I’ve always known that the David H Koch Theater, once known as The New York State Theater, was made to George Balanchine’s specifications. Still, until sitting down to speak with Thomas Mellins, New Yorker, urban and architectural historian, and professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, I never realized how intentionally Philip Johnson’s design highlighted Balanchine’s balletic vision. Mellins, who is such a New Yorker, that asking him how he first came into contact with Lincoln Center feels sacrilegious, has curated a series of exhibits for both New York City Ballet and Lincoln Center over the years. The most recent, Excellence and Innovation: New York City Ballet at 75, celebrates the milestone achievement in the company’s history. In the 52-image exhibit, Mellins condenses the company’s history and unique contributions to the art form focusing predominantly on Balanchine’s creation of a decidedly American ballet aesthetic. Mellins’s approach to his work is deeply studied and animated. During the interview, he referred to City Ballet Theater by its original name, which I didn’t correct. All the most enthusiastic City Ballet balletomanes wish it were still called that.
Read below to see how interwoven Johnson and Balanchine’s visions were (interacting with each other almost like origami), and how Mellins went about approaching this exhibit, which he refers to as an installation.
This interview has been edited for both length and clarity.
Eve Bromberg: How did your balletomania start?
Thomas Mellins: I have a strong connection to The New York State Theater and Lincoln Center. I went to the New York State Theater when it opened in 1964 to see The Merry Widow. I can even tell you what my grandmother was wearing.
Early in my career, I worked in an architecture firm, Robert A.M. Stern Architects, whose offices were in the same building as the David Howard Ballet Studio, also Alvin Ailey, and someone named Luigi who was well known in the jazz world. I would take breaks to watch these companies rehearse.
In 2009, I curated an exhibition marking the 50th anniversary of Lincoln Center at the Library of The Performing Arts. I worked directly with all constituent organizations of Lincoln Center including the School of American Ballet and New York City Ballet for this exhibit. That, in a sense, connected me to the ballet and particularly to the archival resources of New York City Ballet. In 2014, I curated an exhibition focusing on The New York State Theater’s architecture, designed by Philip Johnson which was very much in collaboration with Balanchine. Johnson famously said ‘I built this for George.’ 2014 was the year former City Ballet principal Wendy Whalen retired and I saw her perform multiple times. I thought she was so spectacular and seemed to add another dimension to the work. I saw her farewell performance. That was a very rich experience.
As part of our planning for the 2009 exhibit, someone at the ballet decided that it would be a good idea for the design team (myself and designers from Pentagram, the same firm that designed the current show) to see a performance from backstage. There were all these young dancers backstage talking about what young people often talk about like what they were doing after the performance, who was seeing who, who was no longer seeing who, and then they would enter the stage and transform into these creatures from another planet. The ballerina dancing the lead in Swan Lake fell off pointe during the performance and I was close enough to see terror in her face. There was a very well-known ballet mistress standing backstage beside me and she said in a very pronounced Russian accent to the ballerina coming off stage, ‘Darling, I do hope you’ll forgive yourself.’ I turned to the designers and said ‘Is this real or are they staging this for us?’ It was just a whole other way into the world of ballet.
EB: I must know, what was your grandmother wearing?
TM: [Laughs] My grandmother was wearing a purple shift dress that had an Art Deco design on one side. It was very 60s. Many people’s favorite skyscraper in New York is the Chrysler Building and what they don’t realize is that the Chrysler Building was largely derided at its completion in the 1930s. It wasn’t until the 1960s and 70s that Art Deco began to be reassessed as artistically significant. In the 1960s, Art Deco-inspired design came into fashion.
There is a connection here to Lincoln Center. At the time Lincoln Center and The State Theater, Philip Johnson’s design specifically, were unveiled, people committed to Modernism thought it was too traditional and people dedicated to traditional design thought it was too modern. In the ensuing decades, both the Theater and The Center have gained more of a constituency and I think a lot of people, particularly younger people, are intrigued by efforts to synthesize modernism and classicism. Philip Johnson’s theater is a perfect example of that effort. The attempt to match a minimalist aesthetic with a decorative one is relevant to New York City Ballet and Balanchine’s vision for the company. Balanchine was a real conservator of a cultural tradition, he trained as a musician in St. Petersburg for example, and at the same time, the company has always been about innovation. The ballets Balanchine created on the stage of The State Theater speak to that aspiration.
EB: Is it fair to say that a lot of the foundational aesthetic tensions of the City Ballet are captured in the building’s architecture?
TM: Absolutely. The building is both opulent and modernist. And the building’s sense of theatricality comes, in part, from Johnson’s focus on procession as a key element of architecture. The ceiling of the lobby, where you first arrive, is low and feels cramped, but when you proceed and walk up the stairs on either side of the building, you’re swept up into the Grande Promenade and there’s a ‘ gee whiz’ moment. The way the user of the building participates in the building’s design seems to me completely appropriate for a theater. The building celebrates the body in space.
Johnson’s design captured how passionate balletomanes are and that part of the experience of going to the ballet is about seeing and being seen. There are very good sightlines, not just from the seats to the stage, but from some seats to other seats. ‘I wallpapered this theater with people,’ Johnson said. There, originally, were no aisles as part of the parquet and there was what is called continental seating, which is why there’s so much space between each row of seats in the audience. This was also a social function. To get to your seat, you have to pass by people. New Yorkers couldn’t handle the continental seating plan though, so they changed the design and added two aisles.
The building was designed just before Balanchine created his ballet Jewels [1967]. The other day, while in the theater, I realized how jewel-like the wall light fixtures look, which suggests consistency and vision and an emphasis on luxury.
EB: That was my next question, whether the jewel-like light fixtures were intentional?
TM: I haven’t seen any documentation that Johnson and Balanchine collaborated on this idea, but I do think it reflects something of a common inspiration. The basis of the criticism of the design at the time it was unveiled was about its opulence. ‘Why is it so luxe?’ ‘What is it about these jewel-like lights?’ ‘How does that fit into ‘form follows function?’ But, it was all part of a larger effort to synthesize a traditional and modernist aesthetic.
EB: But also Balanchine has such deference to the beauty of ballet and the aesthetic importance of what’s happening on stage.
TM: Absolutely. More broadly, at this moment in architecture, architects are thinking about the aesthetic pleasure of architecture, speaking to a broader audience, and are warning against focusing solely on modernism so abstract that it needs to be explained to a person walking down the street. Design should be enjoyed, and this became part of an approach known as the ‘Architecture of Joy.’ To some extent, Johnson adopted that stance.
EB: I’ve read that the orchestra pit was designed to Balanchine’s specific requests. Is that true?
TM: Yes and the dimensions of the stage and the actual construction of the stage as well as the size of the orchestra pit, and the theater’s sight lines. All of the design was focused on ballet and dance and creating a home for ballet and that’s very unusual, to have a theater created specifically for dance. The stage itself is huge. Speed and athleticism are so critical to Balanchine’s technique and one of the things that means is that the dancers cover a lot of ground. The dancers needed, and need, a large stage. Jacques d’Amboise has spoken about how the move from the New York City Center to the New York State Theater [in 1964] affected how the dancers moved and how their gestures changed. Everything got larger!
EB: How did you take your architectural expertise and put it towards an exhibit of photographs?
TM: I’ve curated a lot of exhibits on photography. The theater was not designed as an exhibit space; there is no single point of entry or exit or singular way to move through the space. You can almost think of the exhibition as more of an installation, rather than a traditional museum or gallery display with objects and text. I thought that the most powerful way of presenting the material, rather than having cases you’d have to get close to, was to animate the space and make the images visible from multiple vantage points. Just like inside the theater and auditorium, the sightlines of the lobby and promenade are great and I wanted to treat each wall as a canvas. You can, of course, get close to the photographs, and read the quotations, and the text. You can start at the ground floor if you want, where there’s introductory text providing basic information, but I wanted it to work in a way that was appropriate to the building’s design.
EB: How did you go about capturing the company’s history? What did you want to highlight in particular?
TM: The space doesn’t lend itself to a chronological presentation. If it wasn’t going to be chronological, I needed to find another method of grounding the exhibit so I isolated 8 themes, one of each level– four on the east wall and four on the west fall– that I thought were defining features of the company. The themes are tradition, innovation, musicality, athleticism and speed, collaboration, reach, impact, and national identity. As you said, a large part of City Ballet is a celebration of beauty and I wanted it to be beautiful and have the arrangement based on formal considerations. Having said that, it’s not only based on formal considerations! On the ground level of the Grand Promenade, there are introductory panels where you meet the major players like George Balanchine, Lincoln Kirstein, Jerome Robbins, Peter Martins, and current City Ballet artistic leadership Jonathan Stafford, and Wendy Whalen. It’s also where you see dancers of the current company doing both classic City Ballet repertory and newer works.
Curators often talk about takeaways. What do they want someone to learn from the exhibit? You start with an exhaustive list and in the end, if someone can tell you two or three things they’ve learned, that’s a major success. The two things I wanted people to understand were how Balanchine made ballet modern and how he made it American, so those ideas are woven throughout.
EB: How did you choose the photographs? Did you have access to the archives?
TM: I looked at tens of thousands of photographs. It was amazing. Most of the photographs were from the City Ballet’s archives, which are located in New Jersey. There’s a wonderful on-staff archivist on staff, Ailina FIsk, who was trained as a dancer herself. I worked closely with her and also with the Library for the Performing Arts, which is one of the great performing arts libraries in the world.
You want to come up with a kind of conceptual armature when looking through that many photographs to know what you’re looking for without having some sort of checklist or preconceived ideas of what to include. I wanted to make sure to include Balanchine and Robbins prominently given their historical importance and focus on the contemporary company. I was very conscious not to repeat photographs and end up with seven photographs of Edward Villella or Apollo. I also had to be aware of the experience of looking at the photographs and choosing ones that would have staying power when viewed from a distance.
EB: Were there any photographs you couldn’t include?
TM: Many, but the ones I had to pass on were ones with busy backgrounds, particularly rehearsal shots, which I love. They tell so much about the nature of the company. But because they’re candid shots, they often include someone standing off to the side looking distracted. That wouldn’t have translated well to an exhibit of this layout. Even if the photographs include stunning dancers rehearsing with Jerome Robbins!
EB: That’s very telling that the archivist herself was a trained dancer.
TM: Yes. Many of the people who work for the company, at least this is my impression, have ballet experience. Did I ever tell you about Michael?
EB: Is that the ticket taker who used to take Tanaquil Le Clercq to the ballet?
TM: Yes! Even the person collecting your ticket not only has some connection to the ballet but is himself or was himself an incredibly talented dancer [Michael danced at The Dance Theater of Harlem under founder Arthur Mitchell]. He told me, ‘The reason I’m here is because I like the Yankees, but I love the ballet!’
EB: Did you see any of the great ballerinas perform, or see Balanchine take a bow?
TM: The last time I worked with the ballet, I was on a panel with Jacques d’Amboise. In the green room before the event, d’Amboise showed us how Balanchine taught him to bow: bend at the waist with a sweeping hand gesture and make direct eye contact with the person who is sitting in the last row of the balcony when coming back up. It was a fabulous experience. I felt very connected to Mr. B.
EB: Beyond acquiring new knowledge about the ballet, what do you hope people leave the exhibit with,
TM: I hope they leave feeling uplifted and with a deeper appreciation of this remarkable company’s achievements, including Balachine’s unique contributions to ballet. Because ballet is not my primary world, the ability to immerse myself in it was such a rich experience and I was able to approach it with a kind of fresh joy in just how remarkably beautiful this art form is. I hope I have succeeded in sharing that joy.
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