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| Olga Krochik and Julia Rowe do NOT do-si-do/Blaine Truitt Covert |
When I was in college, someone (I forget just who) suggested that the closest equivalent to Elizabethan speech, the language of Shakespeare, existing in the world was spoken in the hollers of Appalachia. I was skeptical. One branch of my family had abandoned the tough living available in western Kentucky for the coal country of eastern Kentucky, and though I seldom visited, my memory of their accent didn't immediately bring to mind any Shakespeare I'd ever heard.
But the more I thought about it, the more I began to understand the comparison -- it's not their accent, it's the structure of their sentences, strangely old-fashioned at times, and certain anachronisms (I heard my mother say, "Donchee know," just yesterday, for "Don't you know" -- and in that ee, I think Elizabethan English endures).
When I saw Balanchine's Square Dance on Oregon Ballet Theatre's program, Song and Dance, this weekend, I had a similar response to the one I had in my college days. What does Balanchine have to do with square dance? But this time it only took me a few minutes to get it.
