Word: ballets
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Founded and sponsored by Oil Heiress Rebekah Harkness, a longtime ballet buff, the company offers ensemble work of high sheen, which is now expected on the American scene, along with dynamic soloistic virtuosity, which is not. Of the 18 works in its repertory only one (a restaging by Director Brian Macdonald of The Firebird) ranks as a classic standby. The other 17 range from abstract studies in pure motion to dance translations of contemporary headlines. In Stuart Hodes' Abyss, a pair of fragile lovers are attacked by three hoodlums; Rudi van Dantzig's Monument for a Dead...
...Demands. To Canadian Choreographer Macdonald, 39, who came to Harkness last February after two years as artistic director of the Royal Swedish Ballet, such subject matter is thoroughly proper to dance. "Ballet today is exciting not just because of the dancers," he says, "but because it isn't afraid to leap onstage with a statement on any subject." Bearing out his thesis, Macdonald is now at work on a ballet dealing with violence and ritual killing as an ingrained social phenomenon now and in the past...
...control, and New Yorker Brunilda Ruiz, an agile, high-leaping prima ballerina. The company's foreign-born dancers, ranging in origin from Iceland to Japan, have been carefully selected for their adaptability to an "American" style. That style, explains Macdonald, is the best in the world for new ballet. "Americans are relatively weak in classical training," he says, "but they make up for it in other ways. They move closer to the floor, use it, bite into it. Europeans tend to hold themselves high and can't do the same movements...
...from a foundation set up with the Standard Oil legacy of her first husband, William Hale Harkness, who died in 1954. Mrs. Harkness, who by family request retired as a dancer at 19, has long made her summer home at Watch Hill, R.I., a workshop for ballet experiments. Until 1964, its showpiece was Robert Jeffrey's troupe (TIME, Oct. 6), which she cut adrift when her new company was formed...
Before the French Revolution it was the accepted responsibility of well-heeled aristocrats to pick up the tab for the creative arts, enabling them to flourish without financial cares. As ballet's reigning Lady Bountiful, Rebekah Harkness is a throwback-in the best sense-to those gallant times...