Word: ballets
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...audience was perplexed. What was George Balanchine trying to do, anyhow? One week be premiered his rollicking, straightforward Western Symphony with his New York City Ballet (TIME, Sept. 20), then he turned around and dished out this weird puzzler called Ivesiana. The music, which was by that half-legendary New Englander, the late Charles Ives, was peculiar enough, with its crotchety rhythms and its wispy dissonances-but what happened on stage was even odder...
...called The Unanswered Question, was that supposed to be funny? That pretty girl in the tight, white costume, Allegra Kent-those men were twisting and bending her all over the place, back dives and everything, all in slow motion, and her feet never even touched the floor. This was ballet...
...Balanchine, and he is a genius, as everybody knows. Even if Ivesiana wasn't very clear, it was fun, and so the crowd gave the cast a nice hand at the end. Next day most of Manhattan's mystified dance reviewers declined to evaluate the ballet, although they paid their respects to distinguished Composer Ives (an insurance broker who pioneered polytonal music in the U.S. in his spare time, died this year at 79). But the Daily News's Douglas Watt found something positive to report about the ballet in Allegra Kent's athletic performance...
Western Symphony ended in a whirling romp for the whole cast. The four movements lasted 27 minutes and used practically every dancer in the troupe, but the audience whooped for more until the house lights went up. At week's end the New York City Ballet scheduled five more performances...
...these terms, the painted mincing of the Lady Wakasa (Machiko Kyo, the rape victim in Rashomon), the snuffling animality of the potter (Masayuki Mori, the husband in Rashomon), the abstract dutifulness of the potter's wife satisfy the spectator as keenly as gestures in a well-made ballet...