full of stunning classical ballet. This show requires six principal dancers, a big corps de ballet, and numbers of children; it offers dashing pirates, slave girls, turbans and minarets, breathtaking stunts by male dancers (Ethan Stiefel was a fetching slave, Sasha Radetsky an effortlessly lithe Birbanto), even a Busby Berkeley-like dream sequence in the mind of a humorous pasha. Although it's an unregenerate Orientalist fantasy of delightful harems wasted on foolish Arabs, it's a dazzling evening of fun.And yet I'm perplexed. I don't get ballet. I'm not sure if I'm watching an art or a sport (like gymnastics or even - forgive the thought - dressage!). I suppose I'm prejudiced against it by my first modern dance teacher Ze'eva Cohen, who derided ballet as like sport in rejecting the human body and trying to turn it into a machine. No question, there are grace as well as precision of an incredibly high order, and each dancer is her/his own finely tuned machine. But... but...
I guess I can see ballet as a means but not an end.
