Word: faun
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...looks perfectly capable of donning tutu and toe shoes and filling in for any of the women in her 16-member company. But she doesn't need to, and that's the point. Her versions of such classics as George Balanchine's Apollo and Jerome Robbins' Afternoon of a Faun, danced by a troupe of near youngsters and up-and-comers, glisten and gleam as though the choreographers had personally stopped backstage to apply one last coat of polish...
Thus we still don't know, and perhaps never will, what is going on in Dosso's Allegory with Pan, circa 1529-32. Maybe the lascivious goat god (if it really is Pan, and not just an ordinary faun) is lusting after the beautiful Titianesque nymph asleep on the ground--who has been variously argued to be Antiope, Pomona, Echo, Canens and Syrinx, among other nymphs with literary pedigrees. But who is the old woman, and what is she doing? If her outstretched palms are protecting the girl, she's facing the wrong direction--away from...
...American musical. But classical dance was his true love, and in 1969 he turned his back on the commercial theater to devote himself solely to George Balanchine's New York City Ballet, for which he made a string of masterpieces--among them The Cage, Afternoon of a Faun, The Goldberg Variations and, above all, Dances at a Gathering, an hour-long garland of sometimes sentimental, sometimes intensely romantic dances set to music of Chopin--that secured his standing as America's first great native-born ballet choreographer...
...clear-cut dramatic situations. "What really interests me," he said in 1958, "is the conduct of man, the rites he performs to face the mysteries of life." The Cage portrays a tribe of ferocious, insect-like women who kill the men with whom they mate; in Afternoon of a Faun, two dancers meet in a studio for a sensuous yet self-absorbed encounter that ends in an oddly tentative kiss. Later, Robbins adopted the plotless style of Balanchine, his mentor and idol, firmly denying that his new works were "about" anything but movement and music. Dancegoers knew better. Dances...
...assimilation into the culture of the Net. Sure, his head may spin a bit as he makes his initial encounters--his first E-mail exchange finds him in surprisingly casual conversation with Bill Gates; he samples the mysteries of cybersex disguised as a half-woman, half-faun named Bambi. But a little head spinning is to be expected at first, and Seabrook is never more on target than when coolly observing it in himself...