"Although I give ballets away to other companies, we have core repertory that only we perform.
"He often gave his ballets away for free, in the sense of making some kind of contribution to other companies," said Barbara Horgan, a long-time associate who now administers the Balanchine Trust.
The ballet withered away along with Anastos's career at A.B.T.
"I loved the work ethic and discipline of ballet straight away," said the slight, dark-haired Ms. Ansanelli, who is far more poised than her age would suggest.
And with that, the Germanic romanticism of the ballet fell away, and I could suddenly see the emotional bones of the story.
Each takes ballet marvelously away from its comfort zone; I recommend the remarkable and compelling all-male "Beaux," new in 2012 and featuring Martinu music for harpsichord and orchestra.
But I was thinking – I could stay inside ballet, chipping away at the same line, trying to do an extra pirouette, but there is a world of dance out there I know nothing about.
Perhaps here lie the origins of that highly circumscribed selection process, whereby girls are selected or rejected at a young age for careers in ballet – whisked away to strive for perfection almost in the manner of nuns, living a cloistered life dedicated to art, but denied the freedoms of other female theatrical artists.
Having put his joystick and ballet pumps away for a few minutes, Shpudeiko's most recent work the forthcoming LP, Anthem is an elegiac record that sees the producer using his own creativity during what he describes as, "a period of recovery from an emotionally dark place," resulting in a "kind of personal therapy".
Over the years, Balanchine tinkered with his ballets, stripping away their stories, pushing them toward abstraction.
