Performance
Armadillos In Toe Shoes
Austin Ballet Theatre performs at Armadillo World Headquarters, where the high and the low cultures meet.
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Not every ballet was a "Joseph Byrd." There were ragged ones, let us all now forget. But as Eddie Wilson said generously, "Everything they did that was sloppy, they did it over again and improved." He was right, and the Armadillo faithfuls loved it. They took to dropping by rehearsals to see just where the process really began. They signed up for classes at ABT's Dancers' School. They became balletomanes, dance freaks, an ABT Army, if you will.
The culture establishment's reaction was noticeably cooler. Erik Stocker of the Texas Commission on the Arts and Humanities came to one performance (in safari regalia), sat through one ballet, pronounced it "tepid," and made his exit. At season's end, the Commission rejected ABT's grant proposal on on grounds that it was "too ambitious."
Then John Bustin, critic of The Austin American-Statesman, finally made it over to see what all the fuss was about and spent much of his review shrinking from the surroundings. Calling the Armadillo stage "a barely adequate rig," he suggested that it "is clearly not much of a help for balletic diversions."
Snorted Eddie Wilson, "You could land a B-29 on that stage and it wouldn't shiver." (To give Bustin his due, the stage is rather small, and it was enlarged over the summer.)
So what if Uptown Austin snubbed the dance scene at Armadillo? Business was booming, and as Wilson pointed out, "People love it because it's happening at Armadillo and because it's not at the auditorium with a lousy view, rotten sound, and snot-nosed ushers."
Attendance during the 1972-73 season shot up from an initial 300 to 700-plus. If Austin Ballet Theatre wasn't getting rich from $1.50 tickets, at least it wasn't too far in the hole. Armadillo began to read the handwriting on the wall, adding a string quartet to its outdoor beer garden and discussing the possibility of a pops concert with the Austin Symphony Orchestra.
And long about spring, there were signs that Uptown was finally coming around. Ada Marie McElhenney sashayed in with the social set. Mary Faulk Koock brought her clan and pronounced the ballet "Absolutely darling." As one Scholz's stalwart put it, "I'm an old Austin hand, and I have to keep track of any innovation."
Innovation, it is, the democratization of dance in a way that makes ballet as palatable as beer. But there are difficulties in bringing dance to the people on a regular basis. The 30 to 35 members of Austin Ballet Theatre spend afternoons, evenings, and every weekend in rehearsal. They are unpaid. Stanley Hall teaches dance classes at the University and at ABT's Dancers' School, then spends his weekends in all-day rehearsals. He accepts not a cent from Austin Ballet Theatre and has been known, more than once, to slip a few dollars to one of his dancers needing new toeshoes.
In addition, dancers alone do not a performance make. The strength of ABT and its democratic flavor derives from the galaxy of creative Austinites who get into the act as stagehands, costume designers, publicity flaks, and technicians. Earlybirds at Armadillo often glimpsed Kirsten Barrera or Betty Adams (better known as president of Austin's Planned Parenthood) sweeping floors, stacking chairs, and wiping tables. Jane Koock (of that clan) signed on as publicity director. Kate Bergquist, an artist for the Austin Public Library , spent spare hours designing programs, posters, and ads, including the trademark, an armadillo in toeshoes.
There were others: Marguerite Wright, looking for all the world like a wardrobe mistress straight out of Carnegie Hall. Kathleen Harter Gee worked days in the University iconography collection, and moonlighted as designer of fantastical costumes and headdresses. Judy Thompson, a schoolteacher, assisted in rehearsals, while her husband Lee lent his television expertise in operating the sound system. These people participate in ballet at Armadillo because they're dancers, frustrated dancers, parents of dancers, or simply hams. And also because of their fierce loyalty to Stanley Hall.
The man who inspires this devotion is enigmatic. Only heaven knows his age, and only a kamikaze pilot would ask. He's an isolated man with a veneer of camp humor, a curious blend of movieland theatricality and genteel restraint. He paternally shepherds his dancers, this past summer taking four of them to Europe for the rounds of master classes, festivals and tryouts—grooming them for the big time, which is part of what ballet at Armadillo is all about.
"This gets into professional performing," says Renata Sanford, director of the Dancers' School and a seasoned pro from Broadway and the ballet world. "It's learning your craft, learning it well. It's the only way to become a dancer."
Hall's forte, choreographically, is broad comedy, but underneath this surface he's developed a feel for delicate design and philosophical meat. The wonder of it all is that he's only been choreographing since he came to Austin five or six years ago.
"Your tendency when you first start choreographing is to copy the choreographer you like most," Hall admitted. " A lot of my first ballets had Freddie Ashton in them, because I worked with him and with (Leonide) Massine. I think Massine's influence is there because he used to make patterns, then they'd go through the steps. He would give you a sequence of, for example, three steps and say, that's number one. Then he'd give you three steps more, and say, that's number two. He'd give you about ten little variations, and then say, the people doing this major pattern do numbers one, three, and seven."
"Les Patineurs," Stanley Hall's choreography after Frederic Ashton, fades from the stage. The house lights come up and the audience filters out of the Armadillo into the October night. Already, the stagehands are striking the sets, and Betty Adams wanders from table to table, picking up stray beer cups and crumpled programs. Eddie Wilson stands at the doorway, smiling at the prospect of another successful season of ballet at Armadillo. "It used to be that we were the lymph node on the counter-culture," he is saying. "Now we're the only culture in town."
A few years back, the Association of American Dance Companies got to figuring and announced that in the past half decade the American dance audience had grown from one to six million. Of that audience, in 1964 70 per cent were New Yorkers. Today that ratio is reversed. Translated, that means decentralization of dance, creeping Culture…Next thing you know, your little boy in his Longhorn T-shirt will be dropping a bombshell: "Guess what I want to be when I grow up?"
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