Subject: LEISURE & ARTS: New Directions in Dance Date: Published: 1/20/88 114 lines Source: WALL STREET JOURNAL. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc. LEISURE & ARTS: New Directions in Dance --- By Dale Harris NEW YORK -- Nearly five years after the death of George Balanchine, American ballet is still picking up the pieces. The creator of a native classical tradition, Balanchine left a rich legacy -- and not merely to New York City Ballet, the company he and Lincoln Kirstein founded in 1948. American Ballet Theatre under Mikhail Baryshnikov is currently reviving one of the choreographer's central masterpieces, "Ballet Imperial" (also known as "Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2"). From such key Balanchine works, in fact, many organizations in this country have taken their creative bearings -- among them, Dance Theater of Harlem, Northwest Pacific Ballet, Tulsa Civic Ballet, Fort Worth Ballet. What "Les Sylphides" and "Swan Lake, Act II" were 40 years ago, "Concerto Barocco" and "Agon" are today: a means of training dancers in the fundamentals of the classical style and audiences in standards of artistic excellence. While this patrimony is likely to be a source of aesthetic nourishment for decades to come, it nevertheless cannot furnish models for the making of new ballets. At present, the repertoires of America's companies are full of Balanchine clones, well-meaning but lackluster works that copy his style and ignore the artistic imperatives of which that style is the natural expression. In such pieces, at once plotless and pointless, the choreography doggedly reflects the structure and mood of the music. Whether the composer is Chopin, Messager, Vivaldi, Stravinsky, Bach, Scarlatti, Carl Nielsen, the results are essentially the same: anonymous and predictable. What young choreographers need to learn from Balanchine's example is that nothing of interest can ever come from simply appropriating the manner of one's forerunners. In works like "Ballet Imperial," Balanchine followed the precepts of Marius Petipa, but he extended the technical range of the 19th-century choreographer's graceful, leisurely classicism and endowed it with heroic speed and daring. Better than any of his contemporaries, Balanchine knew that, in dance, stasis equals decline. Throughout his career, he sought to rejuvenate classical ballet, not by using it to present daring literary themes, but by reconceiving its vocabulary and style -- for which reason his works offered startling revelations about the resources of the human body. Without fresh insights of this kind from today's choreographers, ballet in the U. S. must surely succumb to the inanition that has overtaken it in Europe and the Soviet Union. Much about the current situation was clarified by "Dancing for Life," the AIDS benefit staged by Jerome Robbins at New York State Theater last fall. Thirteen of our most prominent companies joined in, raised $1.4 million and demonstrated the sheer variety of American dance, from Balanchine to Mark Morris. It also demonstrated, sometimes painfully, the dubious artistic value of a great part of our dance life. Obviously, there is a big, national audience for anodyne entertainments such as Eliot Feld's "Embraced Waltzes," Alvin Ailey's "A Song For You," Gerald Arpino's "Kettentanz," Laura Dean's "Magnetic" and Martha Graham's "Acts of Light." Nevertheless, the preponderance of such vapid choreography, including Paul Taylor's "Esplanade," made one apprehensive about the future of dance. Not everything on the program, to be sure, was as insubstantial as these: the Merce Cunningham Dance Company offered an excerpt from "Fabrications"; New York City Ballet performed "Theme and Variations" from Balanchine's "Divertimento No. 15"; Dance Theater of Harlem presented the second movement of "Concerto Barocco"; American Ballet Theatre gave a sampling of Mark Morris's witty work-in-progress, "Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes"; Twyla Tharp and Dancers were seen in two sections of "Eight Jelly Rolls"; and Sylvain Lafortune and Rick Michalek performed the impressive male duet adagio from Lar Lubovich's otherwise unremarkable "Concerto Six Twenty-Two." To close the evening, New York City Ballet, ABT, Dance Theater of Harlem and the Joffrey Ballet joined forces in the exhilarating finale of Balanchine's "Symphony in C. " Notwithstanding such pleasures, the lesson was clear: Apart from Balanchine, the only signs of creative life were to be found in the post-modernist works of Merce Cunningham, Mark Morris and Twyla Tharp. Like Balanchine, all of them demonstrate a conviction that, to be of value, dance must extend our capacity to see. It is hard to think of any purely balletic choreographer today who possesses either the personal vision such an aim demands or the talent to realize it effectively. Finally, the news has got around. American Ballet Theatre, aware of the situation for some time, has courageously commissioned new pieces from Twyla Tharp, David Gordon, Karole Armitage and now Mark Morris. New York City Ballet, too, is about to move. Next April, it will present a festival of American music, to be staged by a variety of outsiders, including several post-modernists. Actually, the company embraced the future back in 1984, when Jerome Robbins invited Twyla Tharp to collaborate with him on what turned out to be the thrilling "Brahms-Handel." From this encounter with an innovative classicist, however, the administration seems to have drawn back in fear. Now it is going after choreographers less likely to threaten its view of ballet. Whatever the outcome, the festival is an irrefutable sign that a new phase in American dance is upon us. [This article is made available here by Dow Jones Co. for the personal and non-commercial use of callers to this bbs, in the hope that it will be of some help to those who are suffering from the disease and others who are seeking to help them.]