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I don’t know how she does it.  Last night Laura and I went to New York City Ballet.  Early this morning, Laura entrained to another city to cover an exhibit for a certain prestigious publication.

En route she sent me this!

“Because I was living out of town for much of last year, I didn’t see a lot of ballet. It’s always interesting to return to a company after a year’s absence. So much change. There are new faces, new phases of development, and often new clarity on the big picture.

“Last night’s program–all Balanchine, black and white–began with The Four Temperaments, a modernist structure through which ancient winds blow. The thing about 4Ts is that it’s got to be sexy. Because it’s about sex. The seduction of big ideas, fertile artistry, creative genius and its priapic doi du seigneur (come up and see my etchings, my African masks). 4Ts is tribal, but the tribe is high-art NYC, Picasso Demoiselles and Harlem jazz, the temple of MoMA with a little El Morocco thrown in.

“Ashley Laracey, in the third theme, got this exactly. She danced with an ingenue gleam–so nice to see in this day of icky twerking–and an ardent stretch that arced from under her bust to the tips of her toes. The tilt of her face to catch the light was a kind of catnip.

“But sex evaporated in the first two variations. Today’s high-power techniques too often get the better of dancers. Ana Sophie Scheller whipped through Sanguinic like an automaton. I hate whippy dancing; it leaves every other quality behind. Ask la Cour in Phlegmatic, however, saved the day. He’s tall yet plush, with real stretch and plié, and he understood the acrobatic self-regard of this role: he’s the sensitive artist protected by groupies, baring his self-conscious soul to the world and making obtuse statements (Don Daniels has written provocatively about that puzzling heel-in-hand balance). La Cour showed every step with strong, silken authority.

“Teresa Reichlen took it from there and danced like a “dom,” giving us a fire and ice Choleric (the firebird inside of Myrtha). Does anyone, in pas de chat, snap up their thighs as high? She crackled through the role.

“The 4Ts coda was rousing, as always, but only the second half of the performance was animated in the right way.

“Rebecca Krohn, in Episodes, had a 60s vibe going and looked like a beauty out of Vreeland’s Vogue–the daughter, maybe, of some Italian count. There are so many cut muscles on female dancers these days that one is grateful to see a more feminine musculature, like Krohn’s, of smooth, leisure-class surfaces.

“Sterling Hyltin, in Duo Concertante, was another big surprise. What delicious shivery shoulders she has–expressive too. She danced with a ribbony flutter–bright as satin–and brought a brimming excitement to the role, like Kitty’s before the ball–before Anna K. snatches away Vronsky and dashes all her hopes. These black-and-white ballets, strung with post-atomic stresses, paved with black holes, are also full of ingenue coloration, which means embraceable radiance, rebirth, and hope.”

It was interesting–

the open-air Delacorte theater didn’t afford real wings at the Fall for Dance opening two weeks ago.

Dancing Esplanade, Paul Taylor’s dancers have to make frequent exits and re-entries and while they were waiting remained open to audience inspection.

And so we saw from them, not the usual at-ease, happenstance body language of dancers waiting to go back onstage, but instead, some beautifully composed and noble stances.

But any time performers are in front of an audience they are doing some sort of performing.

Just the way we civilians are as well, engaged in any type of social interaction, no?

We had advance copies of the current Ballet Review with part 2 of my interview series with Wilde just about the time that Dance Magazine editor Wendy Perron informed me that PW was going to receive the Dance Magazine award!

And would I write a bio of Wilde for DM?

Would I ever!

You can decide for yourself how well I’ve captured PW in 600 words.

The awards ceremony is December 9.

Pia Catton writes in The Wall Street Journal about ballet start-ups and splinter groups.

Apollinaire Scherr’s review in the Financial Times of Preljocaj’s new “Spectral Evidence”  at New York City Ballet makes it sound intriguing.  I’ll try to catch it next week.

Patricia Wilde talks to me about a whole mess of things in the new, Summer 2013 issue of Ballet Review (part two of our interview series).

And there’s so much else in the new issue as well.

You may think summer has already fled. . . But for us it’s just beginning.

For that’s what Robert Gottleib calls the book in The New York Review of Books!

One of the things that’s wrecking dance and particularly ballet is the ticket prices.

I just looked at an interview I did literally decades ago with a friend of the family who was a social work student, then professional, and a New York City Ballet devotee in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  She recalled how popular prices brought an extraordinary cross section of New Yorkers to City Center to be enchanted by everything that NYCB had to offer.

Conservatory art forms like ballet and opera are continuously pining for a younger demographic.  Doing something about the prices might help.  It certainly did back in post-WW2 Manhattan.

Fall for Dance’s why-not-see-dance-for-the-price-of-a-movie [although considered relatively and put into mechanically reproduced-perspective, flick prices are way too high as well] results in sold out houses at City Center.

Even better were the free tickets available at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park earlier this week, when Fall for Dance treated us to a preview program that returned dance to this open-air bastion of the Public theater.

“What good will that do?” I’ve had people ask me when I tell them to pick up the phone, at least make a token effort to improve the future—to ensure that there will be one—to keep our country and the world viable.   The fact that so many educated, financially stable people simply forgot that democracy is supposed to be participatory astonishes me.

Robert Naiman, policy director for Just Foreign Policy, writes at ocmmondreams:

“In the set of people in the United States – particularly on the ‘left’ – who say they care about stopping wars, too much political space has been occupied by people who run down engagement with Congress. That’s a key reason that this moment should be fixed in public memory. More than anything else, engagement with Congress stopped the bombing. So, the next time someone asks you to engage Congress against war, and some anti-political engagement loudmouth runs that down, remember this moment. It wasn’t anti-political engagement loudmouths who stopped the war. It was people who engaged Congress.”

Antony Tudor said, or is reported to have said, something profound about ballet and dance that should be trumpeted over the PA  of every school and theater.

From my interview with Tudor’s former-assistant Airi Hynninen in the summer 1995 issue of Ballet Review:

“The body initiates everything,” she said about Tudor’s choreography.  “The arm gestures, the legs.  Tudor is not an extremity choreographer.  He even said once that people can live without arms and legs, but they cannot live without a center.”

Extremity choreography is too much the fashion today; it’s one reason why people are diverted by ballet but so rarely, I think, touched deeply by it anymore.