Ballet review/criticism archives?

[Victor5678]

Can anyone recommend any website that provides an archive of ballet reviews (especially mid-20th century...)

Also - who would you consider the most important writers on ballet and dance in the 20th century?

Thanks.

[rg]

i know of no website.

collections of american dance criticism by h.t.parker, c.v.vechten (both early 20th c. mostly), e.denby, a.croce, d.jowitt, m.b.siegel, and w.terry(covering the mid-century more or less) are published in book form.

[kfw]

Victor5687, if you subscribe to the New York Times in print or in paper you have free access to their archives. Their dance critic from 1927-62 was John Martin. Non-subscribers can buy articles individually or in groups of ten. Denby and Croce wrote for The New Yorker. As rg said, you could find their books, or at a library search the DVD "The Complete New Yorker."

[ngitanjali]

Of course, if you're affiliated with a university or college, you can get access to the NYTimes for free! It's a bit more painful to search online, but I've wasted many hours (well, not wasted ) reading about Gelsey and Cynthia, when I should have been reading about cells and molecules.

[rg]

re: croce and denby - croce wrote for the NYer, more or less as its first dance critic, her column 'dancing' was the first such in the mag. before her time (which went from 1974 into the 1990s) other critics, such as music critics winthrop sargeant and andrew porter reported on dance before as asides to their music articles for the NYer. (i think foreign correspondents, such as those from paris, also mentioned dance on the odd occasion, but croce was the first full-time dance critic.)

denby wrote for NY dailies and other magazines and journals during this time (the 1940s into the 60s) as a critic, but not for the NYer.

so one won't find denby's reviews in the complete NYer but as noted his dance articles been collected in more than one anthology. the most nearly complete is DANCE WRITINGS, recently re-issued, below is the blurb from University Press of Florida:

DANCE WRITINGS

Edwin Denby (1903-1983) was the most important and influential American dance critic of the 20th century. His reviews and essays were possessed of a voice, vision, and passion as compelling and inspiring as his subject. As dance critic, first for Modern Music and then for the New York Herald Tribune, Denby permanently changed the way we think and talk about dance. This volume presents his reviews from Modern Music and the Tribune in chronological order, providing not only a picture of how Denby's dance theories and reviewing methods evolved, but also an informal history of the dance in New York from 1936 through 1945. The reviews glimpse the vanished dancers and dances that were most particularly of their time, especially Alicia Markova, Alexandra Danilova, Martha Graham, and George Balanchine. It was Balanchine on whom Denby focused after he left the Tribune, and all of his post-Tribune writings on Balanchine and the New York City Ballet are presented here in one section, providing a history of the early artistic development of the company and of Balanchine himself, while also showing Denby's most eloquent and deeply felt writing. Finally there are his post-1945 reviews, essays, and lectures on such general dance subjects as the phenomenon of a truly good leap, classicism in ballet, and dance criticism itself.

ISBN: 9780813030579

Publisher: University Press of Florida

[kfw]

denby wrote for NY dailies and other magazines and journals during this time (the 1940s into the 60s) as a critic, but not for the NYer.

Oh! Thanks for the correction.

[Ray]

Also FYI many libraries of every stripe are beginning to list articles in their online databases--that is, when you look for "Denby," many online catalogues will now direct you to anthologies in which one of his articles appears; some schools are even linking individual articles from periodical databases to their catalogue search engines. So I imagine the same would hold true for subject/keyword searches.

You might check out how much of this work the NYPL Dance Collection has done.

[Victor5678]

Thanks for the response. I have read every review on the NYTimes.com site, so it's great to have more places to start looking.

[carbro]

I have read every review on the NYTimes.com site. . .

I have some eyedrops, if you need.