I’ve written about the wonderful Balanchine ballet “Theme and “Variations” before, here. But this time I want to concentrate on a different aspect of it: speed. Here’s a short solo portion from 1978 in which the ballerina’s part emphasizes that quality. I’ve noticed that, in recent years, the ability to dance extremely fast has become less valued and that dancers now have more and more trouble with it.

Of course, dancing ballet really fast was never easy, and some people were much better at it than others. This video is an example of someone—Gelsey Kirkland—who was one of the champs of speed (in more ways than one; she ended up having quite a drug problem).

This clip features Kirkland and Barishnikov in their heyday (1978). I saw them do it live—not this particular performance, but another similar one. This video shows the actual speed of the performance. It’s blurry but well worth watching. You can see the whole thing if you click on the “YouTube” logo, but I’ve cued it up here for Kirkland’s solo lasting less than a minute—about forty seconds, actually. But boy, there are a lot of steps in that forty seconds!:

This is the New York City Ballet with Merrill Ashley, I would estimate during the late 1980s. Like Kirkland, Ashley was known for speed and her sharp, precise technique. Ashley is tall, Kirkland small. A tall dancer often finds allegro work more difficult because it’s harder to pull the body together quickly. You’ll see that although she’s very fast and quite sharp, she’s not as fast and sharp as Kirkland:

There are a couple of other videos on YouTube of the same passage with different companies and dancers, but they’re not in the same league.