Postscript: Forward to Croce
I ran out of steam on my (overlong) previous post. But I thought that some good (bad) criticism would make a nice change.
The retirement of Kyra Nichols and several other prominent ballerinas after relatively long careers this past spring certainly forced many critics into an unusually introspective mode. But the yoking together of these disparate dancers often seemed forced and irrelevant as in Alastair Macaulay's June 10th piece. Were those four ballerinas (especially in the eyes of New York audiences) really all equals?
As usual, a 1996 article by Arlene Croce, Our Dancers in the Nineties (one of her final pieces to appear in The New Yorker), still resonates, and, in touching on a related theme, doesn't leave much that is fresh to be added.
The tribute it contains to Nichols is at once stirring and sad.
To the emergence of the business company we owe the phenomenon of the disaffiliated ballerina – the dancer who seeks artistic completion by freelancing or guest-starring all over the world. Nichols is a disaffiliated star who never left her home company. One could say that it never left her, but there has been no actual rupture between her and Peter Martins. Since they’ve stopped working together, she has if anything found more freedom to maneuver and more challenge and inspiration in her roles. The splendid isolation of Kyra Nichols can even be a dramatic statement. When she enters in Vienna Waltzes, it’s on a high note of resolve: “Alone then!” Head up, erect as only Kyra Nichols can be, she walks into the darkened ballroom.
Croce's writing is so powerful; it either wins you over to her argument or it doesn't. There's no real middle ground. She easily manages to convince the reader that her own viewpoint is reflective of a "Kyra Nichols" true state of mind or attitude.
What comes after the "disaffiliated ballerina" then? It surprised me in the various ruminations on retiring ballerinas I read, that neither Macaulay nor any other critics commented on whether or not they believed that there still would be ballerinas in the future (or ones with careers that lasted over twenty-five years).
