Ballet for Ford

Ballet dates from the lace-pants centuries, when kings and nobles were its patrons. Modern balletomanes, a tribe with a better-than-average quota of lacy characters, could probably think of likelier patrons of the ballet than Big Business--especially such a big business as Ford Motor Co. Yet at the New York World's Fair, Ford became the ballet's first industrial patron by launching a 17-minute production called A Thousand Times Neigh. A free show, performed twelve times a day in a plushy new $500,000 theatre in the Ford building, the ballet is done (in shifts) by 42 dancers recruited from the American Ballet Caravan of tall, intense Balletomane Lincoln Kirstein.

A Thousand Times Neigh was conceived by the designer of the Ford exhibit, Walter Dorwin Teague, who had no difficulty selling it to Edsel Ford. The ballet was written--it has songs and dialogue--by Edward Mabley of the Teague organization, who never once forgot that two men impersonating a horse are always good for a laugh. A Thousand Times Neigh is a Ford's-eye-view of the problems of Dobbin, a $1,000 steed of cloth and leather, with movable eyes, ears, lips, jaws, tail. Horse-players: Vladimir Vassilieff, Kari Karnikovski. From 1903 to the present, Dobbin foots it featly while such top-notch Caravan dancers as Marie Jeanne and Nicki Magallanes mime the rise of the Ford--often on the toes of their ballet slippers. The music of NBC Staff Composer Tom Bennett, canned on a sound track for the first time in ballet, accompanies them tunefully, if not with great distinction. At the end, Dobbin is reconciled to the horseless carriage: the Ford has relieved him of a lot of work. A chorus sings:

Would he go back to an earlier day,

Before the motor car?

Neigh, neigh, a thousand times neigh!

And a horse-laugh--HAR, HAR, HAR!

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