Sally Brayley Bliss

It was an upbeat opening night for the Joffrey Ballet on Wednesday, with an expectant crowd, smiling dancers and a vaudeville-style final number. Aside from a dropped beach ball that had to be carried out in one segment, no dancers seemed distracted, morose or other than joyous to be performing on the Music Center stage.

It was an upbeat opening night for the Joffrey Ballet on Wednesday, with an expectant crowd, smiling dancers and a vaudeville-style final number. Aside from a dropped beach ball that had to be carried out in one segment, no dancers seemed distracted, morose or other than joyous to be performing on the Music Center stage.

Anthony A. Bliss, who guided the Metropolitan Opera and the Joffrey Ballet through troubled financial times, has died. The Associated Press, quoting an opera spokesman, reported Monday that Bliss, executive director of the Met from 1974 to 1985, was 78 when he died Saturday at a hospital in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada. He had suffered a brain hemorrhage and had pneumonia, spokesman David Reuben said.

1956: The Joffrey Ballet is born as six dancers embark on a tour of 23 one-night performances. 1963: The Joffrey dances for the first time at the White House, in the presence of President Kennedy and Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia. 1964: After a U.S. tour, the company is disbanded in March, after disagreements on policy with the Rebekah Harkness Foundation, which controls most of the dancer's contracts and the recent repertoire.

Members of the National Endowment for the Arts' advisory council Friday condemned the political controversy besetting the agency as a harbinger of an era of censorship. "History has proven that the freedom to create can only be healthy for a country," said Sally Brayley Bliss, a North Carolina dance authority and council member. "If there is censorship, this can lead to the end of civilization."

Orchestrally at least, the 1988-89 season promises to be interesting. Through a coincidence of anniversaries and leadership changes, there will be more new music and new faces in our concert halls than last year. The Long Beach Symphony, searching for a new music director following the dismissal of Murry Sidlin, brings five young American conductors to its podium: Paul Polivnick, David Alan Miller, Kenneth Kiesler, Jon Robertson and Jo Ann Falletta.

Just after 9 a.m. Friday, Washington time, in a drab meeting room notorious for acoustics that are marginal and air conditioning that is worse, National Endowment for the Arts Chairman John E. Frohnmayer will gavel to order the 109th meeting of what he likes to call "the greatest deliberative body on arts policy in the world."