DANCESCAPE

* Inevitably, sketches of costume and set designs from the Ballets Russes era will be among the more than 150 items from dance, theater, and opera that Sotheby's New York will auction on December 9th. Natalia Gontcharova (1881-1962) will be represented by this costume for a Russian Peasant (around 1914). But so will Alexandra Exter (1884-1949), a sister member of the Russian avant-garde during the revolution. Below is her design for a 1917 Moscow production of Oscar Wilde's Salome. Sotheby's tells us the auction will be its first in a decade it has devoted to performing arts memorabilia.

Bart Roth

* This season's Radio City Christmas Spectacular, an annual presentation at the Music Hall in Rockefeller Center for sixty-five years, is the last to be presented before the famed theater undergoes extensive renovation next year. When the show closes on January 3, 1999, the Wooden Soldiers shown here will have been on parade 200 times in eight and a half weeks. This year marks the show's first appearance at Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles. Four other productions will be done in Chicago; Detroit; Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; and Branson, Missouri.

B.R.

* With its exhibition, "Degas and the Little Dancer," which concludes January 3, 1999, the Baltimore Museum of Art has gone beyond the usual show of pastels and oils and bronzes to focus on only one of the artist's ballet subjects--the budding young ballerina.

In his backstage visits, Degas (18.t4-1917) never forgot that he was a painter of modern life. He did not intend to produce works that portrayed only glamorous moments of the ballet, with dancers in the spotlight or bowing to receive bouquets. He also pictured the petit rats, underfed girls whose families drove them to practice for hours for only a few sous a day, or exhausted young girls standing in the wings, straightening their shoulders or adjusting bodices. He concentrates on meaningful--not necessarily graceful or beautiful-- gestures: a dancer stretching her instep, tying a slipper, or merely standing with a fan, as in this lithograph from. around 1879.

Degas opened up the back-stage world of the theater in the best of his ballet works. Few of his subjects have been identified with any particular dancer or dance. For him, any dancer was inspiration enough to paint or sketch or sculpt. Asked why he had concentrated on the ballet, he replied, "Because I find there ... the combined movement of the Greeks."

Beatrice Levin

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