The Philadelphia Inquirer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page 55

Wait Jnquirtr DAHY MAGAZINE PEOPLE HOME MOVIES THE ARTS TV STYLE TUESDAY April 18, 1989 SECTION A ballet born of outrage By Nancy Goldner Inquinr Danes Critic siy wjpfffis; Jm-n ill ill iii- mMmmm )iliiaswiiH sssuQT 7 I i cup LlL Th Philadelphia Inquinr AKIRA SUWA When John Doe is politically outraged, he writes letters, refuses to pay taxes, kicks the television. When Lynne Taylor-Corbett is outraged, she makes a ballet. Her Code of Silence, which the Pennsylvania and Milwaukee Ballet will premiere at 8 tonight at the Shubert Theater, is about a society under siege. "It is about people being snatched away suddenly," said Taylor-Corbett, a New York freelance choreographer whose work has been performed by the American Ballet Theater and other, smaller groups. It's "about the claustrophobia that must occur when you can't leave a country, about people losing their dignity and so becoming abusive." The dance will be presented for a week-long run on a program that includes two premieres by Robert Weiss, the company's artistic director.

"I'm not a cause person," Taylor-Corbett said, "but sometimes I get outraged." The genesis of her outrage, she explained after a recent rehearsal at the company's studios, was a chance meeting she had had with a Chinese dancer five years ago in New York. Taylor-Corbett attended a Chinese New Year's party given by Chiang-Ching, an experimental choreographer who'd worked in New York for a long time. There she met another Chinese choreographer, newly arrived from China. The recent arrival told Taylor-Corbett that she had just spent 10 years in prison. Her work had been deemed treasonous by the wife of Mao Tse-tung, she said, and suddenly she found herself jailed indefinitely.

Just as suddenly, she was released. "This encounter began for me a keen awareness of political persecution," Taylor-Corbett said. "I'm still in a rage about it. And I'm in a rage that our government is not in a rage about it. I'm in a rage that my peers have no political sciousness.

"The other day I read in the paper that some pro-life women who were protesting were strip-searched. This is illegal. I think we're slow in reacting to loss of civil liberties. If it can happen in China, it can happen here. We must be vigilant." For all the straightforward anger she expresses, however, her ballet does not tell a straightforward story; it conveys political and psychological ideas in abstract images that the audience may or may not connect with.

The sense of claustrophobia is a key image, she said, which is why she chose to create the ballet in one of the Pennsylvania Ballet's smaller studios. "In the ballet," she commented, "you first see the dancers in a confined place a jail and then, in a flashback, you see what happened psychologically to get them there." Code of Silence has a hero, of sorts, who will be performed alternately by Jeffrey Gribler and An- (See TAYLOR-CORBETT on 5-E) Rachel Billebault in her restaurant and nightclub at the Bourse. "I am always out front, she says. "I like greeting people and seating them and so forth." Different, yet the same ft Philadelphia's famous transsexual started life as Richard Finocchio, but became famous as Rachel Harlow. After years of shunning publicity, she's back in the spotlight Her restaurant is Harlow's and she's still Rachel By John Corr Inquirer Stall Wrtur They call her Rachel now.

Or Mrs. Billebault. She moves with easy grace through the crystal and marble elegance of her restaurant, speaking softly, smiling warmly, looking every inch the mature and sophisticated woman of the world. It is almost as if more than a decade of self-imposed obscurity had never occurred. Harlow is back.

Harlow. Mrs. Rachel Billebault. The former Richard Finocchio of South Philadelphia. Very much the same, and very much different.

It is early April, the day of her ninth wedding anniversary, and she is receiving congratulations and bouquets of flowers, and consenting to be interviewed in her new, large, beautifully appointed restaurant and nightclub at the Fourth Street entrance to the Bourse Building, south of Market Street Her husband, chef Gerard Billebault, is supervising in the kitchen. She says she is frightened by the responsibilities of being hostess and manager of such a place, Harlow's, but she does not look at all frightened. She looks confident, cool, elegant. For her, the days of giddy glitter, extravagant posturing and gaudy publicity are over. Opening the restaurant in December placed her in the public eye once again, but now things are different.

At 41, she is no longer a curiosity, a "queen." She is Rachel Billebault. "The world has changed, attitudes have changed so much in just a few years," she says. "Having had the operation is not such a big thing now." "The operation" occurred in 1972 and corrected Gerard Billebault supervises the kitchen. He and Harlow have been married nine years; they met in a Center City bistro. what she knew from childhood to be a cruel biological error.

She thinks of it now as simply the last step in becoming, finally, fully, a woman. "People say that it took courage to have the operation she said. "But that's not true. I simply had no choice. I could not have lived otherwise.

It was too terrible to bear." Harlow, who assumed the name because she (See RACHEL on 5-E) Baby boomers blasted by an anti-nostalgia trio A pretty big baby just one day old NBC's new network 13 million subscribers. I I' I i V5 If 0 'it, 'I) 3 STARTING DATE: April 17, 1989 CHICAGO Tired of hearing "oldies" older than they are, three exasperated young men have banded together to quarrel with baby boomers and nostalgia for the 1960s. The fledgling National Association for the Advancement of Time three guys in their 20s is campaigning for new members with the slogan: "We want to end the '60s in your lifetime." "Let's make nostalgia a thing of the past!" say the three. Anti-nostalgia crusader Eugene Dillenburg, 29, of Chicago, dismisses baby boomers as "SO million teenagers who never grew up." "There's so many of them. If they want to live in their past, that's fine but they're forcing me to live in their past," gripes Dillenburg.

He TYPE: Basic cable. Carries commercials. CONTENT: Business and consumer news. SUBSCRIBERS: 13 million. WHERE AVAILABLE: About 25 of all cable systems.

OWNER: NBC (50-50 partnership pending with Cablevision Systems founded NAFTAT with friends Bruce Elliott of Los Angeles and John Keeney of New York City. Dillenburg and Elliott got together in 1987 after discovering their mutual exasperation with "oldies" radio. So far their efforts have amounted to cranking out leaflets that call on sympathizers to "fight for the present and annoy a lot of self-important ex-hippies in the process." Here's a sampling from Dillen-burg's long list of complaints: Movies The Big Chill. Theater the revival of Hair. Television The Wonder Years.

Print media Bob Greene's nationally syndicated Chicago Tribune column. Books volumes on the riotous 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, "as insignificant an event as ever happened in this country." The three young men have come to the attention of Northwestern University sociologist Bernard Beck. He finds the group to be part of a building backlash among youth toward the baby boomers, much as the baby-boom generation rebeled against its parents' memories of the Depression and World War II. By failing to step aside "the way it's supposed to," the baby-boom generation has "thrown out of kilter the ordinary succession of generations," Beck said. Dillenburg adds that the message baby boomers send to others is: "You missed the '60s your life is meaningless.

Your life is irrelevant because it came after mine." Third in a series on the players in the multibillion-dollar cable-television business. By Lee Winfrey Inquirer TV Writer FORT LEE, N.J. CNBC, the nation's newest cable-television service, was born here at 6 a.m. yesterday. For such a big and expensive baby, it looked like a normal delivery.

NBC president Robert C. "Bob" Wright crossed the Hudson River from his office in New York to preside personally over what he hoped was a blessed event NBC became the third and last of the broadcast networks to launch a cable channel, following cable failures by CBS and ABC earlier in this decade. For CNBC, as for virtually every other cable service before ii a normal birth meant two things: a few on-air mistakes and substantial off-camera financial losses. So a few announcers goofed, and an occasional graphic was printed incorrectly on the little screen. And Wright and CNBC's 275 employees settled in to wait out an expected three or four years of red ink before CNBC turns its first profit.

CNBC, a basic cable service spe- Index Art Buchwald Ideas trends 2-E Ann Landers 2 The Arts 3-E Going-out guide 3-E Society -E Darrell Sifford Television 6 TVradio talk 6J Music review: Turkish concert 3-E Theater review: The Entertainer 3-E TV review: Have Faith 10-E cializing in business and consumer news, is competing most directly against the Financial News Network (FNN), also a basic cable service, which was born in 1981 and is serving 31 million subscribers. CNBC was launched with 13 million subscribers, on about one-fourth of the nation's cable systems. In an on-camera appearance at 8:30 a.m., Wright told viewers, "We wont tell you anything without (See CNBC on 10-E) Mary Alice Williams, hired from CNN, hosts "Media Beat. 1110CABLE WATCH.