Word: cinderella
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...perhaps the authenticity in their presentation of "Les Sylphides" which made the evening's other offering, "Cinderella," such a disappointment by contrast. To dance a fairy-tale well, one must make it believable. Yet this "Cinderella" by resident choreographer Ron Cunningham distances the audience from empathy and belief. He sets up a series of cardboard figures, and proceeds to comment on them...
...ballet is basically a good-will-be-rewarded morality tale, and the characters are conceived on this level. There are the ugly stepsisters (David Drummond and Larry Robertson), cavorting with bovine vulgarity, the shrewish stepmother (Elaine Bauer), and Cinderella herself (Laura Young), a painfully angelic victim. We can't be expected to take these people seriously, and Cunningham doesn't either. Large chunks of the ballet are given over to slapstick--the stepsisters squabble tug-of-war fashion over a shawl, or trip over each other to greet the Prince (Woytek Lowski). The liveliest moments are high comedy having nothing...
Worse, the actual dancing is largely incidental to both story and spectacle. Like the ballet interludes in a 19th-century opera, dance merely embroiders diverting decorations. Dancers dance only when one would expect the characters to do so--Cinderella daydreaming with her broomstick, or the guests waltzing at the royal ball--and the content of the movement is a trite and anonymous classical pattern. Cunningham's choreographic vocabulary is limited, ignoring both the music (a beguiling Prokofiev score) and any place of space outside the lateral extension of center stage...
...with most of his Cinderella eleven returning in 1972, Navarro was expected to lead Columbia to an Ivy League title. Instead the Lions stumbled to a 3-5-1 mark, and a despondent Navarro found himself at Baker Field with emotions similar to those of John Keats when he penned "the sedge is wither'd and no birds sing...
...most people, venereal disease means either syphilis or gonorrhea. But, in fact, the most common venereal disease in America today is one that has been so overlooked by both the public and doctors that a British expert has dubbed it "the Cinderella of sexually transmissible infections." The clinical name of the Cinderella disease: nongonococcal urethritis...