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By Root 882 0

about bodies.” Turning out and getting turned on. “Dance was the art in which the body woke up,” recalls Elizabeth Kendall. “For us in our early twenties, the late 60’s early 70’s were about such dramatic waking up, that the awake body, the strongest metaphor for that, was front and center.” From The Exorcist to Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs to Looking for Mr. Goodbar, the rudely awakened body was a war zone, the locus of sexual-social-political strife, the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 legalizing abortion setting a decades-long conflict between personal autonomy and government control. Alfred Kazin’s walker in the city became the jogger in the park, trying to stay one frantic step ahead of the muggers and gnarly inquisitors. Where punk and New York–based movies such as The French Connection, The Seven-Ups, and Sidney Lumet’s garbage-lid bangers shoved a street-level picture of clutter, graffiti, and the cracking vertebrae of the rotting infrastructure at the viewer, ballet—thanks to Balanchine and Robbins—proclaimed the water-towered rooftops and the silver-spired skyscraper skyline, the upward arrowing of energy and aspiration. Where nearly everything I enjoyed were provisional operations, making the most of make-do and snaring contingencies on the fly, ballet relied upon massive resources, exacting rehearsals, wealthy patrons, and a fine-boned sense of hierarchy, a bred-in appreciation of lineage, proportion, perpetuation, deference, decorum, unswerving devotion, acute sacrifice. It should have been out of joint with the jagged decade. Plus it had all that mime.

Elitist and reactionary to its detractors, it also lay on the wrong side of the class struggle, stroking its sable fur. In 1969, a professor of literature at MIT named Louis Kampf rabble-roused student radicals to cry havoc and unleash the dungs of war. Defile the cultural temples! Convert Lincoln Center into a field latrine! “Not a performance should go without disruption,” declared Kampf. “The fountains should be dried with calcium chloride, the statuary pissed on, the walls smeared with shit.” Kampf was more than just another fist-shaking, faculty-lounge, pocket-edition Lenin: he was then president of the Modern Language Association, so his preachings carried reverb. The revolutionary moment came and went without the New York Philharmonic or Metropolitan Opera coming under urinary attack from full-bladdered revolutionaries, and by the early seventies New York already reeked of enough shit and piss that manufacturing more of it to make a political statement would have seemed redundant. Further defilement was the last thing this rock pile needed, and what was solacing even to cynics about Lincoln Center was that it seemed to have earned a temporary restraining order against entropy; its blocky architectural sterility—more than one detractor referred to it as a cultural mausoleum—was a kind of comfort zone, a non-wild life refuge. True, the underpass that connected the uptown side of the IRT station at Sixty-sixth Street to Lincoln Center leaked from the ceiling and reeked from the puddled floor and back-splashed walls, such a dysentery stretch that even panhandlers shunned it, but once you sniffed prison freedom, it was as if the pause button had been hit on the fall of civilization. You could sit at the edge of the illuminated fountain, moisturized by the misty spray, and not fear for your life about a nearby drug deal gone bad or a psychotic breakdown in progress. You might see Balanchine himself strolling toward the State Theater, his head and neckerchief jauntily yachting across a choppy sea of mundane heads belonging to non-geniuses patronizing the sidewalk. It was an inspiriting sight, just knowing he was briskly alive, that Robbins was alive, Bernstein was alive, Martha Graham was alive, Agnes de Mille was alive—they hadn’t forsaken us.

And what I grew to learn about the ballet world was that, once inside, it was like every other subculture high and low in Manhattan in the seventies. It looked like a members-only society only if you lacked