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George Balanchine by Arlene Croce


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If you have the time, you might want to look at Deborah Jowitt (Dancebeat and The Dance in Mind) and Marcia Siegel (Watching the Dance Go By and At the Vanising Point) from the same period. They are often writing about the same works (though Jowitt spends/spent more time with downtown dance) and the multiple perspectives are very rich.

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Thanks, sandik. Two more authors for my list. :smilie_mondieu: Jowitt, whose Robbins biography I admire very much, was a big part of everyone's NYC dance experience in that period. Siegel I confess I am not familiar with. More to learn. For me, however, this reading has strong elements of nostalgia and memory recovery. One's own young life (as a member of the audience at least) is now part of "dance history" -- imagine that!

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What I love about Croce is that she can be so surprising. She gives a balanced, thoughtful, and spirited defense of Mayerling, of all ballets. And then she drops a line like this in the middle of a mostly laudatory review of her beloved NYCB: "Has there been a worse-dressed ballet company in the history of the world?"

I've been reading my way through her 3 collections of essays. Yes, she can be surprising! And never dull. (So much ballet writing comes across as the dance equivalent of narrow trade publications like "Warehouse Modular Construction Gazette" or "Trends in Hospital Management .")

What is most surprising to me is the passion with which she addresses all sorts of ballet issues, from major matters of style and technical competence to tiny details of costume design or how to perform developpes. In current vernacular, she "cares." This quality comes out most in her defenses of the discipline and the vision of classicism in the arts. She fights for classicism -- and deplores its deterioration -- whether she's attending the Bolshoi, the NYCB, Merce Cunningham, or even a Karol Armitage punk rock ballet. And she knows what "classicism" means.

Croce also brings an impressive range of cultural and historical allusions to the discussion. She wields a vocabulary which is challenging and enlightening rather than pretentious or merely arcane. (I had to look up "synoptic" just this morning, having forgotten its meaning. She applies it with great accuracy to Balanchine's story-telling genius in Midsummer Night's Dream.) Her longer essays, such as those on "Dance in Film" or "Ballets Without Choreography" and models of world-class research and analysis.

Croce's wide-ranging intelligence reminds me of the days when ballet was one of the arts taken quite seriously by intellectuals, in New York City anyway. Those days are long gone. But they shouldn't be. And they needn't be. We need more writers like Croce. Where would they come from, however? Who would hire them? Are there many people in the ballet audience who would care what they had to say?

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Don't you think they ended with Balanchine's death?
Good question. I wish I knew. I suspect that this was beginning long before Balanchine's death, but slowly.

One factor might have been the move to the State Theater from the City Center in the mid-60s and the loss of the subsidy for ticket prices ($6 top at City Center, if I recall correctly). More costly tickets meant that audiences rather quickly became older and less socially heterogeneous, it seemed to me. The new economics (bigger productions, more dancers, bigger payroll) meant the need to sell Ballet to socially-ambitious donors who loved associating with the Balanchine enterprise but did not really care much about his aesthetic. Corporations were urged to associate their names with a prestigious cause and get tax deductions for doing so. In the long, slow, inexorable process of commodifying everything, ballet's turn came eventually. It wasn't a good environment for the sort of intellectuals -- or for students, writers, workers in the other arts, populists -- that you tended to find in New York City audiences in the years after World War II. Unless they had money.

During the 60s and 70s you also had the broading -- democratization -- of the concept of what is was to be "cultured." First the Voice, then the New York Times, began reviewing pop, rock, and the downtown dance scene. Balanchine's older view of American culture as basically a continuation (also an expansion) of culture inherited from Europe came under attack. The older intellectuals (Euro-centered for the most part; and highly cultured) were dying out, Denby in 1983. Younger intellectuals were a new breed. Many were attracted by the theory and practice of multiculturalism. Some actually have felt it to be somehow shameful to devote time, thought, and energy to something so traditional so apparently narrow and exclusive as classical ballet. As they saw it, at least.

Many intellectuals continued to respect Balanchine, his work, and his association with Stravinsky, etc. But after the mid-70s there were no longer any Balanchine works being created. The Balanchine repertoire became, at NYCB, something not unlike the collection at the Museum of Modern Art or the Guggenheim. Brilliant. Still incredibly moving to experience. But definitely of the past.

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One thing about the 1970s. There were a lot of new Balanchine ballets in the 1970s, and really right up until his death. The 1970s are considered by many to be a Silver Age, and it was in the 1970s that Balanchine became crowned King of Choreographers in the general media. After Stravinsky's death came, not in order, "Mozartiana," "Davidsbundlertanze," "Ballo della Regina," "Union Jack," "Vienna Waltzes," "Chaconne," -- just to name the hits.

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[During the 60s and 70s you also had the broading -- democratization -- of the concept of what is was to be "cultured." First the Voice, then the New York Times, began reviewing pop, rock, and the downtown dance scene. Balanchine's older view of American culture as basically a continuation (also an expansion) of culture inherited from Europe came under attack. The older intellectuals (Euro-centered for the most part; and highly cultured) were dying out, Denby in 1983.

But it's also true that Balanchine was fond of American popular culture, from jazz and Ginger Rogers to Wonder Woman on tv. I couldn't speak to Balnchine's total view of American/European culture, but the man who made dances for Ray Bolger, Josephine Baker, movies, television and Broadway did not, it seems to me, reject pop culture where he found it good. Didn't he also love John Wayne movies?

I don't disagree with the general argument that the flattening out of "high" culture and the huge, commercially driven, expansion of pop culture has had a lot to do with the decline in critical standards, but I think that comes after Balanchine and his views on the matter. Croce has a marvelously prescient bit of criticism in one of the Going to the Dance essays about classical technique of the Danilova school, with its superb architecture, being overtaken by the Markarova school of over-stuffed acrobatics for their own sake. I'll have to go find the reference, but I think she hit very accurately what's happened in ballet a quarter of a century later.

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One thing about the 1970s. There were a lot of new Balanchine ballets in the 1970s, and really right up until his death.
Yes, it was certainly an exciting and rich time. One of the things I'm most grateful for in life was to have been around for it.

I guess I assumed at the time that Balanchine would keep creating forever and that there'd always be a new Balanchine ballet to look forward to. My reference to a Museum of great work was to a later period.

As a regular attender at the last years of City Center and at the State Theater up to the mid-80s, the changing nature of the audience was one of the things that struck me most.

[ ... ] it's also true that Balanchine was fond of American popular culture, from jazz and Ginger Rogers to Wonder Woman on tv. I couldn't speak to Balnchine's total view of American/European culture, but the man who made dances for Ray Bolger, Josephine Baker, movies, television and Broadway did not, it seems to me, reject pop culture where he found it good. Didn't he also love John Wayne movies?

I omitted Balanchine's love of Americana because I see much of it -- including the type of jazz that Balanchine favored as well as the art, design, and story-lines he used -- as being much more Euro-centered than people sometimes think. Balanchine's America, even the Far West versions of it, was almost entirely European-American. You're right about Balanchine being open to pop culture (with limits). On the other hand, his philosophy, understanding what was avant garde and what was tradition, religion, food, and story-lines were not much different from those of many other artistic European emigres in New York. If he was "American," it may have been in the way he learned was able to swim so successfuly in those places where Art meets Commerce: Broadway and Hollywood especially.

Anyway, the old categories themselves were changing by the 60s and 70s. Definitions of "pop," "American," "avant garde," and "intellectual" all were starting to mean something quite different in New York City in the last decade of Balanchine's life.

Croce has a marvelously prescient bit of criticism in one of the Going to the Dance essays about classical technique of the Danilova school, with its superb architecture, being overtaken by the Markarova school of over-stuffed acrobatics for their own sake. I'll have to go find the reference, but I think she hit very accurately what's happened in ballet a quarter of a century later.
I just read this a few days ago! It's on page 319, on a generally unfavorable review of Makarova on Broadway. (Remember that, popularlibrary? remember when real ballet with Nureyev, Baryshnikov, and lots of others, Americans and European, filled the Uris?) Here's the quote, from a 1980 review, referring to an except from Paquita as staged for Elisabetta Terabust, a role taken over by 16-year-old Nancy Raffa):
Not long ago, theDance Theatre of Harlem gave us a Paquita divertissement that was a triumph. But Alexandra Danilova's staging is so different from Makarova's as to amount to a different work. Two Russian ballerinas from the same school forty years apart teach two different Paquitas. The conflict isn't between student and professional levels of performance; it's between Petrograd and Leningrad. [Lamenting what the Soviets did to the classics is a particular specialty of Croce's.] The way American dancers understand Russian classicism -- "Petipa" for short -- is the way the St. Petersburg-Petrograd generation of emigre Russians has taught it to them. With these Russians, it has always been the rule that the teachings of the academy are shaped by the findings of choreography. Of all the numberless differences between our local accent in Petipa and the current native one, I should say that the greatest derives from the Russian academy's loss of its choreographers -- first Fokine, then Balanchine -- to the West. When the choreographer succession was weakened, the academy fell under the rule of pedagogues. The most immediately striking discrepancy between the post-Imperial-style Paquita set by Danilova and the latter-day Kirov-style one set by Makarova is that Makarova's has a great many more complicated and difficult steps (further complicated by different tempos). Danilova's version has dance architecture; Makarova's has none. Danilova's has bouyancey Makarova's his drive. Danilova's looks choreographically bald; in Makarova's, the dancers split hairs. [ ... ]

That's classic Croce. She doesn't really refer to acrobatics. Rather, she uses the phrase "too many steps" as she does in a number of reviews. That's the "over-stuffing" (to use your marvellous term) that Croce is talking about. Her understanding of classicism focuses on structure, coherence, seamless linkages, musicality, etc, and sees steps per se as being in the service of these higher qualities. When the steps pile up and prevail, she implies, and when you start noticing them too much, classicism goes out the window. If there's one trend in the 70s and 80s that Croce complained about most, it's "too many steps."

As for Makarova, I find that most of Croce's comments are very favorable. She understands Makarova's limits (as she understands Farrell's), but appreciates her very real strengths. It is those strengths that Croce admires and emphasizes. In reading these reviews, I found myself wishing Croce had written -- and combined into a book -- her responses to the Big Three Soviet defectors; Nureyev, Baryshnikov, and Makarova. I suspect that Croce's Makarova would more than hold her own -- as to interest, aspiration, and achievement -- against her more iconic male colleagues.

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Thanks to popularlibrary for referencing the quote and bart for finding it. I think that's one of the keys to this period: we're in an Age of Pedants. I think of it as, somebody has to be in charge. If people aren't creating, then there has to be someone maintaining standards. To al certain extent, this is a good thing, because technique (not virtuosity, but TECHNIQUE) was getting sloppy. Go for umpty-zillion pirouettes and to hell with placement. Turnout, schmernout. Etc. But at some point, you need choreographers to gently push the teachers aside and say, "All right, you're not in class any more, let's MOVE."

It's very interesting to watch films from the 1970s with ballet students, which I now have the pleasure and privilege to do. To al student, they think the 1970s dancers are "better" than what they see on stage today. "That's the same company we saw do this last week?????" is the usual comment. BUT by "better" they mean more disciplined, more cohesive a unit. Individual dancers aren't up to current standards because they don't have high extensions or long enough legs. Even Colleen Neary's legs are beginning to look normal!!!

I think -- and I'm going to write this in an article this summer -- that we're in a Mannerist period of neoclassicism. Neoclassicism is bred out. Three generations of Son of Balanchine ballets without a new spark has left people mining the same territory over and over and over. It's Mannerist because we're now distorting classicism, literally stretching it out, because it's the last thing we can think to do with it.

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I love the Mannerist analogy. One thinks of all those terms associated with the style of so much early 16th century painting and sculpture: distortion, elongation, off-balance, exaggeration. The results can be beautiful, but the style always calls attention to itself and its rejection of, or triumph over, the stylistic ideals that were admired before. Young dancers seem to have the philosophy, "We do it because we can."

It's Mannerist because we're now distorting classicism, literally stretching it out, because it's the last thing we can think to do with it.
Taking the long view, this really makes me want to see what happens next. What will "post-Mannerism" be like, I wonder?

Croce's "Balanchine's Girls: The Making of a Style," in Afterimages, doesn't address your particular concerns, but it does suggest what stylistic change looked like from the perspective of 1971.

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As a regular attender at the last years of City Center and at the State Theater up to the mid-80s, the changing nature of the audience was one of the things that struck me most.

It's interesting about the changes of audiences, and of ballet styles, and golden eras. Here are some things I've penciled little check marks by in my recent readings which (hopefully) tie into what has been said above.

Kocho, "The last season of the Ballets Russes in Paris, in 1929, attracted a new audience--unfashionable but young and enthusiastic. During previous seasons, everyone in the boxes and orchestra knew each other, and people chatted among themselves as if they were in a private drawing room. This year the theater was invaded by a nameless crowd for whom the dance seemed to be a discovery, and they applauded the dancers warmly..."

Croce, "I didn't miss the following season [after 1956] which was the season of Agon and the revival of Apollo, the great life-changing season. But the New York Ballet was known to people in general as a place to go. My friends went there...The New York City Ballet was part of the intellectual life of the city, and if you were serious intellectually, you went...I went [to ABT] because I was interested in ballet. It was not au courant, they hadn't done anything interesting in years. It had all happened. You wanted to go back and maybe catch up on things that had already happened..." [in "Reinventing Dance in the 1960's," interview with Banes & Acocella]

Elliott Carter, " I saw all the 1933 Balanchine ballets that were done at the Theater des Champs-Elysees when I was a student in Paris. It was the most remarkable occasion: in my opinion, I never saw anything as interesting as that again from Balanchine. It seemed to me to be one of his highest moments...As time went on he began to lose some of that very novel character that was striking at the beginning of his career. It occasionally showed up again, as in the case of the Webern ballet, Episodes, and in some of the Stravinsky ballets, but mostly his whole point of view began to change."

Croce, "People don't register what was going on at the New York City Ballet in the sixties, that there was a crisis that had reared up between Balanchine and his dancers over what was to be the style of the company. I think what took place in those years is still being felt today in the way the company dances..."

Danilova, "Today Apollo is a different ballet. What I danced was lighter, smaller, quicker. I did fifth, arabesque, fifth arabesque, nobody does that anymore. And then I did sissonnes--my version was jumpier than the one they dance today...The adagio I did was the same as every Terpsichore's, but lately I notice the dancers tend to emphasize the angular aspects and accelerate everything in between...I tried to do one movement like the next, always light, always in harmony, so that the positions didn't jump out at the audience."

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Quiggin, thanks for that wonderful research. The make-up of audiences (and the changes over time) is one of those aspectds of ballet which generally doesn't get as much attention as it deserves.

Maybe we should have a thread on BT where members can characterize the audiences they find at various companies -- or for various programs and note any changes that they have seen over the years.

On the whole -- and this is just a personal thing -- my heart went out to the new audience (c. 1929) described by Kochno.

"The last season of the Ballets Russes in Paris, in 1929, attracted a new audience--unfashionable but young and enthusiastic. During previous seasons, everyone in the boxes and orchestra knew each other, and people chatted among themselves as if they were in a private drawing room. This year the theater was invaded by a nameless crowd for whom the dance seemed to be a discovery, and they applauded the dancers warmly..."
Young. Enthusiastic. Apparently genuine in their excitement and appreciation. And ... quite a rarity in these days of celebrity-worship and celebrity-imitation .... "nameless." My kind of audience! :flowers:

Question about Croce: She has such amazing powers of recall. Has anyone ever seen her at performances? Does she take notes? Does she sociallize? Or is she -- as I sometimes imagine -- a sphynx-like figure leaning forward in her seat and observing everything with all-seeing eyes?

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AC left town some years back.

She hardly ever comes back to NYC - i can think of only about 4 occasions in the last 9 years or so - and if she does it's not to see a perf.

She took minimal notes in tiny notebooks [see the intro to her last collection, WRITING IN THE DARK, DANCING IN THE NEW YORKER, where i think she refers to her M.O.]. She was known to call colleagues to double check data or others' memories, and likewise would take calls to reciprocate.

She is social and gracious, though she tended mostly to visit with and chat during intermissions with the person she took to the perf, rather than to mix and mill around very much.

She is also one of the funniest people I know and greatly appreciates a sense of humor in others.

(Read "Ballet Alert" which is a really witty jeu d'esprit published in June 1979, and which incidentally gave its name to the earlier manifestations of this site and a related publication, as founded by Alexandra. AC was asked if her title could be used for these efforts and she kindly agreed - to the best of my knowledge titles are not copyright, but it was considered polite to ask her, so we did.)

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Thanks, rg. It's always good to be able to see a little bit of the person when one is reading her words.

Croce's article, "Ballet Alert," is reprinted in Going to the Dance and also in Writing in the Dark. It certainly gives a sense of the ferment in the New York City dance scene in 1979. One of the unintentionally nostalgic touches is that all Miss Capehart's work to keep New Yorkers up to date on "who's doing what" was done via a telephone answering service! What a difference 30 years makes, in technology at least. In 1979, apprently, the Bells were still Ringing.

" ... [T]here're those one-shot performance that sometimes crop up out of emergencies; balletomanes learn to look for them. One man, a fan of Yoko Morishita, dialled us from his office in Boston, learned that Morishita was substituting for Kirland in La Bayadere that night, and flew in on the shuttle. Just as his cab reached Columbus Circle, there was one of those cloudbursts we've been having a lot of recently, and the motor stalled. When he got to the Met, it was one minute past eight, the performance had started, and the ushers wouldn't let him take his seat. He had to watch La Bayadere on television in the viewing room, and the reception was so poor he couldn't tell Yoko Morishita from Janet Shibata.

And thanks also for the reminder about the on-line Ballet Alert, progenitor of Ballet Talk and Dance View Times among other ventures. There are wonderful archives, including a review by Alexandra that I somehow missed before: Miami City Ballet performing Balanchine and Ashton in Washington in May, 2001, just 2 weeks after we moved down to Florida and 5 months before I saw them dance for the first time. :flowers:

Here's the Link: http://www.balletalert.com/

Scroll to the bottom of the page for Archives.

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Yes, thanks for sharing that, rg; I felt more privileged than usual reading here. It's good to glimpse my old teacher, so to speak, especially in these times.

The few times I actually saw Croce, in the auditorium, I never noticed the intense body position you imagine, bart, and I think she and her companion blended in quite normally to everyone who didn't recognise them. But when I read your question I immediately remembered a resonant moment, one of several, actually, from my experience in the cultural center Balanchine's theatre was:

For what it’s worth then, one day, at a matinee in the New York State Theatre, a friend and I took our time getting from the First Ring out onto the Promenade at intermission. As we stepped out, my friend had the better view of the space:

"Look. Do you know who Edwin is talking to?" I turned my head, and saw, down the length of the nearly-deserted Promenade, near the base of the giant Nevelson figure, a gaunt, erect old man facing the glass wall which flooded the space with light, holding forth for the benefit of a tastefully dressed woman in front of him, with graying hair and glasses whose slim red frames added an elegant accent to her subdued color scheme. "Why, Arlene Croce, of course," I chided my companion.

"Too bad there aren't more people here, so we would have some cover for overhearing them," she complained, not so tongue-in-cheek. We did what we could about that, improvising a version of the Surveillance Dance sometimes performed by New York State Theatre Promenaders, strolling about the Eminence(s) we had spotted in a series of little arcs and turns, so that first one of us, then the other, could get a view of them and maybe more, using our companion as a screen; but my friend soon observed, "This is too obvious," and we gave it up, but not before we had noticed Croce wasn't saying a word. Instead, she looked like hanging intently on every one Denby spoke.

It was one of those things you'd never really thought about, but which made you very glad when you saw it. I remember that my friend felt the same way.

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Great story! Thank you, Jack. Croce's has a long tribute to Denby in her third collection, Sight Lines. It's called, simply, "Edwin Denby" and appears in the last section, "Celebrations" which also contains long essays on Edward Villella and Mikhail Baryshnikov.

Hereare a twp snippets and a longer passage.

"My happy discovery on meeting Edwin was that he talked almost exactly as he wrote ...

...It was Edwin's great gift to illuminate the experience of subjectivity in watching dance, but he agonized lest he be even fractionally misunderstood. ...

... The editors [of Denby's second collection, Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets (1965) tell us who some of Denby's actdual friends were, and an imposing list it is: the poets Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, John Ashbery, Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman, Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan; the painters Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Franz Kline, Alex Katz, Red Grooms, Larry Rivers; the composers Virgil Thomson, Aaron Copland, Roger Sessions, John Cage; the photographer and filmmaker Rudolph Burckhardt; the choreographers Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Jerome Robbins. This is the true School of Denby -- his fellow-artists, with whom, as the generations passed, he had more in common than with the pack of inattentive children who wree trying to become dance crditics. Gentlest of men, he bore our presumption with angelic patience and never presumed, in return, to educate us. Rather, he just talked and listened as if we were his equals. The only piece of practical advice he ever gave me was when, at the end of a long ballet summer in the city, he found me staggering: "Get a beach vacation."

According to the credits, the article contains material published earlier in Dance and Harper's. A version was published originally in Ballet Review, the magazine she started before going to The New Yorker.

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AC left town some years back.

For where, if I may ask? I'm just wondering if she went in pursuit of ballet or some other art, or if she just gave all that up.

I was going to let the more knowledgeable about her answer this, but they probably didn't see it. In fact, it was on BT that I recall someone writing that she lived in Connecticut, but that's all I know.

This bumps it up so somebody else can answer.

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croce left nyc because the city no longer suited her.

she's in new england, but not CT.

i prefer to leave it up to her, if she choses, in the intro to a book, or whatever, to make specific note of where she's now living.

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Yes, she can be surprising! And never dull. (So much ballet writing comes across as the dance equivalent of narrow trade publications like "Warehouse Modular Construction Gazette" or "Trends in Hospital Management .")

As a working writer today I have to say "ouch!"

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Sandik, I have to apologize to the many writers on dance who have educated me and and helped me to make sense of the art I admire so much. You are our eyes and consciences in so many ways.

My bad joke was

(1) puerile,

(2) exagerrated,

(3) and, most of all, inaccurate ...

... I wish I had deleted it.

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