1/21/2018 Lincoln Center 50 Years On – An Experiment In American Dance?

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Deborah Jowitt on bodies in motion

Lincoln Center 50 Years On – An Experiment In American

Dance?
February 15, 2017 by mclennan

Reading Joseph Horowitz’s essay, “Bing, Bernstein, Balanchine,” and then re-reading the passages that
apply to ballet at Lincoln Center, I’m suddenly thrown back to the 1960s and a different view of tradition
and innovation. As a modern dancer in New York, I welcomed the founding of the New York State Council
on the Arts in 1961 and the National Endowment for the Arts in 1965. Would choreographers—or some
of them—be relieved of some of their nancial worries? I had also, like many colleagues, been keeping an
eye on the construction going on at Lincoln Center. We had been told that one of its components would
be a theater for dance, and our speculations predictably ran amok as to its size and mission.

So much for dreams. I was among those New Yorkers who got their rst look at the interior of the New
York State Theater when George Balanchine’s revised Ballet Imperial premiered there in October, 1964.

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1/21/2018 Lincoln Center 50 Years On – An Experiment In American Dance?

Astounded by the grandeur of the New York City Ballet production (and critical of what looked like giant
headlights ornamenting the balconies), I didn’t notice the faulty acoustics that Mr. Horowitz’s remembers
about the ballet in its new home: “The Romantic tapestries of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 2,
glori ed as Balanchine’s ‘Ballet Imperial,’ were reduced toSEARCH
dull parchment.”
THE SITE And,
... in another sense, the
musical aspect of the house wasn’t entirely “ungrateful” to Balanchine’s work; it was he who had secured
an orchestra pit larger than the one planned and he who threatened to bail if he didn’t get it. And this was,
after all, “his” theater.

Other New York City dance companies, however, didn’t give up the hope of performing in the New York
State Theater, and one month after those October presentations, a newly formed organization called
American Dance Theater made its appearance on the new stage, offering works performed by three
dance companies headed by their founders: José Limón, Donald McKayle, and Anna Sokolow.

American Dance Theater aimed to be a repertory company, with an established group of dancers who
could accommodate to the idiosyncratic styles of New York’s modern dance companies. I was one of a
great many dancers auditioning for this alluring enterprise in preparation for its short season in the New
York State Theater (I was one of two women cut from the nalists’ lineup for being too tall; another two,
at the other end of the line, were “too short”). Inevitably, Pearl Lang brought her own dancers, so did
Lucas Hoving, so did Merce Cunningham, so did Alwin Nikolais. Valerie Bettis made an attempt to use
the recruited dancers, so, as I recall, did Sophie Maslow. Led by dancers in Limón’s company, they
certainly appeared in the revival of Doris Humphrey’s Passacaglia.

And that was that for the American Dance Theater: a valiant, unsustainable effort to identify the New
York State Theater as welcoming to other New York City companies beside New York City Ballet (and
possibly to introduce modern dance to a larger audience). The idea of a repertory company that would
present the works of various contemporary choreographers in a theater in which none of them could
afford to perform with their own companies (or could have lled) was admirable. It was also unworkable.
For whatever reason, shared seasons materialize either.

I have not dredged up this bit of history to discount one of Mr. Horowitz’s points: that New York City
Ballet under Balanchine was often more adventurous musically than its Lincoln Center companions, the
Metropolitan Opera or the New York Philharmonic. I write to suggest that radical innovation in dance
doesn’t easily ourish in the grand, large-scale proscenium theaters that successfully house ballet. Paul
Taylor has presented his company’s annual season in the former New York State Theater in recent years
and is about to present another, but he couldn’t have afforded to do that in decades past. However,
Balanchine’s successor, Peter Martins, has acquired works for the New York City Ballet by such greatly
gifted youngish choreographers as Christopher Wheeldon and Alexei Ratmansky, as well as fostering
intriguing ballets by, for example, Justin Peck, who came up through the ranks and still dances in the
company. The company’s Choreographic Institute helps identify and develop other talented young
dancemakers.

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