The Greening of U.S. Classic Ballet.

THIRTY YEARS AGO there was a bestseller called The Greening of America. It was, I suspect, one of those bestsellers more bought than read--it must have greened many a bookshelf in its day--which was a pity, because its environmental lesson and warning were, and probably still are, particularly pertinent. I am recalling this because in the thirty-five years since I left Britain and came to live and work in the United States, America has had another greening--the greening of American classic ballet. Look on this picture, as Hamlet says, and then on that.

In 1965, there were quite a few significant modern dance companies in the United States. Many of the more important, incidentally, were based in New York, notably Martha Graham, Jose Limon, Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Alvin Ailey, Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis, and Erick Hawkins. But there were many other smaller troupes, too invidious to single out while too numerous to name. Modern dance was alive and well in the United States, the country that virtually invented it, and was confidently readying itself, via the Judson Church movement, for the assimilation of postmodern dance, a development that had yet to find its name.

That incredible variety in modern dance, which thirty-five years ago was virtually nonexistent in the rest of the world, was one of the two reasons I decided to throw my lot in with American dance and immigrate. The other reason was New York City Ballet. But although Balanchine could say, with a certain brash hauteur, that America, not Russia, was "the home of classic ballet," the United States at that time still had, unequivocally, only three major professional troupes and two rather more shakily established.

There was, of course, New York City Ballet, in exceptional shape; American Ballet Theatre, just starting to pull itself out of a ten-year period of the doldrums; and, then markedly of less importance, but in historic fact the oldest of the three, San Francisco Ballet. Rather smaller and less firmly established, there was the Harkness Ballet, founded by patroness Rebekah Harkness, which had made its debut in Europe that year, and the Joffrey Ballet, which had just re-formed after radical reorganization following the loss of a subsidy from that same Mrs. Harkness. And looking northward, there were no fewer than three small professional companies in Canada.

But it was a bleak picture compared with Europe--although it was a picture already changing, through something then called regional ballet. Across the country, an entire network of companies that were semi-professional was arising, in something of the manner and pattern of American civic theaters. They were always based on the local dance school, and some had arisen largely through their Christmas productions of The Nutcracker, which after Balanchine's production for City Ballet in 1954, began to play a large part in the proliferation of American dance.

The role of the regional ballet movement--which held festivals all over the country and in Canada--can hardly be overestimated. And the standards were sometimes gratifyingly high. In 1965, for example, the English balletmaster David Blair mounted a complete U.S. production of the Petipa/Ivanov Swan Lake for Dorothy Alexander's Atlanta Civic Ballet, following it up the next year with the complete Petipa The Sleeping Beauty.

Things were indeed changing. Let's quote Doris Hering, one of Dance Magazine's founding mothers and the authority on American regional dance, writing in the Oxford International Encyclopedia of Dance: "Whereas there had been virtually no professional dance companies outside New York City in the early 1960s, by the 1990s there were approximately fifty fully professional, plus another two hundred that were engaged in serving their communities on substantial technical and creative levels." Bingo! Look on this picture and on that!

Why? There were many reasons. We can name just some: the general economic climate, the national spread of culture, the specific ballet boom, prompted largely by fashion and the likes of Fonteyn and Nureyev and, of course, the Ford Foundation. On December 16, 1963, Ford announced a $7,756,000 program spread over ten years "to strengthen professional ballet in the United States." The money went to the School of American Ballet, City Ballet itself, and a whole group of institutions outside of New York, all of them with some kind of close connection with Balanchine. It was a brilliantly unfair move and has paid off handsomely. Classical ballet now flourishes from sea to shining sea--at times, usually due to local boards and/or inadequate funding, there are ripples, even the occasional tidal wave, but by and large we have the greatest national ballet culture in the world. All due to three wise men of Gotham: Balanchine, the Ford Foundation's W. McNeil Lowry and his co-conspirator, Lincoln Kirstein.

This year alone I note that, apart from City Ballet and ABT, I have seen ten American major classical companies: Ballet Tech, The Boston Ballet, Colorado Ballet, Dance Theatre of Harlem, Houston Ballet, The Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, Miami City Ballet, Pennsylvania Ballet, San Francisco Ballet and The Suzanne Farrell Ballet. These are just a few, almost a sprinkling, of our really terrific companies. And most of these have, in fact, benefited from the Ford/Balanchine axis, while some owe their very existence to it.

The Boston and Pennsylvania companies are the best examples because they gave their first performances in 1963, thanks to a healthy chunk of seed money from the Ford Foundation. The Boston had its origins in the school and regional company led by E. Virginia Williams, while the Pennsylvania company came from the school of Barbara Weisberger. Williams and Weisberger were both colleagues of Balanchine.

Recently, I have seen the Philadelphia troupe, now directed by Roy Kaiser, in both John Cranko's Romeo and Juliet and Balanchine's Serenade, and was very much impressed by their rising standards, while the Boston company, currently run by Anna-Made Holmes, has developed into one of the five leading classical companies in the country. Holmes has resigned as artistic director and is leaving next year-the company has selected Maina Gielgud as her successor [see Presstime News in Dance Magazine, November 2000]--yet she is proving one the nimblest lame ducks in history.

This year the company has already offered a fascinating double bill by Daniel Pelzig and Christopher Wheeldon, Boston's newly appointed principal guest choreographer, while in December Holmes presented a new staging of Petipa's La Bayadere, which, with her earlier production of Le Corsaire, neatly bookends her very distinguished Boston tenure.

And all this has happened during my thirty-five years of working in American dance. It certainly boggles my mind, and it deserves, I think, to boggle yours.

Senior editor Clive Barnes, who covers dance and theater for the New York Post, has contributed to Dance Magazine since 1956.