NYCB Vol. 14 No. 1 - Concerto Barocco

"By the time Le Clercq emerged as the Balanchine-favored executant of Concerto Barocco, she had become recognized as ‘most nearly the ideal Balanchine dancer, the one who came closest to embodying his conceptions of form and technique, the one whose development he had most carefully nurtured,’ notes Balanchine’s biographer, Bernard Taper. Le Clercq danced Concerto Barocco with a perfectly tuned sensitivity to the shifting, paradoxical currents in Balanchine’s neoclassicism. Her patrician composure italicized the deadpan quirkiness and brisk angularity that inflected its finely discipled lyricism. Le Clercq penetrated the fleet-footed, high-stepping ballet with the stealth and spring of a runner, the rapt absorption of a votive priestess, and, at times the panache of a showgirl." —Joel Lobenthal, In Ballet Review, Fall 1984

Photos by Roger Wood, 1952.

Tanaquil LeClercq and Nicholas Magallanes. Photo by Roger Wood, 1952.