Seeing Things

  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...]

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 daughter to the simpleminded son (pathetically fond of his red umbrella) of a wealthy neighbor.  After many amusing and touching tangles and resolutions, the spunky young woman sees to it that she weds the … [Read more...]

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.  No one in the piece, not even her striking co-star, Teresa Reichlen, is as alive as she is.  Three times her partner, Amar Ramasar, holds out his hand to her; three times she extends her hand as … [Read more...]

  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, wallpaper, exuberant plants refusing to confirm that they’re indoors or out, and secondary human figures appearing as half-visible ghosts charge the viewer’s … [Read more...]

Now that truth and privacy have been banished from our culture, it’s not astonishing (or, apparently, actionable) that Varley O’Connor should have co-opted a chunk of a singular artist’s life and “novelized” it.  Tanaquil LeClercq was not a heroine in a middle-brow tale.  She was a unique, fascinating, and—for those, like me, who saw her dance—unforgettable ballerina who was dealt the worst hand imaginable—paralysis.  She was, for the period O’Connor covers, the muse and wife of the New York City Ballet’s George … [Read more...]