Word: kirstein
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Kirstein's lifework, as it happens, takes in a good deal more than dance. A poet, art critic and onetime novelist, he seems to have an aesthetic Midas touch that produces quality in virtually everything he takes up. At Harvard he established and edited the magazine Hound and Horn, which from 1927-34 was among the most distinguished literary journals. The Harvard Society of Contemporary Art, which he co-founded in 1927, became the prototype for New York's Museum of Modern...
This broad range is what makes Kirstein, 66, something of a miracle worker behind the scenes at the New York City Ballet. He likes to say: "I'm a plumber. I just keep the thing working." His methods are as diverse and mysterious as those of a master politician-which he resembles far more than a plumber. He frequently jets off to foreign cities to negotiate future engagements for the company, and returns brimming with enthusiasm for the music and dance of newly visited lands. Balanchine's Bugaku (1963) was inspired in part by Kirstein's infatuation...
...Kirstein would not presume to interfere with Balanchine in artistic matters, and he leaves day-to-day office problems to General Manager Betty Cage. But when he hauls his angular 6-ft. 3-in. frame into the building, everybody somehow knows he is there...
...kindly to a new dancer and diffident with a doorman. Yet the presence of this "towering man with a frown," as one company member puts it, can be unpredictably explosive. He does not suffer fools gladly, which explains why there is a small legion known as "Kirstein widows"-people he no longer talks to. Among them: New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller, whose early artistic interests he nurtured but with whom he later had differences...
Balanchine once said of Kirstein: "Lincoln is a true Christian, even though he won't admit it. He gives you money and runs away before you can thank him." Kirstein simply says: "We don't talk very much. He doesn't express himself verbally, and I can't dance, so I leave it to him. He moves in time and space and plasticity. One of us is aesthetic, the other political. The politics involves diplomacy, p.r. and money. He is not interested in that. My pleasure is to make it possible for him to do what...