BALLET
603
Niels Kehlet, a wonderfully electric leaper, is fortunate ' enough to
have the wrong kind of face and body for the Don Jose contest; all he
can do therefore is dance as energetically as possible, so he becomes the
most interesting person on the stage much of the time. The company has
several other fairly good men, with an easy and open style, though no
noticeable brillance. Among the many lovely girls I saw, only Lise La
Cour had real distinction.
Looking at the Bolshoi and the Royal Danish Ballet, not to mention
the inferior American Ballet, reminded me that some years ago during a
lecture-demonstration at Amherst College Balanchine said something
like this: "We are the best. Everybody goes to England and Russia to
see the ballet but nobody comes to New York. But we are the best."
This has its share of the inscrutability of a characteristic Balanchine
utterance-very few people in fact go to England and Russia just for that
reason, but a lot of us come to New York more often than we can really
afford to see the New York City Ballet-and yet one could see what
Balanchine meant. For the fact is that the New York City Ballet hasn't–
except in one or two quarters-been quite fully enough praised for
its dancing. There has been plenty of praise, but there has also been
a hangover from the days long ago when it was legitimate to say that
one went to see Balanchine's company mainly for the authoratative perfor–
mances of his great ballets, and only occasionally for a great perfor–
mance by a great dancer. Things are different now. The New York City
Ballet has five or six dancers who are unsurpassed in the world and
who form a lineup that is unequalled. I am thinking of Verdy, Farrell,
Kent, Paul, McBride and Villella-I wish I had space to describe these
marvelous dancers in detail. All I can do as a substitute is to second
Balanchine's advice: go to New York to see the best company.
The season, as my discussion has shown, was chiefly interesting in that
it gave us this opportunity to compare the dancing styles of some famous
companies. The new ballets were mostly a disappointment. Balanchine's
Variations,
probably a major work, resembles
Episodes
and
Movements
in style, but I couldn't catch its special quality at a single viewing and
I can offer only first impressions. The opening section seemed fairly
routine; the middle section offered ingenious acrobatic workouts for the
men but seemed lightweight in feeling; Farrell's very interesting solo is
related to her third-act solo in
Don Quixote
though again I couldn't see
its special quality. But
Variations
was distinctly a piece I wanted to see
again, whereas his other new piece, the Brahms-Schonberg, wasn't-I saw
it twice to check. The first two movements, with dreary music giving
Balanchine nothing to work with, were a complete washout: for the first
time in my experience Balanchine has failed to make the entrances and
