An American Ballet Story - Harkness Ballet Documentary

[miliosr]

I had the opportunity to watch the documentary An American Ballet Story, which tells the tale of Rebekah Harkness and the late Harkness Ballet (1964-75).

 

For those who are unfamiliar with the story of the Harkness Ballet and its ultimate failure, here's a brief synopsis: Rebekah Harkness was an extremely wealthy arts patron (via her second husband, a Standard Oil heir) who channeled her very large fortune into supporting the ballet. From 1962-64, she funded Robert Joffrey's Joffrey Ballet. But she and Joffrey came to grief over who's name should be on the company (and who should be in control artistically) and, so, Joffrey departed from his own company to found a new Joffrey Ballet. (That namesake company now resides and performs in Chicago.) The company Joffrey left behind became the Harkness Ballet, which existed in two iterations - 1964-1970 and 1970-75 - before Rebekah Harkness was forced to terminate her support for the company due to her declining financial position in 1974-75.

 

The documentary gathers together many of the surviving dancers from both versions of the Harkness and tells the tale from their perspectives. This is both the documentary's greatest strength and its greatest weakness. The viewer gets to hear the story directly from the dancers without having to listen to pedantic dance critics holding forth on the subject. The downside to this approach is that the documentary is very discursive - the story jumps around and covers not just the company itself but also the Harkness School and the Harkness Theater (an old theater which Rebekah Harkness repurposed as the company's performing home in New York City). Anyone lacking a basic familiarity with Rebekah Harkness and the Harkness Ballet may well be lost because there is not a lot of linearity to the reminisces.

 

Case in point: The documentary tries to explain the directorship problems that occurred with the Harkness Ballet; specifically in relation to the first iteration of the company. The retelling becomes jumbled, though, and the viewer with no knowledge of the Harkness Ballet would be hard pressed to glean from this accounting that there were three changes of directorship in the span of six years: George Skibine, Brain Macdonald and the team of Lawrence Rhodes/Benjamin Harkarvy.

 

The documentary has some interesting things to say about the critical response the company received in New York, which was largely negative. Did the Harkness fall afoul of reviewers because of how Rebekah Harkness "absconded" with the Joffrey Ballet or because reviewers became fixated on Harkness using her substantial wealth to leapfrog ahead of most of the other New York companies in terms of prominence? Maybe . . . but I've read reviews of the Harkness Ballet from that era and most of them fixate on the same issue: It had marvelous dancers (including Rhodes and Helgi Tomasson) but its repertory was substandard.

 

Ultimately, the documentary leaves one crucial question unanswered: What was Rebekah Harkness's artistic philosophy? The viewer learns a lot about the admirable conditions Harkness provided for her dancers. The viewer learns a lot about how she wanted the Harkness Theater to look. But you never really find out what her central artistic idea was - if any.

Edited September 8 by miliosr

[Angela]

Thank you, miliosr! Is there a possibility to watch this documentary?

I first read about Rebekah Harkness when a friend of John Cranko mentioned her urn which was designed by Salvador Dalì long before her death and stood in the entrance hall of the Harkness House in Manhattan, where her ballet school was located. The urn had butterflies with moveable wings on it, you can find photos online. It seems that Harkness is mentioned in a recent Taylor Swift song because the singer lives in a mansion previously owned by her.

[Angela]

I found it on Youtube:

 

 

[miliosr]

19 minutes ago, Angela said:

I first read about Rebekah Harkness when a friend of John Cranko mentioned her urn which was designed by Salvador Dalì long before her death and stood in the entrance hall of the Harkness House in Manhattan, where her ballet school was located. The urn had butterflies with moveable wings on it, you can find photos online. It seems that Harkness is mentioned in a recent Taylor Swift song because the singer lives in a mansion previously owned by her.

The Dali urn gets mentioned in the documentary!

 

The Taylor Swift song, "The Last Great American Dynasty," addresses Rebekah Harkness specifically. Swift first became interested in Harkness after she bought the former 'Harkness House' in Watch Hill - a very affluent coastal community in Rhode Island.

 

An author by the name of Craig Unger wrote a biography of Rebekah Harkness in the 1980s titled Blue Blood. Warning: If you go looking for a used copy online, you may get sticker shock. Since Taylor Swift wrote her song about Rebekah Harkness, copies now sell for hundreds of dollars.

[Angela]

Thank you for the warning! 🙂 

Harkness also largely influenced the history of the Joffrey Ballet. Does anyone remember the Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet from New York, which was active from 2003 to 2015? It was also financed exclusively by a single patron, the Walmart heiress Nancy Walton Laurie (and folded when she decided to pay no more). As was the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas in the 1960s, whose money came from the Rockefeller heiress the Marquis had married.

[Bruce Wall]

Thanks so for posting this, @miliosr.  It brought back just so many memories.  What a magnificent manse Harkness House was.  There are just so many vivid pictures in my mind - not just of that outer-worldly revolving Dali chalice as breath-taking as it was to the child in us all - and not just of the building's physical majesty but also of the glorious peoples who would come through its elaborately heavy front doors.  I knew it at the end of the so-called 'dance boom' and there you could not only see but actively meet history.  The conversations one was able to have - and the groups one suddenly found oneself part of; dancers, choreographers, musicians, painters, sculptors, actors - from Fonteyn to Woody Allen; from Martha Graham to Andy Warhol (who used to 'hang' in the Harkness cafe; not just 'sometimes' in that vivid and constantly changing gallery) - just so many vivid entities.  I often found myself pinching one part of my anatomy or another.  I remember once dashing out of one of those palatial loos and - on opening the passage door - literally bumping into Vladimir Horowitz.  In shock I blurted: 'Oh, I never expected to see you here'.  He laughed and in that entrancing accent of his said: 'Well, I never expected to see you either'.  One special memory I have is coming down Mrs. Harkness' private lift from the upper floors.  It was one of those open 1920's sculpted cages and as you came down the surrounding walls were stunningly painted with figures of fantastical ballet dancers.  What did always make me giggle though was the fact that all of the ballerinas looked in face like Mrs. Harkness and all the male dancers seemed to have been sketched after Robert Seavers!  It was, as it has to be said, a very special time.  Certainly it was a different world.  Thank you so, Mrs. Harkness.  

 

 

 

 

Edited September 9 by Bruce Wall