WEBVTT

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So we're back to tape number one.

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It's April 1.

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So that's 04-01.

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April 85.

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Dip on productive.

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Bars in time.

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And all about the Bolero.

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Now you want to do it again, I'll bet.

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Oh, I'm dying to see it.

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I don't know, you know, that music got so popular that everybody got so sick of it.

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I know, but your way of doing it was tongue in cheek.

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It was tongue in cheek, let's have it.

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Now you can do it again, but at the time you couldn't do it anymore because...

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Copyrights.

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No, it was just too... done all the time.

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Played all the time.

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Seriously.

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But the music started and you hear click, click, click, ta-da-da-da, click, and you think that yours is going to open up to a lot of things.

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They're clicking with these wooden needles.

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Yeah.

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Let's talk about critics.

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And the role of critics.

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I'll tell you another thing about Ruth more important.

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We went to Hamburg and Ruth had danced with Harold Kreutzberg for a couple years and their cup was Frederick Wilkins, wonderful pianist, composer.

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Very old man living in a retirement home.

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She won't tell it, so I will.

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This is her way of saying goodbye to him.

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She paid his way to come to Hamburg and lived in the same hotel we were at for two weeks.

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Ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner with us.

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Then we'd go for rum cakes and hot chocolate every day at four.

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But that was her way of seeing an old friend, knowing that she'd probably never see him again.

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He was deep in his 80s at the time.

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Right?

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Yeah, I guess. I don't remember much about that.

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Well, we give a lot of scholarships over there, yes.

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What other kinds of things? Because Ruth certainly won't tell us about them.

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I was going to tell you about the Harvard thing.

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I told you about in an inner city school, inner city high school, the way she – Tom Fisher was a Harvard graduate.

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In his name, she has established an annual lecture in the performing arts,

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to which all students at Harvard can come without any admission charge.

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The first lecture was to be by Arthur Mitchell.

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I remember that.

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We were in Boston, so she'd be there at the time to see it.

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We arrive, and Arthur Mitchell didn't arrive.

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And they're all sitting in the places filled, a big hall, and standing all over the place.

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Go ahead, say something.

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So she did, and she simply charmed them.

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Well, I had to talk till he got there, vamped already.

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It was only 45 minutes.

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Can you imagine coming 45 minutes late to a lecture you were going to give?

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No. What did you say, Ruth?

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I don't remember.

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She talked. She just made sense for 45 minutes.

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They just charmed them with everything.

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Talked about dance and her own experiences and stuff like that.

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That was funny.

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There was a time when you – talking about children and having things to say,

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there's something that you wrote that hasn't even been published yet about advice to a young dancer.

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And one of the things you said was – or advice even to young people –

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you have to learn what you want to do in life, and if you can't discover it for yourself,

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someone will have to tell you that it's important to pick the right people to listen to in your life.

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Yes, it is. Don't you think it is?

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I've never picked the right people to listen to, at least so my husband tells me.

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But I think that kids are very influenced by the older people that are around them, don't you?

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I used to go around and give lectures at the schools all around Chicago,

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and I enjoyed it very much because I felt I could do some good,

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influence those kids to be interested in dance and art.

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I did it for quite a long while.

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I took a couple of dancers with me and would tell them all I could think of to make them interested in the dance.

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And I think that's very important, don't you?

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I do, and I think you did it.

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As I say, when I was studying dance, an important thing was that you had a company worth being in that had open auditions.

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Yes, I did too.

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That's why I don't believe in this, that you have to have a school,

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and the school prepares them all the right style for that.

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What about after the end of the company, the last tour of the company, the 14th tour,

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the Ruth Page International Ballet was being called by that time.

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Ruth did a series of things called Ruth Page's Invitations to the Dance.

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Oh, that was a talk, sort of like my slide lectures now.

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Sometimes we call that Invitations to the Dance just because we couldn't think of anything else to call it,

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in which I show slides and then describe each dance and what choreography is and what influences you.

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Like with Balanchine, I always say this in the lecture, and I'm sure it's true,

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he's entirely interested in the music.

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He picks the music and then does a ballet to the music.

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Well, Merce Cunningham doesn't pay attention to the music at all,

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so it shows how many different ways there are to do choreography and what an open thing it is.

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You can come in there and do anything, start something entirely new.

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This company, the Toronto Company, I've never seen a company like that before.

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You weren't here for it, but they were extremely interesting, I thought.

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Did you see them?

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No, I didn't.

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They were very, very interesting.

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I didn't even know they had a company, but there was a modern dance company,

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and they did everything in their bare feet, and they had no stories at all.

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But the movement was sufficiently interesting.

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There was one ballet they did that was very surrealist.

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I forget the name of it, it was completely surrealist, and that was interesting.

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It just shows what a variety there is in what you can do,

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and you have to get kids at the right age to get them interested

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and know that they can do all kinds of different things.

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It isn't just one set thing that they have to do.

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So I think that influencing kids in high school and before high school is very important.

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Do you think that it's more open now,

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that kids know more about dance and are more interested in dance than they used to be?

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Well, I think they know more about everything now, don't you?

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I mean, they're so sophisticated at no age at all that you have to listen to them

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instead of them listening to you.

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There's lots of talent around, there's no question about that.

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And then of course with the television, that makes a difference.

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You can see ballet on television quite often, not very good, but sometimes very good.

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So they see a lot more than they were able to before.

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In my day, we didn't see anything.

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And the notion, it seems to me, that as far as men are concerned, that dancing is for sissies.

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Well, that idea is out completely now because of the success of Nur EF

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and all the great dancers.

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There are more male stars now than there are female stars.

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Don't you think there are?

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Well, dancing is a male art. They've got the physique for it, the muscles.

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Yes.

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You realize in primitive societies, the men dance, the women beat the drums.

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That's right.

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And that all through history, even now, who are the great dancers?

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Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Jose Greco, Rudolf Norea.

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The women are secondary.

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It was only in those few decades of Victorian times when they had to have an ideal,

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which was danced by the woman, and the men became the poor tour.

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But men dance better than women.

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Of course, they don't have to dance on toe, and that helps a lot, too.

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You bet.

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I mean, the degree of difficulty.

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I just watched this college then.

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One or two groups did things on point, and it becomes labored.

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It takes so long until the toe shoe becomes part of your body and you dance on it.

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And men don't have to do that.

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But the truth is that the spectacular things, think even in the pas de deux,

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like the corsaire, there's a pas de deux and they show off the girl fine.

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And the man gets 90 seconds to do double, and he, the big thing is that the girl's variations, nothing.

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Then the coda, he comes out with more.

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It's the men's dancing.

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Think back, those are the big names in dance, even today.

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You know, that's unusual because you think of it at first,

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I think a lot of people think of it as a female artist, the prima ballerina.

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No, men are more graceful than women.

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The men with the big shoulders, the thin, and the, that's why Mr. Balanchina even brought up an anorexia generation

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because you don't find a single girl with a bosom or anything.

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They're all boyish looking.

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And the male body is a stand by window and watch people passing by.

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Men stride by much more gracefully than these teetering women mincing around.

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It's true.

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I mean, dance, the word graceful is always mixed up with things that aren't,

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but men have much more grace in movement.

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Awful thing to say, but there are some women, of course.

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Well, I think it's because they're dressed simpler, too.

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Women sometimes wear those crazy clothes.

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And all those years they wore their corsets and all those heavy skirts.

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Nobody's realized that. They always talk about the great radicals, you know, such as his Dordain.

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The big thing was getting the corsets off.

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And when they started to wear bloomers, you know, their old dance books are all wearing a midi blouse and the Jim bloomers.

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A lot of dance came with that.

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That's more theories.

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Where do you think dance is going now, Miss Barzell?

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It's just going to trip along the way it always has.

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It's not going. It goes back and forth and then it's not the same.

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You don't see how you're traveling.

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Dance has always changed.

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It's intrinsic to the arts to change.

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And it isn't just modern dance that made the change in so-called ballet.

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Nineteenth century, there were always revolutionaries then to, it's the way of an artist to try to make change.

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Like with Paige, she never did the same thing twice.

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You never did another flapper number.

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You never did another, that was done, you went on to the next.

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You never did another saloon number after Freddie and Frankie and Johnny.

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You have to keep going on.

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Always going forward.

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It's just more fun if you keep going forward.

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And sequels, you once wrote something that said that sequels are a bad idea.

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Yes, I don't think you should try to repeat yourself.

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If you make a success of one thing, don't try to do something something like it because the one something like it usually isn't as good as the original.

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I tried that with my dance Tropic, which I think is my best dance.

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I tried to make sequels to that and they were never any good.

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They were all right, but they weren't anything special.

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So there you are.

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Ian, are we still on?

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What role do you think critics should play, do play, ought to play in the development of dances and in your own development as a choreographer?

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Well, I think that critics can be very creative and can help you.

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There are not very many of them that do.

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There are not very many of them that know much about dance.

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Actually, because it usually is the music critic.

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Ann knows a great deal about dance.

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She's a real critic.

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But and John Martin, I think, was a good critic.

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He was on the New York Times for years and years and sort of made made that job mount to something.

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Clive Barnes is a good critic, but he doesn't write for he's not on the Times anymore at any rate.

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And you don't see much of what he writes anymore.

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And there are a few good ones.

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There are a few that are helpful to you.

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But on the on the in general, I don't think they are.

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So I think it's we all like to read the critics, but you shouldn't pay too much attention to them.

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I think you should go ahead and do what you feel like doing and not listen to what they tell you to do.

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You know, don't you agree with me, really?

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I think the critic is writing for the choreographer who knows more than he does anyway.

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That's true.

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He should be writing for the reader.

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Yes.

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You should be trying to know.

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But that's what John Martin did for years.

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He advocated the modern dance and he did a great deal to make it acceptable to explain it to the people.

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So they'd want to see it.

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He did help Graham Humphrey and Wideman.

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But the big thing he was trying to do is talk to the audience.

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And that's what a critic should do.

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What about this kind of technical criticism that you sometimes see?

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And what's your opinion of that?

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In words of two syllables, I couldn't say them.

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It's a lot of rubbish.

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The only time you use terminology is a teacher teaching a class or if you are writing notes for the future.

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Or if you modify it in some way, if you say the stanzas entre chas were brilliant, OK, then you use it.

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Or you say his entre chas were faulty because he was, or the arabesque was so beautiful because it opened beautifully and then folded.

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OK, then you use the word arabesque.

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But say she did an arabesque.

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It says nothing.

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As a friend of Ruth's, to change the approach from here, what things would you like people to know about Ruth that aren't generally known about her?

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Well, I think people do not appreciate her personal quality of sympathetic empathy with whomever she's with.

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Unless you know her, you don't get that.

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I've never heard her badmouth anything.

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People have done things to her.

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She doesn't remember that.

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She's big enough to know the world goes on.

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They all know she's adventurous, some that she's creative, that part.

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But as a human being, that's probably why her parties are the most wonderful parties.

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There's such a warmth there.

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00:16:24.900 --> 00:16:30.900
I always talk myself into getting invited because I'm not a party girl usually, but hers I like.

233
00:16:30.900 --> 00:16:32.740
There's some how or other.

234
00:16:33.180 --> 00:16:36.480
She is not just the center and everybody whirling around her.

235
00:16:36.760 --> 00:16:39.900
But the fact that she's there with an eye out, it's planned well.

236
00:16:40.380 --> 00:16:43.020
One lovely part is she knows the dancers are hungry.

237
00:16:43.420 --> 00:16:47.460
You don't come and drink cocktails for three hours waiting for the food.

238
00:16:47.820 --> 00:16:55.000
Also, you know that the vultures who came to the performance and are hungry and start eating, you don't touch it until the dancers come.

239
00:16:56.700 --> 00:16:57.680
And the food is ready.

240
00:16:57.740 --> 00:16:58.580
Dancers come on.

241
00:16:58.580 --> 00:16:59.740
We start with that.

242
00:16:59.740 --> 00:17:01.660
Very few know that.

243
00:17:02.180 --> 00:17:03.020
I've been to parties.

244
00:17:03.080 --> 00:17:04.700
You come in and it's a cocktail thing.

245
00:17:04.740 --> 00:17:05.900
We're all looking at the table.

246
00:17:06.080 --> 00:17:07.240
Nobody dares go near.

247
00:17:08.940 --> 00:17:13.340
Did you go to the party that was after Tom died?

248
00:17:13.500 --> 00:17:14.140
Were you at that party?

249
00:17:14.240 --> 00:17:14.980
The party was gay.

250
00:17:15.220 --> 00:17:16.700
Oh yes, the memorial party.

251
00:17:16.740 --> 00:17:17.940
That was beautiful, yes.

252
00:17:18.600 --> 00:17:19.280
What was that like?

253
00:17:20.040 --> 00:17:26.340
Well, it was very much you remembered what an urbane man he was.

254
00:17:27.060 --> 00:17:28.080
What a way of life.

255
00:17:28.080 --> 00:17:30.960
You remembered him and that's what it was all about.

256
00:17:33.060 --> 00:17:36.020
And wonderfully it was not in a chapel but in his home.

257
00:17:37.160 --> 00:17:38.340
That was his setting.

258
00:17:38.600 --> 00:17:41.200
And you kept thinking of him in that setting.

259
00:17:41.900 --> 00:17:42.980
Did you have that feeling?

260
00:17:43.460 --> 00:17:45.680
Of course, that point you weren't feeling even.

261
00:17:46.140 --> 00:17:46.140


262
00:17:47.020 --> 00:17:48.560
Those were hard times.

263
00:17:49.720 --> 00:17:51.560
But it felt appropriate.

264
00:17:52.940 --> 00:17:54.340
The appropriateness was there.

265
00:17:54.340 --> 00:18:00.060
I think Ruth and Tom both were very sure of themselves socially.

266
00:18:00.720 --> 00:18:02.740
That's one thing about Ruth.

267
00:18:05.980 --> 00:18:12.040
She doesn't have to try to be aristocracy because she is an old family

268
00:18:12.040 --> 00:18:14.720
and she doesn't have to do social climbing which helps a lot.

269
00:18:14.960 --> 00:18:16.340
So she can afford to be relaxed.

270
00:18:18.100 --> 00:18:22.840
Not naming other people who are so uptight because they feel they have to impress people.

271
00:18:22.840 --> 00:18:24.940
Ruth never tries to impress.

272
00:18:27.720 --> 00:18:28.780
What was Tom like?

273
00:18:29.440 --> 00:18:29.800
Tom?

274
00:18:30.860 --> 00:18:32.940
Very, very wonderful human being.

275
00:18:34.320 --> 00:18:35.940
I used the word urbane before.

276
00:18:36.660 --> 00:18:39.420
Cosmopolitan, urbane, could speak on any topic.

277
00:18:41.640 --> 00:18:44.860
He was almost arrogant but he didn't have to be arrogant.

278
00:18:45.040 --> 00:18:46.640
He took the center always.

279
00:18:47.040 --> 00:18:48.900
Wonderful conversationalist.

280
00:18:50.720 --> 00:18:52.060
You can add a lot to that.

281
00:18:52.060 --> 00:18:54.160
You talked about Tom.

282
00:18:54.280 --> 00:18:56.500
I think he was a very remarkable man.

283
00:18:57.020 --> 00:18:57.600
That was crazy.

284
00:18:58.920 --> 00:19:05.460
Do you think Tom's contributions to creating Ruth Ballet companies?

285
00:19:05.560 --> 00:19:09.540
He was very, very more than cooperative.

286
00:19:10.160 --> 00:19:13.140
He was deeply involved even before he married Ruth.

287
00:19:13.180 --> 00:19:16.000
You see they met during the allied arts days.

288
00:19:16.400 --> 00:19:20.280
So he was already interested in the arts.

289
00:19:20.280 --> 00:19:24.720
And here was an art right on his doorstep and of course he was interested in it.

290
00:19:25.280 --> 00:19:29.280
And I'm sure that when I say advisor I don't think he was above.

291
00:19:29.680 --> 00:19:34.560
But they could talk things because he understood he could talk the same language.

292
00:19:35.080 --> 00:19:41.380
And as they traveled around the world they met everybody and knew everybody.

293
00:19:41.520 --> 00:19:46.680
Whether they were in the art of the dance or music or architecture or whatever.

294
00:19:46.680 --> 00:19:53.720
And of course that was a great plus in Ruth's life because there was no antagonism.

295
00:19:54.460 --> 00:19:56.240
We do this all together.

296
00:19:56.880 --> 00:20:01.600
How do you think he felt about Ruth from knowing and seeing them together over all the years?

297
00:20:02.700 --> 00:20:04.560
How do you think he felt about Ruth?

298
00:20:04.600 --> 00:20:06.520
How would you characterize it from your eyes?