She woke up in the apartment of her twenty-eight-year-old boyfriend, Chase Finlay, a principal dancer at N.Y.C.B., who was away at the time, and thought to check her e-mail on his computer. Such thoughts, however, are unlikely to have occurred to Alexandra Waterbury, a nineteen-year-old model and a former student of the School of American Ballet, New York City Ballet’s affiliate academy, on the morning of May 15, 2018. The better the dancer’s first arabesque penché-the more exact, the more spirited, the more singing its line-the more he or she will embody the promise of the ancient Greeks, lasting at least up to Keats, that beauty, truth, and virtue are inseparable, that we live in a good world. That composite stands for what they are as moral beings, and what, in consequence, they tell us the world is. They are more or less as they were when they came out of their mothers: flesh and energy, now with the addition of skill. On the dance stage, human beings place themselves before us much as, in old Italian frescoes, souls came before God: without words, without excuses, without much covering of any kind. Music operates in the same way, of course, but most dance includes music, and it has something else as well: the body. Dance, by virtue of its energy and its precision-and, often, its mounting intensity-brings us close to what many people in the world once looked for, and many still do, in religion. You could say that he dodged the question, but many of his admirers would say that he answered it directly and accurately. “ La danse, Madame,” Balanchine replied, “ c’est une question morale.” Probably the most cherished old tale about George Balanchine is the one in which the mother of a girl who had auditioned for him comes up to him later and asks whether her daughter will become a professional dancer.
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