Dance

...To make matters more complicated, all the women that Mickey kisses (and proposes to) are also being pursued by a hood named Zack (Patrick Bachau...

...This farcical violence gives an edgy tone to the film, and almost pushes it beyond comedy...

...The modern dance tradition is celebrated through the work of its greatest single protagonist, Martha Graham...

...As a dancer between the wars with Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman's group, Stodelle was there and was very observant, as her description of Graham's masterly "Primitive Mysteries" demonstrates...

...Fittingly enough, the first volumes to emerge are by two of Balanchine's own dancers...

...It brings us as close as we will ever get to the working situation of the master practitioner of ballet in the twentieth century...

...In telling her own story as a developing dancer Ashley has illuminated Balanchine's expansion of the expressive qualities of the classic vocabulary...

...As prime mover, De Niro carries the film: somehow he makes abandoning a perfectly satisfactory spouse seem heroic...

...Tchaikovsky's Suite No...

...Love about their problems, but neither they nor she know no first-hand knowledge of...

...Every time the phone or doorbell rings, you have to brace for another hairbreadth escape...

...On radio, Dr...

...The film involves a modern version of boy-meets-girl: two married careerists accidentally meet in a New York bookstore, then fall into what used to be called adultery...

...She is very good on the cycle of Greek mythic themes that occupied Graham at that time, culminating in the full evening "Clytemnestra...

...Maiorano, assisted by Valerie Brooks, presents the slow gestation of the ballet (one minute of finished work per studio hour) including its technical difficulties, emotional crises, musical discussions, costume fittings, humorous asides, stage rehearsals, and unforeseen technical hitches in erecting and lighting the huge hollow tube plastic Commonweal: 688 set...

...Ironically -- contrary to the fifties' and sixties' image of the adolescent rebel -- Collett restores normality...

...Alternatively annoying and amusing, disgusting and enchanting, Choose Me becomes a weird but fruitful meditation on loneliness, spontaneity, and taking risks...

...The better movie is First Born, which details how two sons cope when their mother (Terri Garr) becomes obsessed with a big-talking, apparently friendly, and finally slimy drifter (Peter Weller...

...was begun by Nigel Gosling who, with his wife Maude Lloyd, wrote under the pen name of Alexander Bland...

...excellent as a comedienne, passable in her initial scenes as her sons' sidekick, she is simply unbelievable as a fallen woman...

...So Mickey lets himself go, pursuing, among others, Dr...

...First Born and Falling in Love are two Paramount films in the Ordinary People vein: family melodramas that get more mileage from their suburban settings and soap opera plots than you might expect...

...But it did leave me wondering: what about the wife...

...First Born is genuine domestic gothic, ranch-house-style, a sincere stab at a serious adolescent film...

...Later restagings of the work in 1935, 1945, and 1956 preserved the essential folk character of the ballet...

...Nancy Love (Genevieve Bujold), hostess of the radio sex-talk show, "The Love Line...

...In Balanchine's Mozartiana (Freundlich Books, $18.95, 188 pp...

...Love about their problems, but neither they nor she knows their real identities, including Ev~, her roommate...

...The comment on Nureyev, "He never loses the quality which sculptors call 'mass' - - a kind of concentrated volume and density which lends presence to a movement linked with great musicality . . . . " The book celebrates the phenomenon of great male dancing which has emerged in this century after nearly a hundred years of decline in the West...

...Curiously, she shows less interest in the other work of this period when Graham was forging her vocabulary of movement than she does in the more familiar dances of the forties and fifties...

...When she's on the phone, she gets a world of meaning merely from a string of varied "yesses...

...The illusion of heroism is also maintained by the chastity of the film...

...Her best scene, however, involves a set of dresses, a comic vignette that testifies to how little she has realized her best gifts in film roles...

...Kirstein's theme is that nothing is new and innovation consists in using traditional materials in fresh ways, thereby affirming the past and pointing the way to the future...

...But what gives First Born its power is the acting of newcomer Chris Collett in the title role, Garr's older son, a later high school adolescent...

...In Dancing for Balanchine (E.P...

...Rooted in the nineteenth-century tradition of Imperial Russian ballet, Balanchine built upon this foundation, infusing it with twentieth-century speed and athleticism...

...Robert Maiorano, a long-time solo dancer with the company, followed Balanchine through every class and rehearsal observing and recording in exceptional detail the process of a genius at work...

...Falling in Love has a slighter subject...

...When De Niro mutedly tells his wife that "nothing 'like that' went on," she accurately comments, "No, it's much worse," and true to the film's realism, slaps him five minutes later...

...But somehow he makes his determined effort to save things seem grandly dignified...

...Weller is all too believable as the heavy: he's every late-sixties faker you wished you'd never met...

...In 1981 when he reexamined the score, Balanchine choreographed an entirely different ballet, rearranging the order of the music and retaining a period costume only for the gigue solo dancer...

...John Percival, dance critic of the London Times, agreed to fill out the projected work after Gosling's death, and the resulting book is over half his...

...Dutton, $29.95,256 pp...

...De Niro and Streep are emotionally drawn to each other, but there's no headlong rush to bed, and, on her part at least, there is strong guilt...

...Garr is miscast...

...Streep manages the realism handily...

...Everyone in the film calls Dr...

...The photographs are excellent and the individual appreciations of dancers are of a generally high caliber...

...If there is a political angle to the film, it's the younger generation's hostility to the"older" generation's proneness to radical instability...

...was herself a witness to and participant in the "days of divine indiscipline," to borrow John Martin' s phrase...

...Cristofer's style is both witty and natural...

...Men Dancing (Macmillan, $35, 175 pp...

...Balanchine's last great creative effort was the Tchaikovsky Festival, presented by New York City Ballet in 1981, and his "Mozartiana...

...a young Broadway veteran, he actually catches how people talk -- no mean achievement in the screenplay form -- their half statements, ahems, and awkward pauses...

...The movie proves, however, the old truism that good writing and acting can make even a trite story interesting...

...The prose occasionally turns purplish, the tone is adulatory, but Stodelle is celebrating greatness and the story is a great one in American theater...

...If De Niro or Streep made a film where they were the rejected spouses, that would be a piece of realism worth having, with a bite to rival First Born...

...The illustrations actually illuminate the text and are admirably presented...

...4 0 p . 61 ("Mozartiana") first engaged Balanchine's interest in 1933...

...its heroine and his preferred, Eve, (Lesley Anne Warren), can't make a commitment to anyone at all...

...One welcomes this cogent attempt to discern and explicate ballet development as a recognized art form reissued as Four Centuries of Ballet, Fifty Masterworks in an inexpensive paper edition (Dover, $14.95, 290 pp...

...But director Alan Rudolph manages the shifts in tone and somehow diminishes the distasteful aspects of these characters and their lifestyles...

...Ernestine Stodelle, the author of Deep Song, The Dance Story of Martha Graham (Schirmer, $25.95,329 pp...

...Falling in Love is a glamorous, even Platonic, heart-throb, and you can't help but root for the principals...

...Yet the writing of Michael Cristofer and acting of Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep so dignify their emotions that you tend to forget the hidden issue...

...Collett doesn't have to do much to look good given the liquor, drugs, and wild partying that suddenly pervade the house...

...In numbers the ballet used diminished forces but used them to create a large artistic impact from the opening devotional solo by Suzanne Farrell to the closing joyous finale...

...DON McDONAGH 14 December 1984:689...

...Merrill Ashley, currently a principal dancer with New York City Ballet, has shown the other side of the ballet master, that of teacher...

...Lincoln Kirstein, scholar, patron, and the man responsible for inviting Balanchine to the United States and providing him the framework in which to function, originally brought out his Movement and Metaphor, Four Centuries of Ballet in 1970...

...TOM O'BRIEN Dance DANCING BOUND NEW BOOKS ON THE MASTERS W HEN George Balanchine died last April, there existed a single book about him, published twenty years ago.The realization among publishing houses that he was one of the major artistic voices of the twentieth century has begun slowly but is gathering momentum...

...The text is dense, learned, wideranging, and challenging...