DANCE : STANDING TALL DESPITE BALLET’S STATE OF FLUX

Ask Maria Tallchief for a global reading on the state of dance today, and America’s first internationally celebrated ballerina straightens her still-supple back, locks eyes with a listener and launches ahead:

“We’re in a period of flux now. George Balanchine, the greatest teacher of a great tradition, has passed from our presence and the whole dance world is waiting to see what will happen to his legacy.

“I saw a small group from the Kirov recently. Except for two brilliant dancers, it was a disappointment,” she says. “And three years ago the Royal Ballet looked like a parody of its former self.”

Regal yet passionately communicative, Tallchief was the New York City Ballet’s de facto prima ballerina from shortly after Balanchine married her 40 years ago (making her the third of his four wives) until 1955. She holds an exalted place in dance history. Walter Terry described her performance in Balanchine’s “Firebird” as “breathtaking” and wrote that her “fluttering, flashing, soaring moments flamed with dynamic tension and speed.” Lincoln Kirstein called her portrayal of the role “electrifying” and saw it “emerging as the nearest approximation of a prima ballerina we (NYCB) had yet enjoyed.”

Now, Tallchief watches the dance scene vigilantly--and hopefully--from her post as director of the Chicago City Ballet. She is used to speaking ex officio of the New York City Ballet, even though in the three years since Balanchine’s death she has not seen it perform. Her own troupe, founded in 1981, has kept her on home turf. But she says that “even if my company folds, I’ll still teach: Teaching is the essence of the Balanchine/Kirov tradition. George always wanted me to do this for him.”

Invited to Los Angeles recently as an honoree of the Marguerite Amilita Hoffman National Ballet Competition (Tuesday through Sunday at Royce Hall, UCLA), Tallchief views the visit partly as an odyssey. She is ensconced in a luxury suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel, not far from where she spent her childhood and adolescence. As she gazes out on the street at a bower of purple jacarandas, she speaks of her career beginnings.

“It was a propitious time for an 18-year-old,” Tallchief, now 62, recalls, crossing her long legs and looking elegantly slim in narrow, white jeans, a silk shirt and high-heeled spectator pumps. “To be full of energy and music and the desire to dance. And to have a genius like Balanchine challenging you, making you the best. Only a fool would squander the opportunity.”

Tallchief was no fool. She began on an Indian reservation in Fairfax, Okla., where her Scotch-Irish mother decided that life there was too depriving culturally for her young daughters. So when Maria and sister Marjorie were 7 and 5, respectively, the family moved to Los Angeles. (Marjorie will serve as a judge at the UCLA dance competition next week.)

Money was no object, according to Tallchief. Because of oil discoveries on the Osage land, they accumulated “enormous wealth.” Her mother feared, however, that their fortune would be run through and their ambitions thwarted in an unproductive atmosphere.

“She was right, of course,” says the former dancer. “My father was a prime example of that. He never furthered himself. When the family was previously dispossessed of its Kansas farmland and sent to Fairfax, which had only grazing pastures, finding an occupation was a problem.

“Los Angeles suited us all. My father could play golf year-round and we could get all the benefits of a city education, including fine music and dance teachers.”

The Tallchief girls went to school with the likes of Rhonda Fleming and Sam Goldwyn Jr., graduating from Beverly Hills High School. They had both studied dance and Maria also became an accomplished pianist by that time. When she turned 17 and was about to enroll at UCLA, her father laid down the law:

“He announced that it was time to get a job,” says Tallchief, laughing good-naturedly, “that he had paid for hundreds of lessons and now it was my turn to pick up the tab. Quite funny, coming from someone who never worked a day in his life.”

So the dutiful daughter auditioned for and got a bit part at MGM, after which she went to New York with Tatiana Riabouchinska (now Tania Lichine).

By invitation, she looked up Sergei Denham, who had seen her dance in Los Angeles, and he signed her to tour with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. By the time she returned home the following summer, Tallchief says: “I already had a name--albeit a funny one that aroused a lot of curiosity.”

It was then that she met Balanchine, the man who would become her mentor and husband. Just prior to their meeting, his marriage to Vera Zorina (his second wife) had ended. He was choreographing “Song of Norway,” an Edwin Lester production being staged at the old Philharmonic Auditorium. Tallchief auditioned and became Alexandra Danilova’s understudy.

“I was bowled over by him (Balanchine),” she admits, throwing her head back in a remembrance of the giddy delirium she felt. “He drove an MG and took me to Romanoff’s. He was everything a young girl could want--witty, debonair, handsome. It didn’t matter that he was 20 years older than I. Maybe it even increased his appeal.

“But what he represented to me went beyond any of those things. George was the personification of music and dance, which by that time was my all-consuming passion.”

Few would argue that Balanchine’s whole life revolved around the company that would become New York City Ballet. It virtually became his family. He married three of his ballerinas (his first wife, Tamara Geva, preceded Balanchine’s American career). He also formed strong bonds with several others.

Tallchief is not the only one, however, who stayed close to Balanchine even after their marriage ended. Moira Shearer, the British dancer (renowned as the heroine of “The Red Shoes”), speculates in her recent book about Balanchine that the ex-wives remain friendly because their relationships with the common husband were platonic. Tallchief declines to discuss the subject. However, she does admit to a camaraderie with Balanchine’s ex-wives.

“When George and I were together (the actual marriage lasted from 1946 to 1952), we spent 12 hours of every day rehearsing and performing. We played piano, four-hands. Our rapport was strictly artistic, a true working marriage.”

She goes on to explain that, for him, being married “was like cementing his position as head of the family. He recognized me as the company’s prima ballerina (although no dancer had such a title) and the actual marriage stood as an acknowledgment of family.”

A dozen years after the annulment of that “acknowledgment”--Tallchief says no-fault divorce was not yet written into the law--she left the company. But not before rising to the popular peak of her career. In the mid-’50s, she appeared briefly again with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, was a guest on several television variety shows and made the cover of Newsweek, which proclaimed her “the highest-salaried ballerina in the world.”

In 1957, she married her present husband, Henry Paschen Jr., an affluent Chicago builder. “It was eight years later,” says Tallchief, “that I decided to follow through with the rest of what my mother ordained:

“Having a major career was only one part of the equation. Making a home, nurturing children and having a happy, complete marriage was the other. I was a precursor of superwoman. “

These ideals were so strongly inculcated, says Tallchief, that they became her own urgings. And, fortunately, everything just fell into place. When her daughter Elise (now 28) was 7 and could no longer accompany the dancer on tour, she decided to retire in 1965.

“I accomplished as much by then, artistically, as I ever would,” she says. “It was time to stay home with my husband and child. But I know it’s apocryphal, in this day and age, to marry, have children and live happily ever after.”

Now Tallchief admits to being a hand-wringing mother herself--what with an unmarried daughter who is a doctoral candidate studying Yeats at Oxford. She laughs, realizing that her Osage grandmother wore a blanket and couldn’t speak, read or write a word of English and predicts that “the next generation will seek, rather than hide, those roots.”

To a great extent, the dancer for whom Balanchine created no fewer than 31 roles sees herself admiring that mentor more now than ever. At the time she resigned from NYCB, however, Tallchief admits to a certain unhappiness.

“I felt abandoned by him,” she confesses. “As he became absorbed with younger dancers, I got less and less attention. But as soon as I started my own company (Chicago City Ballet and, before that, the Chicago Lyric Opera Ballet), it became clear to me that his priorities were right. And only then did I fully understand the kind of love affair he developed with his favorites.”

Tallchief remembers back to 10 years ago when the master sent Suzanne Farrell to dance with the Lyric Opera Ballet.

“He was so solicitous of her,” says Tallchief. “He called at 7 the next morning to make sure everything was all right. The way he felt about her bordered on obsessional and, frankly, I could see why--in how he made her dance and look. We (Tallchief and other wives and quasi-wives) knew that this was different from what we had experienced with him.”

Until he became ill in later years, Balanchine stayed in close touch with Tallchief--even admonishing her husband “to come to me if you have any trouble with her,” she says. “George remained protective and even encouraged me to carry on his tradition by organizing my own company.”

But in many ways Tallchief sees herself at Chicago City Ballet “as more of a football coach than an artistic director. George always said that posterity will reflect his influence more as a teacher than a creator and that is how I can best serve him.

“The ballets he left may actually disappear--we don’t know how those at City Ballet will manage to keep it together. But the aesthetic--creating for individual dancers the most beautiful movements possible--will not die as long as some of us pass it from generation to generation.”