_________The word fatuous has appeared in 13 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on July 23 in the dance review “Petipa: Precursor to Modern Ballet or Hierarchical Elitist?” by Alastair Macaulay:And though dance made an important contribution in most Petipa ballets, in several it was far from their raison d’être. “King Candaules” (1868) ends, after its title character has died, with a scene in which his queen is haunted by his ghost until she drops dead; that, Ms. Meisner writes, is followed by a tableau in which, amid the other gods in the cloud-filled heavens, Venus-Astarte points “at the corpse of the hubristic queen who had dared to compete with the goddess of beauty.”Fatuous, yes — and all too characteristic of other Petipa ballets. Such a narrative epitomizes what the Bolsheviks would soon want to sweep away.

Source: New York Times October 08, 2019 06:00 UTC