WASHINGTON, D.C. – Just a month ago, one of our neighbors had a very grand weekend.

For well over 20 years, Patricia McBride has had a home at Chautauqua, with her husband, Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux. He is the head of the Department of Dance at Chautauqua Institution. You might have seen her, riding her bicycle around the Chautauqua grounds, or shopping in a local store or attending a showing of a film in one of our local theaters, with her two children and a pack of their friends in tow.

But for more than 30 years before that, McBride was universally celebrated as one of the greatest dancers of all history. Many have said she was the greatest. On the first weekend of last month, McBride was celebrated by our entire nation, by being awarded one of the five Kennedy Center Honors for last year. Those awards are the highest honor which our nation gives to Americans who have achieved excellence in the arts.

The ceremony was presided over by President Obama and the First Lady, and it has all been televised on CBS television at least twice.

This week, I would be ashamed to call myself an arts columnist if I didn’t add my humble applause to the nation’s highest praise.

THE KENNEDY CENTER HONORS

Each year since 1978, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, in Washington, D.C., has named five living American artists to be honorees. To receive these awards is considered equivalent of being named a Knight or a Dame in the United Kingdom, or to receive the French Legion of Honor.

Past winners of the honors include Marian Anderson, Leonard Bernstein, Tennessee Williams, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, Arthur Miller, Lucille Ball, Katharine Hepburn, Marilyn Horne, Shirley Temple Black, Carol Burnett, Yo-Yo Ma, plus four or five more, for each of the 27 years in which the honors have been given. That makes McBride the third person with strong ties to our area to receive the award. I’m sure you recognize Jamestown’s Ball and Bradford’s Horne on that list.

McBride herself told one interviewer, recently, ”In Europe and in Russia, to be an artist is comparable to being a major film star. In our country, it has never been given that emphasis to make a life in the arts, so that makes the award so much more meaningful to me.”

The annual Honors Gala has become the highlight of the Washington cultural year, and its broadcast on the CBS network has won an Emmy for each of the past seven years.

The medallions, on their multi-colored ribbons, were actually presented to the winners at a dinner hosted by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, held in the State Department on Dec. 6.

On Dec. 7, the honorees were hosted at the White House by the President and the First Lady. The Obamas were in high school when McBride and partner Mikhail Baryshnikov were invited to perform for an international diplomatic dinner in the East Room of the White House by President Jimmy Carter.

They all then adjourned to the Opera House of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where honorees and hosts sat in a balcony and received both honorary speeches from the stage, and either filmed or live performances. McBride reported herself thrilled that four of the dancers whom she has helped to train from the Charlotte Ballet performed selections from the ballet ”Who Cares?” which was created in 1970 for McBride by choreographer George Balanchine, and which she had originally performed with partner Jacques D’Amboise.

The Charlotte dancers were Alessandra Ball Janes, Anna Gerberich, Sarah Harkins and Pete Leo Walker. Area audiences have seen all four dance on the stage of the Amphitheater, as the Charlotte Ballet has performed each season for more than a decade at Chautauqua.

At the State Department dinner, McBride was presented her medallion by the dancer who was her most frequent partner, with the New York City Ballet: 1997 Kennedy Center Awards winner Edward Villella. She was presented to the audience at the Opera House of Kennedy Center by actress and Buffalo native Christine Baranski. The selections from ”Who Cares?” were staged by former City Ballet dancer Damian Woetzel.

The winners of the awards neither speak nor perform, themselves, but rather are honored by others, at each year’s ceremony.

PATRICIA MCBRIDE

Patricia McBride was born in Teaneck, New Jersey. Unlike the vast majority of people in the limelight, she leaves her date of birth in her official biographies: Aug. 23, 1942. She began studying dance at the age of 8, with a former Broadway hoofer, but she found herself always drawn to ballet. ”I wasn’t determined on a career in dance. The lessons were just something to do, at that time,” she once said.

”I was dancing en pointe at the age of 8, and that was much too early,” she told one interviewer. When a dancer rises to the position called ”en pointe,” she places all her weight, not on the ridge of bone, where the toes connect to the foot, but up, onto the absolute tips of her toes. Bone specialists have long believed that dancers should not rise to that position until their bones have matured enough not to be misshapen by the weight.

When she was 14, her mother made the big sacrifice of taking her across the Hudson River to New York City to audition for the School of American Ballet, which was created by New York City Ballet founder George Balanchine as a source of dancers he considered properly trained to perform with his world-renown company.

Mother and daughter moved to a small apartment in Manhattan, and Patricia attended the School for the Performing Arts, which was been created to provide the flexibility for children who perform professionally and need to attend classes at unusual times, and to be occasionally absent while instruction is taking place.

Classical dancers are billed and are paid in three degrees: corps de ballet, soloist and principal dancer. At age 16, in 1959, she was considered so accomplished that she was made a member of the NYCB corps de ballet, and at 18, she became the youngest dancer ever to be promoted all the way to the top degree.

Only a bit more than 5 feet tall, she was the perfect partner for male dancers who were not as tall. She was a thrilling partner for Peter Martins, who is more than 6 feet tall, but it’s important to realize that when a ballerina rises onto the tips of her toes, she adds 4 to 5 inches to her height. A tall woman easily towers over her partner, and the discrepancy can pull the audience out of concentration on the dance and even may appear a bit ridiculous. Her performances with D’Amboise, Villella and Icelandic dancer Helgi Tomasson resulted in dance lovers coming to New York from around the world.

She once lamented that her future husband, French dancer Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux, joined NYCB in 1970, and she wanted very much to dance with him, but he is tall, so they were rarely chosen to perform together by choreographers.

I first saw her dance in 1967, when a friend at college invited a bunch of us to take sleeping bags to New York City and to camp out on his family’s dining room floor in order to attend Broadway shows, opera and ballet performances during a school vacation. I don’t remember what role she was dancing, but I remember being startled by the fact that it seemed as though, for the first time, I was seeing music. All my life I’ve loved listening to music, but she added a visual dimension which made it a hundred times better yet.

Ballet companies, like many performing arts groups, are known for rivalry among the dancers, and for the development of huge egos and diva-like behavior from their principals. When she retired from professional dancing and began her work as an honored teacher at Chautauqua, I was lucky enough to be allowed to spend an entire afternoon with her as she went about her duties.

Before I began the assignment, I got five different autobiographies by professional dancers, and read what they had to say about Patricia McBride. The books went into considerable detail about which dancers had weight problems, and which ones slept with choreographers to get roles, and which were so disagreeable that no one wanted to dance with them, yet the books all were packed with praise for McBride.

She is kind, she is friendly, she is cooperative, she is generous, she works harder than any other dancer in the company – all these elements of praise and many more were offered by her colleagues, who competed with her for roles and for the opportunity to dance with the partners who were most likely to bring the public’s attention.

Choreographer Jerome Robbins, who shared the artistic directorship of the NYCB company with Balanchine, was famously hot tempered and prone to verbally abuse dancers who couldn’t meet his very high standards on even isolated occasions. Villella, in his autobiography, reported that if Robbins started to complain, McBride would smile and say, ”Did I do that? How silly. Let’s get it right,” and soon Robbins would be smiling and offering helpful suggestions how to perform the steps the way he wanted.

Robbins created the ballet ”Dances at a Gathering” for her, plus parts in”The Goldberg Variations,” ”The Four Seasons” and ”Dubbuk,” to name only a few.

McBride danced more than 100 ballets with NYCB and with companies from other cities who hired her as a guest artist. Of those, more than 30 were specifically choreographed for her, mostly by Robbins and Balanchine.

”My parents divorced when I was very young, and I barely knew my father, so Mr. B. (which dancers famously called Balanchine) became sort of a father figure for me,” she explained. Russian-born Balanchine was known for frequent romantic entanglements with his female dancers, and even married a number of them. To McBride, he happily fell into a fatherly role, even once, seeing her running to catch a bus, lifting her over a snow bank so she could get aboard.

”To have a great choreographer create a dance for you is better than diamonds,” she said recently. In my years of knowing her, she speaks only glowingly of Balanchine, second only to her husband.

One highlight of my afternoon in her company was the chance to have lunch in a local restaurant with her and her mother-in-law. It was deeply impressive to me to watch her play three important roles simultaneously. She was an international star, and people continued to stop by the table to tell her how much they had loved seeing her dance. She was an interviewee, sitting with a reporter who might set his sights on almost anything, or even possibly make something up, for all she knew, which would embarrass her and her husband.

Third, she was a daughter-in-law to a woman who spoke no English, at least during the time we were together, and who seemed to feel that a son’s wife should be attentive and solicitous, such as translating the menu into French and explaining how the food would be prepared if she ordered a certain dish.

Everyone at Chautauqua tends to call the ballerina ”Patti,” although on the occasions when she has called me on the phone she has inevitably said, ”This is Patricia Bonnefoux.” Her devotion to her dashing husband, whose career as a dancer was ended by a misplaced foot in the midst of a dance on stage, while she continued to perform for a number of years, is a marvel to behold. “I never dreamed that I’d marry a dancer,” she said during her interview. ”To dance with someone is a very intimate experience. The man needs to know how quickly you’ll do something, and extend his hand to you in time to maintain your balance, but not too soon, so that it looks as though you are behind where you’re supposed to be. But to dance with your soul mate, with the person you love, is an experience that goes beyond anything else I can imagine.”

I remember clearly the first time Bonnefoux and wife danced at Chautauqua. The administration of the institution was honored that they would perform, and tried to honor them by having a thick, shiny coat of wax applied to the floor of the Amphitheater stage. Today, when dancers perform, the stage floor is covered by rolls of a special flooring, which slightly pads the impact of their feet on the stage, and which is slightly tacky, so that a satin slipper will not slide and bring the dancer down to the floor – possibly with a career-ending injury.

In those days, they were at the mercy of the stage floor. I remember watching them pour can after can of a sticky soft drink onto that fresh coat of wax, and to do everything they could think of doing to roughen its surface and make it less treacherous. In the end, they didn’t fall, but the freedom of their dancing was probably more restricted than at any other time in their careers.

I remember how much the couple wanted to start a family, and when that didn’t happen, they began adoption proceedings. And, of course, while that was still in the process, nature took its course and their biological child was on his way. Since adoption agencies typically cancel adoptions if a couple conceives a biological child, McBride continued to dance into the fifth month of her pregnancy, until their daughter, Melanie, arrived, to be soon greeted by brother Christopher.

The Bonnefoux family makes their principal home in Charlotte, where they are artistic director and associate artistic director of the Charlotte Ballet, but they are part and parcel of our own area, as well. Their home, just outside the grounds of Chautauqua, from which they can ride their bicycles to the institution’s dance studios, and where they play host of beautiful parties for their dancers, faculty, and guest dancers, is a spot of light and excellence in our area.

In 1989, at age 47, McBride decided she would stop dancing. The company held a special gala performance, at the conclusion of which they showered her with 13,000 roses, each of which had been carefully de-thorned, by hand. Every seat in the giant Lincoln Center theater was sold, and people stood by the hundreds outside in the rain. At the time, she said she had achieved everything she had done, and while she was still getting glowing reviews, she couldn’t see continuing living in New York City, while her husband was on the faculty of Indiana State University. ”I could have danced twice a week for two or three more years, but why?” she said to a reviewer at the time. ”I loved what I was doing. I had a life I never dreamed I’d have. It was better than any dream I could have imagined.”

How lucky we are to have her with us, summer after summer.

WINKS

Opening Jan. 16 and playing through Feb. 8, Buffalo’s Irish Classical Theatre Company will present the play ”The Lion in Winter” by James Goldman.

The play, which became an Oscar-winning film starring Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn, is set in 1183, and tells the historically true story of England’s King Henry II and his love/hate relationship with his wife, Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, with their sons, Richard the Lionheart, Geoffrey and Prince John serving as pawns in their parents’ ongoing struggles. When kings and queens quarrel, soldiers die and cities burn.

The company’s artistic director, Vincent O’Neill, and his wife, featured guest artist Josephine Hogan, play the royal couple. Tickets are $39 each. On Sundays, seniors are admitted for $35. Student tickets, with valid ID, cost $15. Phone 853-4282 or go by computer to www.irishclassicaltheatre.com. The company performs at the Andrews Theatre, diagonally across Main Street from Shea’s Performing Arts Center.