NYCB Vol. 16 No. 3 - Square Dance

Lauryn Johnson
Sep 17
2 min read

Updated: Oct 13

Nicholas Magallanes and Patricia Wilde. Photo by Martha Swope, 1957.

"Last night at the City Center the New York City Ballet presented its first new work, and the hitherto sluggish young season came to life with a bang. The work in question was George Balanchine's "Square Dance" and it is a gem.

"The set is just a bare hall such as usually houses square dancing, and on a dais sits a band of fiddlers in shirt-sleeves. Below them is caller (a famous one he is, named Elisha C. Keeler), and the dancers are seven couples of kids. All of which is very ordinary, but what is not ordinary is that the kids wear ballet practice clothes with the girls in toe shoes, and the music happens to be excerpts from Corelli and Vivaldi. As they go into action, and brilliant action it is, in the general range of the academic vocabulary, the caller gives an approximate analysis of their steps and figures in a running stream of quite classical square dance calls. On the surface, it is just a gay and amusing tour de force, but actually it is profoundly based, for the roots of the American square dance are. also the roots of this seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music, of the elements and phrases of the classic ballet, and markedly of the personal choreographic style of one George Balanchine. Only a genuinely sensitive choreologist would ever have known enough or had the right intuitions to put together such a work, and only an extremely gifted artist could have turned out such a witty, inventive and formally beautiful one. Add another masterpiece to the Balanchine list without further ado.

Nicholas Magallanes and Patricia Wilde. Photo by Martha Swope, 1957.

"The performance is as good as the work. Patricia Wilde and Nicholas Magallanes are the leading couple, and they dance superbly. Miss Wilde has always been a bravura dancer of parts, but she has never had more sparkle and brio. And when in her solo bit she comes up with a series of entrancing gargouillades you are really seeing virtuoso dancing at its most engaging. Mr. Magallanes is free, relaxed and genial; and gives the best performance he has given since "Orpheus" and "Illuminations," and they, heaven knows, are in a totally different vein, there are stunning ensembles for seven boys, for seven girls, for the full company and various combinations of them. All of it is difficult dancing, and there is a constant flow of it. It is quite credible, as Mr. Keeler remarks at the conclusion, that they have to quit because the caller is winded. Happily, they will begin again soon, and we can go to see it all over."

--John Martin, New York Times, 1957