Ric Burns Podcast Transcript MUSIC CREDIT: Winter Sunshine from the album Winter Sunshine EP by Evgeny Grinko, used courtesy of Creative Commons. Julie Kent: Years ago, Natasha Makarova wrote me a note before my debut in Bayadere and she left it on my dressing table before the performance and it said, among other things, “Dear Julie, someone once said beauty can save the world. What a great responsibility you have on your shoulders.” And that has resonated with me for all these years. It’s not politicians or scientists or technology but beauty and humanity, which is so clear in dance, is the closest we can get to, to that salvation, I think. Jo Reed: That’s dancer Julie Kent in an excerpt from the documentary American Ballet Theatre: A History which is directed by Ric Burns and premieres on May 15th as part of the PBS series, American Masters. And this is Art Works, the weekly podcast produced by the National Endowment for the Arts. I'm Josephine Reed. American Masters and Award-winning filmmaker Ric Burns joined forces to create a new documentary about American Ballet Theatre in honor of the ballet company’s 75th anniversary. American Ballet Theatre: A History chronicles the rise of ABT from its earliest days as a small, struggling collective, to its current place as one of the most respected and revered dance companies in the world.  And let me blow the NEA’s horn here: we support both American Masters and American Ballet Theater. In fact, ABT received the first grant ever given by the National Endowment for the Arts.  So it was a no-brainer that we would be interested in both the film and the filmmaker. Because the documentary is directed by Ric Burns, no one will be surprised at the beautifully curated photographs, rare dance footage, and interviews with dancers and critics that illustrate the cultural significance of ABT’s contribution to dance in America. Burns combines this with hundreds of hours of original dance footage, including live public performances, intimate rehearsals, and slow-motion captures of the artists dancing exclusively for the film.   Ric Burns began his career co-writing and producing the PBS series The Civil War. He’s gone to direct a number of award-winning films, including Coney Island, The Donner Party, and New York: A Documentary Film. Even though Burns also directed a number of films about artists like Ansel Adams, Eugene O’Neill, and Andy Warhol, I still wondered how he chose to focus on ABT as a subject for a documentary. Ric Burns: You know, the subject chose me.  A wonderful woman named Madeline Eckett Oden, who’s kind of a friend of ABT’s and a former dancer and a wonderful person, got a bee in her bonnet 10 years ago and thought that for whatever reason it might be an interesting project for me to work on.  And she took my wife, Bonnie Lafave, and me to the ballet, and it wasn’t like we’d never been before, but we were certainly not balletomanes.  And I think it was in the second or third outing with Madeline that we went to City Center where ABT has its fall season.  You know, they don’t have their own home.  They’re kind of orphans.  And, you know, from way back.  And we were watching a performance of the Balanchine Ballet “Apollo,” which is occasionally in the ABT rep.  And it just, one of those kind of out-of-body experiences, kind of took both of us by storm.  And storm’s the right word.  You know, when dance first hits you full force, it’s like a tsunami and you realize you might’ve had all these sort of semi-cartoon clichés in your mind, you know, kind of an elitist art form and tutus and pointe shoes and, you know, that’s all part of it, of course.  But man, it really, really hit hard the immediacy of it, the power of it.  The complete understanding that you couldn’t get what you were getting any other way.  Like, this is the way you get it. When the people get to the point where they get when dancers at a company like ABT, and there aren’t, after all, that many companies like ABT, you know, around the world, they’re doing something so powerful and so expressive of the algebra of human experience that we were blown away and just agreed with our friend Madeline, “We would love to make a film about that.”  And that began a 10-year odyssey.   Jo Reed: Wait, wait, wait. 10 years? That seems like a long time. Ric Burns: Right, it really was an odyssey.  Hard to fund.  Dance is hard to fund.  You know, films about dance are hard to fund.  And you’re competing with your subject matter.  You know, we didn’t want to take a penny off the table or a piece of bread off the dinner table of anybody at ABT.  So that’s why it took us from 2006 until now.  And I think that that was lucky, because it allowed us to piece it together and think about it and spend a long time.  We had just totally open access from the wonderful people at ABT.  Rachel Moore, their executive director, Kevin McKenzie, incredible.  Incredible ex-dancer, incredible artistic director.  And they had no editorial input. They never, in any way, tried to spin it or muscle us.  And they gave us every conceivable kind of access, which was really extraordinary.  So we got to travel with them, got to see them in performance, in classrooms and classes and maybe for my purposes, most spectacularly when, and we knew we were going to have to get to this sooner or later, they came and danced for us at a dance center up on Hudson, Kaatsbaan, in Tivoli, New York.  And for three days, we weren’t filming them doing what they were going to do anyway.  We were filming them doing what they were doing for our cameras, and it was an experience of a lifetime. Jo Reed: Capturing dance on film can be kind of a tricky proposition sometimes. Ric Burns: Film and dance are antithetical in some pretty obvious ways.  Dance is now; film is in the can.  Film robs dance of an essential aspect of its being, which, it’s here now, it’s ephemeral, it doesn’t exist except when people are actually dancing it, as Kevin points out. The truism of that reality of dance, is violated by a form which is recorded and repeatable and subject to the laws of mechanical reproduction.  Dance is not subject to the laws of mechanical reproduction.  And when you rob it of that immediacy, it’s not just you’re robbing it of, like, the immediacy of a sports even that’s taking place in real-time.  There’s a kind of communion that’s taking on between dancers and the audience in real-time that’s enormously special.  It’s part of that tsunami of emotion that it’s capable of provoking when it’s done with extraordinary power.  As so often is the case in dance films, it feels like you’re looking at it through a two-inch thick piece of Plexiglas and it’s frustratingly both there, but you can’t quite get at it.   Jo Reed: So how did you get at it? Ric Burns: We wanted to get at it with some of the techniques film can.  And some of them are just sort of sound like an expensive version of a cheap trick.  Slow it way down.  But, you know, when you slow dance way down, boy do you see deeply into it.  And it gives you time to think and feel as a leap or an arabesque or a plié is taking place.  It allows you to really fall into it in a way which you can’t, in that way, while they’re dancing in real-time, but you can in this way while they’re dancing in the unreal-time of film.  And the other thing you can do to it is you can juxtapose the thoughts and feelings of people whose artistry as thinkers and feelers about dance, Clive Barnes, Anna Kisselgoff, I think spectacularly, Jennifer Homans, Kevin McKenzie, their artistic director, juxtapose that to it, so that you can really see into it and think and feel about what it is.   Jo Reed: That’s interesting because that allows you to play with time and space which your film also points out, is at the very center of dance. Ric Burns: Right, dance is nothing if it’s not about time.  You know, it exists in time, it is about, as Jennifer Homans puts it, it defines space and time while it unfolds, and therefore to see it elastically dilated in time is to actually do something which is maybe unusual and incompatible with what it would be in real-time.  But it allows you in time to understand and feel something about what it is as a temporal art form.  So that was really having access to these people, for, you know, Kevin McKenzie, the artistic director, chose brilliantly, I think, 9 or 10 of their dancers to give a sense of range and variety and chose with us which dances to excerpt and film in which way and then we shot them with five different cameras, VeriCam and two F55s and a C300 and then this incredible machine, which had only really been developed a couple years ago, Phantom Flex, which, you know, brought within the range of a documentary film production, a film technology which really would not have been available if we’d been finishing the film 10 years ago.  And that really, really allowed us to do this thing and to have them dance in all these ways.  Steadicams and cranes and dollies.  And that makes it sound as if we were trying to kind of gussy it up.  We weren’t trying to gussy it up.  We’re trying to get close, intimately close, to this most intimate of art forms in order to somehow do justice on film Jo Reed:  One thing that your film highlights, which is also really unique to dance, is that there’s no dance without the dancer. Ric Burns: Right. Jo Reed: And that also comes down to the way dance is passed on, the way dance is made.  It’s made on a dancer. Ric Burns: You know, what you’ve just said, Jo, is so much the essence of what we want and hope our film is about. I think the center of the center of the expressive power, the human power of the form, has to do with that reality which you just expressed the way William Butler Yeats did in his great poem “Among Schoolchildren,” whose last line is, “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we tell the dancer from the dance?” And the idea, the reality, of this art form, which is always many things but always helplessly about what it is to be caught in real-time, to be unfolding in real-time.  And, the emotional power is as existential in that, for that reason, as any art form.  And maybe arguably more so, because it cannot separate itself from the sort of ineluctable human condition which it tries to both express, transcend, it always fails to transcend and its power comes in that aspiration to transcend.  She leaps up and falls back to earth.  And in that eternal kind of oscillation of rising and falling, transcending and descending, you have this incredible poignancy of dance.  And I think that our hearts go out to it in a very, very special way, because there’s a sort of a, an openness, to the quintessential vulnerability of the human condition, which is rendered ineffably beautiful in what these dancers do.  And there’s just a kind of, there’s a way in which of course it can’t stop the moment, but it gives voice to that eternal desire that human beings have to make it last, as well as giving voice in the same movement to that eternal realization that it will be over. Jo Reed: You’ve talked about some things that surprised you: I’m curious, what else did? What else did you discover about dance or ballet as you made this film? Ric Burns: You know, I think among the things that we were so struck by as discoveries for ourselves was the way in which the, you know, Kevin says at one point, Kevin McKenzie, you know, “In a sense, every time a dancer goes on stage the entire history of the art form is being recapitulated.”  And there’s a way in which that’s very, very true, and that you can feel that it is a form that’s about where it came from and where it’s going.  I didn’t understand, the degree to which this isn’t just a practice which somebody invented in the 17th Century.  It was a set of discoveries which is arguably on the level of Galileo’s discovery or Newton’s discovery.  Something quintessentially true that’s going to remain true as long as our bodies are shaped and built the way they are.  About the proportionality and beauty of the human body, as Jennifer puts it, so that it is much more like the great measure of man drawing of Leonardo. We’re seeing something about the beauty of the human form, which has both an outward expression and an inward emotional and even sort of spiritual dynamic to it.  And until we evolve and mutate, we are going to discover that ballet is one of those quintessential ways of moving that avails itself of the deepest expressivity available to the human form.  So it’s going to be rooted in time and transcend time in the sense that it’s as flexible as any form.   Jo Reed: Yeah.  Ballet is fascinating in the sense that the body is in fact the instrument, the sole instrument of the art.  And on one hand, as an audience member you’re watching what a body is capable of doing and revealing with both grace and lightness and enormous power and strength.  It seems like it’s happening spontaneously but it is so much the product of a discipline that I can’t even comprehend. Ric Burns: That’s so beautifully put, Jo.  And like, you know, I think like all art, like all the arts, it’s ultimately all those things that you do see would be meaningless if it didn’t conjure up something you don’t see. There are two invisibilities in dance, as there are in any successful art form.  The interiority of the human beings doing it and the interiority of the people watching it and taking it in.  Neither of those things can be seen with the eye.  And the magic is the bringing those two invisibilities together.  The interior of each human soul sitting there in the audience, is what the dancers are trying to reach.  And, what they want to reach that interior of each audience member with, is the interiority of something which they can only use something visible, the human body, or audible, the music.  But it would be nothing, it would be mechanical and sort of rigid and only kind of a form of banal pageantry, if it didn’t say something about what was inside the human being.  When those potent, invisible spaces are brought into juxtaposition, and that’s what the arts exist for.  Art is the science of human subjectivity and it’s bipolar.  It’s from the art maker to the art consumer.  And when the convergence takes place, there is a kind of a specialness which is, we all know it and it’s really inconceivable.  We feel it in the movie theater when all the faces are shining and up tilted towards the screen in the same way and there’s dead silence.  And no one has said, “Shh.”  And we feel it in the dance.  When the tiniest and most indescribable inflection of a movement suggests something so deep about, what?  Love, hate, rage, hope, loss, betrayal, forgiveness.  And then we find ourselves doing this magic thing, which is, again, only happens in a couple of other human circumstances.  We find ourselves voluntarily brought together in a way that doesn’t annul our individuality but somehow lifts up our individuality.  And yet we feel that individuality in the context of communion with others in the circumstance of the dance.  Wow. You know, it’s one of those places where humans meet.  That affirms, both oneness and togetherness in a very powerful, pleasurable and even sometimes ecstatic way. Jo Reed: I didn’t quite realize that to tell the story of ABT is really to tell the story of ballet in America. Ric Burns: Oh, my God.  I mean, and that’s not, I think of ABT in that respect, Jo, the way I think of New York City.  You know, New York City is kind of a version of America.  Why?  Because everything kind of came together there.  It just happens to be where so many American things came together. I think the thing about ABT that makes it kind of moving and interesting in its own way, this funny set of accident and improvisation and intention.  You know, Richard Pleasant, Lucia Chase.  It’s in the 1930s.  There are all these dancers who fled the, you know, the Russian Revolution.  Pitched up in Europe and America.  And people go like, “Well, let’s do a dance company.”  It’s at the moment where Americans are now feeling like, “Well, maybe we like this.”  And they get together and the unique thing is they don’t do the logical obvious thing, which is if we’re going to start let’s start with one and build out.  Lucia, Richard Pleasant.  They’re basically going, “Let it all in.  Let’s be a big tent.”  And the danger from the start would’ve been it could’ve been incoherent, it could’ve been chaotic, but the reward of it is that there you have, within the first 10 years, Antony Tudor, Agnes de Mille, Jerome Robbins, George Balanchine, to name only, like, the kind of the starting four.  And they’re all there mixing it up in the opening years of this company, Ballet Theatre.  And that’s really, really quite exceptional.   Jo Reed: American Ballet Theatre: it’s had three artistic directors. Ric Burns: Is that unbelievable? Jo Reed: And what three?  I mean, Lucia Chase-- Ric Burns: Unbelievable. Lucia Chase. Jo Reed: --Baryshnikov and Kevin McKenzie. Ric Burns: Is that incredible? Jo Reed: Yeah. Ric Burns: I did a film once about Goldman Sachs and they have an interesting similar history.  You trace them back and there’s been, like, you know, just a very, very few people who have run it over 170 years.  That sometimes tells you something.  That if they’ve survived, and by definition you know they have, something’s worked about that.  So there’s some balance of continuity and innovation, which is at the core.  And when you see a company, especially a company that has not been a boutique, one choreographer company, when you see the way in which it has navigated the shoals, and here’s a difficult world.  It’s expensive, it is relentlessly competitive. Nothing is harder.  I mean, there are more brain surgeons and major league pitchers than there are dancers at the level of the Corps de Ballet of ABT or a city ballet.  So it’s really, really demanding.  And yet when you see a company that’s capable of sustaining itself and it had three directors, Lucia from the early ‘40s down through 1979, then the greatest male dancer of the 20th Century, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and then Kevin McKenzie, since, you know, for the last, what, 25 years?  Twenty-three years? And it’s a long time now.  And the funny thing is, in a sense, we still think of Kevin as the new kid on the block.  Which, of course, he’s not.  But there’s this way in which he doesn’t seem kind of like he walked in the door yesterday he still has freshness.  And I think that’s because look at what he’s done.  He’s both been an artistic director and he’s invited in one of the greatest, arguably, possibly the greatest, choreographers in ballet today.  That’s Alexei Ratmansky, who’s now their long-term artist in residence.  But again, you see that kind of extraordinary convergence of commitment to the form and openness to innovation and change and evolution, just the way, in an absolutely different way.  You had Baryshnikov, who embodied the imperial, so to speak, soviet ballet more than he, and who at the same time rushed towards Twyla Tharp, or any one of a dozen other sort of extraordinary innovators inside and outside the ballet community and the world of modern dance and popular dance.  So again, that kind of mixture of what strengthens and continues the tradition but what does so partly by reaching out to something new, finding a way of making it new.  You know, somehow here’s an organization that’s had the great good fortune of having at its helm three absolutely different people over 75 years as the primary stewards of this extraordinary enterprise.  That to me is moving in and of itself but also revealing. Jo Reed: What about for you?  How difficult was it for you to structure all the material into a coherent whole?  To get your arms around it and know what story you wanted to tell? Ric Burns: You know, I want to thank Fred Wiseman, whose film about American Ballet Theatre is really one of the great, and first of all, I mean, Wiseman is one of the greatest filmmakers documentary filmmaking’s ever seen.  And 20 years ago and more made a fantastic film into sort of the time of Baryshnikov. ABT, when Baryshnikov, having been the principle soloist dancer that he was, was also, became, the artistic director.  And that film is fantastic.  So there are many things that I knew we didn’t want to do.  We didn’t want to get into the politics and the personalities and the logistics and the money.  I mean, all of those things are incredibly important and we could make a whole different film with the material we have about those things.  It would never be as good as Fred’s film.  Which I heartily urge people to go out and see tomorrow.  We wanted it to be about dance.  And we knew that sort of going in.  And what that meant was that here’s a company which on the one hand is a company, and because it’s a ballet company, it means it is doing both classical and modern versions of ballet.  That means it’s both about something that’s not here anymore, and it’s about something that can only be here now.  It’s about the present and the future on the one hand, and it’s about the past.  And so that told us right away that what we wanted to do is we wanted to use ABT as a way of plunging through ABT’s history an audience, whether they were familiar with dance or completely unfamiliar with dance, into the reality and the history of this form.  This form which, arguably more than any other, is inseparable.  How can we tell the dancer from the dance?  From its own history.  And so that told us a lot going in about how we wanted to approach it.   Jo Reed: So you decided it was important to give a history, however abbreviated, of ballet as a whole in order to tell the story of ABT? Ric Burns: Right, ABT opened January 11th, 1940.  Ballet wasn’t born in 1940 on January 11th.  And there would be no way of understanding what happened when it came to America if you didn’t understand the roots that it both returned to and departed from when it came here.  So we knew that there had to be ABT now, ABT’s history, and the history of ballet.  And that we were going to have to find some way to structure those together.  And that the hardest part of it was to figure out how to titrate the length of time we devoted to the period from the court of Louis the XIV in the 17th Century, down to the point where they decided to, “Hey, let’s make a big ballet company here in New York.”  Because we didn’t want to confuse people.  We didn’t want to make people say, “Hm, why are we getting this?  I thought this was about ABT.” what we knew was that we didn’t want it to ever become too much bogged down in the minutia.  Because we want to stay where the form itself as a form is attempting to live and breathe. But I’m absolutely committed to the idea that there’s no way you would understand what Antony Tudor was doing or Jerome Robbins or George Balanchine, if you didn’t understand where it came from.   Jo Reed: Now, what about you and filmmaking?  What was the draw for you to do documentary filmmaking? Ric Burns: I was going to be a professor of English.  And kind of look down on my older brother Ken’s kind of fledgling years as a documentary filmmaker. He’s a year and a half older than me.  I’d been, like, a hippie drummer in a band called Suzie and the Pimps. He’d been a straight-A kind of student in high school.  He got out of high school and cut out a coupon on the back of a radical magazine called Ramparts and applied to one college that had been in existence for one year, Hampshire College.  I got, you know, I quit Suzie and the Pimps and went to Columbia in Cambridge.  So we did this kind of weird cross-over from high school to college.  And I was, I would even say, idiotically slightly condescending in his early years.  And I can remember a moment in my brother’s editing room with his then wife Amy Steckler, who’s his collaborator, brilliant editor, and watching them while they were making their second film, a wonderful film, about the Shakers.  And there’s a moment where there’s a shot that dissolves from a wider to a closer shot of a Shaker broom in the corner of a well swept Shaker structure, Hancock Shaker Village in Western Massachusetts.  And it was so strong.  Just one of those little simple things.  Prepared for by everything you’d heard before, but itself almost silent.  And certainly there was no narration at that moment.  And it was so strong and it was just one image dissolving into another image.  And I went like, “What the hell am I doing?”  I mean, “This is so powerful and so strong.”  And I was kind of just jolted hypnotically into the desire to do it.  I’d helped him with some writing before.  But over the next few years it just felt more and more like I felt the pull of it.  And I have to say, I don’t know if I would have gotten there without Ken.  I don’t even know if I care to say I’d like to think I would.  I just, that’s the way it happened.  And it was close enough for me to see it and be drawn to it and then after that, you know, I’m here to tell you that my older brother is a very talented guy.  And it was a huge, huge, unparalleled school, and, like, every craft, you don’t learn it in school, you learn it on the job next to somebody who’s doing it.  And that was invaluable.  And by the time a few years of that had gone by and we were working on The Civil War series which he asked me to produce with him in the late 1980s, ’85 to ’90, you know, that was it.  And I left thinking I’d go back to academics.  But, I cherish the 12 years I spent and perhaps will go back and finish my Ph.D. someday.  But, I feel so blessed to have, you know, through this kind of almost Mr. Magoo-like way, you know stepped, if not stumbled, you know, from one world into another.  I feel like it’s challenging, it’s hard as hell.  It’s really humbling.  You know, you can’t, and, you know, there’s no dialing it in.  You know, it’s just always hard.  Doesn’t get any easier with time.  If you’re lucky, super lucky, you get better.  But that doesn’t mean it gets easier. Thirty years on, just as challenged and thrilled by every project.  Including, I have to say, spectacularly by this one, on ABT. Jo Reed: Amen, Ric, and thank you. Ric Burns: Thank you so much, Jo, and I really appreciate talking to you about this incredible, national treasure. Jo Reed: That’s documentary filmmaker Ric Burns.  We were talking about his film American Ballet Theatre: A History, which premiers on May 15th as part the American Masters Series on PBS. You've been listening to artworks produced at the National Endowment for the Arts.  The Art Works podcast is posted every Thursday at Arts.gov. You can subscribe to Art Works at iTunes U -- just click on the iTunes link on our podcast page. To find out how art works in communities across the country, keep checking the Art Works blog, or follow us @NEAARTS on Twitter. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.