Rockwell on the New York City Ballet

[Farrell Fan]

The beautiful women are still there at City Ballet. What might be missing is the glamour. I'm thinking of those pictures of Toumanova and Danilova in the 30's and 40's, they looked like screen goddesses.

In her later years. Danilova still looked glamorous, even while teaching class at SAB. Perhaps some of those young dancers learned something from that.

[dirac]

Danilova did work hard to look glamorous, although in her later years she had a few facelifts too many, IMO. Sometimes there's too high a price to pay for glamour.

[cargill]

My first thought when I read Rockwell's article was that maybe if dancers were paid more, they could buy some makeup. And my second thought was, what is his point! He does seem to confuse beauty with glamour, and it is not a glamorous age. Personally, I think most dancers would look better if their hair weren't so scraped back--the looser hair and the lower buns of the 50's I think is much more flattering, but of all the issues to raise, that is a pretty trivial one.

[Quiggin]

I thought the juxtaposing of named males, Nureyev & Baryshnikov, with an unamed "harem of Balanchine ballerinas" fairly offensive.

Also Balanchine hardly came of age "prefilm." He knew Eisenstein and had seen his works and there is an interesting 1930's interview in which he talks up choreography for the screen, against the interviewers "better thoughts" about it.

A friend--with a longer memory and stronger opinions than I--said that Mr. Rockwell knew absolutely nothing about classical music, and yet he was the Times classical music reviewer, and he knows absolutely nothing about dance and yet now he's become the Times' dance critic.

[Old Fashioned]

He does seem to confuse beauty with glamour, and it is not a glamorous age.  Personally, I think most dancers would look better if their hair weren't so scraped back--the looser hair and the lower buns of the 50's I think is much more flattering, but of all the issues to raise, that is a pretty trivial one.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I also like the lower bun look, although that wasn't the hairstyle Balanchine preferred. It's true that Rockwell is confusing beauty and glamour; I don't find today's dancers any less pretty than a previous generation. Danilova wasn't conventionally beautiful, but no one can deny she was glamorous.

[Guest nycdog]

Let’s not forget the title of John Rockwell's piece is actually, 'Today, It's Dance 10, Looks 3.'

I don't think there's any female dancer at NYCB that rates a 3! Was Rockwell joking?

The truth is more like, Dance 8 and Looks 8.

Rockwell's column rates a 1.

The pictures of some of the dancers at the NYCB Website could be better maybe he was looking there.

[nysusan]

Dance 10 looks 3, is he nuts?

The timing of his article is pretty funny for me. With my return to watching NYCB after a long absence (pretty much since the 70's) I was sitting in the State Theater just this past weekend watching the company and thinking about

a) how much better I liked looking at the corps with the current variety of body types rather than a forest of Balanchine ballerinas and

b) how absolutely beautiful just about all the women in the company look. In fact, there was one women in the corps who's face was not perfect and I thought she stuck out in contrast to the rest. And most of them project such a sophisticated "New York model" attitude.

I have noticed a general decline in individuality and big "star"" personalities, perhaps a lack of imagination among today's crop of ballerinas. This has been discussed before and merits continued discussion, but it's been evident across most companies, not specifically at NYCB (and less so with NYCB than with other companies). But for Rockwell to pine about a lack of physical beauty & glamour among today's NYCB ballerinas - aside from being unbearably sexist & adding to the casual objectification of women in general (from the NY Times, no less) is baffling to me. Even if such unique and mesmarizing artists as Whelan or Sylve or Bouder don't qualify as great beauties in his eyes, has the man never seen Maria Kowroski? Janie Taylor? And his talk about NYCB discouraging individuality in it's young dancers doesn't track with the likes of Carla Korbes or Ellen Bar, just to name two. I guess there's no accounting for taste but as far as I'm concerned the current roster of NYCB is chock full of beautiful women with star quality, from principals to corps.

[Ari]

I also like the lower bun look, although that wasn't the hairstyle Balanchine preferred.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I believe that the "high bun" look came into vogue at NYCB because Suzanne Farrell wore it, and all the girls tried to emulate her. I'm not aware that Balanchine ever expressed a preference one way or the other.

[Anne74]

That was what came to my mind when reading his "Think of Rudolph Nureyev. Think of Mikhail Baryshnikov": the fact that they were Soviet Union defectors probably was as important for their fame as their facial beauty... On the whole, I find his arguments a bit confused.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Back in the "glamourous days", Balanchine and his ballerinas appeared on the cover of Time Magazine. Yes, they looked like movie stars, but I dare say that if there was enough public interest to inspire a major news magazine today to put ballet dancers on its cover, they'd look pretty darned hot, too. Again, my point is that it's not that individual dancers today aren't as beautiful or glamorous, but that the general public doesn't have enough interest to elevate them to movie-star status.

[Anthony_NYC]

Coincidentally, a gaggle of NYCB dancers is featured in a photo for this week's "Fashion" issue of New York Magazine. (They're wearing their Divert. 15 costumes.)

[Old Fashioned]

I also like the lower bun look, although that wasn't the hairstyle Balanchine preferred.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I believe that the "high bun" look came into vogue at NYCB because Suzanne Farrell wore it, and all the girls tried to emulate her. I'm not aware that Balanchine ever expressed a preference one way or the other.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Sorry, when I said that I was thinking about the section on hair in Suki Schorer's book, which I know shouldn't be taken as gospel and does not necessarily reflect Mr. B's own thoughts on the matter. Here's the quote:

More often, he wanted the hair pulled back and off the face to help reveal its features.  The hair could be secured in a flat, hig twist or bun...Its arrangement should not obscure or shorten the line of the neck but should usually give the illusion of lengthening it.

I looked back on some photos of pre-Farrell ballerinas, and while some donned low buns (and others did not), those were not what I had in mind. I was thinking of the Giselle look with the hair pulled over the ears or those rolls (sorry, I have no idea what to call that hairstyle) popular with English dancers.

[Kathleen O'Connell]

Hasn't City Ballet *always* had a handful of dancers with more star quality or individuality or personality or glamour or whatever you want to call it than their colleagues? As much as I enjoyed watching, say, Judith Fugate, Lourdes Lopez, Lauren Hauser, Melinda Roy, Nicole Hlinka and their many estimable colleagues dance (and I did enjoy it very much), I'd hardly have put them in the same category as Suzanne Farrell in that regard. Not to mention the bevy of lackluster dancers now forgotten. I suspect that there's a tendancy to compress many years of dance-watching (or opera-listening or theater-going) into a personal highlights reel and assume that every single moment up until oh, I don't know, we turned 40 or something, was aboslutely without a doubt a peak experience the likes of which we'll never see again. Two decades from now, we'll be wondering why there aren't real stars like Whelan, Bouder, Sylve [insert your favorit dancer here] anymore ...

I just couldn't make any sense out of Rockwell's article, in any event.

[oberon]

NYCB today is loaded with beautiful people of both sexes...beautiful, glamourous, striking, sexy, mysterious, cute...you name it, NYCB has it. Ringer, Korbes, Golbin, Beskow, Edge, Weese, Katie Bergstrom, Kristen Sloan, Ellen Bar, Janie Taylor, Alexandra: sorry, Mr. Rockwell, but these girls are knockouts. We have the womanly beauties like Darci & Kyra and we have the sweet young things like Jessica Flynn and Ana Sophia Scheller. We have demure (Borree), we have mystique (Wendy), we have the pretty girl next door (Abi), we have the blondes (Rachel, Pascale, Jenni Tinsley, Elizabeth Walker), we have the striking Rebecca Krohn and the uniquely pretty Sarah Ricard...we have the eyes (Riggins, Wendy, Kyra), the legs (Kowroski and Reichlin), the hair (Darci & Janie & Carla)...we have something for everyone. And, we have Sofiane!!

We won't even start with the men because it will require several paragraphs...

Who needs Vogue or Men's Fitness? If you want to look at beautiful people, NYCB is the place to be...

[Guest nycdog]

Kathleen O'Connell wrote:

"I suspect that there's a tendancy to compress many years of dance-watching (or opera-listening or theater-going) into a personal highlights reel and assume that every single moment up until oh, I don't know, we turned 40 or something was aboslutely without a doubt a peak experience the likes of which we'll never see again"

Ain't it the truth, Kathleen! In listening to music I think there's a tendency to consider the first recording one became familiar with as being 'the best' and I fear the same thing is true for the ballet?

But there is this issue of the choreography becoming diluted which is real in some performances, so I wonder how much that matters? Recently I watched the movie 'Amadeus' and the Salieri character said something about Mozart's music I thought completely wrong:

“He'd simply put down music already finished in his head. Page after page of it, as if he was just taking dictation. And music finished as no music is ever finished.

Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase, and the structure would fall. It was clear to me. That sound I had heard in the Archbishop's palace had been no accident. Here again was the very voice of God! I was staring through the cage of those meticulous ink-strokes at an absolute, inimitable beauty.”

From what I've been reading lately Mozart's compositional process did not involve copying out complete works top to bottom, rather he would work on the main melodic line and fill it in as necessary, but this idea that 'displacing one phrase' would diminish Mozart's music could not be more wrong! The most astonishing thing to me is how it stands together, complete and interesting, even in a fragmentary state. The relative success with which the magnificent Requiem Mass, incomplete on Mozart's death, could be 'completed' by Sussmayr is but one example.

I think that Balanchine's Ballets are structures hardly diminished by leaving a few steps out here and there. I've only been interested in the ballet a few years myself and I'm not missing anything. I've seen films of the dancers from the past but I also like what they are doing today.