Word: ballets
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...film The Turning Point. He avoids this undesirable trade-off by casting a competent actress who cannot pirouette her way out of a paper bag (Anne Bancroft) in one of the two lead roles--a middle-aged ballerina clearly in decline--and supporting her with two genuine ballet stars (Mikhail Baryshnikov and Leslie Browne) in significant if minor roles. Realism and a respect for the irreplaceable skills of a tested movie star blend nicely in Ross' polished parable about the world of ballet and the thoughts about the roads not taken fostered by the onset of middle...
...Deedee Rodgers (Shirley MacLaine), a one-time aspiring ballerina who gave up the stage for a family, and Emma Jacklin (Bancroft), Deedee's former friend and rival who pursued a career in dance to rise to the top of her profession as the prima ballerina of the best ballet company in the States. They reunite after a long spell of separation when Emma's touring company hits Oklahoma City, where Deedee, the frustrated dancer, spends her middle-aged, middle-American existence raising her three kids and running a ballet school with her husband Wayne (Tom Skerritt...
Such verbal snapshots form the documentation for Croce's broader, harder judgments, particularly on fads that have parasitically grown with the popularity of ballet. "Reviewing should function like a Food and Drug Administration," she notes, "even if that function is largely futile." What she calls "pop ballet" is a particular target: "Whole repertories (the Stuttgart Ballet) or parts of repertories (the Jeffrey, the Ailey) devoted to slick approximations of the higher article." In an essay called "Selling It," she has very harsh words for the American Ballet Theater, which she accuses of merchandising stars in shoddy productions while neglecting...
Croce began watching the New York City Ballet when she was a student at Barnard. In addition to writing the New Yorker column, she is editor of the quarterly Ballet Review. Her standards can be formidably high. What does she like? Certain words recur: clarity (for Gelsey Kirkland), purity (for Baryshnikov), amplitude (for Farrell and Peter Martins). If Croce's criticism has a godfather, it is George Balanchine, who, after all, reinvented classical ballet and made it American. If she has an idol among dancers, it is Baryshnikov, though she thinks that A.B.T. misuses his genius...
...there are many others. In 1973 she attended the World's Professional Ballroom Dancing Championships and discovered Richard and Janet Gleave, a British couple who won the Modern competition. Her admiring chapter on the drag ballet troupe, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, is also a witty essay on sexual stereotypes. Perhaps even more than Balanchine, she loves Fred Astaire. A passage describing his partnership with Ginger Rogers could stand as well for Croce's writing about dance: "Passion-the missing element in just about every 'sexy' duet that has been attempted since- is usually confused...