Word: agon
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...sublime when he wrote for the theater. There were operas, including The Rake's Progress, composed for a libretto by W.H. Auden and one of a handful of 20th century operas that have found a secure place in the repertory. The ballets also continued; the last of his masterpieces, Agon (composed for another Russian choreographer, George Balanchine), came...
...June 1993 at the gala marking New York City Ballet's Balanchine celebration. To dramatize the international impact of Balanchine's work, artistic director Peter Martins invited some foreign dancers to perform with the company. Bussell was ablaze in the sexy pas de deux from Agon-and brought down the house, the prime spectacle on a spectacular night. Her reaction to the ovation was typical: "I didn't expect it-all that for just a pas de deux. Weird...
That is where Bussell and her bridesmaids come in. Darcey always dances big, her moves expanding the music and lending pliancy to the tautest Stravinsky in Agon. Herrera carries with her the timeless aura of the theater. Ringer has the potential to bring forward the Romantic tradition. As for Weese, there is a mysteriousness that is still intact, while her grace and skill are obvious. We may be approaching an era of poetry in motion...
Bloom's view of literature as a ceaseless agon between challengers and titleholders is interesting and, in some instances, true. Virgil obviously had an eye on Homer when he set out to write The Aeneid, just as Dante and Milton had Virgil in their sights when they embarked upon The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost. But Bloom cannot prove, on aesthetic or any other grounds, that all the writers he deems great shared the motives he ascribes to them. By the time he gets to a discussion of Emily Dickinson's poetry, he has grown so vexed at the absence...
This assertion is just as extraliterary as those set forth by feminists, multiculturalists and all the others who discuss books in ways Bloom ridicules and despises. And Bloom's view produces chapter titles such as "Freud: A Shakespearean Reading" and "Joyce's Agon with Shakespeare," in which the actual works and words of the upstart authors are wrenched out of context and forced into hypothetical bouts of cross-generational arm wrestling...