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Reviving the past: once-lost choreography lives again.

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Reconstructing a ballet is a legacy of love, but one with a ticking clock. Today's dancers, with their 21st-century bodies, sensibilities, and training, face challenges in assimilating the aesthetic of early and mid-20th-century choreography. Dance Magazine spoke to three dance artists deep into the process of restaging noted ballets." Suzanne Farrell, who is rebuilding a Balanchine work; Dianne McIntyre, who has made a second career of staging Helen Tamiris' How Long Brethren?; and Clay Taliaferro, who recently revived The Traitor, a 1954 work by Jose Limon. We also spoke to some of the dancers who are breathing life into these ballets.

Suzanne Farrell has likened reconstructing once-lost ballets to piecing together fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls. There are the missing words and gaping spaces that time has eaten away, mistranslations and misunderstandings of what remains, and the impossibility of fully comprehending life in the context in which the manuscript was created....

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