ABSTRACT

In 1975, the erudite and cantankerous Lincoln Kirstein delivered the following broadside against the ‘soi-disant “modern”-dance’: ‘Essentially, the modern dance tradition is a meager school and is without audience, repertory, or issue; it never gained a mass public, a central system, nor a common repertory…’.1 It was, in other words, no threat to operahouse ballet and, more particularly, no threat to the New York City Ballet, the company that Kirstein and George Balanchine founded in 1933.