Word: sylph
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Harvard ('26) hell-raiser was brief. At Harvard he was part of a splinter intelligentsia-Poet-Instructor Robert Hillyer, Classicist Dudley Fitts et al.-and kept flailing away at a novel that appeared early in his sophomore year. Aptly titled Confusion, it concerned a shimmering young sylph named Cerise D'Atreé who was caught in the Fitzgerald undertow and dragged to an early Jazz Age death...
...featured work was La Sylphide, choreographed by famed August Bournonville in 1836 and passed down virtually unchanged from lip to toe. It begins with a round of mimed action during which some observers usually expect the dancers to burst into recitative and aria at any moment. The white-clad sylph (Margrethe Schanne), her supernatural character implicit in the tiny wings at her waist, falls in love with the Scotch farm boy (Henning Kronstam); but when the family arrives, she dashes over to the fireplace and literally whisks up the chimney...
...unhappy betrothal to a human girl is developed through the dancers' fingertips-pointing at the eyes to indicate tears, at the forehead for mystification, at the ceiling to swear by all that's holy, etc. There are magic veils, palm reading and plots until the sylph's little wings drop off and, faltering as if blind, she dies. When, amid all this fabulizing, they get a chance to dance, the Danes are light on their toes-as if the stage were covered with foam rubber-and their movements are graceful rather than virtuoso. Everything they do onstage...
...point on, Sally drags the reluctant Isherwood along on a series of crazy escapades, notably with a rich American who happily pays the bills in return for shacking up with Sally. Her one serious moment arrives when she decides that she is pregnant, but she again becomes her old sylph on discovering that she was falsely alarmed...
...Whims of Cupid and the Ballet Master, and moved on through an unabashedly romantic La Sylphide (1832), in which a forest witch vamps a young Scot (to unfamiliar music by Hermann Lovenskjold). The piece offered a show-stopping Scottish dance and was full of good-humored stage tricks (a sylph vanishes, later is seen flying up into the rafters). The modern ballet (1942) was Qarrtsiluni, by Knudage Riisager, a tom-tom-thumping, gyrating Eskimo rite...