But the biggest obstacle to arts education isn't resources; it's tacitly low value placed on arts and humanities when (as we are wont to do) we discuss education in terms of economic productivity. This is a problem Mark Slouka articulated well in last month's Harper's:

We can explain, as Mike Huckabee does, that trimming back funding for the arts would be shortsighted because “experts and futurists warn that the future economy will be driven by the ‘creative class.’” We can cite “numerous studies” affirming that “a student schooled in music improves his or her SAT and ACT scores in math,” and that “creative students are better problem solvers . . . a trait the business world begs for in its workforce.” They’ll see we have some value after all. They’ll let us stay.

So perhaps the most heartening thing about the Kennedy Center announcement is how completely it avoids this type of cheerleading. From the Any Given Child site:

Too often a child's arts education is intermittent and irregular. Unlike other subjects such as math—which is taught sequentially and is offered each year—music, dance, drama and visual art may be taught one year and not the next.

Or we could start teaching math more erratically, a solution that K-8 students could probably rally behind.

Now, again at the Kennedy Center in Washington, her home base, she’s back with another “lost” work of Balanchine’s, or at least part of another work—the “Contrapuntal Blues” pas de deux from Clarinade, which Balanchine made to a Morton Gould score and which featured Benny Goodman on his clarinet. It’s what we call a “novelty,” and like most novelties, it came and went fast. Did it survive the spring 1964 season? If so, not for long.

Balanchine had always incorporated jazz elements in his work—ballets like Concerto Barocco were far more jazz-inflected in their youth than they are today—but Clarinade was an official Jazz Ballet. What Farrell remembers of it and has re-created here is the central pas de deux that she danced back then with Anthony Blum. There were other principals and a corps, but it’s clear from what we see now that there was only one point to Clarinade, and that was Farrell herself. The choreography, except for a few astonishing moments, isn’t particularly interesting: It’s elevated pastiche jazziness with a few echoes of Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, which he would revive for her four years later.

No, the subject of Clarinade isn’t really jazz; it’s the young Farrell. This ballet, Balanchine’s first after the company’s move from the City Center to the State Theater, was only the second work he made on her—less than five months after Meditation and a year before Don Quixote. He isn’t “using” Farrell here, he’s both inventing and defining her. If you saw this pas de deux on any stage anywhere, mounted without her input, you’d still know within seconds that it was a Farrell role: Her unique amplitude and daring—and her unique quirks—are unmistakable. Clarinade is an anthology of Farrellisms—far more important as a missing link in her story than as a lost link in his.

And in Erin Mahoney-Du, she’s found a dancer who makes the connection confidently and convincingly. Mahoney-Du doesn’t hold back (an essential Farrell quality), and she moves—in fact, one of the things this all-Balanchine program reveals is what Farrell is looking for in her dancers, and moving is clearly a high priority. You see it in a young soloist, Matthew Prescott, who was entrusted with the Peter Martins role in Duo Concertant—he’s a charmer with a bouncing blond mop of curls, but what matters about him is that he loves to go, go, go. (He’s at it again in La Valse.) And in La Source, Shannon Parsley, an open and appealing dancer, doesn’t come into her own until her last solo, when she can take off and fly; up till then, she’s constricted and ill at ease.

I’m not sure why Farrell chose to mount La Source, which I don’t remember seeing her in, and which could never have been an obvious vehicle for her talents. Violette Verdy, for whom it was created in 1968, has said, “Clearly it is not Balanchine’s greatest, but it is a moment of incredibly refined French dancing—ornamented, very detailed, with a lot of subtle nuances of charm, femininity, coquetry.” Does that sound like Farrell? No, it sounds like Verdy, and like Gelsey Kirkland, who was also wonderful in it. Farrell’s company approaches it nervously, as if it’s foreign territory. Maybe that was the idea; maybe Farrell, following Balanchine’s lead, is deliberately stretching her dancers by pushing them (and herself) in unlikely directions. But as of now, La Source is dead on the stage, a fallen soufflé.

Duo Concertant, on the other hand, was a brilliant success. Natalia Magnicaballi is a highly finished dancer—she has style, musicality, and she easily takes charge of the stage. (As a bonus, she has beautiful, highly arched feet.) Duo has a casual look, but it isn’t simple; it needs both dash and tenderness; it can’t be solemn. Magnicaballi and Prescott brought home to me more forcefully than any performance I can remember the relationship between Duo and the central pas de deux of Apollo—the playful and touching quality of the young god’s relation to Terpsichore. Farrell herself was glorious in Duo (made for Kay Mazzo), but she hasn’t asked Magnicaballi to imitate her; she’s just made it clear what the ballet is all about.

Finally, the big closer: La Valse. It’s not an easy ballet to stage, partly because the mood of 1951, when it was made, is not easy for young dancers to retrieve today. Ravel’s doom-laden music is always effective, as are Karinska’s famous “New Look” costumes, but the romantic morbidity of the ballet’s story and atmosphere are alien to a postmodern world, in which technique is stressed above everything else. The corps and the demi-soloists attacked the job bravely, but for me, the big question was whether Farrell, who’s so effective at helping good dancers to a higher level, would manage to make something of Alexandra Ansanelli, that perplexing principal from City Ballet, who didn’t fulfilled her promise there and has recently left the company for England’s Royal Ballet. Perhaps given time, the La Valse experiment might work, but as of now it’s a failure.

Ansanelli has based her career on her prettiness and charm, flirting sweetly with the audience. Fine in Susan Stroman, say, and plausible in Coppélia and Harlequinade, but nowhere near enough for core Balanchine.

In La Valse, Ansanelli is totally out of her depth (if she has any). Bright red lipstick and flirtatiousness don’t begin to illuminate this very complicated role, perhaps of all Balanchine roles the one most associated with a particular dancer: No one who saw Tanaquil LeClercq has ever forgotten her—the combination of glamour, danger, elegance, haughtiness; the way she made you understand the death-driven heroine’s complicity in her horrible fate. Other dancers have succeeded in this role, Farrell among them, but it’s not within Ansanelli’s range. She looked like a kid playing at tragedy dressed up in Mommy’s ball gown, even though, ironically, she’s older than LeClercq was in 1951—only 21. But LeClercq was a woman, not a kid, and a great, distinctive dancer. Ansanelli, although she can give pleasing performances, hasn’t lived up to her substantial talent and intelligence, and a few weeks under the influence of Farrell hasn’t made the difference.

Ansanelli, though, isn’t the story of the Suzanne Farrell Ballet, although she’s a symptom of the company’s need for star presences—the estimable Magnicaballi is the closest they come. Farrell is deploying her limited resources carefully and sensibly, but they are limited.

Like Balanchine, she knows how to make do with what she has—patiently developing her current dancers while seizing opportunities as they present themselves. What she needs is time (including more rehearsal time). Meanwhile, it’s fitting that Farrell has given us this all-Balanchine program just a couple of weeks before she’s to be celebrated as one of this year’s Kennedy Center honorees.

We are presently living in—or through—the Year of the Rooster, an apt name for a time in which strutting and crowing have become behavioral imperatives and hallmarks of style. But if we set China aside for a minute, I thought: Why not construct a zodiac specific to the news-dominating fauna of post-postmodern Wall Street finance capitalism? We could have the Year of the Trump, the Year of the Milken, the Year of the Grubman, the Year of the Meriweather, the Year of the Smartest Guys in the Room. So what about this year? Well, how about 2005 as the Year of the Schwarzman?

This has been quite an annus mirabilis for Steve Schwarzman, C.E.O. of the Blackstone Group. A breakout year, you might say. The chairmanship of the Kennedy Center came his way. The splendors of his lifestyle and the glittering pearls of his career were recorded in a long article in the Business section of the Sunday Times. Many saw it as a puff piece; others, this writer included, saw it as an egregious lapse of judgment on the part of the subject. Had I been asked, I would have advised Mr. Schwarzman—whom I barely know, but who seems to me to be a pleasant enough little chap, always well turned out, and with a bright smile for the masses—to forbear. Much better to be a mystery man, a shadowy, discreet puller of strings and pusher of buttons.

The thing is, if one wishes to be taken seriously, one should not be reported in the company of the sort of people for whom serious folk are never at home, the sort found with regularity in what is, for social butterflies, climbers and like-motivated assholes, the kind of schooling ground that the Farallon Islands are for great white sharks: David Patrick Columbia’s New York Social Diary, a monkey house in Prada that anyone with a developed sense of the ridiculous must relish.

But anyone on the way up is entitled to a few mistakes, say I. Which brings me to the two news items that occasioned these reflections.

The first was that Mr. Schwarzman has bought the Water Mill house belonging to Susan (and her late husband Carter) Burden for a reported $34 million, or a mere $1 million less than was received for Asher Durand’s Kindred Spirits by the New York Public Library, on whose board Mr. Schwarzman sits. This is a juxtaposition I need not dwell on, although it may account for the several worried calls I’ve received since the announcement of Mr. Schwarzman’s election to the board of the Frick Collection. Well, we shall just have to see, shan’t we?

Many have been the happy hours I have spent at the “Burden house,” as it will always be known to people with any memory. Its sale marks the closing of an era. Certainly it’s a trophy property worthy of the others in the Schwarzman collection: the big apartment at 740 Park Avenue, a.k.a. “the old Steinberg apartment,” and a house in Palm Beach, also said to be a landmark.

I must say I do find it amusing that this acquisition puts Mr. Schwarzman right around the corner, more or less (in the way Bosnia is right around the corner from Serbia, or the Hatfields lived right around the corner from the McCoys) from Blackstone co-founder Pete Peterson, head of the Council on Foreign Relations, which the same administration that handed Mr. Schwarzman the Kennedy Center plum has marginalized to the point of irrelevance in this nation’s power structure.

What relations are now between the two, I cannot say, but one hears ….

I can’t help thinking of Dante (Purgatorio, XI): Credette Peterson ... tener lo campo, e ora ha Schwarzman il grido. Oh, isn’t it always the way? If they’re not upset about who gets the money, they’re upset about who gets the ink.

Of equal interest was the announcement the other day that Blackstone is raising a buyout fund of $12.5 billion. That’s a lot of money. Where is it coming from? Participants weren’t identified, other than certain funds of the State of New Jersey, but their commitment came to less than 1 percent.

I find this really interesting to speculate about. As I see it, the key word here has to be “China.” Maybe not as an investor going in, but more than likely as a key prospect when it comes to exit strategy. After all, the point of buying something is to sell it: The question is, to whom? Who will be our next Greater Fool? This is the question the shrewdest minds on Wall Street have always asked as they crank up a new scheme.

Well, there are the Chinese, with all those dollars. Haven’t they tried to buy Unocal? Maytag? Plays itself, doesn’t it? This way, the greenback holders based in Shanghai and Beijing and points elsewhere will be able to avoid messy takeover fights, will be able to do one-stop asset diversification. Not that I think this is necessarily a bad thing. Quite the contrary: If the Blackstones of this world should be the instruments to bring about a much-needed enfoldment of China into the private U.S. domestic economy, then the Year of the Schwarzman will be an occasion as much for celebration as for mirth.

From
the start, Don Quixote was seen as a problem, most of all by Balanchine himself—he was always fiddling with it: adding music, moving sections around, creating new dances. Audiences were perplexed by its unique and unexpected combination of drama, pageantry, religiosity, formal divertissement and the heightened passages he created for Farrell, as well as by the central character being a non-dancing role. The music, by Balanchine’s old friend Nicolas Nabokov (they went back almost 40 years, and had been discussing this ballet for almost that long), took much of the blame for what was generally seen as a flawed effort. And yet Don Quixote was compelling, especially when on occasion Balanchine himself took the central role.

Act
I is the weakest. The servant girl Dulcinea, who lovingly ministers to the Don, also appears to him in the guise of the Virgin Mary. The hero, with his befuddled grasp of reality, sets off on his quest to vanquish injustice, accompanied by the faithful Sancho Panza. There’s some generic peasant dancing in a town square, a juggler, a puppet show with children, a horse, a donkey and a remarkable solo for Dulcinea, who at this point appears as a young girl accused of complicity in a murder.

Act
II takes place at the court of a duke and duchess who maliciously welcome the mad Don as an honored guest only to encourage their courtiers to torment him.
Here we witness the bitter cruelty of Cervantes’ Spain, but also the Don’s courtesy, innocence and generosity. His innate chivalry keeps him from grasping that he’s being made a fool of. There’s an extended divertissement—a suite of ingenious formal dances (flamenco, Mauresque, Sicilienne et al.)—and finally an orchestrated assault on the Don by the masked courtiers, who prod him with their rapiers, blindfold him, leap on his back, pummel him, and leave him almost dead, after a surreally horrible final moment when one of them smears his eyes with a gout of whipped cream. During this powerful and deeply disturbing passage, Dulcinea appears as a vision of tenderness and consolation.

It’s
the third act that explodes into brilliance. Surrounded by a formal group of maidens led by two demi-soloists and their cavaliers, Dulcinea—now divorced from any direct responsibility to the plot—performs one of the most intense and thrilling dances in all Balanchine. At first she’s grave, but soon she erupts in a galvanic outpouring of ardor and despair. And now it becomes almost impossible to speak about “Dulcinea” rather than about Farrell. Here was Balanchine’s first and most indelible presentation of her astounding qualities; here, almost at the start of their unprecedented collaboration, she was fully and magnificently identified.

Fortunately,
there’s a murky film, unavailable to the public, of the first performance of Don Quixote. It features Balanchine and Farrell, and to watch it is to experience the miracle of his total grasp of her potential genius. If this were the only documentation of Farrell, you could infer her entire artistic life from it—it’s as valuable as the famous filmed passages from the first act of Giselle that give us our only glimpse of the legendary Olga Spessivtseva.
Farrell’s
performance is heart-stopping—the amazing off-balance lunges, the ravishing back-bends, the absolute fearless abandon, the total commitment to the gesture and the moment. Yes, she’s still a baby, but she’s also, already, a peerless ballerina, in complete charge of her body, her role and Balanchine.

This
dance is superbly constructed, the solos and the material for the corps effortlessly integrated, and for once Nabokov’s music is appropriate—romantic and exciting in the right way. (At other times, it’s pure movie music, and second-rate movie music at that.) The two dancers Farrell chose to portray Dulcinea carried things off with admirable aplomb and to good effect, despite the light-years disparity between their talent and Farrell’s. Sonia Rodriguez is accurate and hard-working—she’s an excellent executant—but she’s essentially
unexciting: a ballerina, but a provincial one. Heather Ogden, second-cast, is younger and freer—both more innocent and more involving. How odd that Farrell, of all people, cast her second. After all, if Balanchine had stopped to consider status or age, he wouldn’t have made Don Quixote on her in the first place.

After
the climactic third-act pas d’action, the ballet returns to its story—the final degrading assaults on Don Quixote; his famous delusional attack on the windmill; his grotesque journey home in a pig cage. His last fevered vision is of an ominous procession of church dignitaries, and then of Dulcinea, once again seen as the Virgin, welcoming the hero in his martyrdom. When he dies, she reappears as the simple peasant girl placing two wooden sticks in the shape of a cross on his body.

Balanchine,
as seen in the film, keeps the ballet from veering into self-pity—his Don is vigorous in his old age, bewildered rather than distraught or loony, aristocratic without being proud. Farrell’s Momchil Mladenov is tall and thin (Balanchine’s preference for the role), but at the start his body and movement style give him away as inappropriately young. He recovers, though, through focus and intelligence, and creates a credible Don.

Farrell
has handled the complicated stage business impeccably—scene flows into scene, the transformations and other special effects work easily, and the sets (by Zack Brown) are an improvement on the heavier aesthetic of Esteban Francés.
The
weakness in the production lies in the secondary performers. Although there are several pleasing dancers in the second-act divertissement and in the third act—Natalia Magnicaballi, Erin Mahoney, Shannon Parsley—they can’t compare with Balanchine’s 1965 company: dancers of the caliber of Patricia McBride, Suki Schorer, Mimi Paul, Patricia Neary, Marnee Morris, Gloria Govrin, Arthur Mitchell and on and on. It’s a dazzling honor roll. That Farrell succeeded as well as she did with dancers considerably below this level of talent is a tribute to her teaching and coaching skills—no surprise to anyone who has watched her guide dancers over the past several years. One of the many things she learned from Balanchine is to cheerfully and honorably make the best of whatever resources are available, and her respect for her dancers has been repaid with their obvious devotion to her, and to him.

Just
as it did 40 years ago, Don Quixote leaves us fascinated, moved—and puzzled.
Back in the 60’s and 70’s, it was less easy to see it as a link in a chain of related works—related not because they’re all dance-dramas but because they all center on a certain kind of male figure. Yes, Balanchine has given us the male glorious—Apollo, Oberon, the “Rubies” boy—and the male humorous and the impersonal cavalier. But surely we sense a more direct connection between him and a parade of men in extremis which begins with the Prodigal Son, debased by the vicious Siren, and proceeds through the romantic Poet undone by the fatal dazzle of the Sonnambula, the tragic Orpheus destroyed by Eurydice’s importunities, and the desperate Schumann, succumbing to madness. Don Quixote, despite the loyalty and solace offered by his fantasy Dulcinea, is humiliated like the Prodigal, maddened like Schumann, and driven to death like the Poet and Orpheus.

What
sets Don Quixote apart from these other ballets is that there isn’t a great deal of distance between Balanchine’s own pain and the pain suffered by his
hero: He’s so personally affected by the buffetings life inflicts on the Don—so obviously identifying with him—that he seems to be saying, “I don’t deserve this.” And then he rewards himself with Heaven.

We’re
not used to a Balanchine so humanly exposed, and Farrell, at 19, could hardly have understood what Don Quixote was revealing. Her devoted reconstruction of it makes it clear that now she understands.

The
important practical question raised by her production is whether such a large-scale, problematic work can become a permanent part of the Balanchine repertory. Certainly it will stay alive as long as Farrell has the opportunity to present it, and perhaps there are major companies—the Kirov, say—who might take it on. It’s even possible, I suppose, that Farrell and New York City Ballet might eventually accommodate each other. But is Don Quixote worth preserving? After all, other important Balanchine works have vanished—Cotillon, the full-length Le Baiser de la Fée, the early versions of Mozartiana, Balustrade, Bourrée Fantasque, The Seven Deadly Sins.

None
of these works, however, was as meaningful to him, or as revealing. The lesson we just learned in Washington is that although we didn’t know we’ve been missing it since it vanished almost 30 years ago, Don Quixote does still matter, both for its own sake and because of its unique place in the Balanchine canon. When you’re dealing with a supreme master—a Shakespeare, a Mozart—you need to be able to revisit his entire corpus of work. You need King Lear all the time, but every decade or so you also need Timon of Athens. Otherwise your understanding of a genius like Shakespeare––or Balanchine––is diminished, and so are you.

Petipa and Fokine, of Nijinsky and Pavlova, of Balanchine and Danilova and

Spessivtseva, of Nureyev and Makarova and Baryshnikov-is finally lurching into

the 20th century (forget the 21st). Having missed modernism and postmodernism,

and with the West now available both as inspiration and cash cow, it's hurrying

to catch up. On the evidence of its recent season at the Kennedy Center,

though, the company is in a state of confusion, rushing pell-mell in two

different and opposite directions at once. In fact, the Washington program-Petipa's

Sleeping Beauty paired with

Balanchine's Jewels -can serve as an

exact metaphor for the Kirov today.

This Sleeping Beauty ,

first seen in New York a year and a half ago, is based scrupulously, and

sterilely, on the original version of 1890. It's awash in authenticity:

costumes, sets, mime, dramatic incidents all reproduced almost

photographically. Only the style is missing-and the heart. No matter how fine

certain performances may be-and Svetlana Zakharova, the splendid young beauty

of the company, is a highly effective Aurora-the production is never more than

a nearly four-hour pictorial curiosity. This Aurora proceeds from her coming-of-age party to her awakening from the

100-year sleep to her wedding with no sign of growth-she's a pretty girl who dances

well, not a distillation of the journey from girlhood to womanhood. The idea

that the world has been restored to harmony after the defeat of spite and

malice is lost in a welter of colorful specialty acts. The final pas de deux is

just another virtuoso exhibition, not a climax of healing and hope. The most

resonant of classical ballets has been reduced to spectacle. Who cares whether

the costumes are authentic? I'm reminded of those historical movies from the

Golden Age of Hollywood in which every swatch of fabric and every powdered

peruke is in impeccable period style, while the dialogue sounds like Ring

Lardner on a bad day.

To make matters worse, Tchaikovsky's score-the greatest of all

ballet scores-was mauled by the Kennedy Center orchestra. Blaring horns, muffed

notes, moments when it seemed that different sections of the orchestra were

completely out of touch with each other-this was the coarsest rendition of this

glorious music that I've ever heard: a disgraceful contrast to the masterly

playing of the company's own orchestra as heard in New York.

So much for the Kirov looking backward. Looking forward, at least

to 1967, they brought us their recent production of Jewels , and if Sleeping

Beauty looked fast asleep 112 years after its premiere, Balanchine managed

to kiss the company awake. For many years, Jewels

was performed only by City Ballet. Recently, other American companies-notably,

Miami City Ballet-have danced it, and indeed Miami's version was a big success

at the Kennedy Center just last year. No wonder: Edward Villella, who runs

Miami, was the original male lead in the "Rubies" section of Jewels , and he's had its three original

leading ballerinas-Violette Verdy, Patricia McBride and Suzanne Farrell-in to

coach.

The Kirov's version was staged by four ex–City Ballet dancers,

and staged extremely well. But staging isn't everything. Zhanna Ayupova and

Veronika Part are both lovely dancers, but neither of them has a clue about the

very special musicality and wit that is the essence of "Emeralds" and its

haunting Fauré score. The famous Verdy solo with its ingenious arm gestures,

the strikingly original walking duet made on the expressive Mimi Paul-the steps

were there, but the phrasing was tentative and bland. In fact, the most

successful part of "Emeralds" was the trio, more conventional than the solos

and duets, and so more comfortable for the Kirov dancers. And then the powers

that be chose to eliminate the plaintive and moving coda that Balanchine added

in 1976 for the three male and four female leads. For those of us who for 25

years have been watching "Emeralds" as Balanchine preferred it, seeing it

interruptus was very jarring. Interesting, though, to see Balanchine's genius

for getting things right confirmed. Let's hope that by the time Jewels turns up in the Kirov's Met

season this coming July, this unique masterpiece will have been restored to its

entirety.

The Kirov has also gone back to the splotchy look of the original

set that now seems oddly ugly compared with later treatments. Authenticity

again? Should the company take on The

Four Temperaments , will it feel compelled to restore the original 1946

costumes by Kurt Seligmann that were quickly discarded when it became clear

that the ballet was swamped by them?

If "Emeralds" was lacking its French perfume, the Kirov dancers

rose hungrily to the challenge of the jazz-accented "Rubies." You could see

them biting into the music as if they'd been waiting all their lives to meet

Stravinsky and the 20th century. The very young Irina Golub and her partner,

Andrian Fadeyev, weren't McBride and Villella, but they tore into "Rubies" with

understanding and energy, and pulled it off. And the second-cast Diana

Vishneva, pallid and unconvincing as the opening-night Aurora, was as good a

Ruby as we've seen since McBride. She has the flashing legs, the lithe body,

the wickedly humorous look, and she seemed happily at home in Balanchine. Talk

about a Sleeping Beauty awakened!

As for "Diamonds," its quintessential Farrell role has had many

successful interpreters, most resoundingly Kyra Nichols and Darci Kistler, and

at the first Washington performance, Svetlana Zakharova was as imposing as

anyone since Farrell. This is Balanchine's ultimate evocation of Russian

classicism, set to Tchaikovsky's Third Symphony (minus its first movement), and its style posed no problems for the Kirov.

The corps was energized, even through the long and somewhat pro forma opening

section; they may look stiff compared with Balanchine-trained dancers, but they

seemed thrilled to be coping with the demands Balanchine was making on them.

Indeed, at the curtain calls for both "Rubies" and "Diamonds," as the audience

cheered and cheered, the dancers were grinning with excitement and pleasure.

And why not? After serving as mobile costume racks through most of the endless

length of Beauty , they were finally

out there dancing . Zakharova's

success came as no surprise: She's a magnificent, dominating performer. The

surprise came from second-cast Daria Pavlenko, even younger than Zakharova, less

imposing, but with a soft and appealing authority. Watching her and the other

leading Kirov women was a bitter reminder of the paucity of true ballerinas

here in America. City Ballet can field no women today in "Rubies" or "Diamonds"

to compare with the Kirov's. (The situation is just the reverse with men.)

Have the Russians fully absorbed and conquered Jewels ? Not yet. However strong their

performances, they're still cautious in phrasing and accent. Even the

triumphant "Diamonds" ballerinas were conventional in style, closer to Swan Lake than to the dangerous lunges

and risky off-balances with which Farrell amazed us. The great dancers of

Balanchine's City Ballet have always been extreme, both in dance personality

and daring. At bottom, it's a question of musicality: The Kirov dancers dance

on top of the music; they don't live in it and play with it and expand in it

the way Balanchine dancers must.

But this is not to detract from the overall success of the

Kirov's brave venture. Or to underplay the benefits that its dancers are

certain to take away from exposure to the vitality and demands of Balanchine. Sleeping Beauty pits the forces of

darkness (Carabosse) against the forces of light (the Lilac Fairy). The Kirov

today is pitted against itself, pulled between its fascination with retrograde faux-authenticity (we're being

treated to an "authentic" 1900 Bayadère at the Met in July) and its courageous

steps toward a necessary awakening. Will the Lilac Fairy prevail?