Volume 41, Number 7 · April 7, 1994
The Long Goodbye
By Joan Acocella
New York City Ballet's 'Balanchine Celebration' September 1994)
directed by Matthew Diamond. produced by Dance in America, Channel 13/WNET
Public Broadcasting System
Because it has no text, ballet dies every day, to be reborn as the next ballet. The sumptuous ballet de cour of Louis XIV was gone by the end of the seventeenth century, but it rematerialized in late nineteenth-century Russia, in The Sleeping Beauty, Marius Petipa's tribute to the grand siècle. Soon The Sleeping Beauty too began dying, under the weight of successive revisions. It was born again—without its fable, but with its spirit, its symbols, its composer (Tchaikovsky) all intact—in Balanchine's 1947 Theme and Variations.
Review, 6374 words
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