Word: ballets
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...Your article on the New York State Theater and the ballet [May 1] was a well-written, well-constructed, very colorful and spellbinding piece of work. The pictures were beautiful...
...agree with Mr. Balanchine [May 1] that dancing to music with no theme or story can be entertaining, but it should never comprise the entire repertoire of a ballet company. The tremendous emotional and popular appeal of the great story ballets are the very lifeblood...
...Your statement that George Balanchine has "undisputed stature as the world's leading choreographer" surely needs qualifying. He may be the world's leading ballet choreographer, but there are those of us who believe that in musical sensitivity, theatrical sense, urgency of communication, and pure choreographic inventiveness, Martha Graham leaves him far behind...
Balanchine is at his finest when a new conception strikes him and he sets to work on a ballet. "I listen, listen, listen to the music, and then it comes," he says. The music suggests how the ballet begins and ends, perhaps, the number of dancers, the costumes. "But only when the dancers are on the stage and I am with them can I begin. You have only the clay, and you work on it, molding it, changing it, shaping it until you have what you want...
What Balanchine wants is so much his private ideal that many of the ballet's best friends wonder if it can long outlive him. Ballet is an art that resides almost totally in the minds of its choreographers; since it resists notation, it cannot be passed along easily from one director to another. But even if the company fails to survive its master, the esthetic principle he has made it stand for certainly will: that there is only one thing of value in the dance, and that is the simple beauty of the body in motion...