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This is your review on channel 2.

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Channel 1 does not have it.

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It will be mic level for the ships from Larry Long, which is for the film production.

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This is the interview.

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It's 10-24-85.

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This is 10, take number 2 for the Larry Long interview.

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And this will be toned in for the first minute.

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We went to Leadville.

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We were talking about touring.

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And this is kind of an apocryphal story about the kind of places that we toured and kind of why it's sad that this isn't possible nowadays.

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One of the tours, one of the places that we went was Leadville, Colorado.

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At the time we went there, we knew nothing about Leadville, Colorado.

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It was just a name on an itinerary.

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Later, when the musical, Unsinkable Molly Brown, was produced, everybody learned that Leadville was the place where Molly Brown's husband, Leadville Johnny Brown,

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made his great silver strike and got all the money that made Molly Brown such a character.

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Well, we went to Leadville and we were playing actually in a high school.

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But there was a little opera house, a tiny little thing, which we visited.

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It wasn't used anymore.

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It was kind of closed and it was dusty and it was, oh, dilapidated, but nicely dilapidated.

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And finding out that there were, and when we got there, we found posters, saw posters that were up, that guess who had been there before us to this little opera house?

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Anna Pavlova.

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Now, most likely, Anna Pavlova was the last person was there before us.

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That's the kind of thing, that's the kind of thing, the experience that we had on those tours.

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And that's the kind of thing that's almost too bad that it's not possible to do now.

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If you can imagine that of all of the weird places and the tiny, small little places that we went to, a good many of them, we were the first ballet that had been there.

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But probably in fully half of those bizarre little tiny places, we were the second company.

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Pavlova had been the first.

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It shows you something about Pavlova and something about Miss Page as well.

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There's a certain kind of kinship there that's more real than imagined.

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But that kind of thing isn't possible anymore.

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I remember everybody used to think, how is it possible for us to tour the way we did?

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They were very long tours, and every year Miss Page would somehow strive to make a new production for us.

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And I found out later, when my association with Ruth became a little closer, I found out, for example, that since we toured with community concerts, we toured under a guarantee.

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Well, she and Mr. Fisher, probably Mr. Fisher more, because he was a real businessman, made sure that the company cost just a little bit less than our guarantee for six performances a week generated.

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So that the excess over 17, 18 weeks was enough to pay for the following year's new production.

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And it worked that way every single year.

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Every year, Miss Page always had something new.

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Sometimes they were quite lavish, sometimes they were a little bit more modest, although Miss Page was never modest in her scope, never.

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But the one tour always paid.

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The little bit that was left over from expenses of one tour always went into the new production for the following year.

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Nowadays, companies are so enormous, first of all, that no company, probably not even Joffrey, who is the smallest of the big companies, could go and actually perform in the kind of places that we often had to.

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They certainly, Ballet Theatre could certainly never take Four Acts of Swan Lake or Romeo and Juliet or La Sulfide or God knows what to the Leadville Central High School.

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It wouldn't be possible.

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The whole thing is, the whole scene, tours, and especially economical scene has changed so enormously.

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Now, we're in the process of hiring dancers now for Nutcracker, as you might know, for our annual Nutcracker in McCormick Place.

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And we hired principal dancers and some soloists from companies all over the United States and Europe.

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Well, it's very difficult for us to get dancers from American companies now.

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Because, for example, the dancers in Joffrey Ballet are used to getting their salary plus $85 a day per diem.

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Well, when we were touring, there was no such thing. Per diem was a mythical animal.

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It hadn't been invented yet.

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It's that kind of thing about the whole situation, dance situation, has just changed so drastically that it wouldn't be possible for any company to do quite the way we did.

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Although, it is a shame because there's a lot of little places around there who had a taste of it at least twice, once with Anna and once with Ruth, who haven't had it since.

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They must be very hungry by now.

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You know what always struck me about all of this?

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The ballets for the tours and the ballets that Ruth would choreograph, knowing that you did go places like Leadville, Colorado.

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And yet, Ruth would go ahead and choreograph operas, the Bolero, things that were...

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It was as though she never choreographed down to her audience, whatever.

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No, Ruth choreographed as though she was choreographing for the Paris Opera, for Paris or London or Madrid or Barcelona.

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I mean, she didn't choreograph for Leadville.

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She just choreographed like she was choreographing for the most incredible company, for the most incredible opera house and the biggest capital of the world.

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And yet, it worked.

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And yet, without doubt, it worked.

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I think it worked.

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I think people, when they saw Ruth's company, realized they were seeing something that was totally and 100% unique.

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I think they were seeing something that they could very easily have seen in Paris or London.

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Her whole approach was like that.

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She often said, and I think she probably reflected it in her work, that every performance, she'd come every single, no matter what,

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Beville, Texas, didn't matter, Las Vegas, New Mexico, not Nevada, New Mexico.

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Oh, right.

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Yes, right. Big difference.

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It didn't matter.

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This is the most important performance of your career.

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This is the most important performance of the tour.

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Somebody was coming, somebody she met in the lobby of the hotel who wanted to know what she was doing in this town.

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This is the most important. So-and-so is coming.

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And that reflected in her work.

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Each ballet was the most important ballet that she had done, and she gave it that much consideration,

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that much effort and time and care, consideration for everything about the ballet.

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The tiniest detail was tremendously important.

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There wasn't anything that was just taken for granted.

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Can you describe the process of the mounting of a new ballet as you experienced it as a member of the company?

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I don't know, Flater Maus or Mary Widow or any ballet that-a new ballet.

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I mean, what would be the first thing and how would it get put into the repertoire?

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Every year when we would come back, there would be-speculation would be rife, what's going to be the new ballet.

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Sometimes, rarely, we'd have a hint from the end of the tour before what the new ballet was going to be.

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It might be oblique.

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Something said just kind of en passant in the bus about-that would give you a hint.

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Well, maybe it's going to be this, maybe it's going to be that.

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So when everybody reassembled in every September at the Opera House, it would-what's the new ballet going to be?

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What does anybody know? Do you have any idea?

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So it was very, always very exciting. What was it going to be like? Was it going to be a place for me?

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Was I going to get to do something special? Was it, you know?

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And it was always very shortly after that that we got the hint of what it was going to be.

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Ruth would start playing around with little ideas.

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She always started working with material, which is very much like modern dancers do now.

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It's a very kind of avant-garde way of working now.

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Ruth always worked that way.

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She would do what's called building material, movement ideas, steps put together,

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in no particular relationship to one another or not long sequences,

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just kind of building up like word pictures only with movement.

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Just constantly adding and adding and adding until finally when she would get-

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she worked always in collaboration with an orchestrator and arranger, Isaac Van Groh.

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Until finally she'd get probably the first draft of the idea that they had discussed from him,

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a real kind of musical form of how it was going to go together.

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And then she'd start arranging this movement material that she'd been working on.

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And all of a sudden you saw a light at the end of the tunnel somehow.

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You saw how things were going to come along.

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Then you'd actually get the- at that point you'd actually get what the story was.

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If it was from an opera, if it was Deflator Mouse, you'd begin to-

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you'd be told this is Deflator Mouse and this is what's going on.

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Or Carmina or Carmen or Camille.

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Then you'd be told up until that time she'd just been playing with things kind of in a void.

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You didn't really have an idea of what she was going for, where it was all leading.

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But now you would.

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At that point then she would start systematically building up the ballet.

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Not always in order.

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She didn't always start right at the beginning and just kind of go boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, right to the end.

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But you began to get an idea of how the whole thing was going to go.

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And of course the more rehearsals would go on, the more material would be added.

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The clearer the outline of the ballet, the clearer the form the ballet was actually going to take.

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Would take.

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She was always very, very deceptive in a way.

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She always had little surprises for you.

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I remember when we were doing Camille, she sketched out in movement form the opening scene of Camille.

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She'd done some of the pas de deux.

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The more straightforward parts of the ballet had emerged, gurgled up from her innards.

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And then all of a sudden she started putting together this kind of collage of weird movement images, grotesqueries in a way.

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And you couldn't forget, now wait a minute, I know the story of Camille, I've done Traviata, I don't understand this.

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And she wouldn't bother to explain it to you.

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She didn't feel the necessity that you had to know everything about her thought processes as she was going on.

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Well it turned out when the ballet was actually put together that this was a dream sequence.

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This was toward the end of the ballet when Camille is lying, dying in her bed.

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And she has all of these, there is supposedly a carnival.

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It's lent on the streets of Paris in its carnival time.

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And all of these people in weird costumes and revelers are out on the street and everything.

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But they all intrude in her bedroom and take on these kind of fantastic proportions.

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And mixed in with this group of almost sinister figures from the streets and from her imagination are flashbacks to Armand's father and his sister who is getting married and Armand himself.

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And all the people who kind of had a place in the ballet all come back.

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And all of a sudden you realize that Ruth was kind of creating a surreal world all of a sudden.

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And it had real shape and a place in the ballet.

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But at the time it was being done you had no idea of what she was going for.

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And it was very, very exciting because your mind just went completely berserk trying to second guess or trying to figure out where this is going.

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And of course she always had a place to go.

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Why didn't you ask? I mean nobody, why didn't somebody say, Ruth, is this for Camille? What is this for?

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Well, I don't know. But for that particular ballet perhaps someone did ask.

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I didn't because that was my first, sorry about that.

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I don't know why we can do that.

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I, nobody asked.

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I'll try not to do that again.

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It's okay.

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Why didn't somebody ask? It's very possible that at that time somebody did ask.

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I didn't ask because it was my first year in the company and I didn't presume to ask anybody anything.

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Secondly, I thought I must be just so stupid.

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I must be the only idiot in the company and she's hired me out of good graces.

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After five auditions.

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Right, after five auditions.

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And finally I could do a handstand and I got hired and she probably is doing this like one buys Easter Seals just to be good to the cripple.

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And I just thought everybody must know where this is going.

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And I didn't and so I just assumed that it was my own ignorance.

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So it's possible that somebody did.

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Later when I knew her better and I'd worked with her longer it was possible to ask her things.

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And yet even so, somehow there were a lot of times that I would have loved to have asked her all kinds of things.

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Particularly when there was a time when I was interested in doing choreography myself.

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And there were times when I would have loved to ask her in any number of things about the art of choreography and how to do it.

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And somehow I just didn't.

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She was always very, very engrossed.

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In rehearsals she was never frivolous.

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It was never a bunch of joking.

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It was very serious work to her.

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And you just somehow hesitated to kind of intrude on her process.

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I did ask for things at times but one was kind of careful about doing it.

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And then she didn't hang out with the dancers.

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No, no.

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Ruth, now you know what, it dances very democratic.

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If a director for example doesn't go out and have a beer with the boys afterwards, he's a kind of snob or something like that.

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It's become very democratic.

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Ruth wasn't that way at all.

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Ruth was tremendously friendly and very interested in you.

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But you never forgot your place and she never really forgot hers.

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She was Ruth Page.

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She was the director of the company.

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She had tremendous responsibilities.

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And she was very social on the appropriate occasions.

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But she wasn't one of the guys.

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She wasn't one of the kids.

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She was really...

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Now over the years, Larry...