Many things can be said about abstract ballet, chief among them that it is phenomenologically impossible. A fetish of modern critics and an ersatz opposite to the narrative tradition, the project of abstraction in dance is an impressive feat of sophistry. "I always thought the very idea of an abstract ballet was foolish," said choreographer Antony Tudor shortly before his death. "People have to dance it, don't they? How abstract can the human body be: How can it not tell a story?"

       In music, opera has never lost its importance, and few would claim that an art form whose instrument is the human voice itself could ever be meaningfully dehumanized into abstraction. In theater, which depends on words, the abstract and the absurd never took over storytelling onstage, and even the most austere of Samuel Beckett's or Robert Wilson's experiments never lost its power to reaffirm the narrative, humanistic power of the project. Representational painting never lost its attraction, even in the midst of the Abstract Expressionism of the New York School of the 1950s.

       In a recent conversation, well-known choreographer Paul Taylor remembered that generation in New York as "a time of fermentation, when the next generation was branching out drastically and painting was undergoing a revolution." The revolution of Abstract Expressionism that put New York painters on the map was followed by an equally radical, though less publicized, reaction against Abstractionism. Painters such as Taylor's friend Robert Rauschenberg were transforming representational art. The human subject once more emerged prominently.

       Ballet, however, is unique among the arts in holding on to a quaint Modernist aesthetic. The same 1950s and '60s Modernism, long abandoned in the other arts, still entrances American ballet critics in the 1990s. Companies like the Ballet National de Marseille--or the Bolshoi and Kirov--become apologetic in the United States when they continue to use ballet to tell a story.