The first dance Gene Kelly made for the movies was a duet with a mop. He flirted with it, stroked it, bent over it in a kiss. Then he moved on to a whiskbroom and a soda fountain, and with each prop, his steps were full of invention and humor.

This number from the 1943 film Thousands Cheer was just the first taste that his widow, Patricia Ward Kelly, gave us in her inspiring program “Gene Kelly: The Legacy,” at Symphony Space during Tap City Week. The dancer/choreographer/director was not only a beloved Hollywood star but also a major multi-disciplinary artist who helped created the American genre of movie musicals.

Patricia Ward Kelly at Symphony Space, photo by Amanda Gentile, courtesy ATDF

Ward Kelly’s one-woman show started with the exuberance of meeting a fellow word-lover, sharing the last 10 years of his life, reveling in the lore and luminosity of his vast career, and it ended with wistful readings. Her tone was loving but not maudlin, witty but not catty. When recalling his admiration for Judy Garland in For Me and My Gal (1942), she said, “She taught him how to angle the face for the camera, and how to kiss—for which I was grateful.” (Have you ever seen Garland dance better than in this clip from that movie?)

Ward Kelly said their 46-year age difference—she was 26 and he was 73 when they met—didn’t matter to her. “He never seemed old to me,” she said. “He was so young at heart and his mind was going 100 miles an hour.”

Gene Kelly in Anchors Aweigh (1945)

As a dancer and choreographer, Kelly combined meticulous planning with spontaneity. He insisted on shooting the more adventurous scenes—swinging across a Spanish-style inn on a drape, careening atop a ladder that swayed from one end of a building under construction to another—all in a single take, just to show that he did not have a stunt double. He laid down his own taps after each number was shot, matching the sounds exactly to what he had danced in his trademark loafers.

When you see one clip after another of astonishing feats or breezy dance/acting, it’s not surprising to learn that Kelly had studied Russian-descended ballet, modern dance with Doris Humphrey and Martha Graham, Spanish dance with an uncle of Rita Hayworth, acrobatics, and tap. He pulled out whatever style was necessary for the role and the milieu.

Familiar scenes like the one in Anchors Aweigh with Jerry the (animated) Mouse, and clips from An American in Paris and The Pirate, allowed you to see how the intention of every part of his body—not least, his eyes—communicates a big feeling like love or joy or sheer fun. He was a working class kid from Pittsburgh who got beaten up by other boys for taking dance lessons. Instead of a top hat and tails, he often wore his own clothes for his characters.

Kelly directing Barbra Streisand in Hello Dolly (1969)

What I didn’t know was that he directed films like On the Town and Hello Dolly, and was the first American to choreograph for the Paris Opera Ballet. When contemplating how he wanted to be remembered, he enlisted Ward Kelly to write his biography. Five years into the process of his talking and her note-taking, they married.

When they met, Patricia Ward had been a scholar of American literature studying Melville and Hemingway; she’d never heard of Gene Kelly! She is still a scholar of American culture, but her subject is no longer Melville, but an American of possibly equal stature, Gene Kelly.

Toward the end of her presentation, Ward Kelly read some choice pieces of nostalgia, like his funny Valentines to her and an encouraging note from Fred Astaire to him when he returned to Hollywood after the war.

After enthralling us with the range of his genius, Ward Kelly addressed the young people in the audience. “Gene didn’t want you to imitate him,” she said. “He wanted you to go beyond him.”

Kudos to American Tap Dance Foundation for bringing Gene Kelly: The Legacy to Tap City.

The Bolshoi Ballet is bringing three of its most traditional ballets to Lincoln Center Festival July 12 to 27. Of course audiences like seeing timeless classics like Swan Lake and Don Q. But Spartacus—that old warhorse from the Soviet era? The early pinnacle of Yuri Grigorovich’s endless career? Hasn’t the Bolshoi moved beyond Spartacus with artistic director Sergei Filin’s internationally savvy outlook?

Like some others, I’ve been grumbling about this conservative array. But to tell the truth, I have a secret reason for wanting to see Spartacus—actually two reasons: nostalgia and curiosity.

Back in 1962, when I was not quite 15, I was an extra in the Bolshoi’s previous production of Spartacus at the old Met on 39th Street. Yes, that’s right. Grigorovich’s famed version was not the first one. Experimental choreographer Leonid Yacobson created it for the Kirov (Mariinsky) in 1956 and restaged it expressly for the Bolshoi’s tour to the U.S. in 1962. And it was a disaster. I know. I was there, onstage with Plisetskaya and Vasiliev. The audience booed, the critics panned it. The last three performances of the eight scheduled were cancelled and replaced with Giselle.

Maya Plisetskaya and Dmitri Begak in Yacobson’s version

But I have great memories. I remember being onstage at the old Met before the curtain opened, watching Plisetskaya warming up with a thousand knee-high prances. I remember the scale-like sequence of the brass players as they tuned up for Khatchaturian’s passionate, sensual, Eastern-tinged score—music that got under my skin. I remember the beautiful American-Russian corps dancer, Anastasia Stevens, who translated for us. And I remember the Bolshoi dancers singing songs from West Side Story backstage. (I’ve written about this whole experience in the memoir section of my first book.)

Who Was Yacobson?

In the brochure for the Bolshoi’s 1962 tour (under the aegis of Sol Hurok), it says, “Yacobson is one of the most ‘restless’ of our modern choreographers. He argues boldly and sharply about art and evokes violent arguments around himself…In his works not everything is precisely regulated or in proportion, for the irrepressibility of his characters hinders him from being patient, artistically ‘calculating.’ On the other hand, his work is always interesting for the audacity of his conception and… the boldness of his imagination.”

Natalia Ryzhenko as Aegina in Yacobson’s version

Well, that boldness got him into trouble this time. Yacobson, who died in 1975, was in line with the Soviet regime in wanting to pry ballet away from the elitism of the Czarist times. But his method of popularizing the art was to incorporate acrobatic and gymnastic moves. And, in the case of Spartacus, blatant sex scenes. In his depiction of degenerate Roman times, he staged Crassus’ feast as a huge orgy scene, the better to contrast with the purity and courage of Spartacus’ slave uprising.

But Soviet authorities didn’t want sexy, they wanted heroic. According to Christina Ezrahi in her book Swans of the Kremlin, some officials judged certain scenes to be “repulsively erotic”…hmmm, a precursor to the current Russian prudery? Think of the recent ban on discussing gayness, and the even more recent ban on obscenity. 

Dance scholar Janice Ross has written that Yacobson was basically an artist of resistance. “One of the subversive, radical things in Spartacus . . . is that he makes it a very intimate, personal tale. At the core of it is a tragic love story about loss and longing.” Because of that very personal approach, Maya Plisetskaya, in her autobiography, declared him one of her favorite choreographers.

Not catering to good taste

In my teenage eyes, Yacobson’s Spartacus had many peak moments. Here are descriptions from my diary of September 11, 1962, of two of my favorite scenes.

CIrcus scene in Yacobson’s Spartacus

1. “The circus scene when men fight to entertain the people. It’s so exciting—just like the rumble in West Side Story—only in dance form. The choreographer, Yakobson, really did a good job on that. There are some more fighting scenes with Spartacus where they really use their shields and swords.”

2. “In the orgy scene a glamorous courtesan (played by the beautiful Natalia Ryzhenko) tempts Vladimir Vasiliev, as a slave. He’s blond and wears a red shirt and black tights. He’s cute as all hell and boy—can he dance! He does about eight arabesque turns which slowly change into attitude turns and his arms are behind his head. He starts feeling her up and everything, but when the courtesan doesn’t accept him, he goes wild and has these fits. In one part he jumps about five feet up and crashes down.”

At first, I was cast in the orgy scene. You were supposed to lounge around on bleachers, make out with your partner, and every once in a while tilt your head back and dangle a bunch of imaginary grapes above your mouth. Yacobson gave us instructions, through a translator, to be “sexy…oversexed” and to “make love, make love, make love!” I’d never had a proper make-out session in real life so I was very nervous. When my partner was reassigned to a different scene, I was excused from the orgy. Phew!

I don’t know if the booing was prompted by the “oversexed” treatment of the story, or, as my friend Rosemary Novellino-Mearns suggests in this posting, the fact that some of the world’s greatest ballerinas were wearing sandals and tunics rather than pointe shoes and tutus.

Put in context, the 1962 engagement of the Bolshoi in NYC was a month before the Cuban Missile Crisis—the scariest moment of the Cold War, when it really did seem like the U. S. and the USSR might destroy the world. Weirdly, it seems like there was some kind of offbeat mutual trust that the Bolshoi could bring this oddball extravaganza to our shores.

Grigorovich’s collaborative approach

Ekaterina Maximova as Phyrigia and Vladimir Vasiliev as Spartacus in Grigorovich’s Spartacus, photo by Serge Lido

In any case, the powers that be in Moscow discontinued Yacobson’s 1962 version (though the Kirov kept his 1956 version in their rep). The quest for an uplifting revolutionary ballet  (“the great truth of Soviet realist art”) escalated in urgency as the 50th anniversary of the 1917 Soviet Revolution approached. The Bolshoi decided to ask the young Yuri Grigorovich to try his hand at a Spartacus with less sex and more heroism. At first, according to Ekaterina Maximova’s memoir, he didn’t want to do it. But he complied, involving his four main dancers as collaborators: Vladimir Vasiliev as Spartacus, Maris Liepa as Crassus, Maximova as Phyrigia, and Nina Timofeeva as the courtesan Aegina. “We would discuss Yuri Nikolayevich’s ideas together with him, put forward our own, argue over them,” Maximova wrote. “He would listen to us and accept our suggestions.” This sounds so collaborative, so democratic, so not how Grigorovich is known to be now!

Love It or Hate It

Nina Kaptsova and Mikhail Lobukin, currently in Grigorovich’s Spartacus, photo by Elena Fetisova

Together the choreographer and dancers created the image of male heroism in the Soviet Union. Grigorovich became the figurehead of the “golden era” of Soviet Ballet. Larissa Saveliev, the former Bolshoi dancer who co-founded and directs Youth America Grand Prix, told me that it was Spartacus’ emphasis on sheer male energy that was so captivating. Grigorovich was less interested in specific steps than the story as a whole. In my conversation with Bolshoi Ballet’s artistic director Sergei Filin last April, he explained the ballet’s success to me by pointing out that it has a strong narrative flow and the “monologues” of the four main characters move the plot forward.

When it last came to NYC in 2005, New York Times critic John Rockwell called it “a grand cinematic spectacle, full of leaps and loves and betrayals and brilliant tableaus.”

Although no one has booed Grigorovich’s version as far as I know, it’s controversial in the sense that Americans and Russians react to it differently. American dance writers tend to find it propagandistic. Jennifer Homans, in her book Apollo’s Angels, describes it as the epitome of Soviet bravura—in both good and bad ways. “The Bolshoi kept going but after Spartacus, it was running on old energy, recycling past glories, fighting old ideological battles.” She clearly has no respect for the choreography. Although she says Vasiliev was thrilling in the lead role, she calls Spartacus a “degraded form of art” compared to Balanchine, Ashton, and Robbins.

Ivan Vasiliev in Grigorovich’s Spartacus

Others praise the achievement of this enduring Spartacus but say the performance relies on a superstar like Vladimir Vasiliev in the 60s and 70s, or Ivan Vasiliev in the last few years. (Unfortunately Vasiliev the younger cannot dance it this month as he will be performing with Natalia Osipova at Segerstom Center for the Arts in California. View a YouTube clip of the elder Vasiliev in the role here, and the younger Vasiliev here.) 

And then there is the view of Ezrahi, who believes that the ballet’s artistry trumps its original purpose as a government mouthpiece. I hope she is correct when she says the following:

“In the final analysis, ideological demands never managed to completely stifle the power of artistic autonomy. After the collapse of communism, Spartacus has survived the death of the political system that had provided the context of its creation. Today the ballet stands as a reminder that despite the political-ideological demands…artistic imagination proved to be remarkably resilient, creative, and enduring.”

When Trey McIntyre Project was going strong, the synergy between Trey as choreographer and John-Michael Schert as dancer-cum-executive-director was the juice that stoked this company’s success. Whatever creative projects McIntyre came up with, Schert figured out how to implement them in a way that strengthened their role in a community—both local and international. Trey was the dreamy, dreaming one and John-Michael was the practical one. Together they created a juggernaut that turned Boise into a city of dance lovers.

Mercury Half-Life, which will be performed at the Pillow, photo by Trey McIntyre

Three years ago, when Dance Magazine did a cover story on the company , it seemed the TMP would last forever. The company had found an ideal home in Boise and was continuing its dense schedule of touring. Audiences all over the world responded to their snappy, fun, witty, complex choreography. As I wrote in 2009, McIntyre really knows how to use music that brings big pleasure to a broad audience.

Chanel daSilva and John-Michael Schert, photo by Lois Greenfield

Trey McIntyre

So when it was announced in January that this week’s run at Jacob’s Pillow will be its last, many speculated on the cause of TMPs demise. Marina Harss quotes McIntyre in her story in yesterday’s New York Times as saying he doesn’t want to undergo the “creative sacrifice” any more. Fair enough. Running a dance company can be a burden, especially when a choreographer is still getting lots of freelance work or wants to pick up a camera instead of walk into a dance studio.

But I am also guessing that the chemistry, once Schert left, just wasn’t there any more. And that must have changed the balance of responsibilities drastically.

By the way, I don’t think the loss of TMP is a tragedy, at least for dance lovers outside of Boise. Yes, he is one of the best American choreographers, and in the old social order, he should have his own company. But things are changing. We can see McIntyre’s work in many other companies—Cincinnati Ballet’s wildly fun rendition of his madcap Chasing Squirrel at the Joyce was a recent example. And Schert has gone on to become visiting artist, mentor, and social entrepreneur for the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and UChicago Arts.

Just remember, even the Beatles only stayed together a few years.

Watching Gina Gibney whack away at a wall dividing two small studios to create a large one was thrilling. Using a gold-painted mallet, she was strong and persistent even though the wall was harder to get through than she expected. It was a perfect metaphor for what she has already accomplished at 280 Broadway, her new space on Chambers Street. The official opening in October will unveil five studios, two theaters and Lab outfitted with the latest technology, these last three to be programmed by a curator. Meanwhile, her space at 890 Broadway, near Union Square, continues going strong with eight studios, buzzing with classes or rentals most of the day. One could call this double massive center an empire—except that Gibney is the last person to be imperial.

Gina Gibney taking the first bash

At the bash/brunch gathering on Tuesday, Gina talked about breaking down barriers, namely, the barriers of negative thinking. Before taking up the mallet, she described the former situation as succumbing to a downward spiral. She aims to build up, bit by bit, with positive energy. If anyone can do it, Gina can. Spending a few minutes with her is all you need to witness her loving care for the space, respect for her staff, and willingness to listen to all options. During her talk, she said something like, “When you work on solving a problem, you can find a solution that’s not just for yourself but for the whole community.”

Margaret Morton of DCA taking a whack

That is such a generous, forward-looking philosophy that I (as somebody on Twitter noticed) called her a visionary. But the Department of Cultural Affairs saw her vision—and powerhouse competence—way before I did. Margaret Morton, former deputy commissioner of the Department of Cultural Affairs, talked about the love and brains that Gina invests in her projects. She also praised Gina’s ability to work closely with her own board through thick and thin. The DCA had been watching how Gibney operated her fifth-floor space at 890 Broadway (the same building as American Ballet Theatre); they were impressed with how steadily Gibney expanded that space from one studio to eight since 2000. The lease on 280 is for 20 years so the DCA needed a solid tenant.

The space at 280 Broadway (entrance on Chambers Street) had been designated for dance by the City in hopes of developing the cultural life in Lower Manhattan post-9/11. When DNA went under, they were in jeopardy of losing the space for dance. Last January, Morton told Pia Catton of the Wall Street Journal that the DCA “didn’t want to lose it. We put money into developing the space, and we wanted to preserve it for the dance community.”

Morton also mentioned Gibney Dance’s history of activism as bring a plus in the eyes of the DCA. The Gibney Dance Company’s mission since 1991 has been to work with survivors of domestic violence in all parts of the world. The company, which just returned from an activist stint in South Africa, has garnered support to continue giving hundreds of workshops. And Gibney has designated a room for community action training at 280—how many dance centers have that?

Thomas Scott, head of the board of, and his two sons, all photos by Whitney Browne (you might recognize a certain dance writer in the crowd)

The six organizational partners in this new enterprise, named last January include the Trisha Brown Dance Company, The Playground, and Movement Research.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I’ll say that I’ll be teaching dance writing at Gibney Dance in October. But in the spirit of a New Yorker for Dance, I’ll say I’m just very happy about this. Click here for more information.

For 34 years hordes of people have gathered every spring to run, walk, and dance with a purpose. The brainchild of the Bay Area’s living treasure, Anna Halprin, the Planetary Dance is performed on the side of Mt. Tamalpais in Marin County. As the story goes, the murders of six women had turned the mountain into a place of fear. Halprin’s group decided to create a ritual to purify and reclaim the mountain. After the ceremony, which lasted several days, the killer was apprehended. (More about the history of the Planetary Dance here.)

Just one of the miracles of Anna Halprin. Another was her ability to heal her own cancer through dance and imagery. Yet another is the sheer vitality of her physical and mental self as she nears age 94. She is still a leader, and where she goes, all kinds of people follow—dancers, drummers, authors.

Last week I got to experience the Planetary Dance at Mt. Tamalpais. (I had once participated in it at Judson Memorial Church where Halprin had given workshops in 2010.)

The outdoor, relaxed ambience reminded me of a family-style Woodstock, with people of all ages responding to the drumbeat. Instead of drugs, delicious and healthy homemade food was set out on tables.

Anna Halprin demonstrating how to announce our purpose

As a warm-up, Anna led us through simple shakes and reaches. She told us to “Put your mind into your body and ground yourself. If you really connect to the ground, you’ll be as solid as a rock.” As we walked out to the field in two lines, the slow beat of the drummers echoed in the surrounding mountains. When the two lines split and created a huge circle, we then started running in three concentric circles. You changed your path depending on how fast or slow your body felt like going at that moment.  But before you ran, you had to raise your arms and yell out what you were running for.

With the designated theme of protecting our children, the first person ran for the children of Fukushima. The second person, from a group of Malaysian students, ran for the Malaysian child victims of the recent flight lost and never found. Another person ran for all homeless children, may they find love and shelter. I ran for children to be free of gun violence.

The drummers pounded and chanted at the center of the circle—the eye of the storm—where Anna was quietly orchestrating their changes in pace. The drummers got carried away; we got carried away.

With the drumbeat accelerating, the uneven earth commanding one’s attention so as not to fall, and the exhilaration of being among other runners (and walkers), it was easy to forget the purpose of the run. But at the end Anna brought us back to our purpose. She asked us to sit back-to-back with a neighbor for a few minutes, then face that person and tell her or him of our plans to bring our stated goal closer to reality.

One could call the Planetary Dance a feel-good ritual. But built into the structure (or score, as Halprin calls it) is connection to your body, to nature, and to the challenges of a cause. Ideally, the Planetary Dance, which last Sunday involved about 400 people, takes you from ritual to activism.