Bourrée Fantasque was choreographed by Balanchine in 1949 and was described by Nancy Reynolds (affiliate link) as, “melodious, colorful, full of comic touches, dash, high spirits, elegance, lots of difficult dancing, and massed effects created by a horde of dancers on stage […]”
Tanaquil LeClercq and Harold Lang. photo by Roger Wood, 1950.
John Martin of the New York Times wrote, “Balanchine has translated the general exuberance and vivacity [of the music] into most ingratiating choreographic terms. […] There is comedy not only in the unexpected distortions of classic movement and in the wonderfully amusing use of groups of three figures together in quietly outlandish design, but also in the relations of the individual dancers to each other.”
(top left) Jerome Robbins and Tanaquil LeClercq.
(top right) Tanaquil LeClercq.
(bottom left) JR and TL
(bottom right) Full Cast (L-R Tanaquil, Nicholas Magallanes, Melissa Hayden)
Photos by Fred Fehl, 1949. Harry Ransom Center.
“LeClercq and Robbins were nothing short of triumphant. LeClercq’s wide and innocent eyes and her long legs projected the wit of her sequences to perfection, and Robbins, agile as a leprechaun and twice as mischievous, created a character which must be classed with his immortal Hermes in Helen of Troy.”
—Walter Terry, New York Herald Tribune
Jerome Robbins and Tanaquil LeClercq. Photo by George Platt Lynes.
Tanaquil LeClercq. Photo by Baron, 1950.
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