What a bright soul. I didn't know Clive Barnes, but we smiled--he with his lovely wife, Valerie--whenever we encountered each other on the aisle, and I always read his reviews in the New York Post and his columns in Dance Magazine with delight. He was old without ever being an old fart. Curious, never immune to enthusiasm, but no pollyanna either, he gave me faith that even a review of a couple … [Read more...]

It was a labor of love: there would be no other reason to spend a decade sifting through thousands of pages of previously published work for this massive "gathering of memoirs, reportage, criticism, profiles, interviews, and some uncategorizable extras," as the subtitle puts it, in charming 18th century fashion. I was excited to discover the 1360-page tome in the slush pile at the women's magazine … [Read more...]

In dance, and even moreso in the subset of ballet, we don't possess such a supply of geniuses that we can afford to demote any of them to the merely good, or even to era-specific genius. So between the video testimonies that Baryshnikov, Agnes de Mille, and director Kevin McKenzie proffered to the soothsaying powers of Antony Tudor at American Ballet Theatre's celebration in his honor a couple of … [Read more...]

I just didn't believe it could happen--this,  our new First Family. I'd been calculating and recalculating the electoral votes since the beginning of October--you know, switching a NH for a CO, a Michigan for a Pennsylvania, etc., etc.,--and maybe by Monday, I'd arrived at a glimmer of hope: perhaps he could pull off 280 electoral votes. (Please, please.) But after the election of Bush for a … [Read more...]

I know, we haven't even resigned ourselves to winter yet and I'm already drooling over ABT's spring season, but I just got the schedule, and I thought while you were in the ABT mood--they are currently dancing at City Center--I'd alert you to the glories ahead. First, a world premiere by new ABT recruit Alexei Ratmansky to Prokofiev, paired with Balanchine's early, Expressionist "Prodigal … [Read more...]

It's always bothered me when critics call a work or performer "boring," but now Susan Sontag, in her 1965 essay "One Culture and the New Sensibility" (from Against Interpretation), helps put my finger on why: The charge of boredom is hypocritical....Boredom is only another name for a certain species of frustration. The moment a critic declares (through her nose) that she is bored, she's abdicated … [Read more...]

See, this video can be custom made for every well-intentioned Obamaite you know who just might take too long a nap on Election Day. Watch it, edit it, and send it out. We might as well turn our election jitters into something useful (and funny). (You ask, isn't this just a bit off topic, Apollinaire? I say, Only in the narrow view of things). … [Read more...]

When my niece, Hannele, was an infant, she would light up whenever you turned on the light, staring at this facsimile of the sun with curiosity and awe. For her little brother, Pascal, music had the mind-altering effect. Light took my niece out of herself; music pulled my nephew into itself. He'd close his eyes and let his head fall back in a swoon.   Dance often moves in fruitful … [Read more...]

To celebrate the release of the DVD "Together"--a compendium of scenes from ballets that the American Ballet Theatre ballerina shared with principal dancer Fernando Bujones--Cynthia Gregory is sitting down with my esteemed colleague Joel Lobenthal, of the extinguished Sun, at the Lincoln Center Barnes and Noble, 7:30 pm this Friday, October 17. GO! I know from firsthand experience that Joel is an … [Read more...]

  Recently at Slate, it flashed on writer Meghan O'Rourke what "dark literary doppelganger" Sarah Palin--"with her bright smile, her folksy-corporate style, and her Silly Puttied authenticity, which mirrors back at the viewer whatever talking point she's just absorbed"--reminded her of:   a character in a George Saunders story... trapped in the American DreamTM. … [Read more...]