Tudor Reign.(Antony Tudor)

American Ballet Theatre spent its two-week fall season at City Center celebrating the centenary of the Anglo-American choreographer Antony Tudor. Tudor was part of the extraordinary convocation of dance-makers--Martha Graham, George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, Merce Cunningham--who worked in New York around the middle of the last century, but his reputation has always been smaller than the others'. In part, it's because his output was meagre. Though he lived to be seventy-eight, most of his major ballets, and all his finest ones (to my knowledge), were made by the time he was thirty-four. Tudor was a prickly, sarcastic man--a perfectionist who tormented his dancers and ...