Balanchine's Big Season

The agile, accomplished New York City Ballet, which often dances in practice costumes to spare its skintight finances, shot the works last week on a brash, brassy premiere, Stars and Stripes, set to the marches of John Philip Sousa. The works were well shot, thanks largely to George Balanchine, at 54 not only the world's most prolific choreographer (the Sousa ballet was his 93rd), but its finest.

Beneath a striped canopy, Balanchine marshaled 41 dancers wearing spangled tutus and brass-buttoned coats loaded with a fruit salad of stars, medals and epaulets (famed Costumer Karinska, who traditionally arrives, cavalrylike, just as Balanchine is about to burn, outdid herself by producing the outfits several hours before curtain time). All the dazzle did not glare from the costumes: Ballerina Diana Adams, in a blue, yellow and red drum majorette's rig, led a regiment of girls in high, prancing kicks to the tune of Rifle Regiment; Ringmaster Balanchine had 13 men of the ballet corps performing difficult, double in-the-air turns to Arranger Hershy Kay's combination of Sousa's The Thunderer and The Gladiator.

Showstopper: a wacky session in which tiny Ballerina Melissa Hayden piccoloed about on her toes, and lanky Jacques d'Amboise bounded around in great, oompah leaps to the Liberty Bell and El Capitan marches.

For Choreographer Balanchine, it was the fourth premiere in an amazing nine-week stretch. The first was Square Dance, a whimsical leap between cultures. To the chamber music of Corelli and Vivaldi and the cadenced commands of Square Dance Caller Elisha C. Keeler, dancers executed the disciplined, classic patterns that Balanchine has made a trademark. The mixture was unlikely, but when Keeler had twanged out his last call ("That is all; the dance is ended/ The music is finished; the caller's winded''), audiences cheered the blend of do-si-do and pas de deux.

Next came the hugely complex Agon, Balanchine's danced counterpoint to Stravinsky's brilliant, abstract score (TIME, Dec. 16). Two weeks ago Balanchine presented the elaborately costumed Gounod Symphony, an intricate construction on the French composer's first symphony.

The settings were 19th century and romantic, the tutus were pink and yellow, the dancing poised and beautiful. But Balanchine wove tensions not usually found in such period pastels. Massing dancers in great, wheeling formations, he demanded uncanny accuracy from his corps, succeeded in presenting the audience with hard, precise form through the swaths of tulle.

With a toe-danced hoedown, a flight of several light-years into the abstract, an astringent costume piece and last week's boisterous blast of Fourth of July fireworks, Balanchine accomplished the richest and most varied season of his immensely productive career.

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