help. But one has to start with love; one has, in the case of music, to want to hear the notes. If one has no initial desire to listen and no sympathy after listening, the notes will signify nothing, sound and fury, whatever their intellectual content.

I could paraphrase this as: “one has, in the case of dancing, to want to see the steps. If one has no initial desire to watch and no sympathy after watching, the steps will signify nothing, sound and fury, whatever their dramatic content.” Forster goes on to say that “Criticism’s central job seems to be education through precision,” and later “on its destructive side criticism exposes fraud and pretentiousness and checks conceit.” (Heaven knows there are plenty of those qualities around.) All that may be true, yet I also agree with Forster that, for the artist, criticism is usually irrelevant: “When I am praised, I am pleased; when I am blamed, I am displeased; when I am told I am elusive, I am surprised—but neither the pleasure nor the sorrow nor the astonishment makes any difference when next I enter the creative state.” So a certain humility is appropriate on the part of the critic.

What Forster says about love strikes a chord with me; it reminds me of a famous statement by Merce Cunningham that begins, “You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.” It’s a very moving statement, and yet I have to disagree with it: I can’t say that dancing has given me nothing back. It has actually given me a wonderful life. I have met great people, traveled far and wide, gone to marvelous places, all thanks to my day job with Merce—I’ll call it that, but it has been so much more— it has made it possible for me to devote my life to dancing, which is all I have ever wanted to do.