Word: ballets
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...longer the dominant performer in the economy that it once was, but its price rises still bring confrontations with Washington. Government officials know that other industries watch steel for clues to the size of price increases they can get away with. The confrontations have become a ritualized ballet. A steel company announces a towering jump in prices; Washington denounces it; another company posts a smaller increase; the original raise is trimmed down. Last week the ballet had an exceptionally thunderous performance, and it headed toward the same old curtain call...
Cynthia Cole's "Confrontation Number 25" and "Confrontation Number Four" both capture the action of hockey with sharp lines of movement softened by the curves of the human figure. It seem her figures could be dancing in a high speed ballet just as easily as playing hockey...
There is one bright note--but let me hasten to qualify that: you need read no further unless you are a) a ballet fan; b) a ballet fan tolerant enough to overlook the lumps and warts of the Boston Ballet (well, what do you want, Balanchine?); and c) a ballet fan tolerant enough to overlook the lumps and warts of the Boston Ballet who can suspend cynicism and realism long enough to become imaginatively involved in a fairy tale. Now that I've eliminated jocks, pre-meds (sorry, that's the second snide remark this column!), and Crimson editors...
...ballet should belong to Kitri- and eventually it will as it enters the A.B.T. repertory and other men take Basil's part. Right now Baryshnikov's dynamism puts things off balance, much as Marlon Brando's Broadway perfo mance in A Streetcar Named Desire obscured the fact that the play was really about Blanche DuBois. Baryshnikov is the Figaro of Spanish barbers. He flirts recklessly, he fumes, he pouts. He does a wonderful bit with two mugs, leaping and drinking out of both at once. He has a hilarious, hollow-eyed mad scene in which he stabs...
...part is interwoven into Baryshnikov's life. He danced the wedding pas de deux at his graduation recital at the Kirov Ballet school in Leningrad. Basil was his first full-length role, one he danced often. Playing it, he says, taught him a great deal: "Technical control, mime, how to use a cape, how to give a flower to a girl, how to be funny, touching, a lover . . . a lot." He is giving those gifts now to the A.B.T. dancers and, one suspects, a profligate present to the company at the box office as well...