IN a scene that is symbolic of new directions in modern dance, Astarte, the moon goddess, writhes in passionate triumph over the spent form of the mortal who seduced her. The action is bathed in lights and film images that glide, collide and dissolve in a psychedelic pattern to the crash of rock rhythms. This ascendant moment in Robert Joffrey's ballet Astarte appears on the cover of this issue almost exactly as it is seen by audiences. To capture the moment, Photographer Herbert Migdoll photographed the dancers, Trinette Singleton and Maximiliano Zo-mosa, during a performance. Then at another performance, with a telephoto lens, he made the closeup of Miss Singleton's face and the filmed background in order to complete his final montage.

Getting the pictures for the color pages that run with the cover story presented similar technical and artistic problems. For the Triptych scene, Photographer Ormond Gigli had to ask the dancers to freeze in mid-motion. In several cases, performers left busy rehearsal schedules in austere studios to re-create their dances for Color Projects Researcher Andrea Svedberg and the cameramen in settings that made for better photography.

As he worked on the cover story, Writer Ray Kennedy recalled his own fling at ballet. As an art student some years ago, Ray was in Cincinnati sketching a ballet from backstage when he was asked to serve as an extra--to walk across stage followed by five other striplings all adorned with helmets, spears and quaint buckled shoes. When the big moment came and he strode boldly forward, his feet got snarled in electrical cables and he tripped over the footlights almost into the lap of Senator Robert A. Taft. Hoisting himself back onstage, he tried to recover his fallen armor, only to be thrust forward again by the spear of the young man behind him. The audience convulsed; Ray fled.

Researcher Mary Cronin, whose childhood experience with dance was limited to ballet lessons, revisited for this story many choreographers and dancers whom she had met five years ago while working on a Rockefeller Fund project examining economic problems of the performing arts. After nearly a month of ballet going, she was inflicted with a recurring dream in which she was forced to dance in slippers far too large before a vast audience. The reality that Mary and the rest of our troupe found in American ballet makes a revealing story of new, inventive, uninhibited spirit.

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