Word: ballets
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...School of American Ballet had its start in 1933 with a legendary exchange between George Balanchine, then 28 and a Russian émigré choreographer living by his wits, and Lincoln Kirstein, two years his junior and a rich American aesthete with billowing ambitions to further the arts in his country. He invited Balanchine to start a ballet troupe in the U.S. The choreographer replied, "But first a school." As always, Mr. B. was right; a company like the New York City Ballet could not exist with the sketchy training that was available here...
Today S.A.B. is in effect the national academy of ballet, offering priceless schooling to those who survive its competitive rigors. It was nourished in part by Balanchine's inspired choice of zealous teachers, many of them Russian, and by his fecundity in providing peerless ballets for children to employ their little fund of steps (The Nutcracker) or to aspire to (Serenade, a signature work he began within ten weeks of the school's opening). Starting in 1963, the school also benefited from then unprecedented grants of nearly $6 million from the Ford Foundation, which allowed it to recruit the best...
...school must now survive without the firm hand of Balanchine, who died in 1983. Several important teachers are over 70 and will probably be replaced by retired City Ballet dancers, whose methods may be blander and more homogeneous. Last spring there was a public power scuffle on the school's board between the Old Guard and new benefactors. Dunning does little speculating about future problems. Wisely, she records the past and observes the present in clean prose and with the same eloquent good manners that mark a well-schooled dancer. --By Martha Duffy
There are the inner-city kids of Rize, who raise local spirits by dressing up in clown costumes and performing an impossibly energetic, strenuously graceful "ghetto ballet." Or the Dominican preteens in New York City who take up ballroom dancing in Mad Hot Ballroom, or the music students in Rock School. And though the quadriplegics who play a brutal form of wheelchair rugby in Murderball are gruff, grown men, they too are capable of uplift. "I'm alive," says one. "I use everything I have, to get through life. That's what we're all here to do. Use everything...
Recently Lithgow worked with New York City Ballet choreographer Christopher Wheeldon to animate his award-winning children’s book “Carnival for Animals.†Stomping out his mark in the world of classical dance, Lithgow made a center-stage cameo as an elephant in the ballet...