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December 12, 2006
TT: Mailbox
- My Wall Street Journal column about the dance bust stirred up a fair amount of talk, most of it favorable and some of it from unexpected quarters. (Much to my surprise, for instance, the Little Professor commented on it at length.)It also brought me an e-mail from a reader of "About Last Night" who showed the column to his cousin, who in turn wrote back as follows:
Thank you for forwarding this. Yes, he's quite right--lots of the companies I loved in my ballet-filled youth are gone, and all those little girls taking ballet class have grown up to raise daughters who take soccer and softball. I expect that the vast improvement in after-school options for strong, athletically inclined girls is actually all to the good; lots of talentless kids are no longer clumping around in leotards. But I do miss the exciting froth of new little companies putting on performances on a shoestring. In my Chicago years I (briefly) did fund-raising and audience development for the company which became the Chicago City Ballet, and I was so impressed by the determination of these young people who had so little common sense and so much passion for dance....
I love that last line. I'm not an idealist--life has made me fairly hard-headed--but I'm well aware that many, perhaps most of the great things that get done in this world, especially in the realm of art, are done by people with no common sense whatsoever. George Bernard Shaw described the Julius Caesar of his play Caesar and Cleopatra as "a man of great common sense and good taste--meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage."
Of course it's more complicated than that, but those who (like me) lack a poetic streak should always be wary of condescending to those who don't. If George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein had had any common sense, they wouldn't have founded New York City Ballet.
- A reader writes, apropos of this posting:
Your posting brought to mind a winter night in Minneapolis more than forty years ago. While most people like to just lie still and savor the mood afterwards, this girl often felt like dancing. I can still remember her dancing naked in the moonlight coming in through the picture window of my apartment. The music? Smetana's Moldau. So long ago, but so vivid!
Somehow that memory reminds me of this.
Posted December 12, 2006 12:00 PM
