Merrill Ashley ---Part 3

I never spoke to Balanchine about dancing the classics---The Sleeping Beauty for example---outside the company. I think he was always afraid that his ballerinas were going to go off and do Giselle and Swan Lake. My impression was that, if you started talking about it, then he felt you were turning your back on him, and I certainly wasn't going to turn my back on him. I kept hearing toward the end that he was interested in doing Sleeping Beauty himself but that he didn't have the right facilities. As far as Balanchine's own Swan Lake was concerned,he really confused me a lot when I first did it. He was very involved in my first performances. He kept saying " Don't act. No acting at all. Don't look at your partner. Don't do anything. Don't pay any attention to him. You stand there with him to the end of the ballet. In the old days people never got close. You must just stand there."I had trouble accepting that. I felt there was an emotion there, and I couldn't just stand there blankly and let the corps run around me. It just didn't make sense to me. My conclusion in retrospect is that he just didn't want it to go overboard. Especially with someone young, he wanted to minimize the acting. He wanted it to come through the movement. Too many dancers go for the facial expressions and elaborate arms, and he wanted it simple. Tchaikovsky's music just seems to pull emotion out of me, anyway.I find myself sometimes in performance thinking. " Now, have I overdone it?" Because I am certainly freer now than when I first did it. I'd like to give the complete Swan Lake a try. I'm very blessed with my Balanchine repertoire. There are very few of his ballets I feel I can do without.