Dance:
McDonagh, Don
tion and to some degree joins it. Nolte plays a role in sustaining the revolution: he prints a picture of a revolutionary leader that the Somoza government claims is dead, but stages the shot...
...Charles Hefling James Hennesey, S.J...
...In The Big Chill, the movie begins with his funeral, but that finality is checked by the way his passing provokes others to measure and change themselves...
...In Under Fire the situation is not, at first glance, similar...
...His performing career has been brilliant and will ever stay so...
...Most important, he awakened to the expressive possibilities of the balletic vocabulary organically developed as a visible language...
...In both, resurrection of the dead provides a sense of purpose or meaning or at least direction...
...The decision was necessary...
...Among them are numbered Mikhail Baryshnikov, Vladimir Vasiliev, Rudolf Nureyev, and Anthony Dowell...
...When and if it does, nostalgia has a future...
...In The Big Chill, before settling down, William Hurt upbraids Kevin Kline for being too friendly with the local police...
...By the end of the seventies Martins had remade himself from the best BournonvilIe dancer of his generation to the best Balanchine dancer of his generation...
...Frans Jozef van Beeck, S.J...
...Thomas Wangler James Michael Weiss For further information on graduate programs and resources contact Anthony Saldarini , Director of Graduate Programs, Department of Theology, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02167, (617) 552-3880...
...The transformation places him in a special category: the dancer who has mastered old and new with equal facility...
...In addition to creating the body of work that remains the special heritage of the Royal Danish Ballet, Bournonville also designed the basic pedagogy that governs the training of dancers in the school...
...When Robbins remounted "Fancy Free," Martins was given the part of the Latin dance sailor...
...The carefully wrought technical feats gave way to the fluent and understated virtuosity that is the mark of the Balanchine dancer...
...To choreograph, rehearse, decide on rePertoire, and guid~ the development of over one-hundred dancers is a full-time' job...
...There is one final parallel between the two movies that helps answer the question, "Where did Alex's hope go...
...Martins found that Balanchine's own New York City Ballet danced the work with greater dynamic urgency and less grandeur than he _9 accustomed to, but welcomed the opportu'nity to make further guest appearances with the company, which he joined in 1970 as a principal...
...Balanchine cast him as the male lead in restaging his elegant "Chaconne...
...It went into making Ronald Reagan president, but then the lesser of two evils has never been palatable to Utopians...
...DON McDONAGH THE DEPARTMENT OF THEOLOGY AT BOSTON COLLEGE Offering Masters in Theology and Biblical Studies and the Ph.D...
...In 1978 he choreographed "Calcium Night Light," his first ballet, which was warmly received...
...But perhaps these movies demonstrate that the "party of Hope," as Emerson once characterized the optimistic strain in the American tradition, lost its way in the sixties and early seventies, leaving us with only nostalgic longing today...
...The route to this knowledge came through Balanchine's classes which extended conventional pedagogy in new and unusual directions...
...But the transition involved more than mastering a repertoire, it necessitated a basic change in style...
...In Under Fire, the fake photo provides hope and illusion which keep the revolution alive...
...After the revolution succeeds, Nolte does not turn an American mercenary in to the Sandinistas, although he knows the man has mercilessly killed scores of people...
...In Under Fire, after cautioning her child against risqu6 dresses, Nick Nolte's girl and writer companion takes off into the hills with him...
...The variety of these roles is extreme and runs from the most restrained classicism of "Chacorme" to the knowing comedy of "Union Jack" and "Fancy Free" to the sensual, athletic vigor of "Violin Concerto...
...Patricia DeLeeuw Harvey D. Egan, S.J...
...It went into discarding values like money, family, comfort, law and order - - as if their excesses invalidated their necessity...
...Vasiliev, who is the leading male dancer of the Bolshoi Ballet, maintains the brio and heroic attack of the Moscow school...
...In both movies, mothers attempt to coordinate bourgeois parenting and private rebellion, and emerge only with uneasy solutions...
...As if to drive home the point in 1976, he alternated as a guest artist with the Royal Danish Ballet at the Metropolitan Opera House dancing Bournonville's "La Sylphide," while maintaining his regular schedule with New York City Ballet at the New York State Theater, a stone's throw across Lincoln Center...
...He recognizes the bourgeois necessity to be unliberal about crime...
...On one view, if he did turn the man in, he might seem a revolutionary, and therefore the opposite of Kevin Kline...
...Balanchine commented: "Diaghilev used to give scores to me to choreograph and now I am giving scores to Peter...
...Dowell is totally the product of English dance training and embodies its ideals of precision, neatness, and finish...
...In addition to dancing in the established repertoire, roles were created for him in new ballets such as Balanchine's "Violin Concerto, . . . . Duo Concertant, . . . . Union Jack," "Vienna Waltzes," and _9 Robbins's "The Goldberg Variations," "In G Major, and "Other Dances...
...Martins came relatively late to the role of choreographer but is passionately involved with it...
...In part this passion has contributed to his decision to retire as a performer...
...Martins alone is something of a maverick...
...10 February 1984: 87...
...He foresaw no further artistic challenge in Denmark, whereas the New York City Ballet had a vibrant and ever expanding repertoire of major baltets by Balanchine and Jerome Robbins...
...A tall, six-foot-four-inch, noble-looking dancer Whose partnering ability made him a natural for the classics, Martins quickly established himself in the repertory...
...The effects of his stewardship will reveal themselves in coming yearsas he applies his alert, quiet intelligence to perfecting the talents of others...
...The resultshave beenmarked by intelligence and skill and occasional flashes of imaginative invention...
...In The Big Chill, after Glenn Close orders a curfew, she barks into the phone," When you're a mother, you can be mean, too," then comments to her lawyer friend, "Sometimes I can't believe the things I hear myself saying...
...He was encouraged by Balanchine to continue with other scores of Balanchine's choosing...
...According to the film's implausible and unhistoric but exciting plot, the revolution succeeds because people believe the leader is still operating...
...In 1967 he was asked on short notice to perform the lead role in Balanchine's "Apollo" in Edinburgh...
...As Alex's story and Nick Nolte's actions indicate, it went into compulsive antibourgeois gestures that meant the real world would not be changed...
...The perfected craft that served the Classic repertoire was not suited for the twentieth-century ballets he now encountered...
...in a Joint Program with Andover-Newton Theological School) in Systematics, History of Christian Life and Thought, Christian Ethics and a minor in Bible...
...He just as avidly sought out opportunities to work with _9 experimental dance presentations on the state-controlled national television network and worked with guest choreographers who regularly mounted productions for the company...
...It avoids excess and Commonweal: 86 stresses balance, restraint, and control...
...In both movies, there is a fascination with dead bodies, the corpses of the revolutionary leader...
...Mary Daly Robert J. Daly, S.J...
...Martins chose to retire at the top of his form...
...It went into a style that would not accept America as the country it was as a way of changing it...
...As a dancer he set fearsomely high standards...
...His rule of six daily classes was only modified in the nineteen fifties and sixties by Vera Volkova, the Russian-trained dancer and teacher who became an artistic advisor to the company...
...Despite the differences, there are some parallel scenes worth noting in The Big Chill and Under Fire...
...TOM O'BRIEN (Tom O'Brien, a past contributor to Commonweal, teaches at the Manhattan School of Music...
...But on a deeper view, i regardless of the specific left-fight politics, he would be the same as Kline: he would have accepted the painful reality that there is such a thing as crime, that crime ought to be punished, that any society -- even a revolutionary one -- needs law and order...
...The parallel involves views of law and order...
...Thomas Groome Johann Baptist Metz (Visiting Professtr, Fall '84) FACULTY Philip King Fred Lawrence John McDargh David Neiman James O'Donohoe Pheme Perkins Susan Praeder Anthony J. Saldarini Margaret Schatkin Theodore Steeman, O.F.M...
...Because of Bournonville's own success as a first dancer, the system has a certain inherent bias which enables it consistently to produce outstanding male dancers of whom Martins is the most recent...
...J. Cheryl Exum Ernest L. Fortin, A.A...
...Dance . . . . i l I II PETER MARTINS MASTER OF OLD & NEW T HE RETIREMENT of Peter Martins from active performing is clearly a loss from the ranks of the principal dancers of New York City Ballet and from that handful of international male stars who set the standard of performance for all others...
...To maintain the quality of one's performance is a full-time job in itself...
...The system of training which formed him was essentially that of August Bournonville the great Danish nineteenth-century dancer, choreographer, and ballet master...
...Where did Alex's hope go...
...He began his training in the Royal Danish Ballet School in Copenhagen...
...The reeducation process nearly caused him to leave the company, but in that dark night of trial he persisted and emerged as the finest male dancer of the new tradition...
...The realists in The Big Chill are hardly preferable to the doomed dreamers...
...Mastering new techniques of partnering, learning to dispense with preparatory stances, and sustaining the insistent musical flow of the new ballets proved to be his severest trial...
...In both, mid-to-late thirty-year-old mothers call their daughters and tell them to behave conventionally while they themselve are engaging in unusual, even radical acts...
...Baryshnikov and Nureyev trained with the Kirov ballet and, despite their decision to work in the West, sustain the clarity, openness, and dramatic vigor of their early schooling...
...Kline screams back that the police are not pigs, as they had once thought...
...9 Stephen Brown Lisa Sowle Cahill Francis Clooney, S.J...
...But the real resemblance lies deeper...
...If Under Fire represents a current application of revolutionary optimism, it doesn't seem that hope, a theological virtue, has found its roots in the bourgeois soil of South Carolina...
...When he and Jerome Robbins were named Ballet Masters In Chief of the company during Balanchine's fatal illness last spring, that decision was accelerated...
...The elaborate Kennedy anniversary and the NBC movie suggest the same thing: an urge to revive hope by touching the hem of the fallen leader...
...RESOURCES OF THE LARGEST CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY IN THE US CENTER FOR LONERGAN STUDIES CROSS-REGISTRATION AND ACCESS TO LIBRARIES OF THE BOSTON THEOLOGICAL INSTITUTE FINANCIAL AID Mary Boys, S.N.J.M...
...Characteristically, Nolte turns away from the mercenary in disgust, but not enough disgust to take meaningful political action...
...He graduated into the company with a reputation of being a vaguely discontented individual with exceptional technical gifts...
...The Danish style emphasizes quickness in the legs and feet, an open but calmly composed torso and razor sharp clarity in poses, and the completion of steps...
...All are superb exemplars of their individual traditions...
...The aristocratic manner was replaced with self-assured dignity...
...It was a work in which he had been previously coached by Henning Kronstam of the Royal Danish Ballet...
...Nolte plays a role in sustaining the revolution: he prints a picture of a revolutionary leader that the Somoza government claims is dead, but stages the shot to imply the leader is alive and well in the mountains...
Vol. 111 • February 1984 • No. 3
