Never a Straight Line: A #tanaquilleclercq legacy #Repost @alastair.macaulay Last year, I was a Jerome Robbins Research Fellow of the New York Public Library, researching Robbins’s “Faun” and its connections to Nijinsky’s “Faune”. After I presented about this in January 2018 at the Bruno Walter Auditorium, I assumed my assignment was complete. This week, however, I’ve been approached about possible publication of my presentation (we’ll see). And then this afternoon I came home to find that the Dance Division has sent me this - framed, too: a photograph by Robbins himself of Tanaquil Le Clercq in Robbins’s “Afternoon of a Faun”, a role he conceived and made for her. Her father was a French literature scholar who corresponded with Robbins about the original Mallarmé poem, which has two nymphs: Mr Le Clercq felt Robbins’s ballet joined the two in one. At the Robbins “Faun” seminar, several Robbins dancers spoke of the singular generation he had for Tanaquil: he would have liked her in every ballet he made, they said, and he would have trusted her with whatever changes she might have made to any work of his. When you consider that, before polio curtailed her career at age twenty-six, she created roles for George Balanchine (at least six), Robbins (two), and Frederick Ashton (one) that still endure in repertory today as well as others for Merce Cunningham, Todd Bolender, Ruthanna Boris, and Balanchine, it’s hard not to feel she was both muse and catalyst. My hearty thanks to the Dance Division of the New York Public Library: its staff are my friends as well as my colleagues, but this gift was more than I had ever expected. Saturday 21 July.