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The Abandoned Mosque. The ballet presented an entire week of previews before getting around to its official opening—a dazzling, well-nigh perfect performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The first preview was for the workmen who built the theater, the next for patrons and balletomanes, one for friends of Lincoln Center, another to present the building to society, critics and politicians. The first preview opened with a twelve-tone trumpet fanfare composed for the occasion by Igor Stravinsky, and though it sounded like something to herald a recitation from The Bronx phone book, it was an acoustical triumph. The auditorium, as the rest of the week soon proved, has a superb sound—clean, warm and rich enough to make the Philharmonic across the way seem all the chillier.
The new theater is also the home of Richard Rodgers' new light-opera company, which will take it over in July with Rise Stevens in The King and I. The ballet will have the stage only 20 weeks a year, and will remain on the premises an additional 13 to 15 weeks to practice and rehearse. Still, the stage was clearly built with ballet in mind: instead of the turntables and elevators that are de rigueur in new musical theaters, it is a linoleum-covered wooden platform especially constructed to add spring to a dancer's steps. To judge from the unmixed delight of the dancers in their first moments on the new stage, Balanchine would have to chloroform them to get them back to their old, abandoned mosque on 55th Street.
The new stage has the width and depth ballet needs to unfold its patterns and gain its wings. "At the old theater," says Star Dancer Jacques d'Amboise, "I used to have a boy hold the curtain for me while I went down the hall to start back far enough to get the momentum I need for my entrance." With all its new elbowroom, the company danced with new grace and exuberance.
The first week's repertory relied heavily on brash and bouncy crowd pleasers, such as Western Symphony (cowboys and cowgirls) and Stars and Stripes (Old Glory unfurled to the music of Sousa). But the dancers also presented Agon, a work of great depth and sophistication, and Serenade, the company's signature piece. Serenade was the first ballet Balanchine created for American dancers, and it reflects the simple, untrained beauty he saw in them from the start. One of his first pupils fell, and another came late to rehearsal; Balanchine choreographed both episodes into the dance, and the work has served him as a copy book ever since.
Creative Classicism. A theater of his own is merely the latest godsend that has showered on Balanchine this winter in a monsoon of largesse. He achieved his undisputed stature as the world's leading choreographer (TIME cover, Jan. 25, 1954) while proceeding strictly in forma pauperis, and for years it was the fashion to cluck about what a pity it was that such a genius had to scuffle along with a crippling budget. Then last December the Ford Foundation gave a $7,700,000 grant to Balanchine and his artistic satellites, entrusting him with the future of classical dance in America. Now that he has new power to attract the best talents in the country to the splendors of his theater, the dance world outside Balanchine's orbit is all but unanimously against him.