Nobody could call the work of Noche Flamenca & Soledad Barrio pallid.
The eternal and uneasy relationship between ballet and modern dance endures, but radically altered in tone and intensity.
If Tom Clancy didn't write any Op-Centers, he would be $60 million less rich.
When December comes, can 'The Nutcracker' be far behind? No, it can't - not in America, anyway.
Most writers are vulnerable and insecure, and Kay Graham was more so than most.
I first read 'An American Tragedy' in college, and in my entire life I had never read anything so painful.
Increasingly, editing means going to lunch. It means editing with a credit card, not with a pencil.
What 'War and Peace' is to the novel and 'Hamlet' is to the theater, Swan Lake' is to ballet - that is, the name which to many people stands for and sums up an art form.
It's always fascinating - and sometimes a little disquieting - when two first-rate critics violently disagree.
'Eclipse' is overlong and overly self-conscious, but it isn't a fake or a zero; it just gets exhausting. It raises a crucial question: 'When does Concept morph into Gimmick?'
'The Sleeping Beauty' is the greatest, most challenging and most vulnerable of classical ballets. Everything can go wrong with it, and all too often, everything does.
The mysteries and scandals of the Kremlin are nothing compared to the mysteries and scandals of the Bolshoi.
'Seven Sonatas,' with its flowing series of meetings between men and women in an identifiable emotional world, is in the mould of Jerome Robbins' glorious 'Dances at a Gathering.'
What really matters is that 'Black Swan' deploys and exaggerates all the cliches of earlier ballet movies, especially 'The Red Shoes,' another tale of a ballerina driven mad and suicidal.
Ladies: You have to support an infant with a hand under its head.
A steady diet of the higher truths might prove exhausting, but it's important that we acknowledge their validity and celebrate their survival.
Without a Prospero-Caliban relationship to balance the Prospero-Ariel one, 'The Tempest' loses much of its resonance.
Choreographers, historically, are born, not made - their talents drive them to it.
What guarantees - or at least semi-guarantees - good ballets is good choreographers, and they are thin on the ground.
'River of Light,' to a dense but powerful score commissioned from Charles Wuorinen and with ravishing lighting by Mark Stanley, has depth and resonance.
The finest chroniclers of the great and the near-great have often been courtiers - the Duc de Saint-Simon, for instance, or Lady Murasaki.
Ballet in September used to be dead as a dodo. Now, with City Ballet's ingenious decision to give us four weeks of repertory in the early fall, having cut down on the relentlessly long spring season when dancers, critics and audiences droop on the vine, we wake up after the dog days of August with something to look at.
The 1920s brought not only the Charleston but the flat chest.
Tolstoy may be right about happy and unhappy families, but in ballet, it works the opposite way: All good ballets are different from each other and all bad ones are alike, at least in one crucial respect - they're all empty.
One of the eternal mysteries of ballet is how untalented choreographers find backers for their work, and then find good dancers to perform in it. Is it irresistible charm? Chutzpah? Pure determination? Blackmail? Or are so many supposedly knowledgeable people just plain blind?
It's a crapshoot, publishing.
Ballerinas are often divided into three categories: jumpers, turners and balancers.
When you can't follow a ballet's action, you can always read the program notes.
With literary fiction, generally a film maker falls in love with a book. In commercial fiction, it's a producer or studio falling in love with a book they can make into a movie with worldwide appeal.
It's often the case that the most strained moments in books are the very beginning and the very end - the getting in and the getting out. The ending, especially: it's awkward, as if the writer doesn't know when the book is over and nervously says it all again.
When I was at Cambridge in the early fifties, there was a school nearby for training Army officers in Russian, and some imaginative genius came up with the idea of putting on Russian plays with the students to improve their language skills.
Why movie and dance critics are taking 'The Company' seriously, I can't imagine. Are they impressed by Altman's reputation and naive sincerity? By the fluid semi-documentary approach?
