I know it's a long standing issue that ABT has a problem with artistic direction if only because dancers and critics keep harping on it over the decades. From Gelsey Kirkland's memoir twenty two years ago to Alistair Macauley's seasonal review last month in the NY Times, ABT's lack of artistic vision keeps coming up. I don't know why anyone complains about a situation that has never been an issue, for ABT doesn't pretend to be a dance company; therefore, it doesn't need artistic vision or direction.

ABT has always marketed itself on the star system, not the company system, offering great international--not American--dancers to headline tonight's ballet. The ballet choreography and overall company quality both become irrelevant, probably because management thinks it too difficult to achieve financially and artistically. They must fill 4,000 seats for ten weeks every year with a limited repetory, and great international stars attract balletomanes on a long-term basis more effectively than anything else. What's key about the star system is that people will pay to see stars in anything regardless of performance quality. You can bank on it.

So we get Erik Bruhn and Carla Fracci, Mikail Baryshnikov and Natalia Makarova, ad infinitum. Indeed, I believe two-thids of ABT's current lineup of soloists and principal dancers are foreigners, and the company even lists their legal firm specializing in immigration issues on their website! Talk about outreach. In Russia and France, their companies are bastions of national dance culture, and they each have distinctive styles that arise out of that culture. ABT management must have realized that there isn't enough interest at home to develop enough first rate ballet dancers, so they, like the Metropolitan Opera, resort to being a "headliner" venue instead. And they get to stop worrying about artistic vision. "Variety" is the marketing term.

1-Wasn't NYCB originally created to counteract all of the above...?
and if so...
2-Did they succeed...?

1 - Yes
2 - Yes, IMHO

Balanchine provided some two dozen masterpieces (and 400 other ballets) to his company on which to base both repertory and style, whereas ABT decided to stick with classical, for which hardly anyone has been choreographing more ballets except the English (Ashton, Macmillan, etc.)

ABT could never find a great choreographer on which to build a house style, I guess, and so they embraced the past. I don't know of any American choreographers who work in the classical style; they've chosen modern or neoclassical.

Well, NYCB was founded on a different artistic precept, but certainly not to counteract Ballet Theatre. Ballet Theater came about in 1940; The first incarnation of NYCB was several years before that and NYCB itself was formed in 1948.

Back to the original question - I think ABT likes to consider itself more than a vehicle for stars - it certainly likes to advertise itself as "America's ballet company." And as long as it does so, we have the right to measure them by their artistic output. If the company doesn't want to produce great choreography, fine, you can't wish a great choreographer into being. But for the company to make third-rate productions of the classics the backbone of its repertory and then bill itself as America's ballet company? Sorry. There's no excuse. I'll cut ABT far more slack when they clean up their classics.

I'll have to quibble with that. ABT, in its Ballet Theatre days, was not based on the star system but on presenting a repertory of vibrant, new, ballets by choreographers from America (Robbins and De Mille, Eugene Loring, et al.) as well as England (Antony Tudor) and Russia (Mikhail Fokine and Leonide Massine, among others).

I'm not sure what you mean by "doesn't pretend to be a dance company," but I think ABT has always considered itself a ballet company. It has also promoted American stars at different periods -- when there are American dancers who measure up to international standard (snowballs down, please ) The company was very proud of Cynthia Gregory and Fernando Bujones, to name two. I'll leave it for atm to come in and tell us about the first generation of American stars.

I agree with the criticism of ABT's productions, but I think a lot of the people who are complaining are doing so because they're comparing the current company to past glories.

I don't know what their mission statement is, if they have one, but perhaps they are essentially doing the "American" approach... ie taking people from everywhere, as we do in America. putting on a range of performance themes, not focusing on a narrow genre.

American baseball has players from all over who make the grade, though baseball was born here. In a sense I can see that ABT wants to be good at all things ballet and dance, a smörgåsbord, the classics, international star power, a basic repertory, some new pieces and put on a traveling "act" around the country and the world. Perhaps they are good at lots and great at nothing.

I think this may be a uniquely American approach to this art form as the dance genre is both founded in classical roots and infused with newer artistic efforts. ABT sees itself as fashioning a creative approach to a ballet company. They make room for artists and perhaps less room for classical, technical historically driven performers. And they, as most American arts endeavors must market themselves to a wide audience because there is no way to fill the house is they parked themselves in one niche and excelled.

They are somewhat all things ballet/dance to all people and all can find something to love about them and somethings to not love. In the end if they can inspire people, keep the entire genre alive, their approach may ultimately prove clever. If the narrow focused approaches are not economically viable, we may not have any dance/ballet companies at all in this country.

Just a thought.

I think it was Arlene Croce who described ABT as a dance entertainment company, by which she probably meant that commercial interests took precedent over artistic concerns--hence, the reliance on paying top dollar for headliners and letting all else take a back seat. It was what Baryshnikov was referring to when he said that NYC Ballet was the most ethical company he had been with.

ABT does dance classical ballet, but have never settled on a house style of instruction or repertoire. And their productions vary in quality significantly as a result. Too many people aiming at different targets.

As for American versus international ballet stars--I agree that not enough Americans choose to study ballet for cultural reasons but also financial reasons: careers are short and poorly paid compared to athletic and other entertainment professions.

I get a sense that a point being made here is that the AD issue isn't all that important since ABT really isn't a ballet company, its choreography merely a vehicle for foreign stars and its dancers mere background for them. Yet, going back to that end-of-season Alastair Macaulay summation, I find it to be very pro-ABT and very anti-AD. The critic spends a lot of space on Sleeping Beauty, I think because it most graphically illustrates the problems with the artistic side of Kevin McKenzie's direction.
Mr. Macaulay, by the way, prefered what he saw to what he'd just seen The Royal Ballet do with the same ballet. And he says "the dancing at corps level shows a shared understanding of classical style that comes out of more than rehearsals alone: the fragrance and sparkle of the steps, beaming through, express a whole ethos. At soloist level the dancing is often more distinctive yet." Sounds to me like there're some pretty good home team dancers here, not just scenery to back star leads. And I, and others too, found much to admire in ABT's corps in Bayadere. Credit for this was given to Natalia Makarova, here to refresh her work's performances. And no doubt that underscores the point. This IS a company of REAL dancers, with true esprit de corps, just give them artistic direction and they will excel.
The problems lie with artistic choices. Often poor, "third class", productions of the classics. I remember the earliest performances of Mr. McKenzie's Swan Lake, right in the middle of White Swan he'd inserted an upbeat, virtuosic celebratory leaping solo for the Prince, after all "it's about him, she's just a bird." But, as with many early failings with his Sleeping Beauty, the AD was willing to make corrections. Yet so many gross artistic miscues ought not to have been there in the first place. Moreover, too much of the too little new choreography that find its way onto the Met stage just plain fails.
It is hard to give Mr. MeKenzie a passing grade for the A part of AD. But for the D part, it may be another story. For one, he has averted the very real threats of financial failure. And, at least as pointed out elsewhere on this Forum by an outside insider, Nina Ananiashvili, relations between dancers and administration are civilized, and there is a great sense of family about the company. Not irrelevant considerations at all. So what we do have is a dance community of really fine dancers, who can with coaching and artistic direction dance finely. And people are getting paid. For me, all we need is someone who can see and impose what is right for the classics. There's a darn good company just waiting to dance.
Oh, and America does produce some pretty great dancers, it is just that most of them, but not all, are across the plaza and across the country.
To next year!

Glamorous.

One huge difference between ABT and NYCB is that Balanchine said to Kirstein "but first a school". Therein lies a crucital difference in the 2 companies. NYCB builds from within, ABT does not.

Those early years of Ballet Theatre were truly marvelous...we were insulated then---the English hadn't arrived with their evening long ballets and the only Russians we saw were the grainy film versions. I suppose I still 'rue-the-day' when we were invaded! I remember when ABT was planning the Makarova Bayadere---and I wrote them a letter objecting to the million dollars they were spending on 'this chestnut'....these ballets should have been left to the Europeans.....the closest thing we have now of the perfume of the old Ballet Theatre---is Paul Taylor; the wit and drama can still be sniffed...and our 'American' dancers were top drawer---we had Hightower, Kaye and Alonso (yes, I have always considered Alonso an American dancer) who more than held their own against Markova, Toumanova and Riabouchinska; unfortunately I wish I could say the same for today's ABT principals.

Just to clarify: shoud we not have a ballet company that have a classical repertoire but wait for Kirov and Bolshoi and Royal to give us Swan Lake and Giselle, my two favorite ballets?

What about Baryshnikov, Makarova, Julio Bocca, Alessandra Ferri, Nina Ananiashvili, Malakhov, Carreno, Corella, Gomez and so many others - who spent their entire ballet career on the American soil? I think this view should be very discouraging for them all. How sad. All these dancers spoke of their love of ABT and American Audiences.

To develop ballet in America at a minimum means that America's national ballet company should have a majority of its principals and soloists Americans. ABT's foreign hiring policy has communicated to American dancers one thing: they aren't good enough for national recognition, which has done more to impede ballet's attraction to young Americans than anything else.

Which American dancers have ever said they've gotten this message? And there are ABT dancers -- Julie Kent, Susan Jaffe and Ethan Stiefel, just to mention a few recent names -- who have achieved national recognition.

I don't see ABT having a problem this way. If anything, the company "looks like America", which has a long and honorable tradition of welcoming the immigrant and the refugee. Many of the foreign-born artists at ABT have become naturalized, and to discriminate based on national origin is simply abhorrent.

At the very end, ABT TRULY is what US is...a melting pot. What's more american than that...?

I'd love to see more discussion of Printcess's piont about ABT's nver having had a feeder school. This must definitely have had an enormous impact on the company's artistic vision (or lack of one) over the decades.

The lack of a unifying school tradition seems much more important than whether or not dancers were trained in New York City, Arizona, Maryland and South Carolina or Spain, Cuba, Ukraine and Argentina.

Whoa, wait a minute - Ballet Theatre School was around for lotsa years, and then under Baryshnikov, there was the Classical Ballet School, and now there's the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School!

It's never had a School. Not the buildings and the classes, but a School -- a choreographer whose ballets shaped its classical dancing and/or a teaching method that defined the company and gave it a style. Washington School of Ballet was a feeder school for ABT for about 20 years, and there are other schools who've supplied dancers over the years, but it's not the same thing, and First, a School means: if you're going to have a great classical ballet company, you have to have a School. Balanchine was importing hundreds of years of European tradition. All of the great European companies born in the 18th century started with a school, and the company grew from that.

I have to disagree with that definition of "school".

JKO has only been in existence for a few years.

Mel, I'm not going to argue over definitions. What I wrote is not an esoteric, personal definition of School as it's referred to in ballet, but one that critics and historians have used for a very long time. I'm sure you've read it. When Russian critics commented upon the [now] Royal Ballets first visit to Russia, for example, one wrote, "We wondered if they would have a school, the company is so young, but they have an excellent school." She wasn't referring to the RBS, but its technique.

Printscess, yes, JKO has only been in existence for a few years. It isn't that ABT hasn't wanted to have a school. It's always been the poor cousin -- without a theater of its own, without a huge endowment to draw on. They have made, as Mel noted, many attempts to start a school (in all sense of the term) and I hope this one succeeds. A company needs to be able to train dancers to its own standards, to have them dance the way the artistic direction wants them to dance.

Re atm's comment above: In Charles Payne's book on ABT (the big silver coffee table book) he writes about the fight within the company when Lucia Chase decided to stage "Swan Lake" in the 1960s. Robbins and de Mille argued very strenuously against it, saying that it would change the company's aesthetic, really its reason for being. (The company danced "Giselle," "La Sylphide," "Coppelia" then, but the emphasis was on the triple bill, preserving some Ballet/s Russe/s ballets, but the main focus on new creations. But accbob's point -- that we should have a company that does the big classics to our taste and for our dancers and audiences -- is also a good one, and that's the way ABT started to go. (I'd like both )

"Americans" meaning citizenship, either being born with or aquired...?

I can't speak for Gary, but I'm pretty sure he means trained in America. A good example would be the difference between the Delgado sisters in Miami, who were trained in the US, and Carlos Guerra, who was trained in Cuba. It's the same issue at the Royal - or for that matter at Ballet Nacional de Cuba. Style is in the training - which loops back to the earlier discussion.

Not to enter a dispute on the definition of school, merely discussion, but it does not exclusively mean a method, a system, or even a place where a style is inculcated. BT School was an intake point (a "feeder school") for the company, and the company did not use it as a SINGLE-intake point, either. Ballet Russe school was more like that for its record of student placement with the Denham Ballet Russe. Even Joffrey didn't have much of a record of training dancers up from the get-go, and putting them into the company. Denise Jackson is the only Joffrey dancer I can think of who was trained from primary grades at the American Ballet Center. The School of American Ballet is really the only school in NYC attached to a major company which has acted as a single-point supply, and even they have been noted for "skimming", taking high-functioning intermediate students and training them into the Balanchine style after learning the rudiments elsewhere. For quite awhile, they were a "feeder school" for ABT, too, in fact if not intention.

School in the sense of method isn't really found in the major companies in the US. The National Ballet of Canada used to be a pretty dedicated Cecchetti-based place from top to bottom, but no longer. Most schools use the "International" lexicon, freely based on Cecchetti, with interpolations from all over. Even SAB doesn't have a complete method, as it uses the International lexicon instead of having different names for steps to match the distinctive ways they have of doing certain things. I don't know how many dancers in NYCB today are exclusively SAB products, but I suspect that it's fewer than you'd think.

I don't know if such a long-view definition of "school" were in place when it was said, "But first, a school." All we have is little more than a sound bite, and not much of a context of conversation to indicate whether the objective were a freestanding method, or a pragmatic measure for obtaining dancers to dance together.

When talking about style and a living, breathing tradition, perhaps we should use the French word "ecole"? That clearly has broader implications than the American/English word "School," which always suggests bricks and mortar first of all.

I've only seen ABT twice in the past 10 years, but my experience of Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty was not overwhelming.

I'm not talking about the excellent, if not always well cast, leads. I'm talking about the combination of all dance elements in the production. (I assume this is is one of the things that garybruce meant when he used the term "art direction" at the beginning of this thread.)

The Sleeping Beauty, for example, was wonderfully danced by just about everyone on stage. But it was not danced in a a stylistically unified or consistent manner. Nor was it danced in a way that suggested either the the royal setting, the presence of powerful spirits, or the grandeur of the themes. As a package, it looked "nice." It was danced with great technical skill if not with all that much sense of time and place. It was bright. It was snappy. It was youthful. It was, even with extensive editing, rather faithful to the broad outlines of story and music.

Perhaps, on second thought, that IS what "American" style means to most people. For something like SL or SB, I prefer the aesthetic unity still visible in companies operating from and within a sense of "ecole."

P.S.: Thanks, gary, for introducing such a provocative and useful topic. Let the good posts ROLL!

Most students who make it from the beginning levels of SAB to the advanced are not asked to be in NYCB. The majority of the NYCB dancers came in as intermediate- advanced students and are "Balanchinized" for a few years. They arrive at the school at 15 or 16 yrs old and by 18 they are in the company.

Yes, that is my impression, too.

Speaking of the various écoles, it is interesting to note that there are a lot out there, but only three that I can think of directly feed companies, or at least have for some time: the mysterious "French School" of the Paris Opéra, the Vaganova School, and the Bournonville School. The Royal Ballet School is often thought of as a Royal Academy of Dance School, and as well, the National Ballet of Canada. Neither one is. They each have their own proprietary curricula, and even though they enter many RAD candidates to examination, they aren't RAD. Will these schools be long-lived and produce many generations of dancers for their companies? Too soon to tell.

PS. The Cuban School is definitely on the radar, but we'll have to see if it survives Doňa Alicia.

American Ballet Theater definitely started out with resident choreographers and a cutting edge vision for that period in time: early 1940's. Lucia Chase and Oliver Smith brought in Antony Tudor and Agnes de Mille and Mikhail Fokine restaged many of his Diaghilev ballets for them. I personally feel that it is a good thing to have a national company that does the Russian full-length classics especially since many regional ballet companies do them as well. Do we really want to wait for Bolshoi or Kirov tours to see "La Bayadere" or "The Sleeping Beauty" let alone to see Diana Vishneva or Nina Ananiashvili?

Also I think that the very eclecticism of the company is what contrasts it with NYCB and makes it crucially necessary to the ballet scene in this country. The NYCB has programming that when you see it season after season can become stale. The Balanchine and Robbins ballets are classics but their successors as choreographers aren't on the same level. Mr. Gottlieb meet Peter Martins. You had people like Richard Tanner doing a xerox of a xerox of a Balanchine ballet. People coming in for one new Diamond Project work feeling their way and not being invited back. Wheeldon was a great addition for the time he was there. I mean you have the neoclassic tutu work to Tchaikovsky or Mozart, the leotard ballet to Stravinsky or Ligeti and the jazzy Robbins work, etc. The few fun razzle dazzle Balanchine romps like "Stars and Stripes", "Union Jack" or "Western Symphony". Then lesser lights do riffs on that. After a while it can get stale when the real masterpieces have been seen multiple times. (I will admit I am really enjoying NYCB a lot these days due to Bouder, Reichlen, Mearns and old vets like Whelan and Woetzel).

As far as I know, they never had a school in those days and the main victim was the corps which always was very inferior to the New York City Ballet corps de ballet. I believe that Arlene Croce believed that Makarova's work with the corps when she staged "The Kingdom of the Shades" from "Bayadere" in the 1970's transformed the corps and Elena Chernichova under Baryshnikov worked on them too. The corps is nothing to be ashamed of now.

However, ABT currently is in a state of being an international dance boutique displaying international wares without any kind of central dance aesthetic or personal vision. Kevin McKenzie started out with the Joffrey in the seventies and they were famous for curating and restoring old lost ballets by Bronislava Nijinska and Massine and then doing modern stuff by Arpino and others. Plus doing Ashton and Cranko when other U.S. companies weren't. Kevin seems to be following something of a Robert Joffrey template especially during the City Center season with things like "The Green Table". Kevin has borrowed all sorts of classic Cranko, MacMillan and Ashton ballets from the National Ballet of Canada and Royal Ballet. However, there are several things missing here and he has revived as many of the 20th century classics as he can. When it really comes to going out on a limb and doing let's say a Massine, Nijinska, a lost early Balanchine, a lost Ashton, Leo Staats or other such work, he isn't doing much to rescue these pieces. With the death of lots of those Ballets Russes era dancers many of these almost vanished ballets will become unrevivable.

A genius choreographer is another desiderata but almost every company is looking for one nowadays. Also Kevin McKenzie as a stager of the 19th century classics is decidedly a mixed blessing. He was absolutely the wrong person to do "Sleeping Beauty" because he had no sympathy for Petipa's courtly formal style and leisurely abstract dramaturgy. Anna Marie Holmes would have put something presentable up there, especially with a different design team.

Did the lack of School drive ABT's rep in the first place? Is there a specific system that would prepare a dancer for deMille or Tudor, for example, more than any other. (Maybe Cecchetti, at least for the Tudor?) Many of the ABT ballets that have survived over the years required formidable dance-actors, which I think is more emphasized and encouraged than taught.

While there may not be a training academy like RDB, POB, or the Vaganova School in the US or Canada, where children are admitted at an early age and there is an expectation that these are the dancers that will fill the rank of the affiliated company, why would the training at Kirov Academy in DC be that much less of a School, for example? If an Artistic Director wanted to form a coherent style, especially in the corps, there are a number of distinct schools/programs that could be unaffiliated feeders, given the number of trained students each year vying for a small number of contracts.

Interesting points, Helene. At the beginning, ABT, I have read, considered itself a Fokine company -- not quite a school, but at least an attitude. BUT it needed to be eclectic in order to dance Tudor-Robbins-DeMille, and other choreographers. I think this only became a problem when the company started dancing a lot of Petipa. It didn't have its own way (School) of dancing Petipa. KAB has been a feeder school to ABT in the past ten years. I've lost count, but I think they have seven KAB graduates (disclaimer: I teach ballet history at KAB), and it is a Vaganova school (and School), but, as Mme. Vinogradova once said about Michele Wiles, "They have already started to change her," after she had been in the company about a month. The current direction doesn't want that look/style/School. Too extreme? Too European? (That's a defensible point.) I think that's why they're trying again to start a school, and press releases indicate that they're consciously working on defining a classical style -- taking bits from several techniques, as the Royal did when it started.

BT's first members contained a large contingent trained by Mikhail Mordkin. Other sources were SAB (even then!) and various Ballet Russe students. Having a dedicated company in the city your school serves as a big plus; it provides a venue for consumers to view the finished product. The Kirov in DC is a good school, but what company do they fill? The Maryinsky? The Universal? There is no there there when your school is remote from the company.

Corps work was largely the province of the ballet master and/or the regisseur. Dimitri Romanoff was remorseless about "Les Sylphides" - not an eyelash out of place. Other corps as in Giselle were subject to the vagaries of the ballet master schedule and sometimes did not receive the heavyweight supervision needed to achieve "together would be nice!"

Quite a change from when I first saw the company in the early 1970's, where having a European or Russian, or Latin American style sold tickets, at least among the principals. Makarova put on her own shows with Nagy as a tender, thoughtful partner; seeing Fracci and Bruhn in the same roles was like travelling to another continent.


Ironically, ABT is quite big for seven to make an influence, especially if the company is trying to change their style.

For a smaller company, with a corps in the 20-30 range, seven dancers could have a huge influence, especially if the Artistic Director chose those students deliberately for their style and training.

Yes, in Baryshnikov's day they were aiming for a Kirov style and had a Kirov balletmistress to work with the corps. There were a lot of complaints that Baryshhikov had completely changed the company and was trying to turn it into Kirov West. (And a lot of people who were very happy about that.) But now there are dancers from lots of different schools (and Schools )



Yes. The school isn't trying to be an influence. It's just a school -- one of many schools in this country that teach Vaganova. We have graduates in many different companies with many different styles, and I'm sure the others do as well.

I think that the pre-Baryshnikov ABT was proud to dance Tudor ballets "in Tudor," if you think of style as a language, and Robbins ballets in his style, and "Les Sylphides" like Fokine, and "Swan Lake" a la Ivanov. One of the divides between Europeans and Americans on the style question has long been that we criticize them for dancing Balanchine, say, in their own company's style, and they criticize us for not having a style.

And, of course, they HAD Tudor -- and Robbins -- other lesser creators like de Mille -- in the studio. They also had Fokine earlier on -- and people who had learned directly from those who had participated in the original Swan Lakes.

Yes -- and that does help!

Not to make it a competition of any kind, but Harid also has had at least 7 graduates in the various ranks of ABT since 1996. If one scrolls through the bios of the dancers, both American and not, one will find that ABT has a rather large Vaganova influence amongst the ranks.

There were quite a few Vaganova trained and influenced ballet masters and one company teacher at ABT during the Barishnikov years and in the the School of Classical Ballet, the entire faculty was trained in a Soviet ballet program either as dancers, teachers and/or both. During those years an attempt was made to form a school and a uniform schooling.

The question of a school and schooling however has yet to be sustained long enough to produce a generation of dancers to feed into the company since the 1960s. Hopefully they will be able to maintain the existing school long enough to see positive results. It is highly unlikely however that the company will hire students from only their school.

Only time will tell.

I'm of two minds about this. One is that for a ballet like La Bayadere, having 32 perfectly trained Shades that are all sprung from the same School is breathtaking. If you don't believe me see the POB and Kirov dvd's. The ABT will never have that kind of perfect uniformity. Even if they did, say, Symphony in C, their corps de ballet will never look as natural as the NYCB, or even the Kirov, who dance in the style of the School no matter what.
On the other hand, at the ABT there is a feeling of Marco-Polo-esque wonder. When East meets West, North meets South. This kind of meeting of disparate styles has produced some of the greatest partnerships, and it would never happen at companies where everyone is from one School, and Outsiders Not from the School are not welcomed.
For examples of great partnerships that happened when two dancers of disparate Schools met, there's Fracci and Bruhn, Makarova and Nagy, Fonteyn and Nureyev (well they weren't ABT but you get my point), and in more recent times, Bocca and Ferri, Acosta and Rojo, Cojocaru and Kobborg, etc, etc. This year when I saw Marcelo Gomes and Veronika Part dance together, I realized "only at the ABT would this happen." Two dancers from two totally different places and schools, dancing like soulmates.
What I do think could be VASTLY improved with the ABT is the quality of their productions, from Swan Lake to Sleeping Beauty, and their programming/repertoire.

Yes, that is what I was referring to--the ways in which the various dance elements cohere in a single overall vision of ballet. And perhaps the American contribution to ballet may just be our athletic approach to everything--presented with pace and energy but not much sense of tradition or even story context. Given the various schools of thought, any AD should select which would take precedence over the other styles in terms of his company's repertory, instruction and production values. But Kevin McKenzie has been AD of ABT for 18 years, which means the ABT Board of Trustees want this directionless direction or he would be history.

I agree! I think you've nailed the approach -- but I don't think that dancing the 19th century repertory "with pace and energy but not much sense of tradition or even story context" is much to be proud of.

And pardon the personal observation, but I truly believe that McKenzie owes his long tenure at least in part to being a really, REALLY nice guy!

In part, no doubt, but the board must be happy with his product. After a while, in the nature of these things, doesn't a board become the boss' board, anyway?

It should also be noted that ABT rarely takes young corps dancers directly into the company from . . . whatever school/s provided earlier training. ABT II (Formerly Studio Co., formerly ABT II ) serves as a transitional phase where, presumably, the young dancers master whatever stylistic elements the artistic staff demands.

And don't forget, way before all of them, the first "in" BT's partnership, where the Caribbean met Europe: Alonso/Youskevitch.

Are "showcase for stars" and "choreographer's vision" mutually exclusive? Did showcasing blockbuster superstars like Baryshnikov do wonders for the box office but sink the company once Tudor & choreographic company departed? ABT always showcased stars, didn't it? Why has no choreographer been resident since Tharp left? Was Tharp's rehearsal process so expensive that they were loathe to go there again? Why is there no resident choreographer?

It's not the rehearsal process that's so expensive with Tharp, it's Tharp herself. Her fees are just as high as Jerome Robbins'.

Re: Faux Pas' question:

"Do we really want to wait for Bolshoi or Kirov tours to see La Bayadere or Sleeping Beauty?"

A resounding YES from me; along with POB and Royal Ballet they do it a lot better than we do. McKenzie may be a 'really great guy' but lacks imagination in his week (weak??) long programming of the classics. ABT lost their uniqueness when they took the Russian route. I know what has been lost. My early ballet-going was nurtured with the 'triple bill'---ABT, Ballet Russe and NYCB all had 'triple bills'. When the Ballet Russe put on their shoe-string production of Raymonda; it was looked upon as a joke. I am an optimist and I believe there is a lot of choreographic talent out there that begs to be developed, but ABT's priorities are elswehere---another production of Corsaire or Don Q? Fortunately, Tudor, deMille and Robbins worked in a different time--by today's standards they wouldn't have a chance.

ABT went corporate after Baryshnikov left in 1990--during his ten-year tenure he had aggressively introduced new choreographers into the repertory and promoted American dancers to solo and principal positions. After his departure, the ABT Board embarked on a strategy that protected their downside financially. Unless they think their foreign headliner + Russian strategy is a failure, they will continue on the same path. However, given the recent success of their fund raising efforts, that doesn't appear to be in the cards. Perhaps several more "guest artist" debacles like this year's Diana Vishneva (who apparently canceled every appearance) and thinking will change.

The Baryshnikov era repertory was odd, though. On the weekends they did The Classics. During the week, the same small company-within-a-company did modern dance pieces. (Cunningham, Taylor, Tharp, David Gordon, Karole Armitage, etc.) The old ABT rep was pretty much thrown out. Ironically, when McKenzie took over, one of the things he said he wanted to do was to bring back that old rep, and they did a performance of "Three Virgins and a Devil" that pleased even those who'd seen the original. Then things changed. Rethinking? The board? I don't know.

I've been thinking about atm's comment that Tudor, Robbins and DeMille wouldn't have a chance today -- probably that's true. One of the problems with today's Program A, Program B way of doing things is that each new work has to be a Hit. (This is an especial problem for smaller companies who only do four programs a year.) No place to work in a small work. The last one, unless I'm forgetting someone, that had a success there was the late Clark Tippet, who was allowed one work a year, except for the year they couldn't find a place for him. (That was before McKenzie's tenure.)

I hate to bring up the Vishneva "thing" from last season, but I believe she is one of the main marketing tools being the Russian ballerina and someone who got oodles of publicity with her Beauty tour. But she injured herself and was taken out of the line up for the whole season.... except of course the Gala where the money people attend. And they were dodgey about whether she would perform and refused, at least, in word, to exchange tickets where she had been scheduled to perform.

As I stated earlier, Kevin seems to be fashioning the offerings as a bit of the classics ("reinterpreted?") and some new pieces like Thwarp, with dancers from all over the map. I don't mind the mix and match of the companies dancers as they have some good talent, but I would like to see them do some real Petipa and so forth accurately so we can see how it looked when it was created. I haven't been thrilled by the newer stuff, but occasionally it is fun for a change, so long as the main body of work is more classical.

Sleeping Beauty did not wow the critics nor the audiences and if that was an example of "artistic direction", I'd say it was nothing to write home about. Nice try, no cigar.

Just saying.

Oh, it has survived already. Remember that she's been legally blind from a long time ago, so the "thing" has been passed by already to hundreds of others, teachers and dancers, for a while now. Continuity has been basically carried on by some of her most beloved pupils, Mme. Mendez (RIP), Mirtha Pla (RIP) and currently Mme. Araujo and Mme. Bosh-(both Varna winners during the 60's, BTW). This is without counting the long list of principals that still bring the style to their respective current companies out of the island.