Sometimes we like things loose, unstructured, in blue jeans. Sometimes we like things precise, brilliant, and entrancing. This is the heart of ballet. By all logical assumptions, it should never have survived the French Revolution. An art form developed out of... [more]

Sometimes we like things loose, unstructured, in blue jeans. Sometimes we like things precise, brilliant, and entrancing. This is the heart of ballet. By all logical assumptions, it should never have survived the French Revolution. An art form developed out of the formality of court life, it boasts an almost mathematical vocabulary of steps and gestures. Ballet in the past few hundred years has both evolved and remained still. Any city worth its charter supports a ballet company and at least one annual production of "The Nutcracker." Productions of nineteenth-century classics have been a staple of "high" culture to a small but devoted audience. But the art form has witnessed some radical experimentation, as well. One of the half- dozen verifiable geniuses of the twentieth century, George Balanchine, blew the dust off traditional ballet. He made generous use of composers such as Bruckner, Gershwin, and Stravinsky. Balanchine realized, like all great choreographers, that the true soul of ballet is music. What gives the dancing its most visceral pleasures are the dancers, their athleticism evidence of what perfection the human body is capable of, their grace a sublime, physical representation of the music itself. The intellectual thrill of ballet lies in watching the playing out of patterns, the arresting power of a solo, the corps of 50 dancers moving on pointe in grandiose unison. When all the elements work together, we leave the theater with our postures considerably improved. [show less]