Ballets Russes

In his day, Sol Hurok was almost as celebrated as the great artists he presented -- Anna Pavlova, Fyodor Chaliapin, Marian Anderson, Jan Peerce, the Ballets Russes, Isaac Stern, Van Cliburn, Margot Fonteyn, Rudolf Nureyev and the Royal Ballet. ,, "S. Hurok Presents" was a brand name associated with blue-chip quality. In 1952 there was even a Hollywood film biography, in Technicolor, of course, "Tonight We Sing," featuring generations Hurok artists -- Tamara Toumanova appeared as Pavlova.The Hurok empire lasted only a short time after Hurok's death in 1974; his last big "attraction" was the tragic world tour of Maria Callas and Giuseppe di Stefano.

The most notable thing about this season of museum and gallery shows is that, for the first time in years, it seems, there's no blockbuster event in the offing to monopolize all the attention, interest and ticket sales to the public. Instead, area museums will be putting on shows that challenge, entertain and educate - in short, the kind of focused, thoughtful shows that have a reason for being other than how many people they can lure through the box office. In February, local museums will coordinate exhibitions for Vivat!

When last we met up with Alicia Graf, back in April, the tall teen-ager from Columbia had just finished six months with Dance Theater of Harlem and was about to perform with the ballet company on its annual spring trip to Washington's Kennedy Center.She hadn't made her New York debut yet. When it came last month, it brought forth a fanfare of superlatives from Anna Kisselgoff, chief dance critic of the New York Times, who praised Graf's assured and serpentine performance as the Siren in "The Prodigal Son."

Women of fashion may sometimes be thought frivolous, but their very frivolities make fascinating footnotes in the history of their times. Alice Warder Garrett was one of the innovators. The former chatelaine of Evergreen House, the imposing mansion on North Charles Street, roared through the '20s in her fringes and tangoed through the '30s with a gusto that would make today's moderns blanch.Visitors to the Evergreen House can now see how the privileged and creative Mrs. Garrett dressed and diverted herself and her social circle with the opening of a costume exhibit and lecture series this week.

If you've never thought much of the dance scene in the Baltimore area, this coming season is going to make you change your thinking. Along with classic traditional ballet and modern standards, this year brings a host of area premieres that feature extraordinarily physical dancing in all styles and genres from around the globe. International-caliber companies from the United States, Russia, Mexico and China will grace area stages, presenting new works and showcasing virtuoso dancers. Kicking off the season this weekend, the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center presents Doug Varone and Dancers with an area premiere and the "indoor" premiere of a new work.

The arts festival Vivat! St. Petersburg was created to trumpet Baltimore's cultural accomplishments to the world. It also has unwittingly highlighted a major area where the city falls short. The three-week celebration of Russian culture, which ended last week, featured 106 art exhibits, theater readings and concerts in the Baltimore area -- and exactly one dance troupe. The Ballet Theatre of Maryland, an Annapolis-based dance company, made its Baltimore debut March 1 and 2, when it performed three original pieces set to Russian music.

The instant appeal of Fernand Leger's art almost sabotages it. Its balloon-like people, its machine-age contraptions, its bright colors and general air of good humor make it suspect. It may appear superficial to those who think that in modern art, good means esoteric, confusing and anxiety-ridden.As the excellent retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art shows, though, Leger's images may be lighthearted, but they're not lightweight. Collectively, and sometimes individually, they act almost as maps of the territory of modernism.

No one is really sure what George Balanchine meant when he echoed King Louis XV's famous quote, "Apres moi, le deluge." The choreographer of the world's most precise and eloquent ballets was notoriously - even gleefully - obtuse when it came to talking about his art. The naysayers who feared a decline for the New York City Ballet under Balanchine's successor, Peter Martins, saw it as an apocalyptic prediction. Even the most optimistic saw it as a simple statement of fact. After Balanchine's death in 1983, how could ballet ever be the same?

How many times have you driven mindlessly past it, that sprawling mansion atop the knoll in front of Johns Hopkins' campus? And have you ever wondered what lies behind those intricate wrought-iron gates on North Charles Street, marked only by a simple sign: "Evergreen House"?Dr. Bodil Ottesen, associate educator of public programs at the Baltimore Museum of Art, devised a way for the public to become more involved with the idiosyncrasies that Baltimore has to offer: a lecture series offered earlier this fall on "Baltimore Mansions," through a collaboration with the BMA and Johns Hopkins University's non-credit Odyssey Program.

As ballet lore has it, George Balanchine clapped his hands for attention at the end of class one day in 1934. "Mmmm," he said to his students. "I think we'll start something."That "something" was the ballet called "Serenade." As the title suggests, it's a nocturne, a song to the night, hushed and ephemeral as moonlight. It is also a masterpiece."Serenade" was the first ballet the Russian-born Balanchine made in America and also the first major abstract ballet in dance history. Intended as a teaching piece, it is today in the repertory of every major ballet company in the world.