Theme: Ballet

In the 1930s, when he was trying to establish American ballet, Lincoln Kirstein complained that “balletrusse” was one word. Successor companies to the defunct Franco-Russian Ballets Russes, cashing in on its name and legend, were spreading themselves across the globe. Perhaps today in the public mind ballet is still Russian. When the Soviet Union fell and its ballet companies freed themselves from government interference, the Western choreographer whose works they chose to be their main guide to modernism was George Balanchine, a Ballets Russes product who had been Kirstein’s choice sixty years before, his gift to America. Read more

Ballet is dying. Maybe already dead. Impossible, you say, I've got tickets to a show! Alas, dear reader, I've just learned the grim diagnosis in Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet, Jennifer Homans' account of the classical tradition. Pack up your toe shoes, ballerinas. Shutter the theaters, artistic directors. "The occasional glimmer of a good performance or a fine dancer is not a ray of future hope but the last glow of a dying ember," Homans declares in her epilogue. "Apollo and his angels are understood and appreciated by a shrinking circle of old believers in a closed corner of culture."Read more