4. Reconstructive Ballet: A Conversation with Liane Beach
The interview was conducted in New York City over brunch at Prune on a breezy midday in November, 2018.
BV: #YouToo?
Beach: No, not really. We started as an exclusive Parisian club for women, something like your WeWorks, but so many ex-dancers joined up, it might as well have been a WeDance!
BV: And you and the group have formed a ballet company, Le Swing.
Beach: It was time. There was an abandoned casino in the Marais, so we took over the space.
BV: And had an immediate success.
Beach: Pretty much. We were the real thing: ballet as Parisians had forgotten it could be. Ballerinas for days. We want to return to the style – not contemporary dance, imitation sports, or tap. Our ballerinas demand real roles. Where are the great roles today? Audiences are tired of copies.
BV: Who was your lead?
Beach: Izzy. She’s the director now.
BV: Isabella Belladonna?
Beach: We call her Madame B. She also teaches company class. Izzy is a master in Krav Maga. She has choreographed fight scenes. All of our dancers are in training with her.
BV: Sounds like Thomas Berger: Regiment of Women.
Beach: Closer to a local cohort. As the great Monique Wittig put it, “First one must fight for oneself.”
BV: Does Izzy choreograph ballets?
Beach: One so far – Siren. She’s thinking of a new version of Jeux.
BV: Ah, but for three female tennis players? Topical. The Japanese have their equivalent, don’t they?
Beach: The Takarazuka. Their en travestie artists are such an inspiration. We too have men-women.
BV: And the Trocks?
Beach: Yes, except we are very serious, you know.
BV: It sounds like early American modern dance, the all-women groups.
Beach: That passion. We adore Graham.
BV: How big is Le Swing?
Beach: Only sixteen dancers. But here in New York we will expand.
BV: You are here to explore possibilities for an American company?
Beach: Virgin territory. New York is exciting. St. Laurent held its men’s show here recently. Across the river in New Jersey. Tony [Vaccarello] is adventurous.
BV: Do you have a name for the U.S. cohort as yet?
Beach: Perhaps your readers will have suggestions.
BV: Will you have trouble with discrimination suits, do you think? Remaining all-female?
Beach: That would be a tribute, no? In Paris we had a token male dancer to teach partnering, an art in itself, as you know. A temporary solution. I don’t see a problem. We have lawyers. Female.
BV: Will you accept transsexual dancers?
Beach: Of course, as long as the pointe technique is strong. The French pointes are so beautiful, and the American pointes so versatile.
BV: What is your role with the company? CEO?
Beach: Oh, no. Perhaps sage-femme or cantinière. I love to travel. We toured to Berlin last month.
BV: You are not a dancer yourself.
Beach: I wish. In Paris we don’t have a board – it’s closer to a consortium. Here in the States it probably will mean a board, of course. It always does, correct?
BV: You are a patron of Le Swing.
Beach: My late husband, Raoul Beach, was an arms contractor. He left me well provided for. I am happy to support my favorite art with whatever I have.
BV: Your husband is said to have been the victim of a missile attack in Yemen – some say drone-directed. He was a suspected arms trafficker?
Beach: Raoul was always very mysterious about his work. He did his thing. I did mine. When the guns are silent . . . .
BV: Which isn’t often. Was your husband a balletomane like you?
Beach: Oh, no. He was incapable. I gave him Lautréamont to read. But he took it straight. Without irony. The ballet needs a sensitivity to paradox, irony.
BV: You had no children?
Beach: No. But I strive to be a “thinking mother” with Le Swing.
BV: Your name . . . Beach.
Beach: I insisted my husband Anglicize. He was descended from a Duc de la Plage. I notice there are many Beaches in the U.S. It was one of the few things we agreed about in our marriage. It helped in his international dealings, I believe.
BV: You do not sound like the bereft widow.
Beach: Not in the long run. What does the poet say? – “Beware of his foot, put out his squinty eye, he’s the king of volcanoes and the God of winters!” That about sums it up.
BV: You were born in France?
Beach: No, in New York, to a father in light diplomacy and a mother in heavy alcoholism. I was raised in Paris. Schooled in literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, but I insisted on graduate studies in New York. And in Irvine. Derrida was bi-coastal then. I followed him.
BV: Who was your first ballerina?
Beach: The great Guillem. I would stand in line for tickets to see her. I met her once at the cat show at the Garden. She was dismissive when I was introduced. I loved being dismissed by her. She’s like a cat. We have asked her to coach one day.
BV: What did she teach you with her dance?
Beach: That you must have the grain noble. Either ballet has it or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, it’s demi-caractère, faux-moderne, caractère, or contemporary. All not very interesting today, do you agree?
BV: What about the resident choreographers at the major companies? They claim originality.
Beach: I am dubious. Originality is usually overrated. Most of the new is pour les gosses.
BV: Your New York company will come to the rescue?
Beach: More like an “intervention”. I think that’s the term. An alternative. The necessary swing of the pendulum.
BV: What do you look for in a ballet company?
Beach: Simple. Are the women of the company soignée? If not, goodbye. Audiences will stay away in droves. They are correct in their absence.
BV: In the past it’s often taken a male – a Petipa, a Balanchine, an Ashton – to supervise such matters.
Beach: That is changing. There is a female gaze.
BV: Will you be including any Balanchine works in the new company’s repertory?
Beach: Our dream would be the first movement of Serenade, the Sonatina. With a revision at the very end. The Waltz Girl will get a new partner, same-sex.
BV: A coup de théâtre.
Beach: It would be our signature work. I will approach the Trust.
BV: Any others?
Beach: Oh, Raymonda Variations. Such extraordinary pastiche. So preceptual.
BV: Balanchine loved women.
Beach: And youth! Look at his baby ballerinas. We have our babies too. I love his film version of “That Old Black Magic”: snowy mounts of femininity.
BV: How does your Belladonna compare?
Beach: Oh, you must see her La Sirène, a ballet out of Mallarmé, inspired by Quentin Meillassoux’s work. A ballet of mutant classicism, like Balanchine’s.
BV: Any Robbins?
Beach: Antique Epitaphs, perhaps.
BV: What about the future?
Beach: One can dream. Shouldn’t there be a ballet inspired by Mary Renault or Patricia Highsmith? Or perhaps Sarah Waters could do something original for us?
BV: Ah, yes.
Beach: Do you know a wonderful old film titled here Blood and Roses, out of Carmilla, the Sheridan LeFanu story? The movie had great cinematography by Claude Renoir. Such a ballet that would make!
BV: A female Dracula?
Beach: My personal fantasy would be a dance based on Nerval’s Sylvie, so dream-like, all those serial love objects. Or a Perfumes of Yemen, with its Queen of Sheba.
BV: What about Stein’s Ida? Or Collette’s The Pure and the Impure?
Beach: You do understand. I would also like a work based on the lives of the surrealists Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. Such brave women.
BV: Suzanne Malherbe and Lucie Schwob, in original nomenclature.
Beach: And, please, let us have a ballet inspired by the great Gautier. Maybe “The Two Pearls” out of Mademoiselle de Maupin or one of his fantômes, “The Priest.”
BV: As “The Priestess”? I begin to see. The possibilities.
Beach: You are very sympathetic -- like Balanchine.
BV: One does one’s best.
Beach: You are coming along, mon cher.
BV: You mentioned Derrida earlier.
Beach: I adored Jackie. I was his student to the end. His “Double Session” led me to the ballet. I sat at his feet.
BV: The discussion of Mallarmé’s Mimique.
Beach: The luxuries of silence and rhyme.
BV: As in ballet.
Beach: Mallarmé seduced one with his terms: the hymen, the fold, the blank, the fan, the clasp, the mirror, the whiteness. Jackie was there to guide one through the labyrinth. And at its core for me: the ballet. It was all after Mallarmé.
BV: An alternative to the phallogocentric?
Beach: Jackie’s Americans grasped that after deconstruction comes the reconstruction. That is what Le Swing is all about. It’s like reconstructive surgery. After the desecration, the artwork. So many have been brought into the fold through Dissemination, its new words “. . . that light each other up through reciprocal reflections like a virtual sweeping of fire across precious stones . . . .”
BV: A back-reflected tribute. Derrida did not himself go to the ballet?
Beach: No, he binged on movies. Jackie offstage could be so witty, mordant, so “between the lines:”.
BV: Like his formulation: différence.
Beach: Which is related to Mallarmé’s concept of the Idea. From within the artwork’s seeming “blank” appears the unique Idea. And in utter complicity with the immediate: “the present unveiling of the present.” Cocteau also understood this balletic mystery of the present’s eerie complicity with the Mallarméan Idea. Both artists were hipped on fashion.
BV: Mallarmé refers to “the very movement of truth.”
Beach: Some dance writers seem content with the “blank” as their ultimate subject rather than approaching a ballet’s Idea, its mobile truth. Some may even fear a newly produced value, the approach to a new “meaning”.
BV: They prefer the void to the dynamic?
Beach: Especially in France. Void for days. But don’t despair. There are always Deadheads. They want a fetish rather than a perfume, dead ends rather than inaugurations. And we must not be afraid of others’ fetishes. Ballet is a combination of the legible and the imaginative. Everything about its technique encourages the precise reading of rhythmic energy on the big stage. The ballerina turns herself into “a text of culture” (to conscript Susan Bordo). And without the imagination – no energy, no rhythms to begin with. But we require both sensuous effect and formed fantasy. Fantasy as the binding agent.
BV: Instead of Deadheads – Beachheads!
Beach: You are funny.
BV: Foucault wrote about writing “on” the body.
Beach: But what about the Mallarméan body that itself writes – the ballerina’s? The “indeterminate” in ballet is a matter of the great dancer’s possible immediate production – tonight -- of a new vibration from within a classic step or scansion. That’s writing, mon cher.
BV: One awaits revelation. What is your company perfume? Balanchine loved perfumes.
Beach: It is Sigil. Heady but subtle. René Girard comments somewhere on the “silence” in an artist’s work as a silence of fundamental truths, “the area of first principles which are not formulated” because the duty of the work is to suggest them. Politically, the Right is too complacent about such principles, the Left too impatient. But the balletomane lives on such silences, such suggestions, such scents. Once again, the preceptual.
BV: And a dependence on the art’s past.
Beach: Which provides constituent craft. We must love the past. It sustains us. It is the very realm of the preceptual.
BV: Your coinage?
Beach: Like Derrida, I like to invent words. The preceptual is the fire before which we would warm our hands, a theft from the gods.
BV: Like plagiarism?
Beach: You know what Isidore Ducasse said: “Plagiarism is necessary. It is implied in the idea of progress.”
BV: Stolen dances?
Beach: Ballet is the guardian of art’s truth through the most conscious pastiche.
BV: Like Balanchine’s Pas de dix and Raymonda Variations.
Beach: Balanchine critiques the precepts behind Petipa’s choreography with his own inventions. He pays tribute through theft and through revision. This is how the choreographic art is passed on. Balanchine is in dialogue with Petipa as well as with his ballerinas and his music. But you must know the past intimately to craft the present. You must sense the past in its sources so it can live anew. That is the preceptual process. It is like Derrida’s examination of philosophical presuppositions, to find their weaknesses so as to sponsor new strengths. Of course, philosophy always leaves something out. It is regularly exclusive. That is why we turn to the arts. (Jackie was so aware of the arts!) And what our ballet locates is already here, contingent, awaiting inclusion. Mallarmé awaits.
BV: Like Balanchine’s “Now”! You would make a defense of pastiche.
Beach: On the high level of a Balanchine, yes.
BV: A kind of poetic parody?
Beach: It is definitely a kind of game. Balanchine is so witty, so strategic.
BV: As in game theory?
Beach: Applied play for freedom’s sake, perhaps. Very American. A defense of ballet itself!
BV: On your travels, what has been the response here in America so far?
Beach: So gratifying. The Republican wives I met in Washington are so enthusiastic. They are ready. I recognize myself in them. We will have many conscripts in D.C. Those women chant, “Give us also the Right to our existence!” Politics must not become merely lethal. As Raoul used to say, “We are dancing through the minefield.” How right he was. But my Republican women are ready to swing.
BV: They vote for conversion?
Beach: They are tired of the blank. A great American poet wrote, “Pain has an element of blank.” What a pain!
BV: Where are you off to next?
Beach: Beijing. Those Chinese women, filling the factories in the hundreds of thousands. Those unmarried professional women, the leftovers. Greater China needs the ballet. Those women want the ballet. China is near.
BV: A new Beachhead?
Beach: If allowed. I’m having lunch with the Gettys tomorrow in L.A. The lure of the theater is unsparing. But as I say, I love travel.
BV: The red and gold disease allows you to remain youthful.
Beach: I often groan but what can I do? Impossible for humans not to age.
BV: And what will you offer the Chinese?
Beach: I’m thinking of something out of Cao Xequin.
BV: Bao-yu’s fantasy of the ultra-feminine? A “Dream of the Golden Days”?
Beach: “The Visit of the Imperial Concubine.” With China’s millions to draw upon, we will have no lack of stage eunuchs.
BV: In my notes I have something from one of your previous interviews: “Narrative questions the nature of the father’s authority. Lyric art, like the ballet, affirms the nature of the mother’s authority.” Yours is a project of affirmation.
Beach: Michael, I must prompt you: have you considered the transition?
BV: Who, me?
Beach: You, too. Our surgeons can do wonders. Nothing really essential need be lost, you know. You can bank on it. And you are so sensitive to the true art, where nothing is ever lost. Seriously.
BV: It’s just reconstruction. Right?
Beach: Of course, and we will await you, nurse you, groom you, initiate you. You have delayed the menarche.
BV: [silence]
Beach: You have doubts? You hesitate?
BV: No, like Jack Benny, “I’m thinking! I’m thinking!”
Beach: Just like a man.
M.P.
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