Why oh why can't we have better ballet criticism?

X. laughed and I sputtered at this, from Alistair Macaulay:

Even so, I’m impatient to get to Mr. Hallberg. What should one praise most? The way he has taken six roles already this season as if each one made him a wholly different person? The way he makes the imaginative world of each ballet more real by his absorption in it and his focus on others? The beauty of his partnering, so that it’s a wonder just to see him gently lower a woman to the floor? Or should one cut to the chase and wonder at the astounding stretch of his entire body — such legs, such feet — in classical ballet, so that he illuminates steps with time, naturalness and phenomenal grace?

Yes, Mr. Hallberg has lovely feet and, perhaps, from the furthest seats in a very large house, he might look an impressive dancer.

But.

I saw him from the eleventh row of City Center, and his eyes are dead: he sees the studio mirror at the proscenium, nothing more. His gaze focuses on "his" ballerina only when she comes into his orbit and he is required to be aware of her.

Artur Rubinstein always said that live performance was communication, and of course he was right.

In Hallberg's case, haven't seen such a total absence of communication, of communing, of community, since the unlamented Huntington Hartford ballet company.

James Wolcott, as is his wont, says it much better than I ever could:

The suspended animation was broken only when a man rushed on the stage, fell to his knees, and pressed his face against David Hallberg's chiseled cheeks as if he had found the Promised Land. It took two stagehands using an elderly usherette as a spatula to pry the intruder off of Hallberg's white tights, and then Alastair Macaulay was escorted back to his seat, the other members of the tableau shuffling into the wings during the interim.