Laura Jacobs, Cathedral of Ice (in The New Criterion, June 2015)

It's been too slowly dispelled, the Kirstein-Balanchine taboo placed on intense interpretation of the ballets.
Laura Jacobs

Laura Jacobs's fascinating article is a history of Balanchine and Stravinsky's Le Basier de la Fe, and a review of Elizabeth Kendall's Balanchine and the Lost Muse:  Revolution and the Making of a Choreographer, which, as Jacobs says "showed that there existed a wealth of material that no one had thought to look for." (I wrote about Kendall's book on this blog Nov.12,2013). Although I am not one who believes that biography is crucial to an understanding of an artist's work, Balanchine's life can shed a lot of light on his choreography.  But even more crucial is what Jacobs does in her article:  following the path of particular ballets and their  music; Balanchine was continually re-working his ballets and changing the music-- the switching of movements in Serenade is the best-known example.

We are still waiting for Arlene Croce's book about Balanchine, originally scheduled for 2004.  Meanwhile, as Jacobs points out, discussion about Balanchine is expanding:  she mentions Don Daniels in Ballet Review, Jennifer Homans at work on a Balanchine biography (Richard Buckle's biography, published in 1988, was severely cut before it went to press), and Lynn Garafola's conferences on Russian ballet at Barnard.  We do have Croce's useful collections of columns, collected in two volumes, and Charles M. Joseph's Stravinsky and Balanchine, as well as poet Edwin Denby's collection of dance writing (he wrote intelligently in the forties about Balanchine's ballets).

One of the problems that needs to be solved is how to describe Balanchine's choreography so that even those without technical knowledge can understand it.  My initial suggestion is to use ballet terms to whatever extent necessary and to provide detailed references and an extensive glossary of those terms, from attitude to tour jete.