Milton Park

Fresh semen from a new and untested lover

The photo: Readers who have been with me from my days on Yahoo 360 know that the first time I am intimate with a partner I have him wear a condom and then use his semen to test for STIs and as a DNA resource in case I need to go there. The other day a member of congress who was out here inspecting the proposed nuclear waste site came by for a behind-the-scenes tour of the entertainment side of our casino/resort and watched me give a pointe class to our company’s women dancers and one or two of the men. Afterward he came on to me. I was expecting it as almost all male politicians who watch the class I give want to ‘chat’ afterward and this guy came with a reputation. Not that I minded since Jacques is on the east coast on business and I was CD8, newly fertile, and longing for a new man to take an interest in me. I was careful to make certain that he left his smart-phone in his briefcase which was kept in a locker in Security during his tour. Not that this man who is on some important committees is another Anthony Weiner, but I don’t want to become a digital trophy for this or any other guy and have my photo shown around.

His chinos were beautifully tailored but the line was pulled out of shape by the fact that he was obviously very pleased to see me and I was sure he would appreciate some help in taking care of his immediate need in the most pleasant way possible, what we call a Vegas ballet ‘deep welcome’. I was bare-legged in a thong bottom halter top canary yellow leotard (custom made by Gottex for my casino dancers) and wearing a damp pair of nearly dead bespoke Freed Classics. I decided not to change into my play shoes (Gaynors) as I needed the training of being penetrated in dead Freeds to keep up my stamina and pain threshold so I was good to go, almost. As we chatted I was leaning against the barre balancing on my toes with my feet in second position and he was fingering my pubes, or rather he was trying to, but my Penetrator was still inserted and he had a puzzled look as all he felt was the convex head of the plug rather that the soft flesh of my vulva. I smiled at him, took his hand gently and lifting it from caressing the head of my plug, asked him to give me a minute to unplug myself. He was fascinated to watch as I took a Ziploc bag and a baby wipe from my dancebag and pulling my thong to one side pulled on the removal loop lying flat against my perineum breaking the vaginal vacuum with a loud sucking sound. I then pulled forward and down on the removal loop – to get the anti- expulsion ridge under my pubic bone – tightened my vaginal muscles and the plug slid out in my hand. I slipped the baby wipe over my vulva to catch the gush of vaginal lubricant that had been built up by having the plug inside me. I dropped the plug and soaked wipe into the Ziploc sealed it and tossed it into my dancebag then went back on to pointe a la seconde and placed his hand on my exposed vulva. I thought he was going to drop his load in his slacks right then, but he rallied and stepped back so I could unzip him.

The condom: I rolled a LifeStyles ultra thin onto his massive erection. If he had been known to me and had tested clean with a full STI panel and he had wanted the condom for his protection I would have rolled a ribbed condom onto him because I like the addition stimulation I get from the texture of the ribs. However, for me with the added friction ribbed condoms tend to burst or I pull them off a lover so on the first encounter with a man of unknown sexual history I thought it safer (for me) if he wore an LS Ultra Thin. It turned out he was a considerate lover and both very needy and had great stamina, taking me to orgasm and finishing strongly himself three times in 45 minutes. He took me once from behind while I was en pointe bent over holding on to the barre, then once in my office on my back on the huge leather couch and once while I was astride him with him on his back on the couch. I love a Man who is really into me like that and the second time (with me on my back) he was even ramming my cervix a bit which I loved! We parted BFF and while I don’t agree with all his politics I think I can count on him for a favor if I need one. But politicians can be a depreciating asset so I like to have favors available in both camps.

An aide-mémoire: Returning readers may remember In my May 7, 2011 entry’ European ballet venues’ I wrote that Anya and I will be staying with Taryn and Tanaquil while touring great ballet sites in England, France, Germany, Austria and Italy. This entry is to reacquaint my readers with Taryn’s home outside Cambridge where we will be staying most of the time while in England.

From my entry for: September 11, 2010 ‘Taryn leaves for Cambridge’

“Milton Park’s slang name: The stonemasons saw the equipment being installed in the pelvic gym, and one of them is quoted as saying “This place is going to be a boinking cunt castle”. And, since that sort of thing spreads among men so quickly it caught on and then it got around the village. Tanaquil says that now the unofficial name of Milton Park is “Cunt Castle” even though it’s in no way a castle but an 18th C hunting lodge. Actually, it is a much truer description than the stone mason knew given where the money to pay for all the renovations and additions came from. And I’m sure the name will get around Trinity College if Taryn’s tutors don’t already know. The Dons at Cambridge are remarkably well informed. I think they like a bit of insider spice as long as it isn’t flashed about. Since the UK has strong Anglo-Saxon roots a good Middle English descriptive term can be a plus in institutions as sexually repressed as Oxbridge.”

From my entry for May 23, 2010 ‘Taryn and Trinity College Cambridge’

“Off Campus Hideaway: Tanaquil also arranged to lease an off campus residence for her a few miles north east of town (toward Ely) for entertaining and unwinding on weekends and holidays. It’s a 14 room 18th C stone and brick ‘cottage’ that had been built as a hunting lodge on 85 acres of high ground north of the A14 off the A10 (Cambridge Ely Road) owned by a member of the nobility. He hadn’t used it in years so it is requiring a lot of deferred maintenance – starting with a new roof - and renovation. We got it for a pound a year for 20 years if we paid for the renovations so we jumped at the chance since there were no restrictions on what changes we could make to the grounds and Taryn wants a deep pool for dive-sex. One of the beauties of the place is that it’s on high ground as a lot of the surrounding area is low with fens (flat, swampy land) where waterways abound. The pool will be enclosed with its own HV/AC and in addition to surface access to the pool house there will be a tunnel from the cellars for all weather access.”

“Access and personal security: There is a small regional airport, Marshall Airport Cambridge UK (IATA: CBG, ICAO: EGSC), just east of Cambridge with a 6,446 ft concrete runway. Limnaea, my G550, can land there and there is just enough room for it to take off. Marshall is about a 20 minute drive from the estate. There is also frequent rail service from Cambridge to London Kings Cross and Liverpool St stations that takes about 35 minutes each way. We have leased two Range Rovers for ground transportation. I keep saying ‘we’ because since Taryn is only 18 as her guardian I have to sign along with her until she reaches 21 though her major purchases are through the trust established for her education.

I thought Taryn’s personal security was going to be a problem but Tanaquil had that base covered as well, having found a gorgeous 25 y/o aristocratic black-sheep Brit-chick just out of the army who has a body guard license and was working as an up-market escort in Germany with Tanaquil’s clients who want British arm-candy. She has a plumy upper-class accent and Angelica (Angie) wants to go back to school so Tanaquil had her tutored and sit the exams and Angie was accepted as a legacy student (both her parents graduated from TCC) so no chits needed to be called in to get her accepted. Angie likes the idea of a steady 3 year job (perhaps longer if Taryn takes her MD at Trinity) with Taryn while she gets her degree and she came out to meet Taryn this week. The two of them seem to be hitting it off well together so far. As an upper-class teen Angie took ballet and was en pointe for several years, but doesn’t have a thing for pointe. Taryn wants me to teach her dive-sex and I’m hoping to get her back en pointe again, but that’s in the future. Angie already has a GyneFix implanted and I had her fitted with a 22 mm FemCap and a 70 mm Reflexions flat spring as gas guards for dive-sex. The Reflexions can be used effectively to at least a depth of 130 feet which is a plus in case she gets an opportunity to dive Adolph’s well while she is menstrual.” [We now know a Reflexions can be used safely down to at least 216 feet, the bottom of Adolph’s training facility.]

“The Manor house: The locals are pleased to see the manor house being opened again as it will be a source of jobs. Work has already begun on repairing the chimneys and replacing the roof as well as reestablishing the gardens. The masons are working with the roofers to get the chimneys in shape before the new lead roof is put on around them. There are a few villagers in the neighboring village of Milton who worked at the manor when the noble owner had it open occasionally for bird hunting, but no one remembers when the manor was at its best which was before WWII. Taryn wants to make it a showplace again with restoration of the gardens. The place is being leased furnished. The furnishings are good quality but are a bit shabby so we are having everything slip-covered to brighten the appearance. The house, Milton Park, is in a ten acre park at the center of a forest so there should be no problem with privacy. Tanaquil kiddingly called the estate ‘Pussi Park’ given that it will be used for intimate weekends and erotically themed parties and Taryn thought the name was so appropriate that in our conversations she has unofficially renamed it.

Even though we aren’t allowed to change the 19th C double and triple-hung windows that leak air the new HV/AC and new electrical wiring throughout that were installed a few years ago can easily heat and cool the place and will support modern communications and there is an aux generator for power failures that can be used for lighting if she decides to allow erotic video shoots there. There are working fireplaces in every room and getting them safely working is, as I mentioned, one of the first things we are doing as sex by a cozy fire is such a turn-on. Fortunately the owner had left the HV/AC on while the manor was unoccupied as the damp chill of the winters and the humidity from the fens in the summers would have caused rapid deterioration in the furnishings. We expect to move Taryn and her staff in to Pussi Park in August so she can get the house running the way she wants it before starting school.”

Leaving on a jet plane: Anya and will be leaving this coming Monday and we both have our equipment cases and wardrobe trunks already packed. I wrote in an earlier post about refilling our slit-kits and stocking other intimate supplies. I’m taking mostly Gaynor pointes to play in but a dozen pairs of my Freed Classics for classes and technique work to keep my technique and stamina at my usual high level. I’m really looking forward to getting away from the desert heat, though we are going to avoid German bean sprouts while on the continent. I’m not sure how much time I’ll have to post but hope to have some sort of posting routine.

The Mysterious Jack returns: “Jill, I have not been commenting on your blog, but it did inspire me to attend some ballet performances in the ABT spring season... also as a break from a lot of work over the past two months. I was wondering if reading all blog would creep into my consciousness somehow as I sat in the theater watching the stunning artists perform. I can report that NO you had no presence in my mind, or your ideas about dancers and pointe and ballet boots etc. The performances were 3 of the best I have ever seen and they were very well received by critics and balletomanes alike. I could tell I saw something very special. Semionova in Don Q w/ Hallberg and Part... Sarah lane was there too... Vishneva and Gomez in Giselle.. again with Part and last week a stunning Lady of the Camellias with Vishneva and Gomez and again Part. I had the best seat in the house for the last performance... first row center Grand Tier. The entire theatre was on their feet when the curtain calls were taken. My final ballet will be Semionova in Swan Lake. I was tempted at intermission to buy a pair of Diana's pointe... Grishkos by the way... but I decided against it I'm thrilled to have attended this stellar performances and that my mind hasn't been polluted by some of bizarre stuff you write about ballet dancers which likely is not true as much as it part of your fantasies... which as I have said before makes a fun read. Do some ballerinas have latex and related fetishes? Why not. Alexandra Potter I believe may, but she does model the stuff and shows how to move gracefully in extreme heels ... http://www.ballet-heels.com/ In the end fetish and fantasy seem to merge and very well on the internet... and I suppose people are actually doing more of what they read on the internet... sex is fun and people get bored and want something new and stimulating. But I don't think we can "learn" fetishes as much as techniques and practices which may or may not deliver the sexual thrill they are purported to... to everyone who gives it a go. In the end I am more attracted to elegance with a fetish edge than extreme play of any sort... and so all your dive sex stories do absolutely nothing for me... but I suppose it's valid erotica genre. I might not have attended this season, so I need to thank you for, in a sense, making me see if you had influenced the way I see a ballerina on stage and I ended up seeing some of the best performances in my life. I had a few words (compliments from me) with Kevin McKenzie as he rushed to the stage after Giselle... and that was cool too! Jack”

Welcome back!: I’m so glad that you got to see some of the perfs of ABT’s Spring season. I envy you! I could just read about them in the NYT as I’m very busy getting ready to leave on an extended European tour as perhaps you read. On the whole Alastair Macaulay was very complementary of the dancing while fretting about ABT’s specializing in full length story ballets. But with NYCB across the plaza I think they would be smart to continue what they are doing. And they have Ratmansky for new works which is a plus.

I hope you got to examine Vishneva’s Grishkos as they are factory modified for her. Were any of Sarah Lanes shoes available? Whether you are a believer or not, the world will continue on - unless the Rev Camping will be correct the third time. I was glad that you had read my blog prior to seeing this seasons ABT offerings as they gave you, another perspective – however deep it was buried in your subconscious - as to what goes on with some of us who have extended aspects of ballet to enhance feminine sexuality. Although, if you were concerned about my writings coloring your perspective your thoughts couldn’t have been buried very deeply.

Apollo’s Angels – Another perspective

Some of the Shades in La Bayadere

The New York Times
January 4, 2011
Critics Notebook

Is Ballet Dying? Sure, It’s Died Many Times
By ALASTAIR MACAULAY

Each ballet dies with the fall of the curtain. Will it return to real life when next danced? Nobody can be sure. Some dances need occasional periods in cold storage; others — having forever passed their sell-by dates — carry on in some macabre afterlife onstage that feels spectral. For those of us who adored a work in its youth, which alternative is grimmer: never to see it again or to watch it acquire the lines of age and then become one of the dance dead or, worse, undead?

The famous Shades scene in Marius Petipa’s 1877 “Bayadère” is just one example. I loved this in many performances by the Royal Ballet in the 1970s and the Kirov Ballet in the 1980s. In the last 20 years, though, it has grown pale and gray as danced by those companies and others. I can applaud its general look, but the details that made it matter have been blurred out of recognition.

One of the keenest debates in dance right now has been about something larger: is ballet itself dead or dying? This we owe to the epilogue that Jennifer Homans, dance critic for The New Republic, has placed at the end of “Apollo’s Angels” (Random House), her welcome new history of ballet. (I am thanked in her acknowledgments, but I do not deserve it. Over five years ago, before we met, she sent me part of her chapter on British ballet for my comments, which were not, as I recall, generally complimentary.) “After years of trying to convince myself otherwise,” Ms. Homans writes, “I now feel sure that ballet is dying.”

When ballet makers retire or die, their whole repertories become endangered species. By 1992, George Balanchine’s “Divertimento No. 15” — a ballet that had been the apogee of his purest classicism — seemed so trivial and small at City Ballet that I found it hard to recall what had moved me so greatly.

I have written this before, but it bears saying again: Ballet has died again and again over the centuries. The dances that Louis XIV and Voltaire and Pushkin cherished did not survive. We can smile at that now, because we know how ballet, phoenixlike, rose again from its ashes; how, protean, it changed its nature with each new era. But I did not smile when writing that 20 years ago. The deaths of Balanchine (1983) and Frederick Ashton (1988) gave my generation too much cause for mourning. Ballet had a beginning (in the Renaissance); it may well therefore have an end.

Ms. Homans’s epilogue is actually, for several reasons, the weakest part of her book. You can believe that the art form has died for an author who doesn’t even mention Alexei Ratmansky or Christopher Wheeldon: she’s living in the past. Yet her generalized charge that “contemporary choreography veers aimlessly from unimaginative imitation to strident innovation — usually in the form of gymnastic or melodramatic excess” sounds strangely like the complaints leveled at Balanchine (whom Ms. Homans admires at least as much as I do) in his lifetime by uncomprehending critics. That complaint, however, really doesn’t fit Mr. Ratmansky’s “Concerto DSCH” (2008) or “Seven Sonatas” (2009).

Very remarkably, the best parts of “Apollo’s Angels” are the most difficult areas for any dance historian — the years before 1890, from which so few dances survive in repertory. I have spent enough time in the archives researching ballet between 1670 and 1850 to be amazed by the fresh material that Ms. Homans has brought to light, and by the piercing intelligence with which she has refreshed whole topics. She writes of the past with not only thought but feeling too: you sense her heart in it, not least in her marvelous sense of how ballet at many junctures was revitalized by pioneering women.

There are, it should be noted, errors and omissions. (Odile in the 1895 “Swan Lake” was not dressed as a “black swan.” An account of Ashton that omits his enduring pure-dance masterpieces “Les Patineurs,” “Scènes de Ballet” and “Monotones” is simply misleading.) More problematic, however, is a tendency toward hyperbole.

Ms. Homans writes that “Louis XIV and Marius Petipa would have appreciated” the classical nature of Balanchine’s choreography. Would they indeed? Picture Louis XIV and Petipa watching “The Four Temperaments” and you may question Ms. Homans’s judgment. She writes that “a basic attention to form” was something in which the superlative Bolshoi dancer Vladimir Vassiliev “had no interest.” This is poppycock; it makes no sense to anyone who has seen Vassiliev dance “Don Quixote” or “Giselle,” and it misunderstands his achievement in “Spartacus.”

In a book that inclines to this kind of exaggeration, an epilogue arguing that ballet is dead arrives simply as one more overstatement. Yes, in the period after Balanchine, Ashton and other great choreographers, we are living through an often dark era of ballet. There were times in the 1990s when I too felt the art form was essentially dead. But since I began this job almost four years ago, I’ve seen performances of Balanchine’s “Divertimento No. 15” at City Ballet, San Francisco Ballet and (best of all) Miami City Ballet that confounded the misery I had felt about that work in 1992.

Ashton told me in 1988 that his “Symphonic Variations” was “dead,” a view with which I concurred. But he added that “the right dancer” might bring it back to life: this has happened in more than one company, but above all in recent performances at Covent Garden by Alina Cojocaru. I know New Yorkers who attended City Ballet in Balanchine’s lifetime for whom the young ballerina Sara Mearns exerts a compelling fascination they have not felt since Suzanne Farrell and Kyra Nichols. David Hallberg at American Ballet Theater seems to be taking male classical dancing to fresh peaks. And many, many people who lived through the Balanchine-Ashton era feel that Mr. Ratmansky’s choreography gives cause for more than hope.

Perhaps a later history will view all these as the final gutterings of a spent flame. This is no golden age, and several of its ballets are indeed dead. My own main alarm about ballet — not one that troubles Ms. Homans — is that its dependence on pointwork for women and partnering by men proposes a dichotomizing view of the sexes that is at best outmoded and at worst repellently sexist. Nevertheless, this balletgoer testifies that the scene feels brighter than it did 10, 15 or 20 years ago.

Personal comment: It’s always interesting to read Alastair Macaulay’s views on various aspects of ballet. One can only hope that he is correct. It can be argued that the high point in the 70s and 80s left the art at an unsustainably high level of choreographic talent and creativity and some decline was inevitable until new ballet geniuses appeared. Perhaps we are now on the upswing once again.

Ballerinas and body image

NYCB - Jenifer Ringer partnered by Jared Angle in George Balanchine's The Nutcracker

The New York Times
December 3, 2010

Judging The Bodies In Ballet
By ALASTAIR MACAULAY

Go to any gallery and you see how painters and sculptors for centuries have made fat an issue. The nudes of Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt and Renoir show women with curves that are no longer part of any fashionable idea of beauty. Venus or Diana had a belly like that? I love most of them myself, but I have friends who object. Either way, all of us acknowledge that weight plays a part in our response.

Which art requires more exposure of the human form than the nude in painting, photography or sculpture? Ballet, of course. Dancers — even when sheathed in tights, tunics, tutus — open their bodies up in the geometrical shapes and academic movements that ballet has codified, and so they make their bodies subject to the most intense scrutiny.

The issue of scrutiny came up this week in a review of “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker” at New York City Ballet. I wrote that Jenifer Ringer, cast as the Sugar Plum Fairy, “looked as if she’d eaten one sugarplum too many,” and that Jared Angle, as her Cavalier, “seems to have been sampling half the Sweet realm.” (The performance took place the night after Thanksgiving.) This has caused a certain brouhaha online, and a minor deluge of reader e-mails, in many cases obscene and abusive. The general feeling was that my characterizations went beyond the pale of civilized discourse. One reader wrote that the review was “appalling,” “heartbreaking,” “childish, “hurtful” and “incompetent.”

Notably, the fuss has been about Ms. Ringer’s appearance. No one took issue with what might be considered a much more severe criticism, that the two danced “without adult depth or complexity.” And though I was much harder on Mr. Angle’s appearance, scarcely a reader objected. When I described Nilas Martins as “portly” in The New York Times and Mark Morris as “obese” in the Times Literary Supplement, those remarks were also greeted with silence. Fat, apparently, is not so much a feminist issue as a sexist one. Sauce for the goose? Scandal. Sauce for the gander? No problem.

Ballet demands sacrifice in its pursuit of widely accepted ideals of beauty. To several readers that struggle is, regrettably but demonstrably and historically in the case of many women, concomitant with anorexia. (For the record, I have sometimes observed in print that certain dancers of either sex look too thin.)

Ms. Ringer has spoken in the past about coping with eating disorders. Some of my correspondents feel I should know this history of hers, just as others have on occasion written to explain which ballerinas have histories of scoliosis. I think otherwise. Dancers do not ask to be considered victims. When I’ve praised Ms. Ringer, I’ve applied the standards I’ve applied to Suzanne Farrell, Natalia Makarova and Kyra Nichols.

My own history makes me intimately aware of what it is like to have a physique considerably less ideal than any of those I have mentioned. Acute asthma in childhood gave me a chest deformity that often made me miserable into my adolescence. (It was ameliorated by major thoracic surgery at age 20.) On my doctor’s advice, I lost 20 pounds last year.

When a dancer has surplus weight, there can be no more ruthless way to demonstrate it than to dance in a tutu with shoulders bare. Some steps (notably, traveling across the stage on point with arms outstretched) open the upper body to maximum legibility, others the lower. If Ms. Ringer performed flamenco or Bharatanatyam or most forms of contemporary dance, she would look extremely slim. In most of her recent ballet roles, she has actually looked slender.

To be overweight is not to be a bad dancer. Mr. Morris at his largest has often been a sensational performer. I have heard an audience snort with laughter as he arrived onstage and then be awestruck by the brilliance of his dancing.

In the 1970s Lynn Seymour’s weight was more pronounced, and her physique more curvaceous, than Ms. Ringer’s. And her upper arms wobbled considerably more than Ms. Ringer’s did last week. But they were like the wobble on certain notes in Maria Callas’s voice — unfortunate, controversial, but entirely mentionable in an artist who transcended her flaws. Ms. Seymour was one of the greatest ballerinas I ever saw, probably the plumpest and certainly the most original.

Size in ballet is not only a modern obsession. In the mid-18th century at the Paris Opera, the ballerina Marie Allard was dismissed for her inability to lose weight (and the frequency of her pregnancies), while her contemporary Marie-Madeleine Guimard was nicknamed “the skeleton of the graces.” History remembers both, however, as exceptional artists. And it enshrines Marie Taglioni, the archetypal Romantic ballerina of the 19th century. Yet Taglioni as a student was derided by her classmates as a “hunchback.” In due course she became “Marie full of grace” (the echo of the Virgin Mary was intentional), the supreme sylph.

In our own time many other female dancers with obvious physical imperfections have made impressions far greater than those whose bodies were ballet-perfect. But that’s their task: in an Apollonian art that requires purity of line, precision of execution and harmony of appearance, dancers with less than ideal shapes must bring other qualities to bear. Many have, and Ms. Ringer does, too, with several roles. This particular Sugar Plum Fairy — one of her rare tutu parts these days — was not one of them.

Some correspondents have argued that the body in ballet is “irrelevant.” Sorry, but the opposite is true. If you want to make your appearance irrelevant to criticism, do not choose ballet as a career. The body in ballet becomes a subject of the keenest observation and the most intense discussion. I am severe — but ballet, as dancers know, is more so.

Personal comment: I’m blessed with a high metabolism rate and a slim body so I can eat nearly anything I want and since I’m lactating I have to consume an additional 500 calories a day or lose weight. I need to make sure I have foods high in calcium to keep my bones strong and enough iron to offset losses during my periods, but other than that – well I take L-dopa to limit my milk production (an off label use) so I can maintain firm B-cup breasts regardless of how much breast feeding I do. Of course that disappoints thirsty men who find they can easily empty my breasts, but I need to retain my classical figure and B-cup breasts under a compression top is about as busty as I want to get.

In escort training and at St Lucy’s we teach nutritious eating habits and most of the girls are compliant, eating healthy diets. We do have a few who are underweight and won’t listen and those we send for psychological counseling and we suspend them from training as loss of bone mass makes it unsafe for them to dance or participate in very intense sexual encounters, not to mention making them unattractive to men unless they have a concentration camp fetish.

Darci’s farewell performance

Darci Kistler dancing Swan Lake at her farewell performance June 27, 2010

The New York Times
June 28, 2010
By ALASTAIR MACAULAY

A Long Goodbye From the Last of Balanchine’s Ballerinas

On Sunday afternoon at the David H. Koch Theater, the ballerina Darci Kistler made her farewell to dancing onstage, at 46. Some in the audience remembered how she first burst into their lives 30 years before, when she danced the Swan Queen with the School of American Ballet. I cannot forget that when she joined New York City Ballet that same year, she already danced not like a flower in bud but like a full-blown rose, in her first solo role as a professional dancer. The company danced in Paris in September 1980, and she performed the Scherzo in Balanchine’s “Tchaikovsky Suite No. 3.” To choreography that had seemed among the master’s least distinguished she brought an easy hugeness of scale and a sparkling rapture that were intoxicating.

Surely not since the 1930s had a performer so youthful arrived on the scene with a dance character so fully formed. In November 1980 in New York, Ms. Kistler made her debut in the second movement of Balanchine’s “Symphony in C,” one of the great ballerina roles. To find such a combination of sweep and sweetness was startling. She had fearlessness, wit, delicacy, expansiveness and an irrepressible love of dancing. Her long, tapering limbs; remarkable breadth of shoulder; loveliness of facial features (and in particular her lips, whose beautiful outline registered in the theater with great distinction); the beautiful pliancy of her feet: all these aspects were already apparent.

There are tales of how Balanchine was delighted by her rhythmic freedom as she reaccentuated passages of old choreography and thereby rejuvenated them. When she appeared again in “Symphony in C,” 15 months after her debut, I marveled at how much more contrast she then found in it.

Jerome Robbins adored her dancing too. In the first performances of his “Gershwin Piano Concerto” (1982), she ate up space in a series of turns. But though Balanchine’s remaining time was short (he died in 1983), hers was shorter. Before she had been with the company two years, a severe ankle injury occurred and kept her offstage for years.

Only in 1987-90 did she start again to reconquer the ballerina repertory and acquire further roles. Though she never danced with the same easy attack again, her delight in dance did not fail, and her sensitivity and dance intelligence kept growing. And, most valuable of all, the freedom of her musicality remained, lighting up the Balanchine repertory.

In one physical respect, she had become only more remarkable: her hair. There are Balanchine and Robbins roles where the ballerina dances with loose hair, and Ms. Kistler’s now reached her hips: a fair, voluminous cascade. When she sped across the stage in a series of turns in “Walpurgisnacht,” her face now invisible beneath the released locks, this mane became a traveling vortex.

The film “George Balanchine’s ‘The Nutcracker,’ ” in which she appeared as the Sugar Plum Fairy, suggests that her glory lasted until at least 1993. But my memory is that by 1992, her dancing had become scaled down, polite and musically safe. Since then her career has been a long, slow fade.

The sweetness of her presence remains. Sunday’s performance began with Balanchine’s pair of Stravinsky ballets, “Monumentum pro Gesualdo” and “Movements for Piano and Orchestra.” The most affecting moments came from the turn of her head, now to her partner, now to the audience, now to the wide space before her. Though her hair is darker and shorter, the light still falls beautifully on the planes of her face.

After the first intermission, she returned as Titania in Balanchine’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” dancing the Nocturne scene when the fairy queen becomes enamored of Bottom in his ass’s disguise. Titania had been one of her earliest roles, and, again, her sweetness of manner made its old impression.

The company then performed “Danses Concertantes,” the ballet whose 1989 revival she had so distinguished. Finally, after the second intermission, she danced the final act of the production of “Swan Lake” by her husband, Peter Martins. Thirty years after her School of American Ballet Swan Queen, and 29 years after Balanchine coached her as the Swan Queen in his different one-act “Swan Lake,” now she was giving us her Swan Queen as a swan song.

Who is to judge the twilight of a ballerina? My life was changed by the 56-year-old Margot Fonteyn, but there were people who could not bear to see her dancing anymore, just because it had once meant so much to them. This season I have seen momentary glimmers of what I once loved — the twinkle of Ms. Kistler’s feet to the music in some lifts in Mr. Martins’s “Morgen,” and her poise and line in his “Thou Swell.”

After Sunday’s performance I had coffee with a balletgoer who had become a devotee of New York City Ballet in 1996. I was hoping that he would tell me how the later Kistler had meant to him something of what Fonteyn once meant to me. But in all those years, Ms. Kistler’s dancing had never been one of his reasons to follow the company. Her pale autumn has lasted far longer than her bright spring and summer combined, and I cannot see that since 1992 she has been a good role model for the young. Often her mane of hair has been a mere shtick. Her solo dancing in the Stravinsky ballets was wretched, flicking lightly at steps that require a rigor she lost long ago.

At curtain calls, sweetness was all. Her partners that afternoon — Charles Askegard (“Monumentum”), Sébastien Marcovici (“Movements”), Henry Seth (“Midsummer” and, in “Swan Lake,” Rothbart) and Jared Angle (her “Swan Lake” prince) — brought her flowers, embraces, laughter. The excellent conductor (Clotilde Otranto), Ms. Kistler’s former partners, other dancers, her husband, her daughter and three of her brothers were among those who joined her onstage. Confetti fell in showers. With the retirement of this last Balanchine ballerina, we have all moved one generation on in history.

Personal comment: I thought about not posting this because it’s so sad, but it’s not as though it isn’t already out there and I decided I needed to have a record of Darci’s last perf on my blog. Sigh!

Alastair Macaulay on The Nutcracker

Scene from New York City Ballet’s Nutcracker

The Nutcracker: In celebration of the Christmas season I’m posting this piece by Alastair Macaulay, dance critic for the NYT.

The New York Times
December 17, 2009
Dance
Depths to Plumb, Sugarplum
By ALASTAIR MACAULAY

As 2009 ends, it’s worth remembering that it has been the centenary of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes’s turning ballet into the genre that was a prime vehicle for modernism. Meanwhile it’s hard to forget that we are deep into the annual “Nutcracker” season, in which tutus, snowflakes, sweets, the Sugarplum Fairy, magic and a child’s vision of transformation all come together. Few American cities are “Nutcracker”-free zones at this time of year; among those in New York, City Ballet’s production by George Balanchine runs now for two and a half more weeks, and that’s just the best known. Are modernism and “The Nutcracker” irreconcilable?

No. Though Diaghilev specialized in showing three or four modern works per evening, he was not above the full-length traditional ballet. He hit upon the idea of his “Sleeping Princess” production in 1921 because he was looking for a long-running blockbuster (along the lines of the hit musical of the day, “Chu Chin Chow”) to finance his more esoteric efforts. When his colleague Serge Grigoriev told him that such a production would soon bore him, Diaghilev — hoping that it would be the cash cow he needed — said: “Not at all. You’d run it, and I’d do something else.” Poor Diaghilev never found his cash cow. But his protégé Balanchine did. His 1954 “Nutcracker,” with the Christmas tree that grows like Jack’s beanstalk, has proved the most successful production of Tchaikovsky’s 1892 ballet in world history. (The original “Nutcracker,” which also had a tree that grew, opened in St. Petersburg when Diaghilev was a young man there.) Balanchine’s version also gave New York City Ballet the stability with which he was able to create his most avant-garde productions, notably “Agon” (Stravinsky, 1957) and “Episodes” (Webern, 1959).

You can love those two pieces, which remain far ahead of their time in body language and structure, and still find Balanchine’s “Nutcracker” enthralling. Every season I revisit his “Nutcracker” several times, officially to see New York City Ballet’s cast changes in the lead roles in Act II. But at every viewing the chief reward is to discover yet more detail in Act I. Over the decades thousands of dancegoers have learned to think the same; many might agree that Balanchine’s “Nutcracker” is actually more expressively diverse, more theatrically rich, than the extreme modernism of “Agon” or “Episodes” or his Stravinsky masterpieces of the 1960s and ’70s.

In a recent article in The Washington Post, Sarah Kaufman writes of the “pervading tweeness” of “The Nutcracker,” wishes that “ballet had something better to do at this time of year than endlessly reminisce like a sweet, whiskery auntie,” and argues that the work’s “stranglehold is all but squeezing ballet dry.” By contrast, she harks back to the Diaghilev days, “when ballet — ballet — lassoed the avant-garde art movement.”

The full-length ballets, Ms. Kaufman writes, are “European derived.” (Yes, but then, ballet itself is European derived, as are a great many other arts.) So “what’s American about ballet in America?” she asks. “Why not make an artistic statement with a mix of races, and use the spectrum of humanity deliberately, in a provocative way? Why not harness differences to evoke the America of today, or what we might become if only we had the imagination of an artist?”

Consider “The Hard Nut,” the version of “The Nutcracker” that Mark Morris first staged in Brussels in 1991, and that has been revived many times in America and elsewhere. The party scene is a caricature of a period and a none-too-happy white American family (with a black maid); then the stage world is magically metamorphosed into a colorful mixed-race fantasy in which ballet and barefoot dancers are equally mixed to show a view of society that is both modern-American and transcendent. You can watch it on DVD — it won the “Battle of the ‘Nutcrackers’ ” competition on Ovation TV — and in recent years it has become an annual fixture at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley, Calif.

“The Hard Nut” is not a perfect work. Not all of its storytelling is clear, a few of its dances are thin, and it forces some of its narrative against the emphasis of Tchaikovsky’s score. But no American “Nutcracker” has been so internationally successful, and within America perhaps only Balanchine’s is better known. In its finest dances — the Waltz of the Snowflakes above all — that black and white dancers are side by side is merely a premise for an even larger view of humanity, with Mr. Morris’s musicality at its most theatrically exhilarating.

There’s plenty wrong with ballet today, not least with American ballet. It’s sadly true that there are ballet companies whose only annual performances are of “The Nutcracker,” and that almost every American ballet company relies on its “Nutcracker” performances as its most reliable draw. (European companies dance “The Nutcracker” too, but few of them so extensively. The Royal Ballet at Covent Garden, for example, often has “Nutcracker”-free years, and my time in London made me more used to watching Frederick Ashton’s staging of Prokofiev’s three-act “Cinderella” as Christmas fare than any “Nutcracker.”)

But let’s not castigate “The Nutcracker” just because it is the cash cow of American ballet. And let’s not make the mistake of assuming the tweeness of bad “Nutcracker” productions means that the ballet is itself twee.

Just listen to the ballet’s overture. In good productions the view of childhood that starts here, in the miniature orchestration and quick pulse of Tchaikovsky’s introduction, is enchantingly serious. Gradually the music will build in scale until you reach the colossal, slow, full-orchestral grandeur of the Sugarplum adagio in Act II: no ballet score has a greater span, and this shows how passionately Tchaikovsky was depicting the inner life of a child.

There are, by contrast, a number of full-length ballets that take up adult subject matter only to treat it frivolously. (“Le Corsaire” and “Don Quixote,” both musically cheap, are among the most traditional examples. Stanton Welch’s 2009 ballet about Marie Antoinette, “Marie,” is the most recent one I’ve seen.) Much about ballet is bad and is worth trashing; much about it is artistically tawdry and hidebound in bad tradition; and most of its current choreographers are at best poor.

“The Nutcracker,” however, is a musical masterpiece and, in some stagings, a theatrical masterpiece too. Ballet is larger, not smaller, because of it