Archives for January 10, 2004

New York City Ballet
is celebrating the centennial of the birth of George Balanchine, the greatest choreographer of the 20th century, with two full seasons’ worth of Balanchine-heavy programs. I’m in the process of writing a brief life of Balanchine for Harcourt, so I expect to be going to NYCB two or three times a week throughout the next couple of months. I just returned from my first performance of the winter season, an all-Balanchine triple bill of Prodigal Son, Serenade, and Scotch Symphony, two masterpieces and a lesser but nonetheless delightful effort. I brought with me a jazz musician who’d never seen any of Balanchine’s choreography, and was eager to find out what she’d been missing.

Most serious balletgoers (if not all) have felt for some time now that NYCB was in decline, and tonight’s performance did little to prove them wrong. I don’t need to go into particulars, since Tobi Tobias nailed all the myriad deficiencies of the current staging of Scotch Symphony in a posting on “Seeing Things,” her artsjournal.com blog:

I had been looking forward to my favorite Scotch Symphony moment. Two of the kilts lift the Sylphide high–she seems to be standing on air–and toss her, still vertical, into her ardent suitor’s arms. “She sails forward as if the air were her natural home,” Walter Terry wrote in 1957, “and [her partner] catches her high on his chest as if she were without weight.” I recall the exquisitely gentle Diana Adams in that moment. For two unforgettable seconds, she seemed to be not falling but floating–softly, lazily, serenely, swept crosswise by an idle breeze. It didn’t happen last night. They didn’t even attempt it. I wonder if whoever is setting the ballet even knows that moment existed. Or cares.

I was one year old in 1957, but anyone who’s seen the old Bell Telephone Hour video
of Maria Tallchief and Andr

“The band was deep in a minuet, a Clementi minuet in C major that Jack and he had arranged for violin and ‘cello, one that they had often played together; and now that he was in it, in it for the first time as a dancer, the familiar music took on a new dimension; he was part of the music, right in its heart as one of the formally moving figures whose pattern it created–he lived in a new world, entirely in the present.”

Patrick O’Brian, The Surgeon’s Mate

A fellow blogger writes:

An artsy
pal and I played this parlor game: If you were going to be a seven-figure, major donor to one arts
institution in the USA, what would you pick?

That is a really good question, and as Jack Benny said to the mugger who asked him for his money or his life, I’m thinking it over. You do the same. I’m painfully aware that the e-mailbox is overflowing and that it will probably be at least another three days before I have a spare half-hour to clear it out, but I’ll be strongly inclined to post a whole bunch of your answers one of these days.

Right at this moment, I’m torn between Carolina Ballet and the Phillips Collection. But I could change my mind several dozen more times between now and whenever. Oh, the joys of imaginary philanthropy….

Finally, finally, I’ve updated the right-hand column. Three new Top Fives (plus the extraction of one gallery listing that passed its sell-by date a week ago, arrgh), fresh items in “Teachout Elsewhere” and “Second City,” even a revised publication date for A Terry Teachout Reader in “About Terry’s Books.” And about time, too, yes, I know, thank you very much.

In the process of passing these everyday miracles, I discovered that all the links in “Teachout in Commentary” were busted, on account of a major redesign of the Commentary Web site that went live without anybody bothering to tell me (duh, thanks, Neal!). I’ll get ’em fixed as soon as I figure out how.

I won’t make you giggle by promising to do all this more often. Either I will or I won’t. And hey…maybe I will.