Poetry

Killing the Messenger

Steiner believes that a new anti-or non-modernist trend is now taking hold in the culture, but the examples she presents make one wonder if this is entirely a good thing. For instance, she proposes the choreography of Mark Morris as a positive development of the new art; but while Morris’s work is indeed pleasant, joyous, even exhilarating, it cannot match the staggering profundity of the 20th century’s undisputed choreographic genius, George Balanchine, who took the dance conventions that Steiner disdains, and, in one of the century’s more fortunate artistic developments, created modern ballet. Steiner praises especially the genial androgyny of Morris’s dances, but that cannot compare to what Balanchine achieved with his full-bodied, full-blooded sexual polarity. If the new direction Steiner is delineating is going to bring feminization, domestication, the submersion of opposites, the absorption of tensions, it will have to be resisted at some point in its turn, in favor of that more sublime experience to which man must continue to aspire. NR