Word: hurok
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What Is Beauty. The Hindu dancer ShanKar would not board a train unless he was well supplied with movie fan magazines. Hurok learned to handle all such oddities of temperament-all but Isadora Duncan's. Once in Boston's Symphony Hall, Isadora's husband, an enthusiastic Communist, waved a red flag from a dressing room window, made a speech to the crowd below. While she danced, Isadora's dislike of her Brahmin audience got the best of her. She stopped, pointed indignantly at the Greek statues against the wall, shouted to the audience: "They are false...
...Minute Test. Hurok's own musical accomplishment consists in having once played the balalaika badly, which puts him in a class with Caesar Petrillo, who was bad on the trumpet. Hurok lets the public pick his artists. He spends hours in the box office, listening to what price seats customers ask for, to judge what traffic an artist will bear. During intermissions he slips quietly through the crowd, eavesdropping on customer comment. Says he: "When I discover an artist I sit in the audience just like the public. ... If you sit 25 minutes without squirming and your eyes...
...gamble was ballet. When he imported the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in 1933, he lost $65,000 the first year. In 1937 he got some of ballet's wealthy enthusiasts to guarantee losses and Hurok wrote up profits...
Since its U.S. arrival, the "Russian ballet" has broken into a number of pieces, some of them put back together under curiously similar names. Ballerinas like Tamara Toumanova (see cut) were lured away by Hollywood. The latest of the companies recently broke with Hurok because its 40 dancers wanted to be known under their own name, Ballet Theatre, while Hurok insisted it was more glamorous to bill them as Russian...
...Hurok's new company, "S. Hurok's Russian Ballet Company," to open in the fall, will be the first troupe to carry his name as producer. He expects no trouble in casting it: "Our American democracy seems able to produce ballerinas ... as well as it turns out low-price automobiles...