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Missing Misha
| Article
# : |
19284 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1991 |
2,246 Words |
| Author
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Gary Parks
Gary Parks is the news editor of Dance Magazine. |
At American Ballet Theatre, ballet has always been a business. That's why hiring a businesswoman like Jane Hermann as executive director originally seemed like such a good idea. But now, as codirector, Hermann, whose job was intended to complement that of former artistic director Mikhail Baryshnikov, is making both business and artistic decisions. As ABT enters its second half-century, the company that likes to think of itself as the standard-bearer of American classicism is headed by a number cruncher, not an artist.
At the same time, Ballet Theatre finds itself searching for a new identity, as Hermann slowly but steadily erodes the aesthetic that Baryshnikov forged in his nine years at the helm. And in the harsh reality of arts funding at the beginning of the nineties, the company must fashion from that new identity a justification for its very existence. With the growth of such fine regionally based troupes as the Boston, Houston, and San Francisco ballets, what good is a large ballet company that tours but has no home theater of its own? What's ABT for? Should Hermann, someone who has never been a tastemaker, much less a creative artist, be the one who decides?
For more than five decades, Ballet Theatre has played a preeminent role in American dance. Baryshnikov abruptly quit as artistic director in September 1989, on the eve of the company's fiftieth anniversary season [see "American Ballet Theatre Hits the Gold," THE WORLD & I, January 1990, p. 248]. Throughout the following winter, the troupe had no artistic director, though the season unfolded more or less as Baryshnikov originally planned it. In March 1990, ABT's board of directors dropped a bombshell: No new artistic director would be named. Instead, the board appointed two "directors": Hermann and Oliver Smith, the distinguished theatrical designer who had also been a codirector (with the late Lucia Chase, the company's original driving force) from 1945 to 1980. It is Hermann, fifty-four, who is clearly in charge, however, as Smith, seventy-three and a professor at New York University, devotes only part of his time to the company.
ABT is currently settled in at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, in the midst of a run through June 22 that is the high point of this year's national tour. The engagement also marks the first opportunity New Yorkers have had to see the troupe as directed by Hermann and Smith. What can be said at this early date about the new management's approach?
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