85. Identity Issues: Manzoni’s “The Betrothed”, Aster’s “Beau Is Afraid”, and White’s “The Humble Lover”, reviewed by Pippa Hammet
Our dear leader Louise Ebersdorf is now questioning whether or not her proposed ballet company should indeed call itself “The Ballet”. Since so many dance companies – whether or not they claim descent from a venerable tradition – manage to work the word “ballet” onto their letterhead, perhaps the term has come to be meaningless in the general marketplace? If a company has an available ballet teacher to give class in the morning to its dancers, that alone now appears to constitute sufficient reason to use “ballet” to advertise and certify its artistic ambitions. Whereas, in fact, the dances in such an ensemble’s repertory may have nothing to do with ballet as a style, form, aesthetic, morale, etc. They are often closer to modern or postmodern dance in their artistic impulse. Where does this leave our forthcoming enterprise: The Ballet?
The point of such an official designation was to turn the casual statement “We’re off to the ballet tonight” into an automatic reference to our distinguished enterprise: “We’re off to The Ballet tonight!” But perhaps no one today wants to attend what may be thought to be a questionable event when “ballet” designates either the hopelessly old or the pretentiously new? That may be what the word now means to many in our potential audience. Belle suggests that we invent a new term for what we’re up to. Looking in her crystal ball, Mme Sesostris predicts that it could be some time before the present confusion sorts itself out in the mass mind. Louise is dedicated to advertising our aims (“Everything is merch today!”), and she likes to consider all possibilities. I, of course, want to stick with our original nomenclature. “The Ballet” was made for marquee-style display.
To employ another mercantile cliché, let’s look at NYCB’s current “brand”. Not only does that extraordinary company see its manifest in terms of preserving the Balanchine repertory, with its ties to the Russian imperial tradition; it also wants to be seen as a ground-breaking source of new ideas about dance form and style through additions to its rep. The failure to find the “new” which has a demonstrated connection to the Petipa-Balanchine inheritance is the real issue. I’m convinced that the NYCB audience currently has to take the company’s novelties as a facetious form of curation. Surely the recent choreographic choices are not meant seriously! Management has to be joking?
New York City Ballet’s active Balanchine inheritance was frozen under the artistic direction of Peter Martins; nothing has changed about his version of that producible canon since Martins’ recent abrupt departure. Where, for example, is the Mozart-Balanchine evening we had every right to expect: Divertimento No. 15, Symphonie Concertante, and a revival of the Mozart Violin Concerto? Those ballets have substantive roles for ballerinas. No resident or visiting NYCB choreographer seems able to make an equivalent role for the company’s Sara Mearns. Recently, this ballerina has even been conspicuously M.I.A. Could there be a connection?
Instead, NYCB gives its audience diffused choreographic settings of musical compositions used by choreographers in the past. After viewing this season’s new Christopher Wheeldon ballet to Schoenberg’s “Verklärte Nacht”, a local musician friend commented, “I don’t think Antony Tudor has anything to worry about.” If NYCB were to turn really serious about diversity, it would revive Tudor’s Lilac Garden for Mearns and Dim Lustre for Tiler Peck, works once active in the NYCB repertory. And, since ABT has apparently ended its productive relation to its core Tudor holdings, NYCB could then bring in Pillar of Fire for Mearns -- Schoenberg score and all. That would be one way to strengthen the relation of the company’s current repertory to its past, one way to reaffirm its “brand”. And give Mearns a dramatic lead role in an actual, authentic ballet.
When you look at the plans for new repertory at New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre, you see companies that might as well be called New York City Choreographic Institute or American Dance Theatre. Strictly speaking, classical ballet has very little to do with the style and form of the new choreographies featured on their stages. Both administrations are into “relevance” and “theatricality”. Perhaps they merely wish to train their audiences in an abject skepticism about new works. The tendency inevitably advertises a focus on performers. When audiences applaud a premiere, they automatically acclaim the dancers’ balletic training, however cynical they have learned to be about choreographic worth.
Perhaps our company – proudly defending The Ballet – will restore something missing on the scene, for our repertory will pay tribute to the art’s most valuable choreographic tradition: its aesthetics, its methods, and its stylistic and formal parameters. Stray too far from those foundations and you lose artistic identity. Depend on performance alone at your peril. The indulgence of the local audience for dim dances (however lustrous their execution) has to be fought. Choreographic identity is a lodestone of serious new art.
I’ve been reading a new translation by Michael F. Moore of The Betrothed, the 1827 classic Italian novel by Alessandro Manzoni (Random House/Modern Library, 2022). It features the character of the seventeenth century Nun of Monza, a good example of what can happen when a false identity is forced upon a young female, like a ballerina who is regularly miscast. (Manzoni based his Nun on the life of a Milanese noblewoman.) Gertrude’s father entraps his daughter in the religious life in order to protect his holdings in property and guard the family fortune. When Gertrude realizes she was not meant for a spiritual career and protests, she is imprisoned in her home and eventually agrees only under duress to enter a convent. There, she falls in love with a man, Egrito, who lives next to the religious order. Their affair leads to the murder of one of the nuns who discovers their forbidden relationship.
Manzoni’s portrait of Gertrude is a study of the way social coercion and self-deception can warp character, especially when forced upon a young personality. The suppressed anger and bitterness of Gertrude lead to deceit, the breaking of vows, and murder. For contrast, Manzoni also includes the example of a man who changes overnight in his moral nature: The Nameless One. This evil baron suddenly decides to seek salvation after living a life of brutality and riot. (One thinks of nineteenth century courtesans who ended their careers by entering convents.) Because the inner process of the brigand (boredom? self-disgust? panic?) is not narrated in detail, the Nameless One’s hunger for absolution is not as convincing as Gertrude’s plight. But both characters show Manzoni’s sensitivity to psychic change in the individual. Both characters experience identity crises.
I happened also to be reading Johann Peter Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe in the new translation by Allan Blunden (Penguin, 2022). Imagine my surprise to find the great man receiving his copy of The Betrothed (July 18, 1827 entry) and offering a first reader’s report to his recording angel, Eckermann. Initially, Goethe is impressed with the fiction, but later he finds that he is disappointed in the abundance of historical commentary on the warfare, famine and plague that belabor Manzoni’s characters. Goethe cannot know how much this novel was a leap into the future toward the fictional forms discovered by Leo Tolstoy, Theodore Dreiser, and John Dos Passos. Manzoni is dealing with the collapse of social order through general disaster, while two characters -- the Nun of Monza and the Nameless One – protest their individual fates and demand redress. Manzoni had a prescient vision of possibilities in novelistic form.
The young American filmmaker Ari Aster says that as a teenager he found Japanese shock-cinema (the movies of Takashi Miike, for example) to be “transgressive and exciting”. Now that he has made three feature-length films (Hereditary, Midsommer, and Beau Is Afraid), Aster continues searching for equivalent sensations for the young American audience dedicated to the horror genre. Beau, like Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, is a three-hour box-office bomb. It is about a man obsessed with his industrialist-tycoon mom, who may have died when a chandelier fell on her head. Or perhaps not. I found only the initial and last section of the movie to be interesting: first, the portrait of an urban hell from which Beau tries to escape in order to visit his possibly deceased mother; and second, the ending of the film in which our hero faces what Franz Kafka referred to as a “human tribunal”, only to self-destruct under its searchlights. (There is a touch of Leos Carax’s Annette in Beau’s final sequence.) The second chapter of the movie – a satire of modern suburban life – is stale in its comedy. The third section – a stylized version of Kafka’s Nature Theater – is too flatly mythopoeic for my taste. And the fourth and penultimate panel deals much too heavily with Beau’s Bad Mother in the person of the actress Patti LuPone, whose touch is never light. Throughout, Beau is portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix in what appears to be an advanced state of concussion, perhaps brought on by perceiving the unfortunate nature of the film project in which he is trapped. Aster describes the central character as a picaro, but Phoenix lacks personal charm and animal invention, two requirements for that kind of folksy trickster.
Midsommer (2019) was also too archetypal in its Nordic myths and shock-horror lore. (Horror films are interesting only when they allow stylistic and formal exploration denied to more realistic forms of filmmaking.) Aster has been reading not only Kafka but also The Golden Bough, but his translation of such stores of wisdom into cinematic form has not resulted in new objective correlatives. And attempted camp grotesquerie grants no license for lack of narrative logic. The victims in Aster’s films go to their fates too senselessly. They are dispatched with a bio-mechanical narrative facility. The result is a stark absence of dramatic tension.
I make a partial exception for the 2018 Hereditary, not only because it has some effective scares but because its portrait of a family of witches is a nice satire of feminine anarchy amid patriarchal fecklessness. Also, the actress Toni Collette gives an impressive performance as a mother who rhapsodically sacrifices her life (via grisly self-decapitation) to bring a higher being – the demon Paimon – into our world through the vessel of her son, Peter. Mother Love knows no bounds. Note the headless motif out of French philosopher-novelist Georges Bataille and his secret philosophical society, Acéphale. Characters often lose their heads in Ari Aster films. Here, a loving mother’s tribute grants her offspring a new identity.
I take that climactic reveal in Hereditary to be a prophetic statement in advance of what the press has come to call the “demonization” of young men in our society in the wake of the #MeToo movement. It is granted to few artists in any generation to turn seer in the public eye, and here it is achieved via the mass medium of film. Our cinèaste Mme Sesostris is all agog. (The last time a ballet managed accurately to forecast the future, it was Matthew Brookoff’s Fracture, which predicted our land’s current culture wars.) If you want a true “horror film”, catch up with Hereditary. Aster for once managed an objective correlative from esoteric demonology, the arcana of witchcraft, and the state of the union. I will now retreat to my panic room.
Speaking of Georges Bataille and company. A new novel by Edmund White – The Humble Lover (Knopf, 2023) – has a surrealistic connection with Bataille’s fictions (Story of the Eye and, again, Ma Mère). Both authors are Rabelaisian in their social and psychological critiques: bawdy and blistering. In addition, White’s Lover is right up our Ebersdorf alley since it deals with a local attempt to create a new ballet company here in New York City. White’s satire of contemporary life skewers many of its popular fetishes and modish panaceas, and the result is wonderfully comic. We’ve been passing the book around here at the Tower. White knows obsessive balletomanes.
Indeed, his focus is not really on the connoisseurs of the art (you and me) but rather on the type of dance fan who sits in the first row of the orchestra with binoculars for appreciating the physical charms of the young dancers. It’s an update on Jockey Club types. The wealthy Aldwych West, a shy masochist, falls in unrequited love with a twenty-year-old ballet wunderkind, August Dupond, and in the great Diaghilev tradition courts the boy with promises of pricey commissions and perhaps a new ballet company, damn the expense. But August inspires an equally wealthy socialite, the sadistic Ernestine, to battle for August’s affections. Caught between the S and the M, August develops sexual identity problems. The lighthearted opening of the book arrives at a much darker tone in the end. Things do not end well for the trio infernale.
The Humble Lover is distinguished by White’s skill at sex scenes, which are so “worked” they become vignettes unto themselves, functioning rather like the decorative illustrations in medieval illuminated manuscripts. And often the exaggerated bedroom acrobatics are very funny. I was reminded of the orgasmic fantasias in William S. Burrough’s Naked Lunch, but White’s carnal improvisations never become boring through cut-and-paste repetition. The scabrous tone is closer to Gore Vidal’s inventions in Myra Breckenridge.
The novel manages a serious comment on the local infantilization of our dancers. Not only are young artists usually written about in the New York press as though they were embattled figures on a reality television show, the comments on their art are usually condescending. Everything – politics, injuries, sexual tastes, drugs -- is covered but the dancing. Why write about an artist if you are only going to produce a tabloid critique or a paternalistic pat on the head? Too often the writing and criticism hereabouts on dance artists achieve a kind of Foucaultian reduction to the clinical: the subject inspected under a microscope or trapped in a Petri dish of the writer’s devising. At best, the young artist is turned into a totem animal, simultaneously elevated and sacrificed in the report: the ballet scene become decimated deer park. Why are current dance writers so soft on new choreographers and so hard on performers? That’s my question.
In such a pressured milieu, what are ballet fanatics to do? The final surreal scene in White’s novel features a grotesque merger of lovers into a two-headed monster, an image right out of Bataille – or an Ari Aster movie.
White can be scathing about the state of most ballet today. Here is Aldwych observing the rehearsal of a new “Heidegger ballet” from a cult Biarritz ensemble, another groundbreaking masterwork choreographed by the Euro-genius Dietrich: “All those gasping, sweating French and Spanish men with their big muscled rumps and legs as powerful as oak trunks, their sweat-stained practice clothes and their long Romantic hair, the girls’ heavenly thin waists passing through the eye of a partner’s cupped hands, the darting exit of a ballerina whose pointe shoe ribbons had come undone and her quick return after she’d set herself to rights, the strong stresses and missed notes of the out-of-tune upright piano, the sudden thump of the men landing in unison on the springy studio floor . . . .”
Among other accomplishments, Edmund White has illustrated Bataille’s economic theory of the “accursed share” in this new fiction. What surplus wealth is not spent on true luxe and authentic art is fated to fuel the most abject human conflict and to lead to general destruction. The Humble Lover is White’s clear call for change from within.
P.H.
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