• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 872 0

chic, when stewardesses were the runway models of the plane aisle and the pilots in their uniforms looked like bronzed statues—it’s way spacier. It looks like the first Star Trek ballet, a galactic greeting card from some planet a-go-go. I suspect that even more then (1971, when the ballet premiered) than now, the audience overlap between ballet fans and Star Trek buffs was a tiny crescent, ditto among the critics, who were similarly aghast. (The grades given it by Ballet Review’s bull-pen regulars ran the gamut of E to F—E meaning “Not Worth Keeping,” F being “Insufferable.”) PAMTGG was beamed up to oblivion, never to be seen again. After that, NYCB never strayed into pop, and even flirting with avant-garde experiment was greeted with frosty suspicion by the parishioners, as if somebody were trying to sneak something fancy through the vestibule.

Not a lot of hospitality was shown to a new Balanchine ballet I saw shortly after it premiered called Variations pour une Porte et un Soupir (Variations for a Door and a Sigh), an allegorical duet set to a musique-concrète atonality of squawks, squeaks, honks, clunks, amplified exhales of weary breath, and assorted thuds that suggested a futuristic netherworld in need of a lube job. Pierre Henry’s score wasn’t an alien contraption to anyone who had gotten temporary tinnitus from a John Cage piece or for that matter “Revolution 9” from the Beatles’ White Album, and pictorially Door/Sigh was mystico-majestic, the male figure enveloped and devoured by a black billowing skirt large as night (the shadow image of the endless white veil streaming like the etherealized scarf from Cyd Charisse in the dream ballet in Singin’ in the Rain), the victim of a she-serpent who conjures Louise Brooks’s Lulu in Pandora’s Box making a neat meal of her prey. Although the postgame wrap-ups in the lobby and later in print were undecided as to whether Balanchine was impishly showing he could beat the avant-gardists at their own racquetball game—see, here’s how it’s done, kids—or pulling an opaque Jovian prank, the reception was on the prickly side. This they weren’t willing to lap from the milk bowl. One woman near me, who had been knitting socks during intermission, cupped her hands to her ears during the performance to block the dissonant din while others snickered and giggled, and at the fade-out came a smattering of hisses and boos, most unusual. I bet Ballet Review gave it lousy grades, too.

Unlike so much else dished up in that spread-eagle decade, classical ballet was sexy without being “sexy.” It didn’t fondle and flaunt itself, peacocking like John Travolta’s Tony on the illuminated disco floor in Saturday Night Fever (authenticating Albert Goldman’s insight in his coffee-table monograph Disco that “the real thrust of disco culture is not toward love of another person but toward love of self—the principal object of desire in this age of closed-circuit, masturbatory vibrator sex”), or steering its hands along its curves as if auctioning itself off, à la the chesty hopeful in A Chorus Line’s T&A number who sang, “Orchestra and balcony/What they want is what cha see.” Both were Bob Fosse’s department. With its stiletto stalkings and snazzy indentations (the bowler-hat cockings, the cool-cat dropped wrists, the pelvic thrusts and assy ripostes), Fosse’s come-on choreography for the TV special Liza with a Z, the musicals Cabaret and Chicago, the revue Dancin’, and the Felliniesque film All That Jazz became the defining theater-cinema dance style of the seventies, sexing everything up with its witch doctor “magic hands.” When Fosse sexed up ballet itself, in a wet-dream fantasy set at the barre in the 1978 Broadway revue Dancin’ between a shy bumpkin and a female classmate, releasing their inhibitions in a tumbling rhapsody of toes-pointed crotch-splits and scuba-diving cunnilingus, the only place I wanted to dive was under my seat. The worst lewd idea Fosse ever had (to be fair, he had loads of good lewd ideas too), it unwrapped like a Penthouse letter to the editor brought to purple fruition. It