Festive dance - the state of dance - Column

Dance Magazine, Sept, 1996 by Clive Barnes

The popular view is that dance is in a bad way--particularly, perhaps, classic dance. It's no longer fashionable. The choreographers have gone, the superstars have departed, and our dancing founding fathers and mothers are, more and more, gazing back in despair from their own particular Olympus in the skies. What can I tell you? Partly it's true. I have watched genius at play and talent at work--for a time there in this twentieth century, now guttering down like a dirty candle, dance seemed to be the golden child of the arts.

Not for long perhaps, but for a starry, diamond-studded few years of fulfilled effort and happy circumstance, everything seemed to be going dance's way. The choreographers were choreographing, the dancers were dancing, and the audiences were coming and the gossip columns were gossiping. High culture had met with the common touch; Balanchine, Ashton, Massine, Tudor, Robbins, Cranko, Graham, Humphrey, Limon, Cunningham, Nikolais, Taylor, and so many dancers, American, Russian, English, Danish, French--endlessly swooping the heavens like playful eagles. No, those were great days. Now over. Of those choreographers only three remain alive, and as for the dancers, most of those you might indisputably call legendary have become, through hasty death or inevitable retirement, just that--legends.

Nowadays it is not simply generally accepted that the dance boom is over, but it is also fairly well recognized that New York City, while still possibly the fulcrum of the North American dance world, is no longer so imperially its center. There is a great deal of high-class, high-powered dance all over North America, to which New York City must quite often take a back seat. This may be true--but once in a while, particularly when the spring takes its fancy, this city can still become a most remarkable, if impromptu, dance festival. Take this past year.

During just through May and June it was possible to see here New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theatre (playing nine- and eight-week seasons, respectively), the Paris Opera Ballet, Garth Fagan Dance, Netherlands Dance Theater 3, the Parsons Dance Company, Alonzo King's Lines Contemporary Ballet, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, Pilobolus, the School of American Ballet Workshop Performances, Elisa Monte Dance, Dwight Rhoden & Desmond Richardson's Complexions, Mark Morris Dance Group, three Maya Plisetskaya galas at City Center, and the New York International Ballet Competition. And this was just the major companies and seasons. There were, in addition, more dance concerts than you could throw a stick at, even if you were in a stick-throwing mode.

Now even if we admit--and I certainly do admit--that right now dance is in something of a holding pattern so far as pure creativity is concerned, that its superstars, both classic and modern, are notoriously skimpy on the ground, and that the art as a whole does not have--what can one call it?--the fashion impact of, say, the seventies, May and June in New York City were, by any standards, a dance festival, and a pretty impressive one at that. It kept me busy and, on the whole, happy. Of course, there were differing views.

Take those two high priestesses of dance criticism, Arlene Croce of The New Yorker and Anna Kisselgoff of The New York Times. They both spent time this summer at the New York State Theater and the Metropolitan Opera House, but, judging from their accounts, they might well have been attending different theaters, Ms. Croce clearly having a pretty awful time, while Ms. Kisselgoff managed to smell the roses. Personally--as so often--I found myself in the same theater as Ms. Kisselgoff.

Partly this is doubtless the half-empty-glass, half-full-glass syndrome. But I also feel that particularly with regard to City Ballet--Ms. Croce represents that particularized and personalized nostalgia for the past that possibly has something to do with the person one once was, as much as what that person was seeing by way of dance. Where are the snows and youthful snowballs of yesteryear? This viewpoint was perhaps best illustrated by a gloriously wrong-headed or perhaps merely empty-headed--book by a Balanchine fan, Robert Garis, called Following Balanchine, in which he described his past relationship with City Ballet, and particularly its former ballerina Suzanne Farrell, in terms that almost suggested Beatrice and Dante. One hopes that Garis, now seemingly disillusioned with his free-wheeling fantasies about Balanchine & Co., has at last gotten a life! But even if he has, I suspect it would not be a life able to take much pleasure from the goings-on at Lincoln Center nowadays, whatever they may be.

Quality in the arts--particularly the performing arts--tends to be cyclical. The theater may have days of dire doldrums, only to be reawakened by a fresh generation of playwrights, or a new batch of actors capable of making fresh sense out of old classics, or a generation of directors intent on refashioning drama's ever-renewable planks and passions. Concert halls and opera houses have periods of hanging around for regeneration. Artists may go underground so successfully that their very presence goes on unremarked for years. But the art continues--in a minor key perhaps, yet still capable of providing moments of profound satisfaction.