This essay, commissioned by the Children’s Book Council, first appeared in CBC Features, Vol. 46, No. 1, Winter-Spring 1993. Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes was published in 1936. It is still in print. We were in London, my daughter and I, walking down the Cromwell Road. Anne was an exquisitely ingenuous fourteen-year-old, a pupil […]
Archives for May 2012
Armchair Travel
American Ballet Theatre / Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, NYC / through July 7, 2012 We are in India, a long and mythical time ago. A Brahmin priest lusts after Nikiya, the loveliest of the temple dancers, a situation acceptable neither to his gods nor to the young woman. She loves the warrior Solor, who […]
Glimpses #7: Ashton’s Pastoral
Frederick Ashton’s La Fille mal gardée, being shown about town in the Ballet in Cinema series, creates a world of delight. The beloved 1960 ballet is set in a peaceable countryside, back when wheat was harvested with scythes. Yet even this bucolic wonderland is threatened—by greed. A farm owner intends to marry off her delicious […]
Starry Night
American Ballet Theatre: Gala / Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, NYC / May 14, 2012 The 15 items presented in American Ballet Theatre’s gala opening night program proceeded, one after another, like items on a To Do list. The individual numbers, most of them familiar (at least half of them overfamiliar), provided many an occasion […]
What’s New?
New York City Ballet : Spring Gala, Á La Française / David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / May 10, 2012 New York City Ballet’s spring gala treated its extravagantly dressed audience to two new ballets—one by Peter Martins, who heads the company, the other by the dancer and choreographer Benjamin Millepied, who recently […]
Glimpses #6: Sara Mearns
Dancing to the spiky Hindemith score for Balanchine’s Kammermusik No. 2, Sara Mearns—a favorite of connoisseurs as well as New York City Ballet’s general public, is like a coiled spring unfurling and rewinding in bursts of energy tempered by minute doses of calm. She’s like a wild creature, acquired by auction, probing her new environment. […]
Glimpses #5: Vuillard
Edouard Vuillard, Misia and Vallotton at Villeneuve, 1899, oil on cardboard. Collection of William Kelly Simpson. As you can see from the Jewish Museum’s rich retrospective of his pictures, Edouard Vuillard (1868 – 1940) was obsessed by fractured patterns. Clothing in figured fabric and décor vie for attention with the people represented. Dresses, […]