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Thanks for the better links, California. And thanks for the totals, Rosa, cubanmiamiboy, and Juliet. Juliet, I'm envious! cubanmiamiboy, it's interesting that you saw Waltz Academy in Cuba, since the ballet is such a rarity it isn't even listed by the Balanchine Trust. I see that it was made for Ballet Theatre.

Did anyone see the performance of Balanchine's À la Françaix, danced last weekend by the Eglevsky Ballet? Does anyone remember seeing it when it was new in 1951? In his review Alastair Macaulay asks After reading that I just had to make my own tally, and with Kirstein's Thirty Years and Nancy Reynolds' Repertory in Review as supplemental memory aids, I counted 62, including only works I've seen in the theater and in full, and counting Jewels as one ballet and Ballet Imperial and Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto # 2 as one ballet. My count includes a number of rarities revived by Suzanne Farrell for her company, but I have never seen Le Tombeau de Couperin, Coppelia, Harlequinade, or (in the theater) Allegro Brilliante. I'm kicking myself for passing up a chance to see Pavanne on a Saturday afternoon in New York, but then I'd seen four NYCB performances in a row and had two more to go, and New York has other charms. Since this is the silly season on Ballet Talk, when most companies are on vacation or touring, and a ballet starved brain turns to . . . well, making lists in my case, if anyone else is feeling obsessive-compulsive, I'd love to see your own totals. I'll bet there are people here whose counts easily reach into the 80's. For a list of all Balanchine ballets -- at least according to wikipedia -- go here.

Thanks for the heads up, toeprints. I love your description "dignified remembrances," which would not apply to all of what's been written about Nureyev. The book is available on Amazon, and buying it through the Amazon window on the top of the page benefits this site.

It's here! It's below and above

The more I read and hear about Lincoln, the more I think I misjudged her based on the concert in which I first heard her. NPR had a nice tribute this morning.

chezdancer, there is an excerpt with Kyra Nichols and Ben Huys in the leads on the Balanchine Celebration, Part 1 DVD, taken from a 1993 NYCB performance. And you can help this site by buying it through the link at the top of the page.

Thanks for posting, Patrick. I saw her once about 15 years ago but have always had mixed feelings about her music, since for all her talent and individuality, her defiance seemed tinged by more than a little bitterness. These clips and others linked to them show me another side of her. I love Max Roach but have never gotten around to buying the Freedom Now Suite, but I see there are clips of them together.

According to this this Newsweek article, we can thank PBS network president and CEO Paula Kerger for the Nixon in China broadcast.

You must be right, although to me she still sounds patronizing. Sounds like a kind of paradise.

I have mixed feelings about this situation. On the one hand, I find it very sad, and I'd hate to see the future world bart fears "in which professional, live 'dance' might consist of big brands only." On the other, to take the Ellis Wood Company as an example, I wonder if it's Wood's aesthetic or her subject matter that isn't selling. Hereticus may be a great dance on its own terms, but Wood seems to think she's stooping down to her audience to have to make pieces like "Mom." If that's her attitude, she deserves to have to fend for herself. Here is what Lisa Traiger writes about the Ellis Wood dancers in a 2005 Danceviewtimes review included in the press materials on Wood's site: And later: Yawn. That definition of "real women" is at once narrow and commonplace. As salutary as that strand of feminism has been, the potential audience doesn't need modern dance to find it. More importantly, real women are multi-dimensional -- are a whole lot more interesting. Of course it's unfair to judge work without having seen it, but the potential ticket buyer has to make a decision based on something, and much of Wood's work, to read the reviews on her site, is provincial. This is not the 1960's or 70's, and much of her potential audience has moved on. As Helene says, experimental dance asks a lot of its audience, and if the audience would rather doze through another Swan Lake, I don't know why they even go see ballet, much less modern dance. But the artist has to be willing to meet the audience halfway as well, and address some of its concerns. Not just gender identity, but love. Not just aggression but inclusive community. Not just "Funktionslust Slut," but Mom. There is no "Mom" or anything like it listed in her repertory, by the way.

Thanks for the info, Patrick. I do remember reading about Streisand's appearance last year. I love, love, love the Vanguard, both for its sound and its atmosphere, and for its history. It's Jazz Mecca. Lush Life is a song Strayhorn kept to himself for years and only performed privately, and he was upset when it was first commercially recorded, by Nat King Cole. You can hear Strayhorn himself singing it here on NPR.

Today a discussion with a friend led me to read a delightful essay from Wendell Berry's What Are People For? entitled "Writer and Region," which begins by discussing Huckleberry Finn and then opens out into a discussion of regionalism and community. I love Berry's fiction too, but he's every bit as much the great humanitarian in his essays. This summer I read Alive at the Village Vanguard: My Life In and Out of Jazz Time, by Lorraine Gordon, owner and operator of the Village Vanguard, and widow of Max Gordon who first founded and ran the club. Gordon writes about early her love affair with jazz, and her first marriage with Blue Note records founder Alfred Lion, in which the two devoted themselves to the music, the musicians, and the label. She details her missionary efforts on behalf of the eccentric Thelonious Monk, but after that says relatively little about jazz until the final pages about her life as a club owner. She makes no case for this player or this historical period over another. She's no critic, but the anecdotes and stories are a treat. Early on, Max's chief concern was the Blue Angel on the Upper East Side, a music and comedy club and apparently a hip high society place, which launched the careers of Mike Nichols and Elaine May among others. Lorraine's politics led her Moscow, Hanoi, and China. Max admired and collected paintings by Jacob Lawrence (a great favorite of mine). Dinner party guest Norman Mailer once got down on his knees and barked at her dog. Henry Kissinger climbed down the Vanguard's stairs one night and Lorraine refused to shake his hand; he then took a seat with Vaclav Havel. Best of all is the story of how Max asked Miles Davis to accompany a young woman singer, and Miles, "in his inimitable, charming way," and in his much imitated rasp, replied "I don't play behind no girl singers." He didn't, but Ms. Streisand quickly graduated from the Vanguard to the Angel, and even joined Lorraine in liberal activism before Broadway claimed her. I also read David Hadju's Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn. I knew the basic story of how Strayhorn grew up in Pittsburgh, moved to New York to take a job with Duke Ellington after playing him a tune before a concert, and became an indispensible part of Duke's organization as a composer and arranger. I hadn't known that Ellington took writing credit for many things they wrote together or that Strayhorn wrote alone. It's fun to read about "Strays" first settling in in New York, very quickly becoming good friends with Ellington's son and daughter and moving into their family home in Harlem, furnished all in white. Everyone loved the guy for his warmth and his wit and his cooking. He was very close to Lena Horne, and helped her choose songs and develop her vocal style. She called him the only man she ever "really" loved. But Hadju rarely shows Strayhorn and Ellington together and I didn't get a clear sense of what their relationship was like. And while "Sweet Pea," beloved for his sunny disposition, eventually began to resent being so much in Ellington's shadow, it's not clear why he didn't insist on writing credit, and had to be practically pestered by a fan club into playing even one concert as a leader. As he aged he became sad, in part due to love troubles, in part due to being gay before that was widely accepted, and he drank and smoked like crazy. When he died of cancer of the esophagus in May, 1967, Ellington was "virtually paralyzed with despair" and, if the story is to be believed, initially resisted going to the funeral, "because I don't have anything but my kissy-blue shirts." Fortunately Strayhorn had been laid out in a blue shirt himself, so Ellington jumped up and dressed, and at the funeral delivered the famous eulogy reprinted on "... and his mother called him Bill," the tribute record recorded a few months later. This summer I also read Edmund Morris' Beethoven: the Universal Composer and Dickens' Tale of Two Cities, and reread Ernest Becker's The Birth and Death of Meaning: an interdisciplinary perspective on the problem of man, a book of behavioral science which I'm NOT going to pretend I'm capable of summarizing well, except to say that it lays out Becker's theory of human nature. Becker's most widely cited book is The Denial of Death and I want to read that too. Right now I'm in the middle of Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room, and, again, Robin D.G. Kelley's exhaustive biography, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original. Monk is my desert island jazz guy. Kelley is an historian whose field seems to be African-American history, and while he has no style to speak of, the book is a sometimes touching read in that the reader can sense his love for and involvement with the material.

Thanks for posting, Kathleen. The latest New York Review of Books has a new Judt piece, Meritocrats, but the full article is available online to subscribers.

That's a great image, but if you actually saw the show, it must be misdated, since Croce died on September 20, 1973 (a couple of days before he was supposed play to the town I lived in). Anyhow, isn't the Mill Run Theatre in the round? I think I saw the reformed the Band there in the 80's.

"Which is one reason, I think, that their spoofs are so funny, and not just silly." Great point (ouch), thanks. I was not surprised to read, before I saw them, that they care deeply about style, and that made their performance touching as well as amusing. Rereading the Macaulay article, the following sentence strikes me as odd: At the risk of being persnickety, they may put the plot on pause, but not every part of a story has to advance the narrative. Pure dances set pieces like the Garland Dance in Sleeping Beauty and the Peasant pas de Deux in Giselle enrich it by providing context.

Not ever as far as I can tell, no, so -- I should have been clear, sorry -- I disagree with Ray, whom I thought you agreed with, that the Trocs have shown men can perform well on point. Technical achievement aside, they can camp it up well on point, that all. But campy was good enough for me, at least for the Swan Lake (and Dying Swan) spoofs.

I've only seen them once, but have they ever shown that men can make it look beautiful, as opposed to campy? For all their fun, aren't they reinforcing this particular gender distinction?

Thanks for starting the discussion, Ray. One of the problems Macaulay sees is that while gender distinctions have been blurred in large segments of modern society, ballet emphasizes the traditional distinctions, especially through the ubiquity of pointe work. Hmmm, I'm interested in stories we haven't seen onstage before, but I don't think ballet's sticking largely with something it does well makes it sexist.

Mitch Miller? I remember him. In 1977, on the Fourth of July, some friends and I in Chicago took in the King Tut exhibition, had lunch in the beer garden of a German restaurant, and then saw "Star Wars" in the Loop. We must have seen fireworks that evening, but I can't remember fireworks. What I do remember as the capper to that delightful day is sitting in Grant Park singing along with Mitch. Young as were were, we thought the whole thing was pretty corny, as I suppose in part it was and was supposed to be. Fortunately we were too young to be embarrassed, but not too young to be corny ourselves. I've enjoyed reading this thread and learning more about Mr. Miller.

I don't think the blonde is Janie Taylor. That looks like T. Reichlin next to Maria. Here is the casting according to xpatathens.com: Sébastien Marcovici, Maria Kowroski, Jennie Somogyi, Janie Taylor. I'm not so sure about Marcovici, but I'd love to see that cast of muses at NYCB.

There is a thread about Kistler's farewell performance here. There is another about this year's annual NYCB luncheon, which honored her, here.

They were an irascible bunch, but they weren't from the street, and especially not in Stravinsky's score.

Kowroski has danced Terpsichore. Same here. A Greek god with a tattoo??

Jack, most Millennium Stage events are held on the stages in the lobby and require no tickets, as you know. This one was in the Eisenhower, I believe, and tickets were free but were given out Saturday. If they'd given them out this morning, I would have gone, but two trips into town for a few minutes of ballet wasn't worth it.

I'm bumping this up as a reminder that the program is tonight at 6 pm, EST. Suzanne Farrell Ballet will dance Balanchine's Ragtime pas de deux and Contrapuntal Blues pas de deux from Clarinade tonight. The program will be streamed live at 6 pm EST and will also be available for viewing afterwards.