Music: Balanchine Puzzler

The audience was perplexed. What was George Balanchine trying to do, anyhow? One week be premiered his rollicking, straightforward Western Symphony with his New York City Ballet (TIME, Sept. 20), then he turned around and dished out this weird puzzler called Ivesiana. The music, which was by that half-legendary New Englander, the late Charles Ives, was peculiar enough, with its crotchety rhythms and its wispy dissonances—but what happened on stage was even odder.

In the first movement, for instance, a macabre pattern of faces appeared out of the darkness. The two principals seemed to be looking for something, then danced up to a violent climax and went away again, still looking. Of course, there were a couple of ragtime movements that seemed normal enough, with Tanaquil LeClercq kicking up her bobby-soxed heels. But how about that weird finale? A lot of faces began to show in the darkness, too far down to be full-grown dancers. It was pretty scary until the stage got lighter and it turned out that the girls and boys were on their knees, just nudging around the stage.

As for the movement called The Unanswered Question, was that supposed to be funny? That pretty girl in the tight, white costume, Allegra Kent—those men were twisting and bending her all over the place, back dives and everything, all in slow motion, and her feet never even touched the floor. This was ballet?

Anyway, it was Balanchine, and he is a genius, as everybody knows. Even if Ivesiana wasn’t very clear, it was fun, and so the crowd gave the cast a nice hand at the end. Next day most of Manhattan’s mystified dance reviewers declined to evaluate the ballet, although they paid their respects to distinguished Composer Ives (an insurance broker who pioneered polytonal music in the U.S. in his spare time, died this year at 79). But the Daily News’s Douglas Watt found something positive to report about the ballet in Allegra Kent’s athletic performance. It soon became apparent, he wrote after watching her costume pull tighter, that she had “one of the cutest behinds in the company.”