Timedance

Google's News Archive search (still in beta) promises to be a terrific research tool. At this early stage it is still limited and relies heavily on the Time Magazine archive. But what riches lurk there. Here are a few examples I found: a 1934 review of Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts, which was choreographed by Frederick Ashton; a 1954 Time cover story on George Balanchine and a further Time story about Balanchine from ten years later. Then there's Time's first Nureyev cover story from 1965.
I still remember reading it fascinatedly as a child; we got Time at home and it covered dance more seriously than it does now. Further archive trawls throw up reviews of Royal Ballet openings down the years in New York. On November 14 1949, Time's cover featured Margot Fonteyn, Coloratura on Tiptoe , the occasion of the story being the very first visit by Sadler's Wells Ballet to New York with The Sleeping Beauty ("a performance that was astonishingly close to perfection..Margot Fonteyn, its prima ballerina (is) a dancer fit to be ranked with the alltime greats"). And when I read this Time cover story about Robert Joffrey in my teens, the provincial Irish town in which I grew up began to seem suffocatingly small.

A final thought: Time Magazine featured dance on its cover seven times in its history (Fonteyn, Nureyev, Baryshnikov, Kirkland, Balanchine, Joffrey, Bill T Jones); the last time was in 1994 (strange that there was never a Martha Graham cover. In the magazine's heyday, a Time cover was a unique accolade; a recognition that the featured person or issue was of importance to American society. Since the arrival of colour television, electronic newsgathering, satellites and 24 hour news, magazines such as Time and Newsweek matter less than they did. Even so, the way they marked dance tells us something about the place of dance in the wider culture.

I doubt a Time cover will feature dance again soon (and not only because the magazine's arts coverage is less than it was). Jane Simpson's wistful note in the new DanceView ('They didn't know that just around the corner was the next great choreographer') is more a distant hope than an expectation. I only see a major shift when many more choreographers decide to explore (like Pina Bausch) the relationship between dance and the spoken word and to re-engage both with society, and with dance as a theatre rather than a visual art.

Link to Time dance covers


Link to Google Archive Search