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The ballet has two dazzling male stars in Jacques d'Amboise and Edward Villella, and the powerful dancing of Conrad Ludlow and Arthur Mitchell has added a virility enviable anywhere in the dance world. Ranking ballerinas such as Melissa Hayden, Patricia Wilde, and Maria Tallchief have a sameness of excellence that assures every program of a dazzling performance, but much of the company's real excitement comes from younger dancers—Patricia McBride, Suzanne Farrell, Suki Schorer, Gloria Govrin.
Personal Vision. Balanchine, who lives pleasantly on royalties that reach $20,000 in a good year, has been working without salary, but he pays his dancers well over union scale. His selflessness is highly purposeful; a choreographer, he says, has to "use people." Lincoln Kirstein, Balanchine's patron and the general director of the company, calls him "Oriental, impersonal, even sinister," but points out that "Balanchine has imposed his personal vision on the world of theatrical dancing." This is quite a trick, for ballet, according to Kirstein, "has become a means for the extreme release of physical and mental capacity involving measure, melody, memory and money."
Balanchine is at his finest when a new conception strikes him and he sets to work on a ballet. "I listen, listen, listen to the music, and then it comes," he says. The music suggests how the ballet begins and ends, perhaps, the number of dancers, the costumes. "But only when the dancers are on the stage and I am with them can I begin. You have only the clay, and you work on it, molding it, changing it, shaping it until you have what you want."
What Balanchine wants is so much his private ideal that many of the ballet's best friends wonder if it can long outlive him. Ballet is an art that resides almost totally in the minds of its choreographers; since it resists notation, it cannot be passed along easily from one director to another. But even if the company fails to survive its master, the esthetic principle he has made it stand for certainly will: that there is only one thing of value in the dance, and that is the simple beauty of the body in motion.
* When the new Metropolitan Opera House opens on a third face of the plaza in 1966, the three houses will bring nightly audiences of more than 9,000—plus unimaginable traffic jams—to Lincoln Center.