Word: ballets
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Modern dance is almost spiritually opposed to the promulgation of ballet, but Balanchine's good fortune has caused real outrage among classical dancers too. They fear he will use his influence and power to impose his own "American style" on the entire U.S. dance world. Mrs. Rebekah Harkness Kean has just created a new company with a $2,000,000 endowment to resist just that possibility. But long before any grants, the New York City Ballet was the only American company that could be compared to Moscow's Bolshoi, Leningrad's Kirov, London's Royal Ballet...
...first trip abroad in 1950, a London critic proposed a memorial to all the gallant Americans who fell at Covent Garden. Since then, on the strength of a repertory that consists more than two-thirds of Balanchine's own works, the company has been pronounced the most creative ballet group now dancing. In the lean, neoclassical style that is distinctly its own, it is indeed peerless...
Balanchine occupies an incredibly large place in the life of each of his 66 dancers. Even the 16-year-olds in the corps de ballet speak of him as if he were Yahweh. The entire ballet is on call from ten to twelve hours a day, six days a week, and the pace gives no one time to think of anything beyond living up to Balanchine's artistic wishes...
...ballet has two dazzling male stars in Jacques d'Amboise and Edward Villella, and the powerful dancing of Conrad Ludlow and Arthur Mitchell has added a virility enviable anywhere in the dance world. Ranking ballerinas such as Melissa Hayden, Patricia Wilde, and Maria Tallchief have a sameness of excellence that assures every program of a dazzling performance, but much of the company's real excitement comes from younger dancers-Patricia McBride, Suzanne Farrell, Suki Schorer, Gloria Govrin...
...choreographer, he says, has to "use people." Lincoln Kirstein, Balanchine's patron and the general director of the company, calls him "Oriental, impersonal, even sinister," but points out that "Balanchine has imposed his personal vision on the world of theatrical dancing." This is quite a trick, for ballet, according to Kirstein, "has become a means for the extreme release of physical and mental capacity involving measure, melody, memory and money...