television
Mitchell’s Troupe: Harlem Ballet on Television . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235
Camera versus Choreography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236
Choreography and Camera . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238
Beauty and the Beast Ruined by Gimmicks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240
Royal Ballet’s Dream Is TV Event Tonight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241
books
The Cunningham Individualities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242
Ballet History at Its Best . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244
xii
Upon opening this book, the reader will enter the world of concert dance
at a very special time in its history, particularly in America. The figures and
dances from the 1970s described in this collection form some of the most
indelible images in ballet and modern dance up to the present moment.
Fortunately, George Gelles was able to capture many of the era’s significant
performances through his astute and lively writing. How lucky we are to
have this intelligent record of an art form that can both baffle and enchant.
Dance historian Nancy Reynolds has called the mid-twentieth century
“ballet’s high tide,” but the 1970s, in particular, was a fertile decade for
modern dance in the United States and Europe, especially in Germany.
Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal, with its elaborate stage sets and ex-
pressionist approach, provided a sharp contrast to the stripped-down, play-
ful American experimentation coming out of the Judson Church period.
Second-generation choreographer Martha Graham was still active, and
Merce Cunningham and other third-generation dance makers were com-
bining genres and approaches to create new vocabularies of movement. The
influx of Russian defectors such as Natalia Makarova and, later, Mikhail
Baryshnikov was giving American ballet a gloss of international glamour.
The celebrity of the Nureyev-Fonteyn partnership brought ballet into
spheres beyond balletomanes and dancers. At the same time, Balanchine
continued to succeed at the New York City Ballet, with highlights such as
the 1972 Stravinsky Festival; and the American Ballet Theatre expanded
into an international company.
Gelles’ perspective from the nation’s capital while writing for the
Washington Star provided him with a ringside seat from which to view all
the major troupes passing through on a regular basis, as well as some of the
xiii
smaller local ones. The opening of the Kennedy Center and its designation
as the second home of ABT were certainly fortunate developments. Gov-
ernment grants offered stability to always-vulnerable arts organizations, big
and small, and allowed them to tour. Gelles was granted interviews with
high-profile figures, most of whom have remained luminaries of dance into
the twenty-first century. As a musician and music critic, he was especially
sensitive to that most important sister art, dance: his commitment to re-
portage for the dance viewer is apparent in his lucid and witty style. He
possesses the rare gift of clear movement description, in part fortified by
his study of Laban theory. The scope of work he viewed during his tenure
at the Star is wide and deep.
Shortly after I moved to Santa Barbara and contacted Gelles through a
mutual friend who knew that George had been considering publishing his
reviews, I read these pieces with great pleasure and a pinch of envy. I was
sure they would be appreciated by other people who loved dance and good
dance writing. Revisiting that era of dance brought me back to an intense
time in my personal history as a dancer in New York, where, at the age of
17, I had gone to study ballet at the Joffrey school and later as a Harkness
Ballet Trainee. I went on to dance at a theater in Germany and eventually
returned to the United States and transitioned to modern dance throughout
the 1980s. As a professor of dance for almost 30 years, I developed an inter-
est in history, wrote two books with colleagues, made dances, and taught
ballet. One of my courses centered on Balanchine, who holds a special place
in my heart.
Gelles’ project not only afforded me a wonderful reading experience,
but it also brought George and me together for many animated discussions
and mutual celebrations of all that great dance! Marcia B. Siegel has la-
mented that the field of dance “lacks infrastructure.” This volume serves as
further armature toward the enlargement of dance and dance writing, and
what a delight it is that we now have it in our hands.
Melanie Bales
March 2017
xiv
Terpsichore seduced me as I entered my teens.
As it surely was true for tens of thousands of children in and around
Manhattan, a cultural rite of passage was to be taken by one’s parents to The
Nutcracker. George Balanchine set Tchaikovsky’s score for his New York City Ballet in 1952, when it premiered at the City Center for Music and Drama,
a former Mecca Temple and meeting place for the fraternal order of Shrin-
ers on West 55th Street. To a child’s eye, the auditorium—neo-Moorish
and adorned with exotic tile and murals—exuded a whiff of the exotic. It
promised not merely an event, but also an occasion.
And Balanchine’s Nutcracker was an occasion, indeed. Despite the New
York Times critic John Martin dismissively reviewing its premiere, the first full-length production Balanchine made for the City Ballet was, and remains, a landmark success as well as an enduring, endearing introduction
for the young to the dance. Its winning intimacy draws you into a family’s
Yuletide festivities and then sends you soaring to realms of rich imagination.
I’m looking at a souvenir program from around the time of my first en-
counter with the City Ballet, and it’s an extraordinary document. A portfo-
lio of photographs by George Platt Lynes on its covers, front and back, show
three dancers, two women and a man, in poses, I believe, from Balanchine’s
Concerto Barocco, but their silhouettes are strikingly color-reversed—white showing black; black showing white. Between the covers are portraits from
what now must be acknowledged as a golden age—solo dancers shown cos-
tumed in signature roles. Among them are Maria Tallchief, André Eglevsky,
Janet Reed, Nora Kaye, Jerome Robbins, Nicholas Magallanes, Tanaquil Le
Clercq, Francisco Moncion, Diana Adams, Hugh Laing, Patricia Wilde,
Herbert Bliss, Todd Bolender, Yvonne Mounsey, Frank Hobi, Roy Tobias,
xv
Jacques d’Amboise, Jillana, and, of course, George Balanchine. Then comes
a selection of production photos and pictures of the corps de ballet, all de-
picted with Lynes’ idiosyncratic, suggestive sensibility.
The seven-week season’s repertory was rich. As well as The Nutcracker
by Balanchine, the company presented his Bourrée Fantasque, Concerto Barocco, Scotch Symphony, Swan Lake, Tyl Ulenspiegel, Metamorphoses, Prodigal Son, Orpheus, Firebird, La Valse, Opus 34, Serenade, and Symphony in C. Works by Jerome Robbins were Age of Anxiety, The Cage, Interplay, Fanfare, Afternoon of a Faun, and Pied Piper. Frederick Ashton’s Illuminations and Picnic at Tintagel also were performed, as was Ruthanna Boris’ Cakewalk.
I’m naming names and pieces to give an idea of how all-absorbing this
world was in an era before professional ballet became big business. With
its musical kaleidoscope of different schools and styles, its scenic panoply,
and, best of all, its movements and gestures, which knitted together these
various strands into experiences more formidable than those of its compo-
nent parts alone, this was a world of dance with real substance, serious and
sophisticated. It was an era just before Balanchine and the City Ballet forged
their signature style, and although I wasn’t aware of it at the time, there was
a significant exchange of artists and repertory between the City Ballet and
the American Ballet Theatre. When Patricia McBride and I discussed her
work in 1976, she said, “We’re in a beautiful time for dancers.”
For a child already bewitched by music—Euterpe got to me before
Terpsichore, and I spent my teens as a fledgling French hornist, studying
first at Juilliard Prep and then with James Chambers, of the New York Phil-
harmonic—this was a land beyond enchantment.
The names of many of the artists cited above are now hallowed and re-
flect pinnacles of American ballet. Yet in the mid-1950s, before their history
was written, they were not yet blessed or burdened by fame. Occupying a
corner of a local performing arts culture that included a world-class opera
and symphony orchestra and a vibrant theater scene, where Broadway mu-
sicals played next door to dramatic masterworks, the City Ballet was not
yet acknowledged as a national, or international, treasure. It was simply
the home team.
With works by Balanchine and performances by his dancers as my lode-
stars, I began to learn as much as I could about this sister art. Since dance
is inherently evanescent, I knew there was much to absorb; I had to see ev-
erything, read everything, and speak with everyone, from choreographers
xvi
to dancers to impresarios to critics. Serendipity led me through the fields of
ballet and modern and ethnic dance in all their varieties, and curiosity was
rewarded with pleasure. It was an essential education, I felt, and all for fun,
with no thought about where the journey might lead.
Among the most pleasurable places it led, I recall, was Westbeth, in
lower Manhattan, where Merce Cunningham allowed me to watch his
company rehearse his sparse, cerebral, and beautiful creations. Theirs was
movement unadorned, as directly appealing to the mind as it was to the
eye. A different sort of pleasure was afforded by Shirley Wynne’s remark-
able choreography made for her Baroque Dance Ensemble, composed of
students, in fact, from the Ohio State University Department of Dance,
where Wynne taught. Working with the seventeenth-century baroque
dance vocabulary of Feuillet, Wynne infused this antique language with
extraordinary spirit and grace. Though her productions were lavish, with
period costumes researched, designed, and handcrafted by Wynne herself,
they were most memorable for the inventive fancy of their movements and
the skills of her student dancers, who in all ways excelled.
In 1970, the Washington Star hired me to write about music, and shortly
after my employment began, fortune intervened. One of the newspaper’s
owners and its editor, Newbold Noyes—universally known as Newby—
mentioned that his Aunt Lucia was involved with a dance company that
would be appearing locally. Might I like to review the event? Aunt Lucia,
of course, was Lucia Chase, whose foresight and munificence helped bring
into being the American Ballet Theatre, and Aunt Lucia’s company had re-
cently been named resident dance company at the Kennedy Center, which
soon would open its doors. My one-time assignment led to a six-year stint,
during which dance was my beat.
At the time, I did not fully realize that I had been given a rare oppor-
tunity. In the early 1970s, among daily papers, only the New York Times engaged full-time dance critics. The Washington Star, then, was a path breaker.
But the path it pursued was largely invisible: the Washington Post, even more so then than now, was a national newspaper, and it outshone the Star and
surpassed its circulation. Newby gave me the autonomy to make of dance
coverage what I would, but that freedom was pursued largely in isolation.
Despite writing for a limited readership, I ranged as widely as budgets
allowed. I saw my mandate as threefold: to provide reportage, setting the
dance event in context; to define a work’s emotional import, linking move-
xvii
ment to feeling; and to assess, as best I could, the quality of performance.
Quickly, preferences and prejudices emerged. Certain choreographers
evoked deep and important emotions, while others toyed with surface ef-
fects. Certain performers were viscerally thrilling and commanded the
stage, even when standing still, while others expended energy for naught.
My most important discovery, which intrigued me then as it does now,
is that a performance’s emotional impression is indelible. The philosopher
and aesthetician Stanley Cavell wrote in “Music Discomposed” that a favor-
ite work of art becomes personalized and as tangible as a friend.
Objects of art not merely interest and absorb, they move us; we
are not merely involved with them, but concerned with them,
and care about them; we treat them in special ways, invest them
with a value which normal people otherwise reserve only for other
people—and with the same kind of scorn and outrage. They mean
something to us, not just the way statements do, but the way
people do.
Rereading these articles decades after they first appeared has been a re-
velatory experience. As Cavell suggests, it has been like meeting old friends.
Reading about dances viewed in the past recalls not just choreographic im-
ages, but also the feelings that these images first evoked. The dance expe-
rience—watching dancers make manifest a choreographer’s technical and
emotional intentions—remains vivid.
There were giants among the critics in the 1970s: Arlene Croce at
the New Yorker and Deborah Jowitt at the Village Voice set contemporary standards, and though their vantage points were different, their perceptions were invaluable. Looking back on my articles, I am amazed at what
I thought could be accomplished in 500 words, which, with some excep-
tions, seems to have been my allotment. Nonetheless, I hope I honored
the art and served my readers. And I hope further that some of the keen
pleasures I derived from the dance—by witnessing extraordinary artists
onstage, some of whom I came to know, and choreography that at its best was
transcendent—will be shared by a new generation.
W
xviii
Regarding article headlines: traditionally, perhaps universally, daily news-
paper headlines are written by an editor on the copy desk, and not an
article’s author. To compose a headline—to compress to its essence an ar-
ticle that is part factual reporting and part opinion—is an art unto itself,
and its practice is uneven. Rather than retitle the pieces here, I offer them
with original headlines, some, to my mind, more felicitous than others.
Following each article is its date of publication.
W
Before leaving, I must give thanks to Melanie Bales, a consummate dance
professional—performer and pedagogue, author and dance historian—
who, with her husband, moved to our community after retiring from Ohio
State. With a wealth of experience and expertise, she has been an ideal col-
league and collaborator in the preparation of this keepsake.
xix
f or da nce r s
It is not the critic’s historic function to have the right opinions
but to have interesting ones. He talks but he has nothing to sell.
His social value is that of a man standing on a street corner talking so
intently about his subject that he doesn’t realize how peculiar he looks doing it.
The intentness of his interest makes people who don’t know what he’s talking about believe that whatever it is, it must be real somehow—that the art
of dancing must be a real thing to some people some of the time.
That educates citizens who didn’t know it and cheers up those who do.
— e dw i n de n b y, da nc e c r i t ic a n d p oe t
T r e a sur e S PA ST
A ND PR E SE N T
:
The beginning was no less than a brilliant success.
— joh n m a rt i n, r e v i e w i ng t h e f i r s t p u bl ic
p e r f or m a nc e of a m e r ic a n b a l l e t t h e at r e
i n t h e n e w yor k t i m e s, ja n u a ry 12, 19 4 0
above Antony Tudor rehearsing Pillar of Fire at American Ballet Theatre studios, 1975. Photo © 2017 Jack Mitchell.
previous Cynthia Gregory and Ted Kivitt in the American Ballet Theatre
production of Swan Lake, 1975. Photo: Martha Swope / © The New York Public Library.
w a m e r ica n ba l l e t t h e at r e w
Ballet Theatre Troupe Lovely in 30th Opener
new york — How lovely the American Ballet Theatre looked last night
at Lincoln Center as it opened its 30th season, and how lucky we are that the
ensemble has been named official dance company of the Kennedy Center.
Make no mistake—this is one of our two great classic companies.
Although wildly different from Balanchine’s New York City Ballet in its
aesthetic stance, ABT’s artistic aim is no less true, and its dancing at its best
no less brilliant.
Opening night lost some of its sheen by the absence of Erik Bruhn and
Carla Fracci, the best known and most beloved of the soloists. Bruhn has
been struck yet again by the recurrent back injury that has plagued him so
long, and Miss Fracci refuses to appear with anyone else.
But the soloists we saw looked fine. Among the men, Ted Kivitt was
electric in his appeal, and Ivan Nagy, familiar to Washingtonians from his
work with the National Ballet, looked ardent and handsome. Lupe Serrano
is a dancer who does everything brilliantly, and she would be more brilliant
still if she were the slightest bit more suspenseful and dramatic in her tim-
ing. And Toni Lander was beautiful, too—elegant and musical.
ABT’s program told worlds about the company and why we should so
look forward to its being among us. From its somewhat self-consciously
eclectic beginnings three decades ago, ABT has matured into a company
with a truly international flavor, and last night we got a Russian classic, a
Danish work, and two native pieces, one new and one old.
A brief word about these. The Le Corsaire pas de deux, choreographed
by Nureyev after the Petipa original, is a joy, a virtuosic romp and a tour de
1
force that can’t help but please, especially when danced with the flair and
style that Kivitt and Miss Serrano brought to it.
Les Noces is Jerome Robbins’ finest hour. He has done wonders with
Stravinsky’s score, and his setting of the cantata, as Robbins calls the work,
is stunning in its dramatic force, ravishing in its ritualistic beauty. Oliver
Smith’s set is awesome and perfect, and is greatly complemented by the
lighting of the late Jean Rosenthal.
Harald Landers’ Etudes offers casual pleasures. This is a tour of every
choreographic gesture in the book, and though it has moments of wit, it has
precious little dramatic or musical continuity.
Dennis Nahat’s choreography of the Brahms Quintet op. 111 does have
these qualities, but Nahat never illuminates the deep musicality of Brahms,
but rather illustrates what the score so plainly says. And so the piece is
somewhat thin, if always attractive and especially fetching in its imaginative
use of port de bras.
It is to ABT’s great credit that it takes music so seriously. The conduct-
ing side—we heard Kenneth Schermerhorn in the Stravinsky and Jamie
Leon in the Adam pas de deux and Czerny etudes—is far superior to that of
the City Ballet. The house orchestra played extremely well, adding immea-
surably to a fine show and one that can’t get to Washington soon enough.
June 17, 1970
W
Ballet Theatre Whets the Appetite
American Ballet Theatre’s unofficial inaugural in the Kennedy Center Op-
era House was a night to remember, despite a River that ran thin and a laff riot of technical ineptitudes that ended the evening. The company’s appearance on Saturday night was a choice hors d’oeuvre that offered three popular
pieces, one of them very great, and showed off almost all of the company’s
important dancers. If not the most elegant program, it nonetheless whetted
the appetite for the first of Ballet Theatre’s two-week miniseasons and left
the audience shouting for more.
The company was courageous to open its program with Antony Tu-
dor’s 1943 Romeo and Juliet, for though its recent revival is a magical piece of theater, the work is private and personal in its sentiments, refined in its
sensibilities, and strictly pictorial in its presentation.
2
Romeo’s choreography is cool and understated and makes its enormous
emotional impact with deceptively simple means. The action is almost en-
tirely on the ground: there are surprisingly few lifts. But this has led Tudor
to a new virtuosity in the use of limbs, and from the prologue to the final
tableau, arms and legs are given a marvelous variety of twists and turns and
inventive poses.
Tudor also has flattened the dramatic action of Shakespeare’s play. In
a sense the piece is uneventful, for the flow of the story is continuously
smooth. Romeo and Juliet are really the only characters in the piece: ev-
erybody else is incidental. Having made this essential abstraction, Tudor
has paced his work with effortless ease. Seeing scene melt into scene is like
being before a frieze unfrozen. If Trajan’s Column could slowly start to
turn, it would tell its tale in exactly the same manner.
The audience is kept even further from the action by a cunning dramatic
touch. At the front of the stage on the right sit two girls. They are the ones
for whom the show is being played. We are looking over their shoulders
seeing things at two removes. It’s another simple stroke of genius that gives
Tudor’s Romeo its special poetic essence.
Using the amorphous tone poems of Frederick Delius at first sight
seems wildly wrong. But from the scores Tudor has borrowed a rhythmic
spaciousness and leisurely formal articulation. Having taken this, he all
but ignores the music, letting it serve as a fragrant and evocative sound-
scape. Eugene Berman’s set is itself a work of art. His vision of renaissance
architecture is scholarly but not pedantic, and his craft as a stage designer
is superb.
In the title roles, Natalia Makarova and John Prinz both did exceptional
