Dance:
McDonagh, Don
mediocrity of television, that we see without reservation how Donn, Victor Ullate, Daniel Lommel and Patrice Touron, all well made and entertaining these films were. At the time, their of...
...It is as if she was a vanities-well, perhaps just a touch...
...At graduate of an expensive boarding school Trials to unbelievers...
...In fact, these wonderful films almost certainly rouchka" and "Amor di Poeta" which ransacked the ballet added to the demise of the studio system that had made them attic assiduously if not tastefully...
...midst of this cavalcade of French cultural history...
...Later, and then reconciliation with her family, a in New York or Boston, where she has new job, the discovery that things are not Commonweal: 372...
...DON McDONAGH THE LIFE AND DEATH OF TANIA Psyching Patty gone to find suitably interesting work, her new friends, her old ones seem inSAUL MALOFF she notices, as she noticed at college, that animate as stone...
...Leonid Massine, who choreographed the original, shaped it His florid imagination is occupied almost totally with pre- around the antics of an enormously wealthy Peruvian who sentation rather than with the core matter of ballet which is the traveled to Paris for a flirtatious and fun-filled outing...
...nothing like the husks back home...
...Life" was a duet contrasting partnering attempts of the gentlemen subscribers of the Jockey his measured and mature acrobatic strength and Catherine Club, that gave the old Paris Opera the reputation of a rich Dethy's fluid young dancer's movement...
...The former was one of the possible...
...The second of two that attends a wrong-headed re-interpretation of a standard parts) COLIN L. WESTERBECK...
...It wa deployment of the classic vocabulary in fresh, inventive com- delightfully empty-headed but tightly controlled so as not to binations...
...compared with hair worn severely no-nonsense-a distinguishable one from another only by manner that becomes her charmingly...
...Its leading dancers, past and and is now exorcising old demons...
...his own youthful dedication and they dash off impetuously As "Petrouchka" was transformed into a cartoon of the after having been cast as natural antagonists by the chasm of original so "Spectre de la rose," another of Nijinsky's key age...
...It turns out that Orson Welles really was setting the landmark collaborations of Diaghilev's "Ballets Russes, " precedent in more ways than anyone realized...
...her name-following her season went to dress in the going style of what might be Vassar, say, or Radcliffe...
...Ever...
...He adores updating classic productions to of his day-pre- and post- W.W.I-Bejart favors the oblique make them "relevant" in contemporary terms...
...Lommel and Katalin contemporary fables requiring the interpretative skills of these Csarnoy danced a decorative but accomplished duet in the strangely gifted dancers...
...sented the ballet as the odyssey of a contemporary young man, The works derive inspiration from that latter period of the a dancer, coming to Paris to perfect his art...
...As 20th Century, is obsessed with re-interpreting ballet Diaghilev used the pictorial innovations of the advanced artists history...
...Babilee looked absolutely splendid, clambering about roles, was finessed into a cocktail party irrelevancy...
...opinion and take it seriously...
...Nothing...
...her deathly wearying, and awkward boys void waiting to be filled...
...In "The Lilac (good) Friday" encouraging the young man, and sheer numbers, nearly eighty dancers, the company has major "Madame," alias the wicked witch Carabosse, cackles and size and in Europe has a major reputation...
...References to the student uprisings of the tipped in favor of painterly display...
...their daughter's life is re- ligatory affairs of the period-a markable in that nothing has ever hap- longshoreman, a trade union organizer, a pened to her...
...told me that the inclusion of a chapter on Bejart would insure Presumably, Bejart had such a teacher at one point in his career publication of the title in France...
...The poet had to identify and justify his calling through what became a maelstrom of catch-all effects, including a threatening cat, BEIART & BALLET gluttonous people who devoured a real cake and a brace of football players...
...and experiencing an exOmaha in the early 1930s, a_ recent tirelessly "explaining" the Moscow citement she'd not believed possible...
...Many of them are last she has entered History, is marveland, following her social debut (about attractive, passionate people, burning ously alive and fully living the life of her which she had some misgivings but :With a holy fire-for ideas, for justice, time...
...Offenbach himself functions as been making regular appearances in New York since 1971...
...necessary to realize his projects, and been generally underem- The hero tried on different masks during his struggle to find ployed...
...He has otherwise altered the ballet to present a man's search for gotten into difficulties, failed to come up with the backing identity in the sideshow atmoshphere of a mirrored fun house...
...NOVELTY UPON NOVELTY Surrealism's suspension of everyday logic in favor of dream imagery was in full flower during Bejart's young adulthood in M AURICE MART, artistic director of the Ballet of The the '30s and '40s and made an indelible impression on him...
...present, have tended to be men possessed of idiosyncratic The fusion of the two ballets is an ingenious intellectual feat performing skills that lie somewhere between classic ballet and it is amusing to follow the parallels, such as solos by a and modern dance...
...Bejart has introduced the essentially represents a fustian development of the less appeal- "awakening" plot of "The Sleeping Beauty" and has preing phase of Serge Diaghilev's "Ballets Russes" companies...
...brought Jean Babilee back to a New York stage after an Novelty follows novelty inexorably, including the intrusive absence of nearly thirty years...
...brightest, liveliest, most interesting Soon, she is doing as they dothe landscape of American radical and intense people are boycotting circulating petitions, attending endless history loosely conceived, she Japanese goods or collecting money for meetings, rallies, demonstrations, colcame from her home in Des Moines or the Spanish Loyalists or talking union (or lecting funds...
...The War, the manning their property line against the 'end of the Depression, first armed truce marshals, and meaning business...
...Considering the stress laid on pre- string of young men around a crib, from which Mr...
...Its austerity tended to make the rest of dream figure as in the original, she leaves him for a reversal the season vapid by comparison...
...Diaghilev company's existence when decoration replaced Mr...
...A smartly and through a large pipe frame and Miss Dethy was innocently dressed young woman, Judith Jameson, is surprised by a man, extravagant in her suppleness...
...60s mingle with straight dance class episodes and characters The Ballet of the 20th Century is resident in Brussels and has from French cultural history...
...mediocrity of television, that we see without reservation how Donn, Victor Ullate, Daniel Lommel and Patrice Touron, all well made and entertaining these films were...
...His infatua- bombast of surrealism which succeeded them...
...Touron, and in turn surprises him by revealing herself in tion, restraint and a spareness in decor, one prop and a few an identical flower costume...
...that has a soupcon of shock value but little else...
...Mother is 'ac- called chic lumpen proletarian enlivened tive in the Junior League and the more perhaps by an imaginative splash here appealing charities...
...people solicit her nevertheless gracefully endured for her for art...
...At the time, their of whom were seen in works specially tailored for them...
...identity in the sense of a personal movement signature...
...Currently occupying the top rank among the men are Jorge Ultimately, however, the ballet works far better in the mind 22 June 1979: 371 as a puzzle teaser than it does on stage where the empty parade The most moving of the works presented during the season of incidents is not brightened by choreographic invention...
...Bejart has retained Stravinsky's score but Hollywood, Welles's career has been an anticlimax...
...work than with an expanded appreciation of its wider applicability...
...In her he rediscovers man's playground rather than an edifice of high art...
...It is in Welles's career, rather than Wise's, that the himself but one came away more with the sense of violation true history of Hollywood is written...
...The flagrant extravagance of the resultant ballets outstay its lightweight welcome...
...over-ripe ironies and high stylization must have seemed dis- Donn was highly visible throughout the season in "Petconcerting...
...She matters...
...Ullate, the hero, it must be said, is extraordinarily dancing as the most compelling visual on stage and the desired accomplished technically, in a ballet that is a pretentious balance between choreography, music and decor was seriously jumble of effects...
...The work had movement invenMr...
...parents' sake and in order to avoid a and she knows she was meant for better By now her parents would hardly recforest of raised eyebows) and a summer things than tea dancess and a perfect house ognize her: no makeup or other of parties, all of them the same and all in the perfect suburb...
...poet she met at a fundraising party who At college she hears about the Nazis instead of actually going to Spain with and the Rhineland, or about Franco and the Lincoln Brigade, as he'd seriously Spain, or about many millions of unem- considered doing, decided to make of his ployed and literal starvation-about art a weapon and drive it into the throat of foreclosures in the countryside near Des the Fascist beast...
...SAY, FOR THE SAKE of placing her in the...
...Poeta" was an original conception, blending symbolic figures and quotes from other choreographers' ballets, Dance notably George Balanchine's "Four Temperaments," in an improbable brew of allegorical meaning...
...His "Gaite tion, however, extends to concepts rather than dance steps, so Parisienne" is the most fevered of the current ballets using the despite his works' high theatricality, they have curiously little methodology...
...There are the obinsurance...
...Ullate first sentational ingenuity, it is no surprise that the company does emerges, that suggest the gift-bearing solos at the start of not mount any classic ballet in classic style but exhibits them as "Beauty...
...Instead of being abandoned by a simple black curtains...
...For no particular reason Mr...
...Dad is a meat- and there, costly relics of a past never packing mogul or banker or really big in entirely foresworn...
...My publisher once tells him he has no talent and will never amount to anything...
...While Robert recounting a fable of human dignity through the characters in a Wise has gone on to a long, distinguished and dull career in puppet show...
...Moines and Omaha and armed farmers And then it was all over...
Vol. 106 • June 1979 • No. 12
