Miami City Ballet has launched a blog on its newly updated website. Check it out at MCB Blog

There is an interesting entry on the bog, "Edward at the podium", the speech he gave at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

I highly recommend the long fifth paragraph on "what dancing taught me":

http://www.miamicityballet.org/blog/

(Scroll down for the speech.)

For instance:



"Gestures of integrity." Maybe it's me, but I hear here thought similar to Farrell's: "You can speak a lie, but the body doesn't lie."

EV includes a remarkable and long tribute to Dance itself. Especially classical ballet, and all the meaning that classicism imparts to physical movement. For example: "I discovered a mind-driven physicality -- dance." Ballet "made sense of abstract gesture." "I learned the ability to speak in silence ... how to swim in time with designated gestures of integrity."

EV's language reveals just how much of a philosophical Idealist Balanchine was, and EV himself has become. The talk is permeated with Idealism, the view (more or less) that the physical world gains its significance -- its "reality -- from what or mind and consciousness can make of it. To an Idealist, the highest form of physical reality is one which enriches and expands mind, perception, and awareness of life, and gives it meaning.

EV's dismissal of "tricks," his unwillingness to claim to much for the technical bravura aspects of his own dance career, are related to this.

He learned a lot more than dancing from Balanchine.

I think Villella may have picked up and made his own some of what people refer to -- some dismissively, I'm afraid -- as
Balanchine's "mysticism": "This is not the real world. The real world is somewhere else." In other words, this is the world of appearances, which finds its meaning elsewhere.