Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq

[easyazon_image add_to_cart=”default” align=”left” asin=”B00JAGF9Y2″ cloaking=”default” height=”160″ localization=”default” locale=”US” nofollow=”default” new_window=”default” src=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51caavIX7DL._SL160_.jpg” tag=”disabilitymovies-20″ width=”113″]Were you unfamiliar with the story of ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq, you’d be forgiven for assuming at first the documentary [easyazon_link asin=”B00JAGF9Y2″ locale=”US” new_window=”default” nofollow=”default” tag=”disabilitymovies-20″ add_to_cart=”default” cloaking=”default” localization=”default” popups=”default”]Afternoon of a Faun[/easyazon_link] is about her untimely death, considering how often her weeping friends refer to her being “struck down” in her prime. And much is made of the supposed ill omen of her performance in a March of Dimes benefit, in which George Balanchine, as the personification of polio, symbolically killed her with his black cloak. But in that performance as well as in reality, Le Clercq survived polio.

Her struggling marriage to Balanchine improved for a time, as his guilt over the March of Dimes performance compelled him to remain by her side during her recovery in the hospital and at Warm Springs. Le Clercq did recover the use of her breathing muscles and arms, but Balanchine’s insistence that she would dance again caused friction when her body simply could not comply. Eventually he strayed, pursuing a younger ballerina (as he had done many times throughout his life), but Le Clercq’s friends characterize her decision to leave Balanchine and move into a hotel as one of self-sacrifice, opining that her wheelchair and altered body was too much of a burden for the great choreographer to handle.

By all accounts, Le Clercq achieved a level of acceptance of her disability. She went on to write two books ([easyazon_link asin=”B0007EM4RG” locale=”US” new_window=”default” nofollow=”default” tag=”disabilitymovies-20″ add_to_cart=”default” cloaking=”default” localization=”default” popups=”default”]Mourka: The Autobiography of a Cat[/easyazon_link] and [easyazon_link asin=”B0006BOKE0″ locale=”US” new_window=”default” nofollow=”default” tag=”disabilitymovies-20″ add_to_cart=”default” cloaking=”default” localization=”default” popups=”default”]The Ballet Cookbook[/easyazon_link]) and teach ballet at Arthur Mitchell’s Dance Theater of Harlem, demonstrating moves with her hands from her wheelchair. (Balanchine was reportedly too embarrassed of her wheelchair to let her teach at his School of American Ballet.) She renewed or continued her on-again-off-again relationship with Jerome Robbins, and lived independently in New York City until her actual death of pneumonia at age 71.

A Paralyzing Fear: The Story of Polio in America

[easyazon-image align=”left” asin=”B0006U5V9E” locale=”us” height=”110″ src=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51MPZ8GW8EL._SL110_.jpg” width=”79″]More than just a history of the frantic search for a polio vaccine, [easyazon-link asin=”B0006U5V9E” locale=”us”]A Paralyzing Fear[/easyazon-link] also explores the fear of disability that drove it. Even after the causes of polio were understood, small outbreaks could mean the ostracisim of entire families and neighborhoods, or snowball into panics like the mass exodus from New York City. The ominous television ads promoting fear of “the Crippler”, a shadowy scythe-bearing personification of the virus, were the most effective in raising money for research. (Later, when polio was nearly beaten and fear abated, research organizations like the March of Dimes had to take out multimillion dollar loans to finish their work.)

The fears of the polio patients themselves are also explored, from the black children who were given inadequate care and thus suffered more, to the white males who were never taught that they could still live full lives with a disability, to the iron lung-using woman who tearfully recalls being threatened by a nurse as a little girl that her ventilator would be turned off if she didn’t stop crying.

Once the vaccine was found and the unaffected could relax again, donations to find a cure or maintain the (previously free) care that people with polio received never materialized. As the most famous person with polio once said, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.