Seeing Things

The Paris Opera Ballet, in its determined non-classical guise, closed its New York visit with the late Pina Bausch’s 1975 Orpheus and Eurydice.  In a post-modern, glossy-mag décor, Bausch’s take on the subject mingles the ravishing dancers with the solo singers, giving Terpsichore’s favorites little better to do than undulate their supple spines (ladies), run and jump (gentlemen), and (all) make the same gestures, many of them mindlessly co-opted from Martha Graham, again and again.  And again.  In the house program, Bausch assigned … [Read more...]

Like Patricia McBride’s, Tiler Peck’s stunning face registers intensely—once seen, never forgotten.  Her dancing alone makes a visit to the New York City Ballet heartening.  Her technical acumen never falters, only commands, having grown in confidence and in an athletic prowess that’s increasingly managed with subtlety. Yet even viewers who adore her—as well they might—may modify their praise by the worried observation that she seems to have no soul.  Peck entered the company as a performer in the show-biz style, vividly … [Read more...]

  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 in George Balanchine’s revered School of American Ballet, and the one of my two offspring who’d given me the magical gift of reading and loving the books that had been my own … [Read more...]