Word: ballets
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...Remember...elegance, distinction, and aristocracy!" The last tense words of a renowned New York choreographer before the curtain rises, opening his last ballet? Almost. Helen McGehee, visiting instructor at the Harvard Summer Dance program and former soloist with the Martha Graham Dance Company, preps her students before they perform a piece from her own repertory. But these students are Summer School students, and the stage is a second floor studio in Agassiz...
Back in the Radcliffe gym, Christine Temin, faculty director of dance activities at Wellesley College and a dance critic for the Boston Globe, leads a class in beginning ballet. Faces flicker from frustration to intense concentration, to joy at a move executed a little better than before. Eagerness and optimism pervades: "Don't watch the floor," says Temin. "You can convince me that, even if you're wrong, you're right--if you don't watch the floor." Even before the class ends, students for the next class come in to warm up. One remarks "bodies everywhere...
Late spring is the silly season for New York balletomanes. Both the American Ballet Theater and New York City Ballet have been performing at Lincoln Center, and the gossip has centered on Mikhail Baryshnikov, who is dancing at City Ballet after four years as A.B.T.'s superstar. Did he get along with Partner Patty? Or did he miss Gelsey? Did Gelsey cancel most of her A.B.T. schedule because she missed Misha? (To their fans, dance stars, like dogs and cats, have no surnames.) Was Mr. B. snubbing Misha by not creating a new ballet for him? Was Misha...
Some answers came last week. George Balanchine, 75, was recovering well from a heart bypass operation, which he hopes will enable him to return to choreographing. Baryshnikov will leave City Ballet next year, but hardly in a pout. In September 1980 he will take over as director of A.B.T., the country's grandest and most complex company (87 dancers, about 75 ballets in the repertory and an ambitious touring program). When he inherits this extensive but somewhat raveled empire from Lucia Chase and Oliver Smith, who have been co-directors since 1945, Baryshnikov will be just...
...experiment, but that he will be too tough. They may have a point. Baryshnikov feels that "in a way I will be onstage every night. If a ballerina does not do 32 fouettes, then I will feel that I have failed too. In fact, if you put on a ballet that calls for 32 fouettes, you should have a ballerina who can do 46." He is aware of the dancers' worries, however: "I must learn a language to speak to them. If they trust my standards, my judgments, me, it will work...