Quinquagenary.

Quinquawho? Try quinquagennial, as in the fiftieth anniversary, or the quinquagenarian. We all know that the centennial marks the 100th, and in 1976 we celebrated the bicentennial. And all of us are aware of the millennium rolling inexorably toward us, like a Mack truck. Millennium fever, in fact, has even struck at Dance Magazine where this January we begin our monthly series "the century of dance," a centenary celebration.

But what do these "ennials" and "enniums" really mean? Because, technically, we passed by the millennium without much fanfare about three years ago (calendar time, as many of us measure it in the West, is tied to an event that probably took place in 4 B.C.). You could say that the hype is hot air. But it isn't. Anniversaries require that we stand still, take stock, and sometimes say, "Hey, a job well done!" We all need to do this now and then.

So. New York City Ballet is celebrating its golden (or quinquagennial or fiftieth) anniversary this month, with a swarm of events beginning November 22 with an alumni reunion. On November 24, the company will duplicate the October 11, 1948, opening night performance, its first as New York City Ballet: Concerto Barocco, Symphony in C, and Orpheus, three cornerstone works in the astonishing Balanchine repertoire (see Presstime News, page 34).

Of course, NYCB's isn't the only anniversary this season. Ailey will be dazzling us on their 40th (or quadringenarian) in December, and we've reported in these pages the Icelandic Ballet's 25th (see page 35), the Cuban National Ballet's 50th (see page 40), San Francisco Ballet's 65th, the Atlanta Ballet's 70th, and the Royal Swedish Ballet's 225th. The Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, home to the Royal Danish Ballet, is 250. (This is the company Peter Martins, himself now a quinquagenarian, grew up in; see cover and pages 56-59.) But of all the ballet troupes in America today, NYCB is unique in its focus on one extraordinarily influential man, George Balanchine, who created 112 works for the company.

That focus has its roots in the singular mania of Lincoln Kirstein, a visionary and promoter, who brought Balanchine here in 1933 and provided the contacts and money to start a school that would train American dancers in the Russian style in order to feed a professional American ballet company--an absolutely nutty idea, a harebrained hypothesis, a boneheaded belief in its day that has forever affected the subsequent history of dance, theater, design, and music. Everywhere. Forever.

City Ballet, as it has been known from the beginning, today has ninety dancers, making it the largest company in America (ABT has seventy-five), an annual budget of $26 million, and the dancers wear out 10,000 pairs of pointe shoes yearly. Impressive as these statistics are, the journey this company has taken from the earliest days of Ballet Caravan, then Ballet Society, and finally NYCB, is an American adventure like no other (see pages 60-45).

The dance world fifty years ago would be unrecognizable today, if we could go back. Audiences were small and fragmented, devoted to segments of a growing, prejudiced, dysfunctional dance community. The words starving and artist were universally linked--and nobody was bothered much by this inequity. Attitudes in America toward the arts sanctioned memorable terms like egghead and longhair--and much worse for men in ballet, if they were mentioned at all. Funding still depended on old-style patronage, and survival as an artist was very tough. The most recent NEA report on American audiences, released in September, indicates that annual spending on performing arts in 1997 was up to $38.78 per capita, while $24.44 was spent on films, and $23.43 per capita was spent on sports events. It's a sure bet Americans didn't spend their money that way in 1948!

Since those days the appearance of powerful male dancers--Russian dancers such as Nureyev and Baryshnikov--has inspired new generations of men, raising the standards of training for both men and women to today's high level (see pages 70-73). The controversial issue of blacks in ballet, undiscussable in 1948, has at least been addressed, although imperfectly. Content in dance has undergone interesting cycles, from classical-mythical-high-toned creations to stark abstraction to trendy postmodernisms. Balanchine, the trained musician, taught us by example to take dance music seriously, elevating it to the same level onstage as the dancing. Dance and music are equally important today--a fact that some musicians' unions have yet to acknowledge.

Where only a few dance troupes existed in America in 1948, today we have excellent professional companies all across America that can offer artists a living wage and a voice in how things are done. Not surprisingly, many of those American dance companies are today performing Balanchine ballets, managed so capably by the Balanchine Trust, itself a model for the future. Dancers are going back to school in preparation for the career change; illnesses, such as anorexia and AIDS, are no longer taboo topics. Dance medicine was unheard of in 1948, and dance-related injuries often received inadequate care.

City Ballet's quinquagennial anniversary celebrates one of this fading century's greatest contributions to human civilization: Dance. All of us have a stake in that.