The Running, Dancing God
The Running, Dancing God
Heather M. Surls
On the New York City Ballet & Coming Home to the Father
Watching ballet usually makes me twitch like a marionette, not in a jerky way, but as if moved by invisible strings. Though I haven’t danced consistently for nearly two decades, the movements and positions that shaped my body from elementary school to high school graduation still inhabit me. They sleep in my muscles like shadows, waiting for music to wake them. When music does come—paired with images of dancers on stage or screen—subliminal movements commandeer my body. I sit straight, watching. My breath grows calm and quiet. My neck, back, and arms strain and elongate with those of the dancers, my head tilts with theirs, my toes count beats of music.
This usual take-over did not happen when I first watched the ballet Prodigal Son in 2021. For thirty minutes, Prokofiev’s score did not affect my subconscious; I sat motionless, unresponsive. I watched as the son beat the air in a tantrum, defying the boundaries of his father’s house. I stared at the goons—bald, androgynous, and ghoul-like—as they stomped, caroused, and paraded like a coordinated centipede. When the cold, expressionless siren entered, I, like the son, was hypnotized—but still, I felt no urge to move with her. She pirouetted with balled-up fists, braided her cape around her veined tights, and finally coiled around the prodigal like an asp poised to kill. What was this crazy mash-up of acrobatics, gymnastics, and theater? I thought. Was this even ballet?
I watched Prodigal Son after learning that the New York City Ballet would include it in their 2022 tour. I knew very little about its choreographer, George Balanchine, though I did have a memory of his Complete Stories of the Great Ballets on my grandparent’s bookshelf. As a Christian, though, I certainly knew the parable of the prodigal son, and that knowledge propelled me to a question I couldn’t shake: Why would a secular ballet company performing to a post-Christian American audience be interested in a 2,000-year-old Jesus story?
As I viewed the ballet for the first time—a 1978 version with Mikhail Baryshnikov in the son’s role—I encountered ballet as I’d never seen it. From the opening variation, where the son’s movements express his rebellion and defiance; to his complete entrancement and seduction by the siren, expressed through her solo and their pas de deux; to the prodigal’s desolation, remorse, and tortured journey home, Baryshnikov’s movement and acting were consummate. But the ending rattled me—a plaster-faced father watched as his son dragged himself across stage. He even turned his face in shock at what his child had become. In desperation, the son climbed up his father’s body, grasping his hands and shoulders, then attaching himself to him in a fetal position. And then finally—finally—before the stage lights dimmed, the father enfolded his son in his cloak.
My screen went black, leaving more questions burning in the dark: What vision of God led to this kind of ending, and why did Balanchine’s father collide with my own reading of Jesus’ parable?
*
I danced only once in a performance that could be considered a “ballet”—all the others were more or less “recitals,” a patchwork of stand-alone dances. In this ballet I danced as Sylvia Rose, a princess destined to become queen after facing a gauntlet of challenges outside her palace. I was sixteen, a junior in high school. Because I was the only student in my small-town dance studio really committed to pointe work—dancing on my toes in those mysterious shoes—my classmates unanimously voted me into the lead part. They took on complementary roles as gypsies and goddesses, fairies and foes, the gamut of creatures I’d encounter on my adventure to coronation.
I felt flattered by my classmates’ decision, but also isolated by it. Their vote emphasized my “otherness,” the painful reality that they didn’t consider me one of them. Before our classes three afternoons a week, they crowded into a dressing room behind the office to chat and gossip about their shared public school experience while they changed. I put on my leotard and tights at home, where I taught myself chemistry and algebra while my mom homeschooled my three younger siblings. When I got to the studio, I left my purple dance bag where the little girls dressed, then stretched alone, waiting.
Besides driving an hour to Bakersfield for classes at Ms. Ashby’s Academy of Dance (which I did for a year or two), or training in Joy’s tiny, top-floor home studio, this was my only option. What it lacked in true camaraderie, my ballet education also lacked in dance history. Our town’s public library had limited hours, and in the days before YouTube, access to recordings of great ballets was limited. Until recently, circumstance hid from me famous ballets and the story of Balanchine, one of American ballet’s most colossal figures.
So when I heard about Mr. B, Jennifer Homas’s 2022 biography of Balanchine, I didn’t hesitate long before buying the encyclopedia tome. I remembered my questions provoked by viewing Prodigal Son the year before. Perhaps Homas, dance critic at the New Yorker and former professional dancer, would guide me to some answers about the ethnically Georgian, Russian-born immigrant who founded the New York City Ballet.
Right away, I found myself eating up ballet facts I (embarrassingly) had never learned. Homas described how the Russian imperial court had imported ballet, with its French and Italian roots, in an attempt to Europeanize Russian aristocracy. At age nine, Georgi Balanchivadze was unexpectedly swooped up by the Imperial Theater in St. Petersburg. One year later, in 1914, World War I began, and so Balanchine’s ballet training wound through years of war and hunger, malnutrition, tuberculosis, and revolution. Although ballet was a distinctly imperial idea, Homas notes that the Bolsheviks were determined to incorporate it into their socialist state, revolutionizing even its classical movements.
In 1923, Balanchine started the Young Ballet, strongly rooted in the revolutionary Russian art scene: unorthodox, experimental, and purposefully detached from the classicism and decadence of the imperial age. A year later, he and a group of dancers went to Europe on a summer tour and never returned. Instead, they joined millions of refugees wandering Europe in the years after the Great War. During this decade, Balanchine absorbed many more influences in cities like Berlin, Paris, and London. He soaked in art theories of expressionism, surrealism, and constructivism—among others—all of which impacted his choreography. Eventually he began dancing with and choreographing for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.
Prodigal Son was birthed in this early European period, between the world wars, when Balanchine was a stateless man and developing artist. Diaghilev was dying but creating a final ballet, which, as Homas writes, “truncated the biblical parable into a tale of exile and redemption.” Balanchine choreographed, drawing upon his upbringing in the Russian Orthodox church, with its rituals, icons, and images.
I rejoiced when early in Mr. B Homas noted that “the practices of the Church, its liturgy and aesthetic, were among the greatest legacies of [Balanchine’s] childhood—part of the architecture of his imagination.” So picture my glee when she delved into Prodigal Son for pages, noting, as I had, the incongruence between the biblical father and the one of Balanchine’s imagining: “Balanchine made the father cold and formal, more priest or icon than man,” she wrote. A footnote mentioned that once, during a rehearsal, a bystander commented on the father’s stoney reception. Later Balanchine was heard instructing his dancers, “No. Father does not move. He is like God. Boy must come to him.” After reading about Balanchine’s childhood, I wondered too if his view of Father God was informed by his relationship with his own father, with whom he had no face-to-face contact after beginning his ballet training.
In a 2019 article in the New York Review of Books, Homas comments that Balanchine’s stern God was influenced by the harsh realities of his life up to that point: war, separation, and exile. Prodigal Son was in part his response to the trauma the revolution had wrought on his life. “If we understand the Russian Revolution to be one of the great episodes of iconoclasm,” she writes, “intent on destroying the Church and its faith, Balanchine’s icon-filled dances also stood as a riposte: against the Bolsheviks who stole their world away.”
Balanchine immigrated to the US in 1933, founded the New York City Ballet in 1948, and choreographed more than 400 known works—only 117 of which have been preserved. He became renowned for ballets like Concerto Barocco, Agon, Symphony in Three Movements, and Violin Concerto, non-narrative dances stripped to a simplicity that revealed soul. Though he embraced his freedom as U.S. citizen, he resisted the West’s materialism and saw ballet as a spiritual investment in American culture. Homas says ballets poured out of him—and he didn’t take notes; rather the steps went straight into the bodies of his dancers.
Balanchine returned to Prodigal Son multiple times: in 1950 with Jerome Robbins (Balanchine’s associate artistic director and himself a giant in American dance, choreographing musicals like West Side Story and Fiddler on the Roof); in 1960 with Edward Villella (restaged prior to a USSR tour, perhaps a middle finger to the anti-God rhetoric implicit in his homeland); and in 1978 with Baryshnikov, who had recently defected from the USSR.
When he died in 1983, the Russian Orthodox church in New York City initially refused to host Balanchine’s funeral. Though he’d kept icons with him his entire life, he’d also been married four times and dedicated his life to staging ballets that displayed the female body in all its sensuality. Before he died, Balanchine had preempted the church’s unspoken subtext in an interview: “We don’t sin by dancing. We use our bodies like flowers in the field which are growing and beautiful.”
*
Around the time I first watched Prodigal Son, I reached the end of Ezekiel in my Bible reading. I love the Old Testament, especially the prophets. I know many Christians struggle with the condemnatory, angry God they see there and how they gravitate toward Jesus, God’s love incarnate. A close reading of the Old Testament does not warrant this paradox, though; from the beginning YHWH, the LORD, promises his commitment to his people. The Old Testament glimmers with a compelling vision of his faithful love.
At a craggy mountain in modern Egypt’s Sinai peninsula, the Israelites, recently rescued from slavery, make a covenant with God, pledging faithfulness to him. God gives them his law and his name, followed by a proclamation of his character that will be echoed by the prophets and psalmists for generations: “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin” (Exodus 34:6-7, ESV). This declaration comes as a comfort to the Israelites, who’ve been caught in their first major betrayal of their God; when Moses comes down Sinai with the tablets of the Law, he finds them worshipping a calf forged from their gold accessories. God proves his self-proclaimed love and mercy by forgiving this egregious, short-sighted breach of their covenant.
And so the Old Testament marches on. The people fulfill the outward cultic requirements of the law while at the same time committing idolatry, neglecting justice, oppressing the vulnerable, and killing the innocent. But no matter how often they fail—disobedience the prophets describe as spiritual adultery, prostitution, and whoring—God keeps coming back. I, as a reader, get fed up with Israel, but God, even in the midst of justifiable judgments, extends to them promises of mercy, forgiveness, and restoration. My 2021 reading of the prophets felt like a scavenger hunt, searching everywhere for the coruscating light of God’s promised love. I underlined and journaled notes in the margins of almost every prophetic book (Isaiah 43:4: “You are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you”; Jeremiah 30:17: “I will restore health to you, and your wounds I will heal”; Joel 2:13: “Return to the LORD your God, for he is gracious and merciful”; Micah 7:19: “He will again have compassion on us”).
The emotional pinnacle of these mercy-promises comes in Ezekiel 16, one of Scripture’s most sexually graphic chapters. (As Prodigal Son shocked some viewers with its unabashed sensuality, so this chapter makes many a believer speed-read.) Ezekiel paints a metaphorical picture of God’s redemption of Israel—how he rescued her as an infant writhing in bloody afterbirth, then doted on her as a young woman, covering her shame and lifting her to undeserved royal status. In response, Israel forges idols from the costly jewelry the LORD gave her and flagrantly opens her legs to multiple lovers. God responds with righteous, jealous anger, but also unbelievable promises: “I will establish my covenant with you, and you shall know that I am the Lord” (16:62). He has astounding, illogical persistence. If a lover did this today, we’d call him a fool.
Shortly after reading Ezekiel I found myself looking at artist Makoto Fujimura’s Prodigal God, a painting in the Japanese Nihonga style, with colors made from platinum, minerals, crushed oyster shell, and gold. The artwork’s title caught my attention—didn’t Fujimura mean “prodigal son”? No, apparently not. His commentary on the painting referred to a slim volume of the same title by his pastor, Tim Keller. I hunted down the book, curious, and was rewarded with an insightful explanation of the word “prodigal” that corroborates the Old Testament vision.
According to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, Keller states, prodigal doesn’t mean “wayward” but “recklessly spendthrift.” (I had penciled in Ezekiel 16’s margins “reckless mercy” and was surprised to find my own word choice in the words of a theologian.) “The father’s welcome to the repentant son was literally reckless,” Keller writes, “because he refused to ‘reckon’ or count his sin against him or demand repayment.”
I read on, eager to see how Keller would describe the son’s encounter with his father. I still felt needled by the catatonic father in Balanchine’s ballet. “Notice how the father comes out to his son and expresses love to him, in order to bring him in,” Keller says. “He does not wait for his younger son on the porch of his home, impatiently tapping his foot, murmuring, ‘Here comes that son of mine. After all he’s done, there had better be some real groveling!’ There’s not a hint of such an attitude. No, he runs and kisses him before his son can confess.”
Yes, this was the biblical parable I knew, the God I knew. This was the father Jesus spoke of in the parable of the two sons—his father and mine, the YHWH of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—the God whose heart pulses with insistent, initiating love.
*
After watching a ballet, you might find me in the kitchen attempting a balancé or développé while cooking, or at least imagining myself in a completely vertical penché. My feet can feel the moist canvas inside my pointe shoes, the softened block supporting my toes, the shank along my arch cracked but still uplifting.
Well, not after viewing Prodigal Son—I still don’t feel graceful or inspired after watching it. But most recently, after reading Mr. B, I felt more settled than shocked, more sympathetic. This was Balanchine’s ballet. Though I initially expected something more classical—frankly, more balletic—I can now watch Prodigal Son as the production it was: the product of a man steeped in early 20th century art influences and the traditions of the Russian Orthodox church.
My question about the NYCB’s desire to perform the piece kind of melted away. Prodigal Son is a historic part of their repertoire, one of their founder’s oldest surviving pieces. Why not perform it? The ballet’s open sensuality—even its jarring weirdness—are perennially attractive features of entertainment. And it’s not a preachy story that requires Bible knowledge to understand. Rather, the ballet taps into a universal longing to go home, for reconciliation and refuge after encountering life’s misadventures and challenges. Perhaps Balanchine’s interpretation appeals to modern audiences because even in the prodigal’s homecoming, we feel dissonance—is the son really restored, or do the rigid responses of his father make room for the reality of broken, dysfunctional family relationships? In true postmodern fashion, the story relies on the drama of the journey rather than a tidy, moralistic ending.
And yet. Something inside me still craves a more satisfying ending. Video footage of Baryshnikov and Balanchine in rehearsal moves closer to the warmth between the father and son in Jesus’ parable. Homas narrates: “Misha falls to his knees and begins the long journey across the stage. Balanchine shepherds him along until suddenly he too is on his knees and the old man and the boy are holding on to each other, inching along side by side in this ancient story and a dance that has crossed a century from Russia to America, through revolution, world wars, and now the cold war.” Here we see the possibility of a father and son struggling side-by-side, rather than one abased before a stiff-armed, begrudging figure.
When I watch Prodigal Son’s final scene, I think of the contrast between it and the celebratory reception in Jesus’ parable—and I also recall myself as Sylvia Rose. After being outwitted and wrecked by my enemies, I lay lifeless on-stage until three girls in white emerged from the wings, hovered over me, and restored me to life. In the ballet’s final scene, I, like the prodigal son, was thrown a party. I appeared in a tutu and crown and pirouetted among my courtiers in a triumphant coronation.
This is the kind of ending my muscles expected from Prodigal Son, for they remembered the movement they’d practiced over and over at age sixteen. If I can be allowed to bend time, to immerse my younger self in the prophetic voices that would eventually influence me, I can say that my every cell knew the intrinsic joy of coming home to God. “He will rejoice over you with gladness,” Zephaniah promised. “He will exult over you with loud singing.” Although he wasn’t on stage with me then, perhaps he should have been: my father, the king, raising a banner over me called Love.
Heather M. Surls
Writer & Editor
Heather’s creative nonfiction and journalism have appeared in places like River Teeth, Catamaran, Brevity, Nowhere, and EthnoTraveler. She is associate editor of Anthrow Circus, a mixed media site exploring culture through the lens of place. She lives in Amman, Jordan, with her husband and sons, where she is working on her first book, an essay collection about Jordan and Israel/Palestine.
Photography by Andre Benz
