Diary of a Dance Connoisseur

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

“Landscape With Moving Figures” (Dance & Movement Press, 162 pages, $37.25) is a rarity in this era of shrinking dance coverage: a collection of lengthy dance essays, each running six pages or more. All were first published by Laura Jacobs between 1995 and 2004 in the New Criterion, where she is chief dance critic. In a many ways, it’s a decade defined for her by absences — it’s a post-Soviet, post-Balanchine, post-Baryshnikov period.

“Landscape” is a slim volume, but what it lacks in heft, it makes up for in density. Ms. Jacobs’s sentences are thick with ideas, and her paragraphs take hairpin turns. This is writing to be consumed in sips, not gulps.

It is also frequently delightful. Ms. Jacobs has a knack for making fine phrases, and she has great powers of description. She can paint a lake or an emerald or a swan in words. She can make you see the tilt of a neck in your mind’s eye.

Like her passion for dance, Ms. Jacobs’s writing is immoderate. A sentence may begin with a lovely image, embroider it three times, and make a sudden leap to a related (but distant) idea. To read these essays is to tag along on the free-associative jaunts of a quick thinker.

Yet the style of writing accurately records the way her mind processes dance — as images and associations simultaneously. No sooner do we get a glimpse of the choreographer Frederick Ashton than we’re off to the races, touching on George Balanchine, Ashton’s homosexuality, épaulement and ballet legs, Anna Pavlova, Edith Sitwell, pointe work, “The Four Temperaments,” the atomic bomb, and Ravel. (That’s three pages.)

Ultimately, Ms. Jacobs emerges as a diarist, a thinker conversing with herself. In “Landscape,” we read over her shoulder while she works out her burning questions about dance.

The essays have many diarylike elements. We learn that she once pasted a picture of Mikhail Baryshnikov on her dorm room wall, and that she thinks American Ballet Theater soloist Veronika Part has “hourglass allure” and “a downy décolletage.” She includes snippets of poetry, history, and ballet scholarship gathered over a lifetime. On dance matters, she is not afraid to quote — among others — her friends, her fellow critics, and her husband.

In the collection’s first few pieces, Ms. Jacobs can sound like a chatty friend at intermission — albeit an exceptionally astute, well-informed, au courant friend. Soon she settles into her best mode: diarist. She allocates more words to each idea, and this refinement works wonders. It allows the reader to better keep pace with her swift flights of imagination and interpolation — and her blunt, no-holdsbarred judgments.

Ms. Jacobs’s judgments come in rapturous forms (Veronika Part is “making bliss of the art once again”) and scathing ones (as in, “It’s time for Mark Morris to bounce out of his sterile utopia and get some damned life back into his dances”). In general, she’s tough to please; even when she praises, reprimands usually lurk in the next paragraph.

The reason for this is that for her, dance is a form with inviolable rules that support cherished ideals, and if you’re going to break a rule, you’d better transcend it in the process. (In sum, if a choreographer wants to throw off narrative, he had better make something on the order of George Balanchine’s “Jewels.”)

Whether one agrees with Ms. Jacobs’s rules are not, she presents them with complete transparency. What emerges in “Landscape with Moving Figures” is almost a taxonomy of her aesthetics. The title itself is an apt reflection of her basic premise. There may be many figures (classical, neoclassical, modern) on many stages, but for her, they’re all in the same landscape — a single dance world.

And for Ms. Jacobs, that dance world is a small tent, and Balanchine is its central pole. There’s room under it for Ashton, Antony Tudor, Paul Taylor, Merce Cunningham, Agnes de Mille, a handful of dancers, and half of Jerome Robbins (the Broadway half). People who have no business being under the tent include Twyla Tharp, Susan Stroman, Mark Morris, Karole Armitage, Bill T. Jones, White Oak-era Baryshnikov, and Robbins’ other (arty) half.

As these lists suggest, what Ms. Jacobs values most about dance is “a sense of theater — the spotlight and the gaslight and the stage as a space without a ceiling, larger than life … art as unshakeable belief.” According to her, when Christopher Wheeldon fails to “animate [a] ballet from the inside,” it’s because “he’s not working metaphorically.”

Not surprisingly, Ms. Jacobs longs for the return of the prima ballerina assoluta, the ballerinas who were “cultivated like pearls or white peacocks or royal roses … trained on the luminous.” Ms. Jacobs finds a precious few ballerinas in her travels, but mostly, the ladies disappoint her. “Even among the most gifted women at City Ballet,” she writes in a 2002 essay, “the dancing has gotten too thin, too divorced from fantasy, coquetry, poetry, love.”

In short, the classical style of dancing that Ms. Jacobs so deeply reveres “is now in jeopardy.” Her ideal of the ballet is the castle these essays are determined to defend. Much of the writing keys into that dramatic state of affairs: the kingdom under siege.

In Ms. Jacobs’s threatened landscape, there is only one figure that never disappoints: Balanchine. In the 30s and 40s, she writes, he “was taking dictation from God (lightning speed, catpaw quiet).” Later, she calls him New York’s “genius, its prize, its lyric lord.”

Balanchine is also Ms. Jacobs’s yardstick. “Balanchine died in 1983,” she writes, “but even when he was alive, it seemed unfair to measure other choreographers against him.”To compare today’s choreographers against Balanchine, she says,”is still more and rather wildly unfair. … And yet, what can we do? There is no escaping Balanchine as a standard.”

No, indeed. If you’ve only got the one landscape, all the moving figures must be judged in relation to each other. Thus she tasks the dancers who carry on Balanchine’s ballets with reanimating his genius, and asks the choreographers left in his wake to find a way to take dictation from the same god.

Of course, most dancers and choreographers don’t measure up, but Ms. Jacobs’s analysis of why and how they fail makes for engaging reading — especially for people who know who “Misha” is and who can readily picture “échappés done with a scissory half turn.”

To some, Ms. Jacobs’s tone of corrective authority may eventually start to feel like a teacher’s busy red pen. But just around the corner, there’s always some perfectly observed moment of beauty to quicken the pulse. Ms. Jacobs is a demanding critic, but she is also a writer of unusual verve. Her provocative collection of essays is both a diary of a turbulent decade in dance and an articulation of her own sharply honed critical perspective.


The New York Sun

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