Submitted by Sir Joshua, Nov 24, 2006 09:26

Even though connected to a school (SAB) City Ballet has a very small pool of high talent to work with. Why is this? I suppose it goes back to Balanchine's obsession with his ballets being the star and not working with 'stars' as we know the term. Balanchine was a genius. But like all geniuss only about 25% of his work is great. Fifty per-cent is mediochre, and twenty-five per-cent should be forgotten. We must remember that his position forced him to crank out a new ballet just about every month and consequently the proteen gets a bit thin.

NYCB dancers, however, get 'spent' pretty quickly. The teaching at the school has dropped noticably since the teachers Balanchine hand picked (Danilova, Stanley Williams, Andre Kramarevsky, etc.) have died and retired dancers have taken their places. The replacements lack the training and ingrained disciplin their forebears drilled into the first generations of SAB graduates. Peter Martins has to slap his teaching staff back into shape before the company is going to pick itself up from the tedium they have been in for the past 10+ years. If City Ballet didn't get State Theatre for $1. per year they would be history by now.

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