42. Master Motifs: Film and Ballet on Video, reviewed by Sandy
While Cheryl and I have been working on our Joan the Maid solo dance, I have received multiple emails from our resident cat wrangler, Albertine, who sees herself as the one inevitable choice for the eventual premiere performance (rather than my originator, Cheryl), whenever that can be, given the current pandemic. Albertine emphasizes her own “profound” French sensibility, unaware that I have also been the recipient of certain suggestions in Isabella Belladonna’s communications from Paris indicating that she would like to be considered for first performance rights. Our Albertine is not so subtle. She says that her (and her husband Paco’s) eight-year quarantine in the Ebersdorf Tower’s thirty-fifth floor Cat Lab have made her perfectly virus-free and super-sympathetic when it comes to my new dance. I have pointed out that it is Joan the Maid that we are portraying, not the Martyr, but this appears to make no impression. This situation with Albertine has developed because MoMA has locked itself down and Albertine cannot audition her new feline ballet for the museum’s pristine performance space! Cheryl and I have reached the third of Liszt’s Consolations in our ongoing work, and my girl is building her stamina – such good exercise during the lockdown.
Pippa has asked me if I know the Danish director Carl Th. Dreyer’s 1924 silent movie Michael – I do -- and if I would comment on its relation to his final film, Gertrud (1964), which I have seen as well. Michael indeed has a paradoxical theme that it may share with Gertrud: that human love can only be realized through some form of self-sacrifice. Based on a novel by Herman Bang, the film takes the relationship between the famous and wealthy master painter, Claude Zoret (played by actor and film director Benjamin Christensen), and his protégé and model, Michael (a handsome, young Walter Slezak), as a case study. When the film begins, the two have been “involved” (as we say today) for four years, and a point has been reached in their relationship where they are testing the bond. Zoret is the dominant older partner, and his Michael is eager for some youthful independence. Dreyer is eloquent about the resultant power-play. Into their lives comes a Russian “Princess”, Countess Zamikoff (the gorgeous Nora Gregor), an émigré who is in financial difficulties, and Zoret replaces Michael with the beautiful Princess as his new model. When he also snubs Michael at an intimate luncheon, the young man in retaliation moves to take the woman away from the Master. Michael not only imitates Zoret’s lifestyle by decorating his own apartment with “borrowed” artworks; he begins selling some of Zoret’s treasures for funds to help aid the Princess in her monetary plight. Ironically, Michael now uses the Master as his model for his expensive style of life. Like a father figure, Zoret indulges his “son” in these excesses but simultaneously retreats from his formerly semi-courtly life into a removed and ascetic existence. Upon his deathbed, he utters the words, “Now I can die in peace because I have seen a great love!” The theme of “seeing” is a motif throughout Michael.
I interpret that final statement in two ways. Zoret has eventually recognized the tension with which he and Michael have been testing the very real emotion they share for one another: their ongoing conflict is the sign of an enduring connection, a great love. Or, should we doubt the Master’s epiphany – if he has not glimpsed the reciprocal dynamics that the film’s audience observes – then he possibly remains captive to mere power relations, and his vision is one-way. This Master has loved in his fashion, even if the wayward beloved has failed in reciprocation. In that case, the Russian Countess has served as a catalyst for the two men; she has “rescued” a callow Michael from the self-deluded Master. Dreyer provides enough evidence to allow us to take the end of his film either way, or perhaps to perceive the complex question that the narrative poses. The viewer is left to consider her or his own response to the portrayed dilemma. You can see how the category “early gay film” does not begin to cover the issues raised by Dreyer.
The filmmaker also pursues the question of the nature of authentic love with a subplot that involves the characters of Alice Adelsskjold and the Duke de Monthieu, her lover, who lures her into adultery under the nose of her elderly husband -- just as the Russian Countess would “save” Michael from Zoret. The Duke is ultimately killed by the husband in a duel. And Dreyer again emphasizes the “rescue” motif by having his characters gather at an opera house performance of Swan Lake, where they watch Prince Siegfried attempt to free his Odette from her captor, the sorcerer von Rothbart. As we know, the perfect love of Odette and Siegfried is traditionally achieved not on this earth but in an apotheosis following the couple’s deaths.
As in Gertrud, Dreyer suggests that the spiritual nature of love may always involve an earthly sacrifice, an act which – in the real world – can sometimes be taken as including a self-serving choice, whether by one partner or both. Interestingly, the “liberated” Gertrud has given up her artistic career in opera, and she will voluntarily die alone. And Zoret’s growing fame as an artist means little to him in contrast to his concept of love. The director is said to have admired Michael above all of his other silent movies. The film can be viewed without fee on the internet. English titles are available.
Pippa also asked the question whether there is a connection between Dreyer and the choreographer George Balanchine. Certainly, each is an arch-formalist in his most challenging works. Both, of course, are essential modern artists, alert to artistic and intellectual influences from the world around them, including that of inherited traditions. Both are ready to combine all received ideas with imaginative inventions of their own. Both created works with roles that portray strong, unique female characters.
It may be significant that the two men lacked supportive mothers in their lives. Dreyer was born out of wedlock to a serving maid and was immediately put up for adoption. She died attempting a subsequent abortion. Dreyer claimed he loathed his adoptive step-mother. Balanchine was basically abandoned by his mother when he was enrolled in the Maryinsky ballet academy. The woman was quick to absent herself to Finland. Is it possible that the emphasis on the female in the works of both men was a form of imaginative compensation for a missing figure in their young lives? One of Dreyer’s documentary films is Good Mothers, which is about institutional support of unwed pregnant women by the state. (It too is available on the internet.) Watching Balanchine’s use of the dancer Linda Merrill as the goddess Leto in a 1968 television version of his ballet Apollo, we see a birth-mother’s implacable face in close-up as she labors to bear her godling. And Balanchine (who supervised the video translation) invented a brief transitional scene in which two Handmaidens escort Apollo’s mother away forever.
Another connection between filmmaker and choreographer is the use of repeated motifs in their works. For example, in Dreyer’s Michael, often the appearance of the young man is accompanied by light. Either he is bathed in sunlight or he projects artificial illumination from a lamp. He is literally the “light” of his Master’s life. In Gertrud, Dreyer repeatedly uses mirrors and reflections in water to say something about his heroine.
Balanchine’s ballets also hint at their central poetic ideas through the use of motifs. He regularly translates a motivic line into dance movement. Finding evidence of such motifs in his ballets is one of the pleasures of the art form as he practices it. They are like the partially “hidden figures” in certain drawings or paintings by cunning artists. (For example, see the challenging and witty illustrative work of Ella Baron found in the current version of the London Times Literary Supplement.) One alert dance writer has located evidence of references to the legendary unicorns depicted in medieval tapestries in the three ballets that make up Balanchine’s evening-length Jewels. Another has spotted botanical imageries derived from the fertilization of orchids in Concerto Barocco. Balanchine makes references to water nymphs in a number of his works, including the aquatic ballet in the 1938 movie The Goldwyn Follies. Notice how primal such motifs are: sunlight, beasts, flowers, water. I’ve recently been reading Derrida’s discussion in his Glas of Hegel’s comments on the archaic religions of light and flowers. No wonder modern artists turn to primitive imagistic sources for formal allusions: they are fundamental. Their metaphysical implications may even be embedded in our racial memories.
Like Pippa, I watched the Tiler Peck performance of Balanchine’s Allegro Brillante streaming on NYCB Digital during the lockdown. What impressed me was the martial exactitude with which she delivers the lead ballerina role. I suspect Peck has intuited the military beat that can be found in Tschaikovsky’s score and in Balanchine’s reply to its battle orders. I was especially struck by Peck’s weighted dives into penchées arabesques, so suggestive of the gyroscopic swing of battleship artillery in anti-aircraft maneuvers recorded in World War II films. Balanchine also fills his ballet with dance equivalents of the close-order moves of military rifle drill teams. And there is that ports de bras section for the kneeling corps toward the end of this courtly ballet, which always makes me image a pin and tumbler reflex. (Perhaps the sequence picks the lock of a human heart in a dance version of Le Roman de la Rose?) Peck’s deep artistry makes you sense such imageries throughout the ballet and the possible connections between them. In this way, the ballerina illuminates the essence of Balanchine’s Allegro. Strange how very little most writings on ballet discuss the interrelation of such choreographic themes and images to performance artistry. Metaphor delivered in performance is a meeting place for motivic lines.
I have been reading the witty fictional memoirs of the British writer Jocelyn Brooke. He was an amateur expert on botany, specifically flowers. If Balanchine makes reference to orchids in Concerto Barocco, what kind of blossom would Allegro Brillante represent? Brooke calls one of his books (the first of a trilogy) The Military Orchid. There is such a variety: Orchis militaris. So Allegro Brillante would perhaps extend balletic floral allusions into the world of readiness for combat, eagerness for agon, as seen through the poetic dance lens of a master choreographer. How interesting to learn that there is also an Ondine Orchid. (And there is an Unicorn Orchid, as well.) Those ancient magical nature religions are everywhere to be found in our modern arts.
Maybe Balanchine’s focus on ballerina-as-flower is a tribute to the orchid’s traditional identification with female attributes, including matriarchal powers. The ballerina-orchids in Concerto Barocco would represent the gift of creation: the ballerina-genetrix. Balanchine’s water nymph roles would have the seductive charms of the ballerina-sorceress. The martial motifs in certain Balanchine ballets would not only refer to Petipa’s Czarist stage machineries but to the ballerina-leader as sentinel or guardian for her charges. You see where artistic motifs can lead one. But I’m also remembering the use of the Cattleya labiata orchid in Proust, where Swann and Odette incorporate it in their love-play. Let’s hope that the public streaming of Allegro Brilliante can be repeated at some point in the future.
I finally caught the video on YouTube of a brilliant 2015 ballet by Matthew Brookoff (choreography) and Brad Crane (music). Their Fracture begins as a portrait of a dynamic movement system, propulsive and packed with dance detail in an updated neo-classical style. It ends having questioned what lies beneath such energetic compulsion. If ever there was a Heraclitean ballet about constant change and the conversion of energy into matter, here it is. The term “fracture” is seen as an action verb rather than a description of a single fissure. We witness the testing of a situation rather than an isolated break. In the first movement, the dancers must cover an immense space despite the use of strong accents throughout. The second movement analyzes the forces employed in terms of personnel: a trio, a duet, and a solo. And by the last movement, something has been said about a loosening of the constraints that produced the initial thrust of the work and what active process lies within an apparently closed system. Certain musical rhythms in Crane’s score haunt one for days.
As you watch, you see how this choreographer reveals the individual cessation or shift in movement that represents one stage in what the work is becoming. By the ballet’s close, the breadth of the dance phrases has lengthened. The dancers have located more room and more reach from within. Brookoff’s is a classicizing art that discovers itself in its practice, with the dancer pointing the way as the choreographer’s muse. Here is his golden key: the classical performer as a living measure. Instead of imposing a choreographic schema from without, Brookoff invents from within his own developed idiom, which is both inherited from ballet tradition and derived from sophisticated imaginative terms. A new ballet doesn’t have to be a version of Google News.
One dance motif in Fracture that signals a poetic idea is a change in thrust and directionality, usually with a swung or skimming pivot-turn, one leg swept into high rond de jambe or a single foot brushing the floor in the spin. We see the resultant alteration in frontage, the sudden breakaway of an individual, the testing of a possible pathway: new channels discovered in the circuitry. I’m thinking of those lateral paths in the air described by the partnered ballerina in the high lifts of the second movement’s ardent pas de deux. It is at such moments that the group seems to become conscious of itself, the individual dancer more than an element in an insistent design. We can even imagine a slight, considered pause before the consequential change. It, too, registers.
The ballet’s eventual long male solo is a collection of such unpredictable pauses and shifts. The dancer seems to be discovering his dance in the act. If Brookoff were to locate a blossom to describe his ballet, it would have to be a Fire Orchid, after Heraclitus. A viewer can use social, scientific, psychological, and philosophical terms to “interpret” such a ballet. But you then return to the work itself and find it is larger than your single attempt at categorization. It is its own multiverse. Brookoff accomplishes his exploration with only six dancers: four women, two men. You can catch them in Fracture on YouTube.
Identifying such formal motifs is one way to encounter serious art in our time. I must check my new ballet and see what is developing there without and within.
S.
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