Word: ballets
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...Songs of the Disinherited, then portrayed three faces of woman (sweetheart, wife, mother) in McKayle's mournful ode to the chain-gang life, Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder. If McKayle's choreographic style shows a knack for quick, deft blending of styles (such as modern, jazz, calypso, ballet), that is largely because he has spent much of the past decade tailoring dances to the tight demands of TV shows (Ed Sullivan, Bill Cosby...
...legions of supporters, he is avant-garde and brilliant. To his many detractors, he is passé and boring. Actually, Choreographer Maurice Béjart of the Brussels-based Ballet of the 20th Century is all of those things. Part iconoclast, part P.T. Barnum, part aesthetic bluffer, Béjart deliberately gears his creations not to the sophisticated superegos of the modern dance audience but to the sensation-seeking ids of the young generation and the leisure class...
...stated mission is messianic. He is out to reach a new and bigger audience-the neophytes who may not necessarily understand or appreciate ballet but have a thirst for it anyway. In this he has succeeded. Opting for stadiums and arenas rather than conventional ballet halls, he has become probably the most commercially successful choreographer alive. When his latest full-length ballet, Nijinsky, Clown of God, came to New York for a 19-performance run that will end this weekend, it seemed only appropriate that the locale should be the 4,000-seat Felt Forum at Madison Square Garden...
...characters all by himself-artist, simpleton, genius, child of nature and clown of God. Nijinsky also went mad in his last years and thought he was Jesus. Drawing on that, Béjart goes on to pose Nijinsky as a symbol of Man. On that allegorical level, the ballet is a paean to love as the true expression of God. Nijinsky stands for all the simple, warm people who need to love and be loved...
...lights go up on three scanty-panty circles of writhing male dancers. They then form a single circle of life, and voilà it is genesis time. Nijinsky is given life and immediately departs for Diaghilev's Ballet Russe, which represents earthly paradise. Thereafter, the graceful and the grotesque prance the stage in some of the longest, slowest processionals since Catherine de Medici introduced ballet spectacle to the court of France in the late 16th century. Nymphs, whores and clowns flutter merrily about. Morality figures of death and madness strut menacingly. The serpent, dressed in a red flapperesque...