Music: Ballet for Ford

Ballet dates from the lace-pants centuries, when kings and nobles were its patrons. Modern balletomanes, a tribe with a better-than-average quota of lacy characters, could probably think of likelier patrons of the ballet than Big Business—especially such a big business as Ford Motor Co. Yet at the New York World’s Fair, Ford became the ballet’s first industrial patron by launching a 17-minute production called A Thousand Times Neigh. A free show, performed twelve times a day in a plushy new $500,000 theatre in the Ford building, the ballet is done (in shifts) by 42 dancers recruited from the American Ballet Caravan of tall, intense Balletomane Lincoln Kirstein.

A Thousand Times Neigh was conceived by the designer of the Ford exhibit, Walter Dorwin Teague, who had no difficulty selling it to Edsel Ford. The ballet was written—it has songs and dialogue—by Edward Mabley of the Teague organization, who never once forgot that two men impersonating a horse are always good for a laugh. A Thousand Times Neigh is a Ford’s-eye-view of the problems of Dobbin, a $1,000 steed of cloth and leather, with movable eyes, ears, lips, jaws, tail. Horse-players: Vladimir Vassilieff, Kari Karnikovski. From 1903 to the present, Dobbin foots it featly while such top-notch Caravan dancers as Marie Jeanne and Nicki Magallanes mime the rise of the Ford—often on the toes of their ballet slippers. The music of NBC Staff Composer Tom Bennett, canned on a sound track for the first time in ballet, accompanies them tunefully, if not with great distinction. At the end, Dobbin is reconciled to the horseless carriage: the Ford has relieved him of a lot of work. A chorus sings:

Would he go back to an earlier day,

Before the motor car?

Neigh, neigh, a thousand times neigh!

And a horse-laugh—HAR, HAR, HAR!