Violette Verdy is now in her early 80s, but in her heyday as a soloist with the New York City Ballet I saw her dance many times and loved her performances, particularly in the role she created as the girl in green in Jerome Robbins’ “Dances at a Gathering,” set to the music of Chopin. I’ve written before about Verdy in that role, describing her “fluid charm, subtle humor, and exquisite musicality.” “Dances” is an ensemble piece, and her role is one of the smaller ones, but what she did with it was simply astounding. I’ve seen other people perform it since, and watched a few more of them recently on YouTube, and no one compares to Verdy.

In fact, no one even comes close. Although I love the ballet, it’s almost painful to watch other people dance it.

How did she do what she did? Not a great technician by current standards (although she was known for fast footwork that was also incredibly precise), she had none of the rubbery extensions of today’s dancers. Her leg never got raised much more than a little over 90 degrees, for example. Her brilliance—her genius, actually—was in timing, nuance, style, and sparkling wit. She was like champagne, and when you watched her dance, you felt buoyed up.

The are very few videos on YouTube of her dancing, and the few that exist are mostly of poor quality. But watch these two rather short ones and the stills and film in them will give you some idea—a poor idea, but better than nothing—of the amazing musicality and clarity and exquisite Gallic charm of her dancing (alas, no “Dances at a Gathering,” though, and in the second video the music that is used does not match the excerpts, unfortunately):

Here is one of the only visual records I can find online of her “Dances” performance, a multiple exposure still that appeared in Life magazine. There is something very special, particularly in the two middle pictures, about the weightedness of her stance and yet the lightness of her entire being. Her dancing always, always, always said something (that’s why Balanchine said to her that she spoke with her feet; she did):

Why am I writing about Verdy now? My memory was jogged when a reader sent me an excellent article about her that appeared in The Nation July 30. The author describes the musicality of her dancing in this way:

In his 1969 Dances at a Gathering, set to Chopin piano pieces, Robbins cast her as a woman in green who appears halfway through the ballet, an isolated figure who dances for her own pleasure, giving herself airs, reveling in her own charms, perhaps remembering past conquests. With small pauses, sudden changes of emphasis, flashing glances, and alternating staccato and legato movements, Verdy was able to evoke a wide range of emotions, both real and affected: insouciance, self-importance, vulnerability, an underlying loneliness. The woman in green became a multidimensional character, despite appearing onstage for only a few minutes…

…[N]ot all dancers are particularly musical. They are trained to listen and count and follow certain cues, to start with the first note of a phrase and end with the last, but this is a superficial definition of musicality. A musical dancer helps you to see and feel the music in your own body; a dancer with a superior musicality goes even further, playing against the music, entering into a conversation with it, bending it to her own wishes. This is the kind of dancer Verdy was. Such musicality is innate. Verdy already had it as a child; when she heard music on the piano, “I just had to participate, I had to do something about it,” she told an interviewer. Having studied piano and violin, she had a grasp of the structures that underpin music: rhythm, the mood evoked by certain tonalities, the workings of counterpoint, the excitement of syncopation. And she understood phrasing, the changes in topography that give music its character. “It’s like speaking,” Verdy told me. “If you’re going to emphasize a certain thing, then you can slide over something else. Phrasing is a recognition of the values of talking, of thinking; it’s an evaluation, an itinerary.” Like her explanations, Verdy’s dancing was articulate.

Verdy was married briefly but had no children, and at the end of the article she describes herself as “more or less by myself. I’m a bit of an odd number now.” Funny thing, that’s exactly the trajectory of her second variation in Robbins’ “Dances at a Gathering”—after a series of relationships, she ends up alone, still dancing.

Verdy’s Wiki entry says of that role of hers:

Her solo…[was] a showpiece of her extraordinary musicality set to a quick Chopin étude (op. 25, no.4), [and] remains a challenge for ballerinas to this day.

You said it! A challenge that you will see illustrated next.

First we have an excerpt from a tape of the entire ballet performed by the Paris Opera Ballet. You’d think they would display some of the same elements in their dancing that Verdy had, since they are French, too. But I don’t see any of it in the soloist who performs her part. It’s all very ho-hum; straightforward, on-the-music, and the charm factor—the smile, the lightness, the wit, the flirtaciousness—is completely missing.

However, as you watch the dance (which is only about two minutes long) it is as though you can see the ghost of Verdy’s movement peering through the choreography, which highlights all of her strengths—quick changes of direction, unexpected movements that are not bravura but involve port de bras (arms, that is) and the face and the eyes, gestures that say something (or should say something. I don’t want to continue to trash the dancer performing it; let’s just say that she’s not Verdy):

Now we have another dancer attempting it, this time a dancer from New York City Ballet, the company the ballet was originally choreographed on, so you might expect them to continue the tradition best. Well, she’s better than the dancer from the Paris Opera, I think, because she gets the quickness and sharpness of the movement somewhat better (I believe she’s a bit more petite, which helps). But she is too concerned with making graceful and classic lines with her poses, too careful. She doesn’t have that freedom and abandon-within-control quality that Verdy had, or that ability to be with the music without being right on top of it; to be the music:

Lastly we have the Pacific Northwest Ballet of Seattle. It’s an excellent ballet company, but not usually thought of as a world-class one like the first two. Nor does it have advantage of being French or of being the place where Robbins first choreographed the ballet. However, in the very short excerpt from Verdy’s dance you see in this video, I came to the conclusion that the dancer here might just be the best of the three at this particular variation. It’s from Verdy’s second dance in the ballet rather than the first one that’s shown in the other videos, and again there’s the unfortunate matching of the wrong music. But no matter. You can still see a tiny glimpse of something like Verdy’s delicacy and effervescence. This is the dance where various gentlemen come by, she tries to charm each one, but ends up alone:

I know that video or film of Verdy doing the role must exist. And I know where it must be—in the Lincoln Center Dance Library, which has records of vast numbers of ballets that are not allowed to be shown commercially because of the musicians union. Yes, the musicians union. People can go to the library and watch them there; I’ve never done it, but I know it can be done. Maybe I should. I would dearly love to see it again, even if only in two dimensions. Because that’s the only way it can be seen now, except in the mind’s eye and memory.