Reviews of the Century.

Great Moments from the pages Dance Magazine

These excerpts from historic Dance Magazine reviews retain their original spelling and punctuation. Photos are from Dance Magazine Archives unless otherwise noted.

In 1970 Jean Gordon became publisher and William Como editor of the magazine. Doris Hering was appointed associate editor and principal critic.

1974

OCTOBER 1974 LINCOLN CENTER NEW YORK CITY THE NIGHT THEY DANCED "GISELLE" BY OLGA MAYNARD

Of all the performances danced by American Ballet Theatre and the National Ballet of Canada at Lincoln Center, none were more memorable than two Giselles--the Giselle in which [Mikhail] Baryshnikov made an American debut, partnering [Natalia] Makarova, with Cynthia Gregory as Myrtha, and the Giselle in which Veronica Tennant took the title role, with [Rudolf] Nureyev as Albrecht, and Vanessa Harwood as Queen of the Wilis. These are dates for the history books.

July 27, 1974: ... Thunder broke in the theater at Baryshnikov's entrance. It rolled in peal after peal of applause throughout the ballet and for twenty-seven minutes after. When Baryshnikov executed diagonal brises voles (flying brises, quatrieme demie position) and twice appeared to be about to fly off the stage, the crowd roared as it does at Madison Square Garden....

Since his defection in Toronto in July, the Russian danseur had been making headlines in the press--his fame was such that ... New York cabbies knew Baryshnikov's name. Hysterical fans (who had seen him in Canada) declared Baryshnikov the greatest dancer who had ever lived.... The test of his genius was to come in Giselle, before a knowledgeable audience at State Theater.

Baryshnikov's form is so pure that he might be the exposition of a classroom manual, aloof from the astonished gaze, insensible to the raptures of the common throng. His placement is perfect in the most difficult combinations, as when he executes a grande pirouette (about ten complete revolutions) all from a single preparation.... his preparation is almost undetectable, and this gives his allegro steps a magical quality--as though they have happened, rather than as though he has performed them. He finishes every combination with precision and sweetness, as though he had not in the least exerted himself, but could continue indefinitely, even to mounting the air.

Because of his remarkable ballon and his equally remarkable form (the perfection of his movements) Baryshnikov appears, rather eerily, to articulate his steps leisurely in the air, as clearly as he does on the floor.

To me, the most extraordinary aspect of his dancing is its naturalness--Baryshnikov behaves as though it were natural to express emotion, of every sort, in the positions of the classical dance.... This dancing--the steps performed--could be accurately described in the ballet vocabulary but no words will convey the impression that Baryshnikov dancing makes on the eye; he must be seen to be believed.... Baryshnikov shows us that exquisiteness does not emasculate the danseur--on the contrary, it strengthens as it purifies him! If Baryshnikov exerts his good influences on ballet in the West we shall owe him a debt of gratitude....

July 30, 1974: On the following Tuesday, National Ballet [of Canada] presented its opening Giselle at the Met.... ABT's Giselle had been dominated by its Albrecht. An altogether different focus was put on the National's Giselle--here we had the ballet, intact in all its parts, and resolved in its Romantic substance, replete with moral.... The plot was made clear, the identities distinct, their relationships logical; the meaning of the drama was there.

Nureyev's Albrecht is a sensual, prideful, possessive, passionate, contemptuous man, who curbs his temper with an effort when he is crossed--the veins leap to the surface when he clenches his hand to restrain himself in his encounters with Hilarion and with Berthe....

In her delicacy, Tennant's Giselle is alluring, just such a girl to attract a man like Nureyev's Albrecht. He is perversely attracted by her innocence, to see how far it might be perverted. Giselle, in her simplicity, fascinates Albrecht; he, in his worldliness, mesmerizes her. They are drawn to each other like steel to magnet, both will get in deeper than they should dare, and that will be the reason for their destruction....

1975

MARCH 1975 BOLD STROKES AND AIR-BRUSHES BY MOIRA HODGSON

Ballet dancers conceal the effort involved, they give the illusion of lightness and ease, the music adds to the fantasy and the result is a kind of magic.....

But when you get a group of dancers who have all the tricks and artifice of ballet, but can't conceal their heaviness or the strain, the result is insanity.... It's even funnier when the dancers are intensely musical and do the ballets' steps "perfectly."

There are two companies in town that specialize in dance "en travesti." Both capture something of the fantasy of ballet and both are meticulous observers of women. Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, the company that broke away from the original Trockadero Gloxinia Ballet Company, is the superior one because it teaches you something about dance....

APRIL 1975 TAPS AND PSYCHIC TRAPS BY JOAN PIKULA

I love you, Tommy Tune.... Tommy Tune opened a one-man show Atop the Gate on Bleecker Street on February 18, zipping through a series of songs and dances; easy on the nerves, snappy and great fun. There he stood, all six-feet-six skinny, long-limbed inches, topped with a mane of brown hair and ... a lot of personal charm. A great smile. A knack for facial spoofing. And, he can sing.... And.... He really can dance! All those old tap routines. But mainly his own style, something that spins out from his own cosmic center. Nifty.

1976

MAY 1976 BLACK DANCE DOESN'T EXIST BY ZITA ALLEN

Let's get one thing straight once and for all: There really is no such thing as "Black Dance." There are Black choreographers, yes, but no one movement style can be glibly identified as "Black Dance." ... to heap Blacks into one pile is absurd, unfair, damaging and dumb.

RELATED ARTICLE: Timeline of Dance in Theater, TV, and Film

Musical theater at the turn of the century was often a matter of spectacular productions, in which the size of the cast and the transformations of the scenery proved more important at the box office than a show's songs, dances, and book. Throughout the 20th century, the historic musicals of Broadway and later Hollywood were driven by their creators' desire to unite all these elements.

European operetta had brought a formalistic styling to musical theater but the composer was king and the dancers incidental. Jerome Kern's periodically revived Show Boat (1927) achieved much of this unity without tying dance closely to plot development. Carried along on a floodtide of great popular songs, most musicals, including Hollywood "talkies," remained insouciantly episodic until the development of the "book musical" in the 1940s.

With Agnes de Mille and Jerome Robbins, the director choreographer emerged on Broadway to resolve the turf wars over where blocking ended and choreography began. Dance became the dominant element in many shows and a few films (until Hollywood stopped making musicals).

By the 1990s, electronic and computerized special effects had put spectacular scenery back on the Broadway throne again; the great popular composers were dead; revivals were the rule; and dancers were expected to be accomplished singing actors.

* The Black Crook (1866), with its songs, dances, and story, was a precursor of the musical. The producers assured its huge success by hastily hiring an unemployed French ballet troupe to display their limbs in flesh-colored tights. It was revived as late as 1929 by Agnes de Mille.

* Babes in Toyland (1903) by Victor Herbert was typical of the extravagant operettas that dominated musical theater through the 1920s. Rudolf Friml and Sigmund Romberg were Herbert's great rival composers.

* Shuffle Along (1921) broke the color line on Broadway with an all-black cast and an unsegregated audience in every section of the house. The cast included Josephine Baker (left) and Florence Mills. Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake wrote the songs.

1925

* Charlie Chaplin, the most balletic of the great silent film comedians--W.C. Fields muttered he was "the funniest ballet dancer in the world"--brought a form of dance to the screen before the movie musical arrived. This copy of sheet music for a fox-trot demonstrates how his fame had carried over into popular dance.

* The Rockettes (1933) were started by Russell Markert as "The Rockets" but adopted their present name when they set up shop at Radio City Music Hall. They were famed for such precision dance routines as high kicks and collapsing toy soldiers in the annual Christmas show (right).

* 42nd Street (1932), with its squads of synchronized dancers in lush kaleidoscopic patterns, epitomized the simplistic choreography but cinematically dazzling editing that Busby Berkeley perfected for Warner Bros. His movies were the epitome of 1930s art deco effects.

* The Little Colonel (1935) broke another color line by pairing the great Bill "Bojangles" Robinson and the immensely popular child star Shirley Temple for the first time. His light-on-the-toes style was shown to perfection in his stair dance number.

* Top Hat (1936). n their ten movies together, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers set an elegant, sophisticated style in dancing that has never been surpassed. Astaire devised the routines and his collaborator, Hermes Pan, who substituted for Rogers in rehearsal, designed the ensembles. Their RKO films were graced by songs from Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, and Cole Porter.

* On Your Toes (1936), the first of the four Rodgers and Hart shows George Balanchine choreographed, introduced the term "choreographer" to Broadway program credits (Ray Bolger and Tamara Geva are at right in "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue"). Balanchine set technical demands that soon would replace chorus girls with classically trained dancers.

* The Red Shoes (1948). Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's interweaving of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale with a roman a clef about Diaghilev's Ballets Russes was a lushly romantic film that greatly boosted ballet's popularity. The cast included Moira Shearer and Leonide Massine (above) and the Sadler's Wells Ballet.

* Oklahoma! (1943), the first collaboration of Rodgers & Hammersterin, featured Agnes de Mille's pioneering choreography in which plot and dance were further integrated and the "dream ballet" sequence was fully developed. De Mille went on to choreograph "Carousel" (1945), "Allegro" (1947, which she directed), "Brigadoon" (1947), and "Paint Your Wagon" (1951).

1950

* Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) was the last great Hollywood musical with an original score. Michael Kidd's choreography, a randy blend of ballet, jazz, and show dance, made full use of the CinemaScope screen. MGM's powerhouse cast included dancers Marc Platt, Matt Mattox, Jacques d'Amboise, Tommy Rail, and Russ Tamblyn.

* My Fair Lady (1956) was graced by the choreography of Hanya Holm, whose method was not to impose movement on actors but to shape what they could already do. Rex Harrison (at right with, Julie Andrews) became a musical comedy star under her tutelage. Among Holm's other successes were "Kiss Me, Kate" (1948) and "Ballet Ballads" (1948).

* West Side Story (1957), Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Laurents's updating of "Romeo and Juliet," was Jerome Robbins's debut as director-choreographer. His brilliant successes with it, "Gypsy," and "Fiddler on the Roof" paved the way for Gower Champion, Bob Fosse, and Michael Bennett.

* Invitation to the Dance (1957). After his long string of successful movie musicals, Gene Kelly had the clout to make this three-part, pure dance film at MGM in 1952, but the studio delayed its release for five years. A stellar cast included Kelly, Igor Youskevitch (right, with Claire Sombert), Tamara Toumanova, Diana Adams, Caude Bessy, and Tommy Rall.

* The June Taylor Dancers were among the most popular of the pioneering dance troupes on television variety shows in the 1950s, when everything from do-it-yourself rock to ballet could be found. (Early TV, like early talkies, considered dancers excellent subjects.) The Taylor troupe graced "The Jackie Gleason Show" with consistently sophisticated and comic routines.

* Hello, Dolly! (1964) was one of the great triumphs for director-choreographer Gower Champion, whose long career included dancing and choreographing for nightclubs and movies when teamed with his wife Marge. For Carol Channing (right), the role of Dolly Levi was to become a lifetime's employment. Champion's last hit for producer David Merrick, "42nd Street" (1980), opened the night he died.

* Jack Cole did it all for decades, from Denishawn to The Dunes, Broadway to Hollywood. His distinctive choreographic style, a blend of jazz with Asian and African rhythms, was seen in thirty movies, as many concErt pieces, and twenty musicals, including "Kismet" (1953), "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" (1962), and "Man of La Mancha" (1965).

1975

* Public Broadcasting System began telecasting serious dance in the 1970s after commercial TV's infatuation with it cooled. Martha Myers, Emile Ardolino, Merrill Brockway, Judy Kinberg, and Matthew Diamond took the lead in working with choreographers to bring their works to the small screen and their biggest audience ever. Balanchine, shown rehearsing Patricia McBride and Mikhail Baryshnikov in "Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux," even reconceived some works for "Darce in America."

* A Chorus Line (1975) offered dabcers the opportunity not only to act but also, in confessional workshops where they recalled their personal and professional anxieties, to supply the show's plot. Michael Bennett, by editing the sessions, extended the power of the director-choreagrapher on Broadway.

* Dancin' (1978) was Bob Fosse's pure-dance venture, a series of unrelated numbers that had sixteen dancers performing to everything from Bach to Cat Stevens. Tony winner "Fosse" (1999) was a retrospective salute to his work.

* Cats (1982), drawn from T. S. Eliot's lightest verse and choreographed by Gillian Lynne, is the longest running of the spectacular hit shows ("Les Miserables," "Phantom of the Opera") that seem to be playing nonstop in most major cities of the world. The improbable pretext for "Cats"--a contest for entry into cat heaven--should not prevent its running well into the millennium.

* The Turning Point (1977), written by Arthur Laurents and directed by Herbert Ross, duplicated the impact of "The Red Shoes" on ballet when it introduced moviegoers to Mikhail Baryshnikov (shown with Leslie Browne). Ross had enough outtakes of principals from international companies left over to have stocked another film.

* Tommy Tune, after a successful career as a versatile dancer, became a leading director-choreographer with a string of ingenious productions. He is seated--legs apart--with dancers from "Nine" (1982), in which he used an austere white set to adapt Fellini's classic 1963 film, "8 1/2," in a vaguely surrealistic manner.

* The Lion King (1998) is the Disney organization's most successful transformation of one of its animated films into an international stage success, thanks to Julie Taymor's staging and Garth Fagan's choreography. Two ironies: Disney movies have been Hollywood's only successful "musicals" for years, and "King" with its stunning scenery opened at Broadway's restored Amsterdam Theatre, where Florenz Ziegfeld had "glorified the American girl."

* Swan Lake (1998) provided English choreographer Matthew Bourne the opportunity to draw parallels with the current monarchy while giving a surprising contemporary twist to the dance-oriented musical. The prince, dominated by the queen, was tormented by an all-male swan corps--to Tchaikovsky, of course.

2000

* Susan Stroman has choreographed everything from "A Christmas Carol" at Madison Square Garden and the lavish revival of "Show Boat" to the more intimate "Crazy for You" (with Harry Groener, right), collecting awards along the way. It will be fascinating to follow her career into the next millennium.