25. Low-End: Ballet Forensics by Florian
I am suspicious of alternative histories of the arts, but sometimes evidence accumulates right before your eyes. Chronicles of destabilization can be boring, especially the variety that involves an unrecoverable (and often uncorrectable) past. Then, too, dance is always changing in its more superficial fashions and agendas, so trying to chronicle it from the standpoint of personal taste may reveal sheer surface in the analyst. I persist despite such doubts because my long experience forces certain periods of stark deliberation and a sense of impersonal turning points.
As a Virginia Woolf might say, our ballet world changed some time around 1986. Actually, the drift had become apparent a bit earlier. In 1961, American Ballet Theatre imported a work by Birgit Cullberg, Moon Reindeer, a narrative ballet based on Lapp folk traditions. Cullberg was resident choreographer of the Royal Swedish Ballet, where the work premiered in 1957. She was already known to ABT audiences for her 1950 danced version of Miss Julie, performed here by Violette Verdy and Erik Bruhn in 1958. In ABT’s Reindeer the corps de ballet was equipped with pointe shoes which represented the hooves of mythical beings sporting antlers on their heads. Choreographers will often go to lengths to justify pointe work. (Or ignore any rationale. Audiences have become accustomed to this classical convention so as not to question its employment, however ungainly or unlikely.) But the combination of hoof below and horn above in Moon Reindeer was a moment of such delicious humor, some of us have not yet recovered. Even the ballets of Cullberg’s son, Mats Ek, have not achieved a more definitive combination of the folkloric and the ludicrous. Those balletic hooves were Cullberg’s principal (some would say only) gesture toward the classical tradition. Certainly nothing in her dance component made the connection. Perhaps the antlers were Lapland tiaras? Cullberg’s apologists were always quick to claim a modern dramatic achievement in her art, rather than any perceivable connection with a balletic past. In his own works, her son would advertise even less of a serious linkage with any inherited aesthetic. Some artists are not equipped for period evocation unless it involves that time in which they have reputedly lived.
Thus, an early sign of a less than serious contemporary engagement with ballet tradition (Petipa-Ashton-Balanchine here) arrived from modern Sweden. That locale is worthy of note, as will be seen. My revised history of ballet revolves around a question, or several queries: what has happened nationally and internationally to a received idea of the ballet tradition? Has it disappeared in a current search for innovation? Is there a choreographer at any ballet company able to connect more than superficially with our useable past so as to attempt successfully to extend it rather than depend primarily on a sense of How We Live Now? When did it first occur on our New York stages that styles of downtown exotica by infant tyros came to replace serious attempts at a renewed tradition?
Audiences currently indulge works by choreographers who have little or no professional sense of ballet history. We see attempts to force such a connection by having the premieres “danced” by trained classical performers, as though that would do the job. It doesn’t. The shaping mind of an adult choreographer is required for art conscious of its vital inheritance. Hereabouts, generic versions of the “new” in ballet have replaced a unique imagination’s engagement with the past toward a vision of new choreographic form.
Back to the 1986 future. In the 1970s, the appearance of the works of Twyla Tharp at the Joffrey Ballet and at American Ballet Theatre raised the question of stylistic and formal renewal via downtown import. Tharp proved to be adept at providing vehicles for soloists in her own company and for certain dancers on the ballet stage. This was a real achievement given the difficulty of translating her idiosyncratic style of movement to other performers, especially ballerinas using pointe technique. Unfortunately, neither the Joffrey nor ABT provided her with a permanent creative position – for example, resident choreographer – and so the public was never able to encounter a “Tharp ballet dancer” developed over decades through schooling in her adapted style. Imagine what such a performing paragon would have been able to achieve through such collaboration had an ongoing institutional relationship been effectuated. ABT was thus chargeable with the same type of oversight which it had committed in the late 1940s: its failure to employ George Balanchine as its ballet master when he was conspicuously available for such hire. Another missed opportunity.
The result of this misalliance (ABT celebrated its on-again, off-again relation with Tharp last spring with an evening of her works and will offer a new ballet by her during the coming fall season at the Koch Theater) was that Tharp was never able to articulate or develop a unique balletic texture in her uptown dancers’ movement, much less take her best performers and her audience to those shaping refinements of dance materials and breakthroughs in technique and artistry that occur only over time. Subsequent revivals of Tharp ballets have shown a spotty improvement in their execution by later dancers. The usual explanation provided by ABT management was that Tharp always asked for too much expensive rehearsal time. Doubtless. Real art – like any fine fabric – can be costly. Perhaps the same failure was to occur in the company’s employment of Mark Morris, but there one sensed a possible failure of sustained curiosity about the ballet aesthetic on the part of the choreographer. Tharp indicates to this day her interest in classical dance values.
And then came the fatal year -- 1986. As a warmup, ABT (now under the leadership of Mikhail Baryshnikov) had sponsored a work by David Gordon – Field, Chair and Mountain – the previous year at the Met, one of Gordon’s witty essays from downtown “where you may find somebody kind who will help and understand you.” Unfortunately, his postmodern movement style was unable to achieve legibility across the vast distances of the big house, thus diminishing the possibility of being “understood” by an uptown ABT crowd. Undeterred, management hired Karole Armitage – sometime punk ballerina – to stage a new work with décor by David Salle, master of unpainterly appropriation. The resultant theatrical collage, The Mollino Room, failed to boss up or get down, despite a sonic mix featuring Paul Hindemith and Nichols and May in full flight. But the die was cast: after such frivolous debacle – low-end spastic classicism -- anything could forthwith be presented on New York stages and be termed a “ballet”. ABT had achieved a native “Swedish Modern”.
The floodgates were now open. For the prescient in the Met audience, a White Oak or B.A.C. fate could have been intuited for the post-1986 future. Few would have guessed immediately that ballet companies here and around the world would eventually follow suit, with Baryshnikov as the designated po-mo Pied Piper. See what it takes to lead a crowd? But reality – as it sometimes will -- provided an even better analogy than the deluge of the dammed.
It so happened that 1986 was the year when the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl deconstructed. Unskilled hands in the nuclear reactor’s control room allowed steam pressure to increase suddenly near the core from a “positive void coefficient”, thus disabling the coolant and absorbent powers of liquid water and turning the reactor’s core to lava. The world came to know the result: two explosions sending deadly radiation into the atmosphere and around the earth. Scientists in Sweden (there we are) were the first to notice an increase in radioactivity borne on the winds from Ukraine. Populations are still reeling from the disaster and will continue to reel.
I hope I will not be chastised for comparing a globe-spanning human tragedy to an aesthetic misadventure of the world’s premiere dance companies. I merely assume the role of those Swedish savants as I wet my finger, stir the air, and report that in 2019 our balletic environment shows evidence of an equivalent pollution.
Signs of a positive void coefficient are everywhere. We don’t need scandals among top cultural figures at Lincoln Center to suggest that something went amiss sometime back. An official did not do his job in the control center, and the resultant problem is fundamental. Our balletic landscape was twice blasted in slow motion: (1) in the shallow sentimentality of Peter Martins’ ballets at NYCB, his eventual anything-goes festivals of new choreography by many guest dance makers of doubtful rank and interest, and the current widespread imitation of the Martins high-pressured style of choreography found among the young; and (2) in the collected works of Alexi Ratmansky, but especially his opaque evocations of dystopian communal life in a safely abstracted Soviet Russia. It is possible that consequential ballet management has in fact devolved to the boards of our major companies, where stern entrepreneurs make the hard decisions that determine what we see our dancers premiere on our stages today. Surely no mere one or two titled individuals (“artistic director” or “resident choreographer”) could be held personally accountable for so many collective follies over so many seasons?
Some in the audience may not have noticed the soft dance explosions, rippling down the decades from the mid-80s. Lots of hot air from Euro sources. Lots of steam heat from downtown. The resultant atmospheric blur is everywhere. The position of resident choreographer (so resembling the position Gerald Arpino once held for so very long under a Robert Joffrey management) forestalls companies’ visiting guest choreographers from overstaying their term of employment. Indeed, the traffic in freelance dance makers has often resembled the crowds at Grand Central in perpetual transit, shuffling in and out across the seasons. Not a pretty sight.
Not that the nominal “residents” themselves are necessarily guaranteed real permanency in situ. How reassuring at the Royal Ballet to have Christopher Wheeldon maintaining a collegial relation to the aesthetics of the late Kenneth MacMillan. (Although Wayne McGregor is, at this time, prime resident at the Royal.) The internationally peripatetic Alexi Ratmansky visits ABT on occasion to remind us of socially conscious issues in his very personal works. (The company has renewed his position, catching him on the fly.) How convenient that Justin Peck maintains Broadway and Hollywood ties in the midst of his demi-caractère excursions at the David Koch. (What happened to plans for a tap-dance revue on the Great White Way?) Designated place-holders would best not appear too settled in company digs: family relations can only improve through a carefully managed distance. The employee must never feel over-secure in his own home. Any complacency might move a Board to barter.
What can come of it all? Officials at Chernobyl recently encased the nuclear ruins in hope of containment. Could a return to a more conventional concept of what makes the ballet a unique type of entertainment and a valued art form salvage something from Swedish Modern? Can the ground waters of artistic inspiration escape the hot lava of perpetual fashion galas?
Soft-focused publicity may be the best policy under the Mad Max circumstances. How else explain those current Pari Dukovic adverts for New York City Ballet that banner the David Koch façade and decorate the company’s brochures: unthreatening dancers in publicity shots with more fashion fabrics on display than flesh? The colors are pastel, the dancers frequently out of focus, the poses studiedly casual. Thank god for indeterminacy. You don’t have to identify any limb or gesture as dance-specific; any related gestural poetry has been rendered indistinct. Little real repertory is alluded to pictorially. It’s an Elysian vision after the Hazmat crews have scoured the scene and decamped for cleanup across the Plaza.
More incremental fallout. In the latest issue of The Paris Review (no. 230), the ballet photographs of Sayuri Ichida are featured along with jottings by Chloe Honum that stress performer survival. (Never mind audience patience.) On the cover, a student ballerina in practice clothes and en attitude is shown up against a wall. She is faceless. A harsh evident lighting throws her limbs’ shadows against the background, like those burned human silhouettes on buildings after nuclear detonations. All the photos show the model-dancer Mayu en pointe either under some form of active stress, bent servitude, or partial recovery. The career of a dancer is obviously a matter of pressures borne stoically. After all, anything now can be a ballet. In one photo Mayu bends over a guard rail, like a female hunt trophy in a Wheeldon ballet, ready for an objectified display. Honum writes that she wished “to see a ballerina folded over a metal railing while standing en pointe and letting both arms dangle. To see her in the realm of the ordinary instead of the otherworldly.” Careful what you wish for.
Recent and current choices for new works in our ballet companies’ repertories resemble such old-news fashion plates and euphemistic photo ops. Many audiences today are clearly distracted by displays of technical expertise by trained young models. Perhaps they thus contrive to ignore choreographic ineptitude. The dancers themselves are expected to submit docilely to whatever management commissions next, hostages to fashion. At the Bolshoi Ballet, such a syndrome under Yury Grigorovich led eventually to an active revolt by the company’s lead dancers. Perhaps they were tired of endless steaming at their Stockholm spa. Otherwise, it’s another opening, another show.
The New York audience for ballet now resembles the foreign one for the Paris Opera Ballet. That company has made do with expensive chic (call it “French Modern”?) over substance for many decades, dependent on downwind outlier styles to swell a repertory of modern exotics rather than foster any new choreographic developments out of a classical aesthetic. Ballerinas who have retired into management roles – as in the case of the POB’s current director, Aurélie Dupont -- tend to indulge modern and post-modern styles in commissioning new works. (In Paris, anything can be a ballet and usually is.) What feels comfortable on a veteran’s aging body must also be good for the young? But developments in classically honed choreography always grow out of an academic base which is rigorous and long-term rather than immediately feel-good. This usually requires a ballet master in charge, for only then does the art extend itself from within and avoid a break in the inherited stylistic line. Without such direction, we are stuck in latter-day American Modern, alas. How interesting that dance writers in our city maintain a discreet, 1930s Berlin-like silence on all such matters. Perhaps they know something that we don’t know? Or perhaps not.
But such questioning may actually be to abandon history, however revisionary, for speculation. Who knows what more post-1986 ballet has in store for us? If anything goes, what can’t eventuate? When the art of ballet has become a free-for-all, the point is to go with the flow and roll with the punch. To adapt what Ivy Compton-Burnett wrote in one of her novels about the deep analysis of family dynamics: “But [ballet companies] can seldom be explained, and they make better gossip without any explanation. To know all is to forgive all, and that would spoil everything.” Wouldn’t it just?
F.
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