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By Root 923 0

I started stopping after performances at the Ballet Shop on Broadway, which stocked, along with illustrated ballet storybooks, biographies, critical studies, and girlie souvenirs (ballerina figurines, baby toe shoes, music boxes), a cardboard box full of assorted back issues of Ballet Review, the magazine founded by Arlene Croce, who had since ascended to dance critic at The New Yorker and was virgin queen of all she surveyed. Ballet Review contained articles by her that were looser, swingier, and sparkier than many of her New Yorker columns, lacking the more raised-chalice tone of taut distinction that sounded like an abbess played by Maggie Smith with both nostrils. BR’s contributors even graded new dances as Bob Christgau did with his Consumer Guide, a running scoreboard that gave the revival of Balanchine’s Donizetti Variations, for example, a B at best, one critic docking it a D. A D—to Balanchine! Sacre bleu! Although Ballet Review didn’t pie-face the reader with the messy, chop-shop layout of a punk zine, its curt Dragnet poker-faced diligence—every article in the issue looked as if it had been pounded out on the same old newsroom typewriter—registered its own resistance to the angel fluff and slatternly praise thrown about most places in print about dance. Its absence of photographic spreads picturing dewy dancers holding dewy poses—a text-driven emphasis perhaps from economic necessity or production limitations—gave Ballet Review a frank stare of intellectual rigor reminiscent of the literary quarterlies that built their reputations piling one plain block of text upon another in the forties and fifties, a brick wall of surety.

Hard to believe now, but ballet once had an intellectual constituency, an arty swank. The postwar exuberance of the mid-forties had carried all of the arts along on its dolphin crest, from painting to theater to music composing to fiction to poetry. “Even in ballet, previously hardly known, we were preeminent,” observed Gore Vidal. (No stranger to the dance wings, Vidal had pseudonymously authored a murder mystery called Death in the Fifth Position, in which his sleuth “keeps one entrechat ahead of the police in their heavy-footed search for the killer.”) Although Vidal brackets this golden age in the brief span from VJ Day in 1945 to the commencement of the Korean War, its glamorous legs stretched longer than that, long enough to bask in the glow of Camelot. Jacqueline Kennedy took ballet lessons at the old Metropolitan Opera House, hosted evenings at the White House where the invited guests included Stravinsky and Balanchine (indeed, Balanchine was the first guest invited to the Kennedy White House), and today has one of New York’s leading ballet schools posthumously named in her honor. In his journal The Sixties, Edmund Wilson, the closest thing American literary criticism would ever have to Dr. Johnson in a Panama hat, records a gala evening in the mid-sixties:

Elena [Wilson’s wife] and I went to New York May 19 and attended the first night, on the 20th, of [the composer Nicolas] Nabokov’s Don Quixote ballet. Balanchine danced, or rather mimed, the title role, appearing for the first time in years and probably the last time in the night. It was not a very brilliant evening. Nicholas had told us beforehand that the score was made of “Ukrainian cafe music,” but there were also invoked, on occasion, Rimsky-Korsakov and Stravinsky. The end of the first act consisted of one of those varied vaudevilles that occur in Tchaikovsky’s ballets; but then the early part of the second act was a somewhat similar sequence. This broke up the dramatic line, which was not very effective anyway. Everybody was there. Nicholas had a section reserved for his friends in the middle of the first balcony: Kirstein and his brother and Mina Curtiss, Marianne Moore and John Carter were close to us. The New York Reviewers, Cartier-Bresson, and Marian Schlesinger [the then wife of the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.]; but the mob at the “reception” afterwards was so dense that it was impossible to talk to anybody.