RE-RELEASE: Edward Villella, Balanchine Dancer and former Artistic Director of Miami City Ballet (June 2017)
We are going back into our archives from the first few years of the podcast and re-releasing some of our favorite episodes. Today is our first re-release: our June 2017 interview with Edward Villella, Balanchine dancer and founding Artistic Director of Miami City Ballet. We talk with our former boss about his career, dancing for Balanchine, the specific roles made on him, and much more. Part Two of this re-release will be coming next week. Subscribe to Conversations on Dance wherever you get your podcasts.
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Each year, The Clive & Valerie Barnes Foundation provides recognition, encouragement, and financial support to two talented young professionals, one in Dance and one in Theatre, thus, honoring the memory of the many years of critical work and the warm personal generosity of Clive Barnes and Valerie Taylor. This year’s finalists have been nominated by the Foundation’s 11-member Selection Committee comprised of arts journalists and accomplished professionals in each field. Finalists were selected based on live performances given in New York City between January and December of 2022. Winners in each category will be announced on May 22 at the 13th Annual Clive Barnes Awards at Florence Gould Hall in New York City. Guest presenters include Pam Tanowitz and Alex Sharp. For more information or to donate, visit cvbarnesfoundation.org/
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TRANSCRIPT
This transcript was generated automatically. It’s accuracy may vary.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:01:26]:
I'm Rebecca King Ferraro.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:01:28]:
And I'm Michael Sean Breed and you're listening to Conversations on Dance.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:01:36]:
Hi everyone. We are happy to bring you a very special episode today. As regular listeners know, we have recently moved our podcast to a new hosting company and we are now part of the Acast Creator network and when we moved over, we could only take 300 episodes with us. So we have 50 something episodes from the very beginning of the podcast that are no longer on our feed. We decided to go back and take a look at some of these episodes that didn't transfer over and do some special rereleases so that we can preserve the interviews in our feed. Plus, we have found it really fun to go back and revisit these episodes. So first up today is our 2017 interview with Edward Villella, our former boss at Miami City Ballet. Edward hired both of us into the company and we worked with him throughout the remainder of his tenure with MCB. In 2017, we visited his home and he was generous enough to sit down with us for almost 2 hours to talk about his career, Balanchine, the founding of MCB, and so much more. Part two of this episode will be coming next week for our longtime listeners, we hope that you will enjoy revisiting this episode. And for our newer listeners, we wanted to mention that both our sound quality and our interview quality has really improved over time and we hope you would agree. But we still feel like it's worth preserving interviews such as this one, please subscribe to Conversations on Dance wherever you get your podcasts. That way you'll be notified if, once the new episodes come live like the Part Two with Edward. In the coming months, we will be publishing more rereleases like this, so we really hope you enjoy. Without further ado, our interview with Edward Villella from June 2017.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:03:23]:
So we are so grateful and excited to be here with our former boss, Edward Villella, a man we dance under for many years. And to have you in person is even a greater joy. We don't have to deal with Skype, we get to see it firsthand. So thank you for joining us.
Edward Villella [00:03:42]:
Our pleasure.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:03:43]:
So, since there's such a wealth of material to talk about, we figured we'll just start at the beginning with your SAB days. When you were at SAB as a young boy, Balanchine came into your class one day and you immediately recognized him. You later participated in a photo shoot with him and photographer George Platt lines for a book. What do you remember about this first sighting, and what about him was most striking to you as a young boy?
Edward Villella [00:04:11]:
Well, Balanchine had this most incredible presence, and by his presence, you admired him to begin with. But my first view of him, this is just in my mind. The door seemed to open prior to his entrance, and then his presence arrived and it was awesome. I was ten years old and I'm seeing this giant walk in, and he stayed about half an hour. So I was complimented by that, that he would spend that kind of time with me as just a kid. But the other side of it was this was very, very different from Bayside, Long Island, where I grew up, in this little studio that my sister had started dancing in. And then I was forced to dance because I used to get into physical trouble. And my mother said, we're not going to trust you on the streets anymore. You've got to come to your sister's class and watch. I was very upset. However, I am so bored, until they started to jump. And then I went in the back of the room and tried out some stuff and said I could do this, and I started to make fun. And the teacher gave me a terrible look and said to my mother, get him out of here, or put him in tights at the bar. And that was essentially how I started dancing. So I was not a happy camper. I used to wear my baseball uniform over my ballet stuff in case anybody saw me and they would think maybe I was going out, because I used to walk up backwards. It was a two flight walk up to this place, and my idea was, if anybody saw me as I was walking up backwards, it might look like I was going out. And with my baseball uniform that might be a better understanding of where I might be going. So the difference between that tiny studio and the school of American Ballet was enormous. And needless to say, I was incredibly impressed by all of these unbelievable great, great dancers. The maria tall chiefs, the andrea klevsky's, the melissa haydens. It was just this array, and it was so extraordinarily professional. It wasn't as limited, shall we say, as this little school where I had started. And there you would see George Balanchine flying in the studios, in and out and stuff like that. So for me, it was a new beginning. I was still leery of this stuff, so I was thrilled to be at SAB, even though I kept telling everybody I didn't like this ballet, but of course I got to like it awful. And I then decided when I was about eleven or twelve, now I'm going to be a dancer. Of course, that all changed when my sister stopped and my mother said, okay, enough of this ballet stuff. No more ballet in this house. And I went, Whoa, wait a minute. I sort of like this, and I'm pretty good at it, and they're going to offer me a job. And I had made high school in three years to get into a company, the New York City Valley, Sooner. So I had to postpone because my father, once my sister was no longer a dancer, thought that was the end of it for me, and I wasn't interested to begin with, but again, by then I'd fall in love with this stuff, this physicality. But I was amazed that we could speak with our bodies, and all of that was to music, and you could be theatrical and make comment, you could make your own comment. So that was the beginning for me, until my father said, Enough of this, you're going to college. I spent four years at the New York State Maritime College at Fort Skyla in the Bronx, where I achieved a Bachelor of science degree in marine transportation. And the moment I finished, I had auditioned, I was accepted, and I was off. There I went. My father didn't talk to me for a year.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:10:11]:
I mean, that's really, your career is made all the more impressed by the fact that you sort of lost four really formative years, 16 to 20, right?
Edward Villella [00:10:21]:
Yes.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:10:21]:
Where you weren't like that's. You know, that's when most dancers are finishing their training, experiencing their apprenticeships. Do you think that had you had those years, it would have affected your career differently, or was that important to who you became as a dancer and a person?
Edward Villella [00:10:40]:
Two approaches to all of that. First of all, I got an education. I met a lot of great guys that I still communicate with. That was that side of it. The real problem for me was that I hadn't danced four years, and my physicality was baseball. I won my letters in both high school and college in baseball. But I was also welterweight boxing champion, so I had to keep my physicality going. But it's a very different physicality. Sports is very different from our world, the world of classical ballet, neoclassical ballet, if you will. So coming back from using my muscles differently for four years traumatized my muscles. They said, Wait a minute, we've been through something like this before. What is going on? So that provided me with a lifetime of complication because of all of that. But the other side of it was that I had been away those four years and I had lost everything I knew about this stuff. I didn't know how to do a bar, I didn't know how to warm up, I didn't know how to stretch. I knew absolutely nothing. And that was a tremendous disadvantage. However, it turned out to be an incredible advantage because I needed to learn and relearn all over again. And it was fascinating in terms of the approach to the technique and to get back to that. But now I'm in an amazing company that had a lot of neoclassicism works without story. So I literally had to speak with my body now, but that wasn't bad for me because we all have certain intelligences and there are any number of these intelligences. And for me, my intelligence was really the ability to move. So as I began to understand all of that, it was certainly advantageous in getting back and all of that. But for the first time, I saw a neoclassical ballet done. And the point is, a guy like George Valentin rarely ever talked to you. He rarely explained ballet's style, musicality approaches. You just got there, he showed you and you did it, and that was it. But the advantage for me was I started to learn the ballet. I had to figure out who I was going to be in these neoclassical Balanchine. So I started that in my very first couple of months and I never stopped. And that's why when I was having the great pleasure to work with you guys, I knew what these Balanchine were about. So it allowed me to be a pretty decent coach and I could impress you guys with my little stories about the stories within the stories. So that was a tremendous, tremendous advantage for me.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:14:50]:
So, going back to talking about sports and doing baseball and boxing, you are very well known as a dancer for your athleticism and your jump. What elements do you think you were able to pull from from this kind of cross training in sports while you.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:15:07]:
Were away at college?
Edward Villella [00:15:10]:
Again, that's a little difficult to decipher and ascertain, but this kind of physicality, sports physicality, has many, many similarities. And that's the point. There are a lot of similarities, but it's not the same. So, again, I traumatized my muscles, but I was learning how to operate. And in the New York City Ballet. You didn't have too much time to learn these ballets. If you had two rehearsals to learn a ballet, that was a big deal. So crazy to think so again. It was this incredible new world that I was now involved in. But just the idea of learning these ballet, how do I get that stuff into my head? Because I was very well aware of what Balanchine said, which was, ballet is a passing art form. You pass it body to body, but critically, mind to mind. And one of the oddities for me now is there's a great deal of technique out there, but there isn't mindfulness artful mindfulness. We see these terrific young people doing wonderful technical approaches, but you know, it's not coming from the inside. A lot of people now are dancing from the outside because it's a technical error.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:17:11]:
It makes me wonder then, since you did have to think so much about everything, technically, since you had lost those years, do you think that that actually helped hone your own mindfulness about the way you approach things? That you made you smarter in a way, because you had to be so conscious of every little thing you were doing for your body's sake.
Edward Villella [00:17:32]:
Nothing is left out. You have to know every part of it. This one thing about Balanchine sheet talking as a passing art form, the first time I worked with him was his choreographing, squared it. And for me that was terrific because he spoke with his body. He rarely talked in class, but he demonstrated everything. And from a single gesture you could figure out period, style, musicalities, all of those things came from his body speaking. So it became an easier circumstance for me to learn these ballads because I would just understand and imitate what he was doing. And then once I was comfortable with it, I made it my own. It's not that I had that much knowledge, I could make it my own, but I was freed because I knew what was going on.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:18:49]:
I love that you brought up that square dance was the first thing you ever worked on with Balanchine. That's a pretty incredible moment to have, and reminds me that the early years in the company that you had joined, when you joined New York City Ballet, it was such a special time. And the same year that he created Squared, and he also did Agon and Stars and Stripes and Guno Symphony. So it's kind of the perfect year to show what a versatile master he was. It wasn't just neoclassicism. He really could do it all, and you were there to experience that, son. What were those first years like?
Edward Villella [00:19:26]:
Well, the first years were somewhat terrifying because I just, again, didn't quite know what the hell I was doing. But as time was going by, I was learning all kinds of things, obvious things, but I was learning internally, so I knew how to dance from inside out, not from outside outside. And again, this idea with with Balanchine, if you watched, you basically knew, and then you could work on that, that kind of thing. I mean, Stars and Stripes was not a very difficult thing for me. I had just come from the military. I knew how to salute. I was fine. But this idea that you are a different person in a different period, in a different style, was so exciting to me. I could be somebody else. I could be three or four different people in a single evening. And as time went by and Balanchine began to choreograph for me, he made such an amazing repertoire for me. And it covered all of those areas, be it neoclassicism, old 19th century stuff, new choreographers, certainly, balancing Robbins to watch a stravinsky come in, to watch all of these incredible circumstances go on, made me feel not only comfortable, but special. All of us at the New York City Ballet were being directed by our artistic father, and we all viewed him and he viewed us in that way. We belonged to him, and especially the ladies. He loved the ladies.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:21:54]:
So you said earlier that SAB felt like a very professional, different environment from what you came from, and of course, New York City Ballet along with that. So when did you start to get this sense that New York City Ballet was the right place for you and that you belonged, and that Balanchine was in fact this artistic father for you?
Edward Villella [00:22:12]:
I think I was presold because I was studying at the School of Mary Ballet way back. I was ten years old. So what he had to provide was a way to live. He had a manner and style of living, and he kind of insisted that his dancers lived in that way. He had stopped smoking a long time ago. You couldn't smoke. He drank red wine. You drank red wine. It was simply that. But he was full of Elliots. So there wasn't any cheesiness about anybody's approach to any of this stuff. Even though the dancers were not fully aware, they knew it was different. And now I go around and I coach some of my old roles, and it's amazing that people just approach it technically. They don't know who they are on stage.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:23:41]:
I like that you said that there's no cheesiness, because this is in the same breath. We're talking about something like Stars and Stripes that could very, in less qualified hands, go that direction. But if you watch these old videos and I think Melissa Hayden even said that one time, she asked him how she should dance Stars and Stripes, and he said, like ground potato. It didn't ever devolve into just even when it was for strict entertainment sake, it was always still there's an elegance there, right? I feel like that's really clear when you watch the dancers of your era.
Edward Villella [00:24:22]:
It was wonderful to be guided by Balanchine in terms of the field, but as a human being, he helped you grow up elegantly. You were the purveyor of elegance, and that's what you could bring to an audience. So, again, it was another kind of specialness, and certainly that's what made us that incredibly special.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:24:58]:
So you spoke about square dance being one of your earlier works in the company. Is there something else that stands out from those early years for you that when you really knew that you were on a path to becoming a principal dancer?
Edward Villella [00:25:12]:
Well, I knew I could jump, and that's a male dancer's ace in the hole. So I felt comfortable by that. And I probably had a better jump than most of the other people. So I began to understand that that talent, the ability to jump, was a gateway to further repertoire. And the idea that I could also move very, very quickly was another aspect, because the Balanchine choreography is not slow. It's really about the music, and you have to be over that music. So there are a lot of people struggling just to keep up. But I was out there ahead. I was flying around.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:26:17]:
So, before Balanchine began to create roles on you, what were some of the more major soloists in principal roles in the existing repertoire that you were given?
Edward Villella [00:26:27]:
Initially, I was in the core of Western Symphony. I did interplay the Robbins the Robbins piece. What else did I do? It's a long time ago.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:26:46]:
I love that you did. Western symphony. Corps. I don't think I knew that. That's very cool, because we did that, too. I feel like all these other parts that we hear that you do are things that we haven't danced. So it's fun to have that connection with that ballet. One other thing that's fun for us to talk about when we interview our guests is kind of some challenges of a career in ballet and things that people are up against. And one thing that may have been something that could have held you back is that is your height. You are a little bit shorter than many of the men in the company at that time. How do you feel that you overcame that challenge and made a space for yourself?
Edward Villella [00:27:20]:
Well, I had the help of George Ballard. He cast unbelievably well and beautifully, and that was a big help for me, because as the Miami City Ballet was gathering all of these ballets, I could have an expectation that was ongoing. There weren't that many guys at that time. It was a very small company. When I first joined the New York City Ballet, there was 44 people, and the repertoire was huge because of all of these closing ballet. And it impressed me. As a founding artistic director, I was going to have a much smaller company, but I wanted to do these ballets, so I had to lay out all of these things and wait for things to happen, specifically to hire more dancers, to give people more opportunities. That's why we had three to five casts of almost anything, because it was such a small company, one or two injuries would play havoc. And that's why, as time was going by, I tried to get as many of the dancers to know as many of the ballets or as many of the roles within a specific ballet. We had one of those most unbelievable circumstances. We were doing Western Symphony and the fourth movement woman was going after her variation off stage and turned an ankle. Now here comes the finale. What is going to happen? I could do nothing because I had done everything prior to this. But within the ballet, I had two other dancers who knew three roles. So they just adjusted and then started to talk people or that person or those couple of people through the valley. And that's when I said to myself, this is a company. This is now a company that has a comfort. And for me, watching you guys, to be perfectly frank, you knowing who you were on stage gave me great comfort.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:30:32]:
I love that that's a story that stands out to you. I remember that it was such an.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:30:37]:
Insane show, one of those moments that the way it came together, it was unfathomable. And I remember what was so great about it was the women, obviously, were the ones dealing with this, and they kind of figured out amongst themselves. And then the look of bewilderment on the men's faces, who had no idea what was happening. Carlos Guerra, who was doing the first movement principle, he lost his partner, who took the place of the fourth movement, and he's just dancing with someone new, and he's like, what are you doing here? But those kind of things, it's live theater. So obviously we want to talk a lot more about Miami City Ballet, but we want to talk firstly about your experiences, having roles created on you. And what was the first ballet that George Balanchine started to hone, use your talents for and make new work on you.
Edward Villella [00:31:31]:
He started to move me up from the core, and I would get secondary roles like in Stars and Stripes. I got to dance the core of the boys, and in a year I was now that principal boy leading the men's regiment. So there was a lot of networking that was going on. And the crazy thing was that most of the style of Balanchine would be evident in every bow. So the whole thing had this continuity where it started, where it went and where it finished. And that, again, as an artistic director, was terrifically helpful. Son, the joy of having a genius make work for you was extraordinary. One of the first was Prodigal son. However, I did not know that Valentine did not like Prodigal Son because he was forced to do it by Diagala and he had a personal problem with the composer. And Balanchine, when he first came in, said, this is it. I'm not going to stage this ballet anymore. From now on, you're going to stage it. And then I found the background to all of this. However, he came to that first rehearsal and it was about 2 hours. And in the first hour he made The Variations. He redid the Variations, the opening variations for me. He said to me, I need to change this because you are an onlayer dancer. And the two previous guys were mostly partsair. So I felt, wow, the great genius is changing things for me. Wow, isn't that terrific? Then he started in with the pot of debt, Diana Adams and myself. And that in itself, I was not the best partner in the world, but I could manage. And I had watched people and I had asked ladies to help me and work with me so I could have the ability to dance almost anything. If you couldn't partner, you didn't dance very much. So he finishes that part of it and that's it. I never saw him again. And the ballet had been out of the repertoire, so they had to get a ballet mistress, Vita Brown, who had retired, and they brought her back to stage the rest of it. Son most of the time that I would be going to those rehearsals, they were not focused on me, they were focused on the core. They had to know. So I was kind of left out and because I had done this early approach to stuff, trying to find out who I was and where I was going and what was happening, and it was easier for me because my mind was open and I just listened and watched. That's all I did, listen and watch. And then after the rehearsal, I'd go and get some poor colleague and say, help me out with this. Where does this go and what does that happen? So it was a whole new educational process for me, but I was ready for that. My body not Son much, but that came along after a while. Yeah.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:36:02]:
I mean, that sounds daunting, to say the least, to have to create such a deep characterization of that role, the sun, but without very many cues from Balanchine Sheen. Did he offer anything specific that stuck with you or informed your idea of the role?
Edward Villella [00:36:24]:
He would say kind of throwaway lines. There's a moment in the part of the where the siren gets Son the neck of the sun, and he's bent over, she's sitting there and she sits and he said, you know, it's like she's having a cigarette. He would say silly little things at the end of the part of the siren, gives him a terrifying look and he gets into a fetal possession and then she comes and sits on his head and the sun pulls her feet over his knees and then she rises and then she goes down. And he said, you know, like Elevate. So he always had stuff like that. And then as I started to watch the ballet, he always had a style, whatever it was, a style. In each of those ballet, he would create a world for you. And you had to understand all of that. What was that world? I looked at the set, I looked at the table. Excuse me, the fence. Then I watched the fence become a table. I watched the fence become crucifixion. I watched the fence become a boat. And I watched the fence go back to being a fence. Son as I was looking at all of that, I had heard about something called Russian Constructivism, but it wasn't a style that I knew very much about. So I started to think, and by God, that ballet is based on Russian Constructivism. So these things were starting to show themselves. So again, I was just acquiring knowledge and how to operate, how to make a character, how to make a role. Not an easy thing to do if you don't have a long background to all of that stuff. And the director and the choreographer hadn't given you much hands. But I didn't see him again until maybe the third performance. And he came backstage afterwards and he told me I was having difficulty getting into the pot of the I couldn't quite figure out how to have a comfort in doing that with internal knowledge. Son the point of doing a pot of duh like that, that was son unpatted. Like, it's not your grand pot of duh. So maybe that in itself also helped me because I didn't have that kind of technical demands with a lady on point and pirouettes and lifts and all of those things. Then he comes back and I can't get what he's trying to show me and I just can't get it. And he got exasperated with me and he said, byzantine icons, dear. Byzantine icons. Byzantine icons. What is this? And I went, I got every book I possibly could find on Byzantine icons. There was the entire portabros of prodigal. Son so that in itself informed me that I had to be looking for all of those things in all of the other valleys. Again, it kind of prepared me to be a founding artistic director.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:41:10]:
Each year, the Clive and Valerie Barnes Foundation provides recognition, encouragement and financial support to two talented young professionals, one in dance and one in theater, thus honoring the memory of the many years of critical work and the warm, personal generosity of Clive Barnes and Valerie Taylor. This year's finalists have been nominated by the Foundation's eleven member selection committee, comprised of art journalists and accomplished professionals in each field, finalists were selected based on live performances given in New York City between January and December of 2022. Winners in each category will be announced on May 22 at the 13th. Annual clive barnes award at florence gould hall in new york city. Guest presenters include pam tanowitz and Alex Sharp. For more information or to donate, visit cvbarnsfoundation.org. That's cvbarnsfoundation.org or click the link in the show notes.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:42:10]:
Although this role is a world away from Oberon, another great role that balance shouldn't create on you. It did make me think of some things and that you had the virtuosity and that component that was there, but then also to have to find this characterization, to have to bring intellectual ideas to the way you're going to inform your character. So what was that experience like with Midsummer? Did you have a similar sort of little tidbit of wisdom from Balanchine here and there that you had to kind of pick at?
Edward Villella [00:42:49]:
Again, it was almost like Prodigal. It was a huge ballet. The whole company was always in the studio. And then we'd get to an area where I was prominent and he'd start with me and he said, no, we'll do it later, we'll do it later. He did it later for sure. We were four days away from opening night when he choreographed The Scared Cell for me. But that's the way it was. You learn it, you get on stage and you did it. So to be prepared beforehand was really the way to go with all of this. It's a lot of Miami, and he would do the same thing to me. We'll do it later, we'll do it later, we'll do it later. I said, when am I going to learn any of this stuff? So there comes the orchestra dress two days before the performance. And again, there were vacant areas for me because they hadn't been choreographed. So suddenly Stanley Williams, great great teacher and a pal of mine, he said to me, Lincoln Kirstein just came to me and said, Balanchine thinks you're going to ruin the ballet. Oh, my God, Villella is going to ruin the ballet. He said, okay, let's go up into the studio. And I said, okay. So we go up and he says, Show me, show me what he showed you. I said, well, he would say, call puck. So I call Puck. He said, no, that's not how you Mime. You don't mime quickly because the audience doesn't get it. You have to slow it down and have an accent so the audience can focus on it. You can't have that gesture moving because they don't get it, son. I went, oh my God. I said, Stanley, this is incredible. So I was ready to do a gesture and stop it in midair, and I became somebody able to Mime the New York City Bahai. Never had mime. Just never happened. And there I was for the first time. Miming so anyway, the opening arrives, I do my performance. I had a really nice performance. And the next day, I'm hanging on a cold steam pipe backstage at City Center. And in walks Balance Sheet with this trench coat and paper under his arm. And I'm trying to warm up, and he walks right by me. Keeps going. Stops, turns around, comes to me and says, you know, dear you, that's excellent. Last night. Excellent. And put his arm around me. Well, I lived off that.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:46:27]:
So it didn't ruin the ballet after all. I think it's so interesting. Like you said, the New York City Ballet wouldn't do any miming. The Midsummer Nightstream was so different from anything that you guys had done really up to that point. And being a full length production, what was that like? Could you compare and contrast for us a little bit the experience in the studio of the creation process of that versus a neoclassical, like, 2030 minutes piece that you would normally dance?
Edward Villella [00:46:54]:
Well, again, Balanchine didn't talk much, but, boy, did he choreograph. And in the first act, where he's working with the principal people and he tells a story in a matter of seconds, I was absolutely stunned at what he could do economically. He did not waste a gesture.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:47:23]:
I love Midsummer is a very complicated storyline, and it's seemingly at odds with the sort of famous I don't know if you said this directly, but there are no mother in laws in ballet that you shouldn't basically, if there's a character you can't describe, if the audience can't absorb what's happening, it shouldn't be there. But then he takes this story that could be so complicated and tells it so succinctly and perfectly.
Edward Villella [00:47:54]:
It's called genius. That wasn't hard for him. And the reason it wasn't hard for him was he knew the score inside out. You'd walk past his room, we still refer to it as the State Theater. You would walk past his room and you would hear him a note at a time, taking scores apart. He once told me he had 20 fully studied scores in his head at any time, and he would literally, if the time was right, the monies were available, the the personnel was right, he'd do a ballet, and he'd just bring the score in with him, and he'd be looking at the score and then clap his hands. We get together, and he'd knock a huge chunk of choreography off simply because he was always prepared, always.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:49:12]:
So there are many stories about how quickly he works. So was that your experience also in A Midsummer Night's Dream, that it was very quick and even to, like you said, to simplify this story and make it very clear to the audience, it was still a very quick process?
Edward Villella [00:49:25]:
Yes, everything about him was quick. And again, I think with that knowledge that he was studying scores on an ongoing basis, you could understand why he could work so quickly. And he was essentially choreographing while he was taking the score apart, so he knew exactly where he wanted to do what he wanted to do.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:50:00]:
So we're just getting the tip of the iceberg of everything that balance Sheen made on you. But since we're talking about him working so quickly and efficiently, I wanted to bring up another genius that you worked with who is rather different, and that is Jerry Robbins. And if you could tell us a little bit, what was that like to go back and forth between these two men who worked so differently, and what made Jerry so different from Balanchine?
Edward Villella [00:50:26]:
Well, Jerry would choreograph in a way that he was never fully sure. For instance, in Dances at a Gathering, we had version A-B-C and D. And if you can imagine learning four different approaches to the same music, it was maddening. It drove us all crazy. But that was Jerry. This is how he worked. He was a genius. He did incredible work, and you just dealt with it. So having come from a Balanchine sheet rehearsal into Robbins, it slowed down and it continually changed on an ongoing basis. Now, Balanchine would be choreographing specifically to your abilities. Jerry was choreographing to his thoughts, his ideas, all of his. So you had to maneuver and manipulate yourself to fully understand the way he was moving and the way he was talking. And he talked an awful lot, but he was a director, and he directed on Broadway. And son, no matter what it was he was doing for you, he was directing you. And he was the first person I really ever worked with when I had joined the New York City Ballet. I was there a couple of weeks, and suddenly I hear that Jerry wants me to learn Afternoon of a Fawn. Afternoon of a fawn. But why me? I had no idea. I just gotten out of a military college, hadn't danced for four years, and he wants me to. I don't get it. And it was years before Jerry came to me and said, you were part of the original inspiration for Afternoon of a Fawn. He said, yeah, he said, both of us were in a class at SAB together. And he said, I was leaning against the bar, and I suddenly began to stretch, and that became an image for him. I was, like, gone. I was an inspiration for this master work, and that's why he wanted to see me immediately. But I wasn't quite prepared for that, certainly not in the partnering area. I didn't learn partnering at the Maritime College. They did not have that as an.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:53:32]:
Elective, someone who you very famously partnered. It's one of the most beloved partnerships, I think, in New York City Ballet history is Patricia McBride. And we've already talked about dances, and that was with Patricia McBride. And another ballet that Balanchine created on you was Tarantella, which, again, helped to showcase your virtuosity and the stamina that you two had together. But what do you think made you guys such a great pairing? Why did it work so well?
Edward Villella [00:54:07]:
I don't know if you know Patricia McBride at all.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:54:11]:
We had her on the show. She was so wonderful. We want both of you together. That's what we really want.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:54:18]:
She talked about you, too. She said we asked her one of these a very similar question about your partnering, and she just lit up. It was so cute.
Edward Villella [00:54:25]:
Well, we had a good time. First of all, we were comfortable with each other, and I loved her. She was an angel, just an absolute angel. I danced with her probably 1718 years or something like that, and we never had a cross word ever. So I have nothing but the greatest admiration for her. And I used to take her on a lot of my gigs and stuff, and we'd go up and symphony date or something, and she'd be there scratching the floor a little bit, doing tondus and this and that and the other. And I would come, and I would start an hour and a half, two hour warm up, because that's how long it took me to warm up for her. Maybe 1520 minutes. She'd want to push it, just keep it comfortable.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:55:35]:
One of the things that she mentioned to us when we spoke with her was the gigs that you would go on, and she said that that was one of the things that made her start to feel so comfortable performing. She said it was something that she felt so lucky to do with you, is to go on all these gigs, and she started to feel really comfortable on stage, comfortable with you. And she felt like that was kind of a big turning point for her.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:55:54]:
Is what she said.
Edward Villella [00:55:57]:
I had the great pleasure of she is a Kennedy Center honoree. And they asked me to make the toast to her. They give the actual awards in the State Department. It's a big, huge, gorgeous ballroom. And I started to talk, and really what I was talking about was, patty, I'd like to explain to you what it was like for me to dance with you. And then I went on and on about her generosity. She could do anything. She was really the glue in the New York City Valley because you could put her anywhere. And she did just brilliant, incredible work.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:56:53]:
Of course, another really important work that you guys made together that was centered on your partnership would be Rubies. And of course, there's the famous story of Balanchine going into Van Cleaven Arpels and being inspired by that, as that being his departure point for Jules. But when did you in the company start to hear that this idea was formulating? And at what point did you know what role you'd be taking in it.
Edward Villella [00:57:20]:
At the last minute?
Michael Sean Breeden [00:57:23]:
Makes sense.
Edward Villella [00:57:24]:
The New York City Ballet was not full of information for the dancers. You just had to wait for it to come at you. But the oddity with Jewels was people were a little leery of it because it had never happened before. Three different ballets, three different composers, but also Balanchine, he was educating his audience. So he would start with, obviously, emeralds, and that was French romanticism. Then there was Ruby's, American Neoclassicism and obviously the Tchaikovsky, the Diamonds, grand imperial Russian manner and style. And again he would say, very, very little. Patty and I were now going to do the potato and rubies. He told me I was the jazz man and she was the jazz lady. So that was it. That's all we were told. And as time is going by, I'm saying, what else is going on in here? Because I knew that Balanchine would always have three or four points of departure, at least three or four points of departure. And I started to listen to the inside of these pieces. And going back to emeralds, the first thing I heard beyond what I had originally picked up was an aquatic kind of thought and idea. So I think he was mixing emeralds with the emeralds of water. So he did all of these things and nobody was aware of it, but I began to be aware of it and I'm looking for something inside rubies. And I kept listening, kept listening, and I'm hearing clap, clap clock. I said, oh, my God, oh, my God, it sounds like horses. Well, when the ballet opens and you have this big necklace of rubies, there's a demi soloist woman or a soloist woman separate from the necklace or whatever, and she suddenly comes barreling down and I said to myself, oh, my God, it's a horse, it's a philly, it's a philly. And then there's this big pot of Sank with the big girl and the four guys. The four guys were grooming the philly. So I said to myself, hey, jockey, I'm the jockey. And Patty was the Philly. It was just amazing, this little charade that I was dealing with all the time, trying to find out what this stuff fully was about.
Rebecca King Ferraro [01:01:17]:
I remember you talking to us also when we danced that ballet about the moment where the principal man, so your spot would be going around the stage and the four corps men would be kind of chasing after him. And I think there's a really specific story behind that as well.
Edward Villella [01:01:31]:
Right, well, that's basically how I grew up in Queens, right? I mean, we chased each other, that's what we did. And you say, well, how did Balanchine even think of something like that? He knew us inside now, and I'm sure he just said, I was that kind of guy anyway, I wasn't your typical ballet kind of guy.
Michael Sean Breeden [01:02:02]:
So onto another work that Balanchine created for you, this time with Allegra, kent wanted to talk a little bit about Bugaku, and I think at this point we're already getting a sense of how varied Balanchine was as a choreographer and how he saw you. I mean, Oberon isn't Rubies isn't Tarantella, and none of those certainly are bugaku. So can you tell us a little bit about what the idea behind this ballet is and what your experience was like creating it?
Edward Villella [01:02:35]:
Well, bugaku is a Japanese ancient, ancient ritual, if you will. It's a marriage ceremony, and it's almost beyond Risque. So those were the obvious things. But how to make that character, that was, for me, very complicated. What was he doing? What was he providing us with? Where is he going with all of this stuff? And just recently, about a month and a half ago, I was asked by the I work a bit now with the Balanchine Foundation, which is different from The Trust. So they asked me if I would do Bugaku. I'd love to do it. I just love that ballet. So anyway, I go and I'm watching them, and I'm seeing technique and nothing else. And in a ballet like that, you have to clearly identify yourself with a Japanese understanding. So I would go back and think about anything Japanese that I had any awareness of. The sense of a samurai, the delicacy of the women, the quickness lightness of the feet for the women and the guys, and all of these other areas that you could tap into. So I watched these people and nothing was going on. It was just vacant gesture. So when the gentleman is walking on with his four other guys, he is making this entrance, and I stop him. Maybe he made two steps or something, and I stopped him and I said, I'm going to ask you a couple of questions, okay? What's going on in your mind right now? Because his face was blank. So then I started to talk to him about the weight of the character. There's a weight to this. It's kind of this samurai, and there's a tilt to the neck, and there's a sense within the eyes, and that already begins to draw you in to this Japanese world. So if you're going to make your entrance and there's nothing there, that's a big hill to climb. So it was terrific to be able to get him already the first thing we were doing together to get him Japanese oriented. So it's an important thing. And I'm attempting a book now, and I want to talk about that, about stepping on stage. What happens? Something happens. You don't just step on stage and look around. You have to inform an audience. You have to give them terror. You have to give them joy. You are the sounding board. You have to provide for that audience to feel comfortable with you in relation to the music, the style, the period, all of those.
Michael Sean Breeden [01:06:49]:
I love hearing you talk at length about this because I think there may be some misunderstanding in particular about the balance. Sheen saying that so many people use don't think, just do. And it isn't meant to be mindless. Obviously, you have to have the awareness. Son what do you think that really meant when he would say that, shut up.
Edward Villella [01:07:21]:
Because he's choreographing away, and some of these dances would be yapping away like crazy. And forgive me, Violet, whom I adored and loved. Violet was a Rockham tour. I mean, she could speak gorgeously, and so her mind was ahead of all of us, not ahead of Balanchine sheet, but he didn't want to hear it. He didn't have to hear it. He knew all of this stuff. That's really one of the things about the misconceptions that come from the presence of Balanchine. He just knew it all and he put it upon you and it was like he was the master tailor, and he would make a suit for you that you almost couldn't feel. Son you that's how easily you could move with it. Elegant, fully informed, very comfortable. He was a basic, simple man who happened to be a genius.
Michael Sean Breeden [01:08:37]:
So another ballet that you worked with Balanchine on that stemmed from the 1972, the legendary 1972 Strainsky Festival. You did The Pottereda with Sarah Leland of Symphony and Three Movements, and by all accounts, that was a really hectic time, getting that festival off the ground. People were rehearsing in hallways. And having danced the ballet under your direction, rebecca and I both for many years, we know how hard it is to count, how hard it is to learn the steps. So getting it out there for that premiere, how confident were you guys in the counts and the steps? I mean, you must have had very little preparation time.
Edward Villella [01:09:20]:
Little or none. And that score is, as you know, daunting. And for me, stravinsky was always, always a challenge. Balanchine choreographing it upon us, would say one or two things, and one of the things he said was Balinese. And that began to give me all kinds of other points of departure. Certainly the style that he provided, some of the gestures looked like Balinese dancing. So at least I had a point of departure. I could get inside this thing. In terms of the rest of it, my biggest problem was the music itself. There's a moment when the guys are downstage left and they're doing some kind of backward gesture, and he said, It's like the Back Bay Shuffle. I said what? Back Bay shuffle. And he'd show you this step. It's a jazz step. And he did that all the time. His work is full of jazz. Full of jazz comment on an ongoing basis. But it makes sense. I mean, if you can think of these old 19th century pieces, the grand old things, the composers themselves took folk dance. Well, jazz is a folk dance, and Balanchine could do jazz like nobody else. He was a great dancer, not in terms of big pyrotechnical kinds of stuff, but moving. Nobody moved like him to music. He just showed you a whole other world.
Rebecca King Ferraro [01:11:40]:
So another large element of your dancing career was, you helping to bring bally into the homes of millions of Americans through your performances on television, on programs such as The Ed Sullivan Show. How did these appearances come about and why do you think they were so important for you to do?
Edward Villella [01:11:55]:
Well, first of all, those things didn't kind of just come about. My agent would call me and say, oh, we just got a call for you to do a Sullivan Show, or Carol Burnett, God knows what. So that's how basically those things happen and those producers. That, again, was a very different era, when Ed Sullivan would have classical ballet dances on his show. You didn't expect that from these places. Now, the negative about doing television is in those days they were cement stages.
Rebecca King Ferraro [01:12:51]:
Oh, boy. Yeah.
Edward Villella [01:12:52]:
And what they did was they put these tiles over them and then they waxed them. Son, the lights would hit the wax and it would reflect. So you couldn't even walk across those damp things. But if you jumped and landed, I have nine broken toes. Guess where that came from? It was a terrible time, and the reason was the cameras were huge, so you couldn't have a soft stage. You needed cement to support the cameras, and if you did a bell telephone hour or something like that. I remember arriving in Brooklyn at the studio at eight in the morning, and I started my bar on cement in my studio. So there were negatives and positives. The positives, of course, was that there was audience out there that may not have known anything about Mahim, but the American community really didn't at that time know too much, nor do they now. Valley is a mystery and we speak, we have our own vocabularies and all of that, but it's the last of the major art forms to arrive. There was certainly symphony, there was opera, and finally ballet, the last to evolve. So especially in this country, it was nowhere as familiar as, say, Europe. So a lot of education needed to go on. And I began to sense and feel that maybe I was providing a service in in a crazy way to raise the visibility of this stuff. And I would quite often have questions. I would finish a performance and they would ask whoever wanted to stay to ask questions. So again, I got the sense that maybe I was being helpful at a time when very few people had seen American dance. So I love that idea. And I loved speaking about the art form because I was learning so much about the inside of this stuff that I could make it that much more interesting to people. It wasn't all of the obvious stuff, so for me it never stopped. I just loved speaking about it and I continued to do it. I don't do as much as I used to do, but I'll do maybe ten different little, um ah, this one place, the University of Arizona, I am going back. I think it's the 7th time in a row at this stage of the game. I feel that much better about it because I know so much more now and I can explain these things in a way that most people don't even think about. But again, my disadvantage became my advantage that I hadn't danced those four years because I started to study.
Rebecca King Ferraro [01:17:03]:
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