Valerie Taylor-Barnes
By Mindy Aloff
In 2007, Clive Barnes and I were brought down to Dallas by Southern Methodist University to speak on a panel about Martha Graham's Primitive Mysteries, which Graham star Yuriko Kikuchi had staged for the SMU Dance students. Valerie and Clive were married by then, and she traveled with him, which is how I met her. Yuriko's staging was marvelous, meticulous, but the weekend was marred by a major problem Yuriko suddenly suffered with her spine, making it impossible for her to walk. Yuriko had to return to New York immediately, and Valerie and Clive changed their airline tickets to accompany her. Clive was suffering medically as well (heart, I think), and he was walking with a cane. At that point, Valerie was the only hale member of the triumverate, I was struck by her kindness and compassion to Yuriko and her unwavering devotion to Clive, by her melodious voice, and by her generous smile that lit up her beautiful ballerina face, marked by sparkling, widely spaced eyes and high cheekbones. Her mobile expressions, her cloud of black hair, and her delicate dancer's figure distinguished her in any crowd,. It was energizing to discover her in theater audiences—at first on Clive's arm and then, after his passing, escorted by this or that friend. In my experience, Valerie, an intensely sociable individual, was usually at the center of doting friends and colleagues. She made one feel a little more alive.
Among Valerie and Clive's many good friends were several friends of mine, including the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo luminary Frederic Franklin—like Valerie and Clive, a native of England who spent a significant amount of his life in the United States. Of those three, Valerie was the only one to have become an American citizen. (Toward the end of Clive's life, he apparently thought about applying for citizenship as well, but he never went beyond that.) Valerie danced with Sadler's Wells in the 1950s, where she had the chance to work with Frederick Ashton, whom she adored, and to perform with Margot Fonteyn—an acquaintance that evolved into a dear friendship lasting to end of Fonteyn's life. In those early years, Clive was in the audience, watching Fonteyn, Valerie, and their colleagues dance the works of Ashton and others,. His relationship with Valerie didn't take root until they were both in New York, decades later
Valerie and Freddie shared working exerience at Arthur Mitchell and Karel Shook's Dance Theatre of Harlem, where Valerie taught on the faculty and Freddie staged (sometimes with Alexandra Danilova, his beloved Ballet Russe partner) nineteenth- and twentieth-century classic ballets, among them the choreograhy he knew from the Ballet Russe for D.T.H.'s .Olivier-award-winning Creole Giselle.
When Freddie was in his eighties and nineties, he staged classics for and performed with American Ballet Theatre, appearing often most notably as the Tutor in Kevin McKenzie's Swan Lake and as Friar Laurence in Kenneth MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet. After Clive died, I frequently met up with Valerie—on the arm of Freddie's longtime partner, the handsome and loving Bill Ausman—in the audience for A.B.T.'s productions. After Valerie established the Clive Barnes Awards—and so could be seen in audiences of many dance forms and traditions—Bill often accompanied her as well. However she may have felt regarding the events on stage, she was always an example of warm glamour.
Valerie and I met for lunch every couple of months. Our conversations ranged widely; she was especially interested in my views of young performers and new productions. And our conversations always included a healthy clash of opinions. I was surprised, att first, but I grew to look forward to our disagreements, which were revealing of personality and background on both sides. It is rare, in my experience, to be able to spar—or even debate—with friends who came of age before 1960 without seeing the friendship start to fray. Back in the 1980s, a prominent modern dancer explained to me, during what I thought was a mild disagreement, that if two persons clash, in particular on matters of art, they can never be friends. I learned, sorrowfully, over the years sinc that it was true especially for other women who were practiciing dancers, choreographers, and critics of her vintage. But it was not the case for Valerie. She and I disagreed on a number of topics—on what classics were thriving and what had eroded, or which mid-career choreographers were the real McCoy and which were mediocrities luckily riding the tail of the Zeitgeist. As for politics, fuhgeddaboudid. And yet, our friendship deepened over the years. Somehow, we managed to put out fires before they burned down anyone's house.
Many of our discussions—heated and hearty—were conducted at the Spanish restaurant across West 23rd Street from Valerie and Clive's apartment: the venerable El Quixote, founded in 1930 on the ground floor of the Chelsea Hotel and closed, after eighty-eight years, just before Valere's final illness..
El Quixote, as you might guess, was on more than a speaking acquaintance with Cervantes's masterpiece. In fact, the restaurant was a monument to the novel of the good Don. Its several dining rooms (Valerie and I never got seated deeper in than the first) were untouched by natural light. Heavy red velvet drapes and lamps lowered to the electrical output of a night light immediately put the diner into an artisanally nocturnal world, populated with booths and tables, each sized for two-to-four individuals, that were covered in snowy white cloths and bearing crystal goblets, china, and silvery flatware. Images from the novel covered the walls, either hung from frames or painted directly onto them, and glass cases with relevant figurines completed the obsession. El Quixote had been a favorite restaurant of Clive's, and he and Valerie used to eat there regularly. She was clearly a VIP at the hacienda, always seated at the most prominent booth or table and served as if she had hired the room exclusively for the meal. I had read that Clive was brought to New York to take up his job as Dance Critic for The New York Times in order to begin by reviewing the 1965 première of George Balanchine's evening-length Don Quixote—a performance that I, then a teenager, had also attended—but I never asked Valerie if the Balanchine ballet had anything to do with Clive's affection for El Quixote.. There was a charm to not knowing for sure.
Around 2010-2011, I began to work on my freelance project of editing an anthology of American dance writing for the Library of America. In the course of nearly a decade of work on it, I was asked to construct three separate tables of contents, going back to a memoirist of the late 1700s and forward to a young scholar of the twenty-first century. I knew that Clive—one of the major dance critics in New York during the past fifty years, when he reviewed theater and dance for The New York Times before moving to the Post—was a keeper at every stage for his acuity, his analytical abilities, and his prose style. And it was Clive, along with his compatriots Charles Dickens and Alastair Macaulay, who convinced me that, at least for this anthology, the word “American” was not going to refer to where a writer was born or naturalized but rather to how intensely writers observed and considered dancing here.
Valerie kept Clive's memory current through the foundation she established in his name. And she kept his writing here accessible by archiving his periodical publications in bulging files. Her loyalty was her love and her love was her loyalty. Their marriage was late in both their lives, and their iunwavering intimacy seemed part of an effort to make up for lost time. Still, although the equation of love and loyalty in Valerie was most impressive with Clive, it was also key to her discussions of her family, of her friendships (especially with Margot Fonteyn), of her admiration for Frederick Ashton, and, over and over, of her reverence for the classical dancing she learned, and performed, and taught. She knew precisely who she was and what she valued and whom she treasured. To have been privileged with her friendship was a delight—and also an education.