Word: ballets
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Since his death seven years ago, George Balanchine has taken on a strange, ectoplasmic life in the pages of other people's books, most of them written by his former dancers at New York City Ballet. One, Gelsey Kirkland's angry, vengeful Dancing on My Grave (1986), made the best-seller lists. This year brings a slight but more genial coda from Kirkland and the memoir the dance world has been waiting for, from Mr. B.'s last muse, Suzanne Farrell...
Farrell's Holding On to the Air -- the title comes from one of Balanchine's many wily stage instructions -- is a modest, somewhat limited book. One could wish that she had chosen a more adroit collaborator than Toni Bentley, a former City Ballet corps member. Even so, Farrell's spirit is generous, and she gets the big things right...
...sketches in charming details of her early hoydenish exploits, followed by baby-ballerina days in Cincinnati. At 15, she was spotted by City Ballet star Diana Adams, who suggested that if she ever came to New York City, she might telephone. That was enough for Farrell's mother, who packed up her family and moved right away into a tiny, one-room flat. "Mother," sums up the daughter, "pursued rather impractical interests in a practical way." Providentially, Farrell was accepted at the company's school...
After resigning as artistic director of American Ballet Theater a year ago, Baryshnikov thought of quitting dancing too. But despite chronic knee problems, he admits, "it's neither easy nor pleasant to leave the stage. I never thought I'd spend my last years as a modern dancer, but it's important now to work with someone I admire." He had danced Morris' work earlier and spotted him as someone who saw dance the way he did, musically. "Mark decodes a composer's thought," Baryshnikov says. "He uses dance like an extra instrument." As for Morris, he seized on "Misha...
...anyone who observes the brio of these rehearsals, as well as the total lack of temperamental combustion, it seems clear that there is the embryo of a new troupe here. For dance fans the notion is very attractive. Things are stale now in both ballet and modern dance. The prolific Morris -- who says, "I can make up a thousand steps; my problem is deciding what to keep" -- has shown an affinity for classical movement. It could be a dream linking. Baryshnikov, however, doesn't think a White Oak Company is in the cards. Speaking of dancers in the group...