The Second-Greatest American Ballet Choreographer You Never Heard Of
[Originally published in October 1995]
Ask a balletomane to list some major American choreographers, and the odds are good that Lew Christensen will not be among the first that leap to mind. Thumb through a few general reference works — or even dance-specific ones — and you're likely to find him mentioned only as a secondary entry, if at all.
It's not that Christensen is obscure. Well-informed ballet enthusiasts know the story of Salt Lake City's three Christensen brothers — grandsons of an immigrant Danish balletmaster — who brought ballet to the western United States: Harold, the progenitor of Ballet West; Willam, the founder of the San Francisco Ballet; and Lew, its artistic director from 1952 until his death in 1985. Or they may recall Christensen as the nation's first homegrown premier danseur: the first American to dance the title role in George Balanchine's Apollon Musagète, and later principal dancer with Balanchine's seminal Ballet Caravan.
As a choreographer, though, Christensen seems to have drifted away from the reputation mainstream. Although he created more than 100 works — including a genuine historical landmark (Filling Station, 1938) and a much-loved minor classic (Con Amore, 1953) — comparatively few are staged today. And few younger choreographers, even those he brought to the San Francisco Ballet, chose to follow his stylistic lead, as Arlene Croce noted in a 1978 review.
"Oddly enough, their work — on this showing, at least — derives from everywhere but the Christensen repertory," she wrote. "Maybe he's just too eccentric, and maybe his mind does wander, but it is a choreographic mind of no small distinction. The Christensen ballets hold a provocative secret. They ought to be much better known than they are."
Today, Christensen enthusiasts still feel that his works deserve more recognition than they're getting. Among those trying to do something about it are two of his San Francisco Ballet alumni: Richard Carter, now balletmaster of the Miami City Ballet, who stages Christensen revivals throughout the country; and Robert Vickrey, now artistic manager of Pittsburgh Ballet Theater and former artistic director of Nebraska's Ballet Omaha company -- where he became one of the few contemporary artistic directors to build a Christensen repertory from scratch.
Between them, the two may know Christensen's works from more angles than anyone else alive. From the 1950s until Christensen's death, Carter served him at various times as dancer, ballet master, production manager and technical director. During his nine years at the helm of Ballet Omaha, Vickrey inaugurated the "Lew Christensen Project," introducing audiences to a rotating trio of ballets selected from the choreographer's early, middle and late periods: Filling Station, Con Amore, and Il Distratto (1967.) Both men are quietly but firmly convinced that Christensen was one of America's greatest choreographers — possibly the second greatest, after Balanchine, and entirely different in style and approach.
Carter, a sincere Balanchine admirer, nonetheless shows no reluctance to mention Christensen in the same breath. Often, he finds that the clearest way to illustrate a unique characteristic of Christensen's style is to point to Balanchine for contrast.
"Balanchine used to say that ‘ballet is woman.'" he said. "Lew Christensen must have said ‘ballet is man.' All his works are male-oriented. Balanchine glorified the female… Lew was more interested in the male dancing.
"The role of Mac [in Filling Station] he choreographed for himself, and no one has ever been able to do it like him. I've seen movies in the Library of the Performing Arts in New York, and it's incredible! He was a great male dancer. There was one step in particular where he'd do a series of turns in a circle, and he used to do them so fast that he'd lean into the circle. When he went to set the work on me – I couldn't do that! No one could do that! So he had to rechoreograph it. Of course I was really disappointed that I couldn't live up to his expectations – and then years later I saw that movie, and I thought, ‘My God! He was a strong, strong dancer.' As strong as I ever saw.
"Balanchine had become an American, but came from a European/Asian influence. He had his ideas set before he came here. But Lew was American from the very core. He grew up in Utah. The ballet Filling Station is the first *American* ballet – did you know that? Not very many people do. It had an American theme, American composer, American choreographer, American scenery and costumes, and was danced by Americans. There was not one European in it. It preceded Billy the Kid, which a lot of people think is the first American ballet, by about nine months.
"All Lew's works, I must tell you, have that same signature. Balanchine was able to choreograph Americana…he picked up things that he saw in America and put them, in an ingenious way, in a ballet. The "Rubies" section of Jewels – it's very American, jazzy. The last movement of Concerto Barocco starts with the Charleston step. This is Balanchine.
"Lew, on the other hand, didn't pick up and use tricks like that. His [movement] themes were very American to begin with. I don't know how to articulate the difference. I can feel it, but I can't tell you what it is. One of the differences is the flourish of the port de bras, the arms. Balanchine had a very rococo arm – actually it was French, wasn't it? He got it from Violette Verdy, very flowing. Whereas Lew thought that was too much, and he made it very square, very basic. And he wanted dancers to dance that way – not with all this affectation, if you will. That's one of the differences."
Another difference, Carter said — one that sometimes makes it hard for today's dancers to learn Christensen's style — is that his basic "atom" of choreography was different from Balanchine's.
"Lew choreographed in phrases," he said. "Like sentences, you know: da-dum, da-dum, da-da-da-dum – that was all one step, although it was a phrase of music. Balanchine didn't do that – Balanchine choreographed steps. It's hard to imagine the difference – but to a dancer, it's a world of difference.
"The steps that Balanchine created are phenomenal. Absolutely phenomenal. He did things such as, just a simple chaîné turn, just a chain of turns: in one ballet he would do it turned out, then in another ballet he would do it turned in, then in the next ballet he would do it in first position, next ballet he would do it in fourth position. It was incredible – he would take steps and do them in a different way, and that's the miracle of Balanchine. It was incredible the way he did this.
"But Lew related directly from the music – it came from the music. I don't know if Balanchine ever tried to do that – he never tried to explain the music. He went beyond the music, into another level. Lew tried to explain the music, the phrasing."
Getting dancers to grasp this key difference is a major challenge in staging Christensen's choreography, Carter said. "It's hard to get them to dance in terms of phrases," he said. "That's very difficult. The last company I was [staging a work] in, for the Russians it was like pulling teeth. In the Russian training, they do a step, and stop. They do another step, and stop.
"This isn't that way. Each time you bend your leg, that's a preparation for the next step. You go up, you come down, you go up again. And then you go up again. You just keep going. Russians aren't used to that. They're used to going up, down, and stop; and then you start the next step – up, down and stop. I had to get very angry and insist, and carry on, and create quite a scene to get these people to understand what I was talking about – that you can't adapt the work to you; you have to go to the work. You can't change ballet to you – you've got to become a dancer."
Even Christensen's methodical working style was diametrically opposed to Balanchine's, the two recalled.
"He'd always try to plan his patterns absolutely." Vickrey said. "He'd come into rehearsal with specific plans.'
"…Which was absolutely anti-Balanchine," said Carter. "Balanchine asked Lew to do a work; it was called Pocahontas. Lew was very enthusiastic. He came in with all these reams of notes and everything. He came into the studio – and Balanchine came and took his notes! ‘Now, dear,' he said, ‘just paint.'
"And Lew said, ‘What?!' He couldn't believe it! Lew told me this on the Q.T. – we got drunk one night, and he was telling me - he said, ‘I used to write the stuff on my shirt, and sneak it in when Balanchine wasn't looking.' He couldn't remember all the stuff!
"Balanchine was just the opposite. I used to watch him, and he was a genius. He used to come into the studio and say [imitating his voice] ‘Now, dancers, here's what we're going to do,' and then WHOOSH! The stuff would pour out, and people were trying to remember it, and it was crazy – it was coming out so fast you couldn't memorize it. And he'd get irritated if he had to go back. He was overwhelming, really.
"But Lew wasn't that way. Lew would come in, and everything was sort of planned out – he'd have worked it out at home, and he knew what he was going to do when he got there."
That preplanning extended beyond choreography to every aspect of theater, Carter said:
"He used to build [model] theaters, with lights and everything. One of his in-laws invented Celastic…it's a plastic-impregnated cloth. You'd put acetone on it, and put it over something, and it would take that shape. You could make almost anything with it. He used to make molds and then cast these proscenium arches; he'd have a whole theater, complete with fly curtains and everything, and he'd even have little spotlights made out of flashlights. And he used to manipulate these and work out his ballets.
"He knew a lot about theater. If you look at any of his ballets, they're very carefully thought out. He had a lot of background in technical theater – he knew a lot about lighting, he knew a lot about backdrops, props and all that kind of stuff. Did you ever see A Masque of Beauty and the Shepherd? It's lost now – I mean, I could reconstruct it, but… anyway, it was a charming work. It was about the Judgment of Paris – the apple, and the three goddesses vying for the apple. At the very end of this ballet they constructed a big ship, right on the stage, in front of your eyes, that happened so fast it was just BANG – ‘What? How'd you do that?' It was incredible, actually incredible. He knew how to do these things.
"Balanchine, you know, was just the dance; he didn't like a lot of scenery and costumes. He didn't do that until later, when he got into the State Theater, and it looked awfully bare. But Lew incorporated all these various theatrical things at all times, and used them in an intelligent way. He was interested in that kind of stuff, and ways that he could use it in dance."
Christensen himself attributed some of his theatrical savvy to his pre-ballet days on the vaudeville circuit. And it was there, Vickrey thinks, that he picked up another trait: his willingness to make his ballets entertaining. This accessibility, he said, makes Christensen's repertory ideal for artistic directors who need to program both for artistic quality and for audience-building appeal.
"A lot of what I always liked about his works is that they are so accessible," he said. "I think a lot of that goes back to his vaudeville history, to pleasing an audience. Trying to be intelligent about his work, and trying to get his ideas across choreographically – but always knowing that he needed to please his audience. Especially in a situation like San Francisco, where he had to sell those tickets – people had to come back."
"I read a review that said, ‘An intelligent person can see the San Francisco Ballet and come away rewarded,'" Carter said. "But I think an unintelligent person can go and see some of Lew Christensen's works, and come away rewarded too. It sort of hits you at all levels. It's not so esoteric that it's only for aficionados."
Another Christensen asset for artistic directors, Vickrey said, is flexibility. Most of his works don't demand a large corps of perfectly-matched dancers, because Christensen seldom had that luxury himself.
"He didn't necessarily have what San Francisco Ballet has now as a standard of style, or what New York City Ballet has that's come out of their school," he said. "He would have a group of dancers – some from the school, some from here, some from there, some from everywhere – and he would just work with what he had, and make them look brilliant. Some of them were brilliant, don't misunderstand me. But…"
"He worked with the people who were available to him," Carter said. "Who he had in Ballet Caravan…weren't the finest dancers in the world. They had certain capabilities, and that's the way the steps came out.
"Now, the beauty of that is that you can take a work like Filling Station and go almost anywhere with it. You have two central roles, Mac and the Rich Girl, who are dance roles. You have to have some ability to do those roles, you see? The rest of them, you don't! The last company I was in, I actually had a girl do the State Trooper and a girl do the Thief – dressed up as a man. The truck drivers – one of them was a Russian, more of a character dancer – he came from the Moiseyev [folk dance company.] He didn't even have ballet training. And yet we were able to set it on them, because these steps are more universal, and it's more acting than actual dancing."
So why is it that this versatile, accessible, creative, decent artist ("He was a gentle man," said Carter; "a nice guy, really a nice guy.") is not more famous as a choreographer? Carter has a blunt answer:
"The reason Lew is not more famous is that he left New York! And went to San Francisco, and that's 3,000 miles away. The center of dance has always traditionally been New York. It hasn't been until recent years, with jet airplanes, that it's been simple to get to the West Coast. In the ‘50s, on a propeller plane, it took about 14 hours – it was a long, harrowing trip.
"And I think that one other problem with his fame [or lack of fame] was that he himself was more of an introvert. He was a shy man; he never tooted his own horn."
One consequence of this neglect, Carter said, is that Christensen's ballets are gradually disappearing.
"The Christensen legacy has really been lost in the San Francisco Ballet, in a sense," he said. "What they tend to do now is throw on a token Christensen work for the season, and so these works are in danger of being lost. There are a couple, I'll tell you, that are lost, and will never be done again; one of them was one of the finest works he ever did, Don Juan. It was phenomenal."
In this, as in other areas, the Christensen story is eerily reminiscent of another Dane's: a man of the theater, a champion of the male dancer, a lover of musicality and humor; famous in his own time, but later obscured by geography and shifts in critical taste; his legacy now imperiled by neglect in his "home" company. Could Christensen be America's 20th-century counterpart to August Bournonville?
Bournonville, at least, was rediscovered eventually. Christensen, his admirers believe, is still waiting for the renaissance he deserves.
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