Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clerq

Nancy Buirski's extraordinary film Afternoon of a Faun;  Tanaquil Le Clerq showed this week-end on PBS.  Le Clerq was a fabulous dancer with the New York City Ballet, married to George Balanchine and stricken with polio when she was 27, at the height of her career.  There is marvelous footage of her dancing, especially with Jacques d'Amboise in Jerome Robbins's Afternoon of a Faun and Balanchine's Western Symphony; d'Amboise (who is interviewed in the film) more than keeps up with her: his elevation complements her speed.  She was tall, with very long legs, and changed the ideal of a ballet dancer.  After Le Clerq, Balanchine's fourth wife, Balanchine often worked with dancers with very particular looks and personalities -- Allegra Kent, Patricia McBride, Merrill Ashley, Suzanne Farrell -- whose individual strengths he would draw on for his exquisite ballets.  Some of the best footage in this film is of Balanchine himself, demonstrating choreography and dancing the lead role in his own Don Quixote (which the New York City Ballet has not done in many years but which I was fortunate enough to see, staged by Suzanne Farrell, at the Kennedy Center in July 2005).  Of slightly less interest is the relationship between Le Clerq and Jerome Robbins:  he asked her to marry him but they stayed friends (and he returned to male lovers) after she married Balanchine.  The last third of the film is both painful and moving, with Le Clerq in a wheelchair interspersed with Balanchine dancers who came after her.  I appreciate that Buirski assumes at least a minimal knowledge of the New York City Ballet and is able to use so much film of Le Clerq in such Balanchine masterpieces as La Valse and Concerto Barocco.