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The Three Act Ballet


Simon G

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Hello everyone.

I'm starting this topic in relation to Frederick Ashton, whose work I love. I'm British and over here you'd be very hard pressed to know that Ashton is unequivocally one of the few choreographic geniuses of the 20th century given the way his work is represented or rather underrepresented by the Royal the company he defined and led to greatness.

As Alexandra has rightly said in an email to me, the problem is that Ashton is hard to qualify and quantify, the majority of his work being one acters, pieces d'occasions, and linked to a definite style and school of ballet that takes time and effort to restage and get the nuances of. Reading the postings on the NYCB board on balletalert, I see however, that this is a criticism of the Balanchine canon too, that the spirit of the modern Balanchine rep has lost the flavour and nuance of the originals.

The other problem with Ashton is the lack of bankable 3 Act ballets he created, also three acters linked to Fonteyn who is irrreplacable.

The other problem is that, here in the UK especially because of funding and financial necessity the Royal presents a constant turnaround of the bankable Macmillan three acters (which I must admit I loathe and the classics, which I love when presented with integrity and wit.)

Balanchine insisted that the three act ballet was out of step with the modern world, as did Kirstein, as indeed did Ashton, who refused after Ondine, to make any more. Balanchine of course recognised the financial gains of the three act story ballet and created several, but it is his Jewels, which for me is a modern masterpiece, being as it is a brilliant evocation and reinvention of the classic ballet forms for the new world.

The other problem I have with three act ballets is that of the story. Is the story actually one worth telling?

For that matter if it weren't for Macmillan's R&J, Manon and Cranko's Onegin there would be no modern ie post 60's three act story ballets in the reps of companies the world over performed on a regular basis.

How do you feel about the three act ballet? And by that I mean those apart from the classical canon.

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Welcome, Simon, and thank you for such a thought-provoking post.

I don't think there's a problem with the form itself. What would the Royal look like with a core repertory of:

"Swan Lake" and "Sleeping Beauty" with Ashton's additions

And Ashton's:

Cinderella

Romeo and Juliet

Ondine

Sylvia

The Two Pigeons (2 acts)

La Fille Mal Gardee (which is sometimes given in 3 acts)

Not even thinking about the Raymonda he wanted to choreograph and the Bournonville La Sylphide he wanted to acquire.

So I think there's nothing wrong with the three-act ballet -- or the one-act ballet -- in itself. I wonder if Ashton would have felt differently if there were more music suitable to three-acts -- he had no trouble with R&J and Cinderella, which carried the story through three acts?

I'm a fan of "Jewels," too, of course, and would be very happy with more ballets in that line.

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According to Julie Kavanaugh (Secret Muses), the cause of Ashton's disaffection with the three-act form was not from an artistic difference, but pure superstition. After a reception for Sylvia that left him less than pleased, and a similar reception for Ondine, he decided that for him, three acts was a jinx! He had nothing against ballets in three scenes, as Act I, sc 1, Act I sc 2, Act II, or any other tripartite division. He felt that letting the audience rise twice in the course of a ballet was just plain unlucky!...for him. :shrug:

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Is the story worth telling? I have believed since childhood that most ballet stories I've seen are not worth telling. So often it's escapist entertainment. On the other hand, even escapist entertainment touches on some fundamental truths of our humanity, within a certain range.

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The great story ballets aren't about the story, although the story must be clearly told. Those who appreciate Petipa's Sleeping Beauty or Ashton's Cinderella know how it will turn out. It's how the story unfolds that matters in classical ballet, and many of the greatest ballets have the slightest stories. They're like "The Faerie Queen," a pretext for poetry.

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Is the story worth telling?

Is the story worth telling? I have believed since childhood that most ballet stories I've seen are not worth telling. So often it's escapist entertainment. On the other hand, even escapist entertainment touches on some fundamental truths of our humanity, within a certain range.

Sorry Citibob, let me clarify. I meant by that, is the modern ie very modern R&J, Anastasia, Mayerling, Manon, Onegin etc etc story one worth telling. Or rather is it worth telling in the expanded 3 Act format.

Ashton did a very lovely chamber version of R&J which is the antithesis of the Macmillan epic version. Lavrosky did a 3 acter also on an epic scale.

However, especially with adaptations of texts is a mere translation into a ballet of equal length the best approach? When Ashton did Month in the Country he condensed the dramatic narrative down to 45 minutes to extract the essence, whereas with Onegin Cranko made a ballet of equal length to the play which loses all the weight and depth.

But especially with the large Macmillan works where a story ballet has been made out of a factual life does the format actually support the story? Was the story one worth telling and was it even told well choreographically? My thought behind this was a quote by Clive Barnes regarding the three act works of Macmillan: Barne's once a champion of the youthful promise of Macmillan as choreographer said of his three act work, "Macmillan became the Andrew Lloyd Webber of ballet."

I think perhaps that's the essence of my question does the choreography justify the length and subject matter?

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I think perhaps that's the essence of my question does the choreography justify the length and subject matter?

I agree -- that's what I was trying to address above. The choreography in Ashton's Romeo and Cinderella does (my two favorite R&Js are the polar opposites, Ashton's and Lavrovsky's, one intimate and the other grand, as you say).

I'd also compare Ashton's much maligned Marguerite and Armand -- another distillation. I wrote something along these lines on another thread recently -- that often Ashton is misunderstood, I think, that he's taken too literally. Marguerite and Armand is a series of pictures, flashbacks from Marguerite's fevered imagination; it's not a literal, linear retelling of the story. So is Month -- it's scenes, scenes that can be danced, and in that piece, I think Ashton went further than anyone has yet in using the classical vocabulary to advance plot and delineate character.

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We seem to all basically agree that the story in and of itself does not justify three, two or even one acts of ballet. As Alexandra pointed out, most people already know the story before they go in and will be sorely disappointed if they don't see good dancing.

As for length, there has certainly been a downsizing trend in many types of storytelling. Long novels (like 600 pages or more) were common in the 19th Century: Charles Dickens, Tale of Two Cities, Les Miserables, etc. They just are not the norm any more, life seems to be faster. Similarly, Hollywood has "downsized" its movies to just over 90 minutes on average.

To suggest that maybe ballet downsize along with the rest would not be particularly surprising. The storys are usually pretty simple. They can be told in 5 minutes or 30 minutes or 2 hours or more, depending on how long one stretches them out. Hey, I always read the Cinderella fairy tale in 20 minutes in my children's fairy tale anthology; there is certainly no need for a 1 hour + show to tell the story. But obviously, you get dancing with the ballet, which you don't get if youread the book.

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I think that's the problem with modern three act works, conforming to the format in length but not technique of classical ballet.

The thing we all know about classical three act works is that the stories are hokey beyond belief, however the elements of classicism have a definite format which is followed through whichever the ballet may be: pas de trois, six, grand pas de deux, court dances, coda etc etc. The story or total lack thereof, are the framework within which classical ballet as a form exists.

The modern three acter by eliminating much of the classical technique or format in which it is used seeks to replace classical form with modern choreography in the ballet mould. Unfortunately the onus is totally on the story and the need for endlessly inventive choreography over three hours plus, which doesn't just fill up space, where each movement carries a literal psychological and sematic weight.

In ballets in the modern three act format which nonetheless attempt to put back some elements of the traditional classic form the effect jarrs awkwardly with the dramatic realism of the ballet. For me the best example of this is the pas de deux between Tchessinska and her partner within the second act of Macmillan's Anastasia. Curiously it was in a ballet it was the last place where one expected to find a ballet.

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Hello and welcome, Simon. I'm glad to see you posting here.

I saw the National Ballet of Canada perform Eugene Onegin this weekend, which seemed apropos to this discussion.

This is the first time I've seen this ballet done really well, and in the right hands, it made incredible theater. But as you're intimating, there isn't much "ballet" to the ballet.

For me, the three act ballet - or any story ballet for that matter, is about the classical abstraction of a situation; something where the form becomes the content. The dance of the Wilis or the Shades says as much from its construction as a dance (for instance, a line of women snaking on into eternity) as it does by the plot.

Listening to the audience talk during intermission, there's an entire camp that can't stand the ballets blancs for exactly that reason. They want plot, not form as plot. So Onegin makes sense to them in a way that Swan Lake or Giselle never can. I find this fascinating, because I'm not on that side of the divide (the reason I love Balanchine's Midsummer is because Act II is the classical abstraction of Act I). I've often thought this issue is greater than ballet itself; it's about how we interpret meaning, and from where we take it.

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Leigh, as you know, Onegin is a ballet I cannot STAND. It is, for me the worst example of ballet taking on a story and losing.

But the most interesting thing about Onegin is how little dancing there actually is in it. Made on the nascent Stuttgart, a company which had at that time only four principals of any note, this is evident in the paucity of any choreographic material for the corps or soloists.

The one thing that is very interesting to me regarding Onegin is that the first time I saw it I was very young, but Lynn Seymour was dancing Tatiana. The moment with the mirror at the beginning, when Seymour saw Onegin reflected she jumped up and rocked across the stage as if she had been given the most tremendous shock. It made the ballet for me.

I've seen it several times since with some very very good ballerinas (Cojocaru was far too young to be given Tatiana) and they all played this scene in a very sedate way. The first time I saw a Tatiana just jump up and look away in a very sedate manner I thought she'd missed the choreography, however all the other Tatiana's I've seen since have treated this seminal moment in Tatiana's development in the exact same manner.

The thing is Seymour's reaction was not choreography but it coloured the choreography or lack thereof throughout the rest of the ballet and gave it gravitas to me.

It's been mentioned on these boards before that Balanchine on seeing Onegin for the first time assumed that the dancer on whom Tatiana was choreographed couldn't dance as she spent practically all the ballet being lifted. As bitchy as this comment was it does have a ring of truth. Not that Haydee couldn't dance, that she certainly could, but in the impression the role gives of the ballerinas capabilities.

Having seen several other Cranko's including Pineapple Poll, Shrew etc I have to say although Cranko did love a story I don't actually think he had the choreographic arsenal to expand that story, certainly not over three acts.

Interesting things that occur to me when seeing Onegin are that he had obviously seen the Bolshoi and the Graham companies prior to making Onegin. In Onegin we see the ecstatic Bolshoi lift and in Lensky's solo prior to being shot he dances his grief through a series of backward falls which I very much doubt Cranko could have gotten from any other source than Graham, whose company had made its first trip to London prior to Cranko's departure to Stuttgart. However, lifted verbatim both the lift and the fall as used by Cranko don't add as they are not reinterpreted in a way that becomes individual to Cranko, rather they become bathetic as they are extreme movements from other choreographic sources plagerised.

What does anyone else think about this theory?

Edited by Simon G
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I've always believed that Cranko had a genius for distillation. He could take a very complex set of relationships and make them clear to an audience with remarkable economy. With Onegin, I felt that he had worked against that talent, and tried to spread and pad a story so that it would fill an evening. I don't enjoy it.

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They want plot, not form as plot.  I've often thought this issue is greater than ballet itself; it's about how we interpret meaning, and from where we take it.

The thing is dance embraces such a huge spectrum of style and form. But with the classical three act ballet form as plot has to take precedence.

When classical form is eliminated for plot and only plot it all goes pretty pear shaped.

In the UK we have Matthew Bourne's Adventures in Motion Pictures. You've had his Swan Lake over there. Bourne is not a classical choreographer or even a ballet choreographer. He makes these three act evening length works which can best be summarised as being musicals without singing, based around classical ballet stories.

The problem comes in that his choreographic language is limited and the conceit by which he justifies the evening's work - all male swans, end of childhood etc etc are so obvious that he doesn't add to the subtext of the ballet's original meaning but destroys it.

There is a plethora of dance theory literature about the homosexual subtexts of Swan Lake, the oedipal trauma of Siegfried, the destruction of childhood within the Nutcracker, the Cinderella myth and these are implicit within the three act classical format.

But for me the problem with much of the modern three act reworking with it's "revealing" of implied meaning, is, that it is much like going to see some major landmark such as Stonehenge, Yellow Stone National Park etc and instead of going all the way to the landmark and taking it in for what it is and making your own conclusions, it's a bit like getting out of the car a mile before you get there and looking at the signpost pointing the way to the landmark and thinking you've seen it for what it is.

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This is a very interesting thread, and I don't have time to do it justice now (I'm on a deadline and will come back later), but there are several points I can't resist responding to now. :thumbsup:

Simon, I agree totally on the "revealed meaning" problem. It's like someone rewriting all the children's stories and renaming the characters Scary, Good and Evil as a shortcut. To me, all the Freudian interpretations take the fun out of it. That's what coffee bars are for -- to discuss things, to say, yes, but don't you think Siegfried's mother is a bit.....

I think there's a great divide, not just between Romanticists and Classicists (who can get along rather well) but between Realists and Classicists, or Realism and Abstraction (and, to me, the point of classicism is abstraction, distillation, objectivization of experience). The Realists want to see it live, in color, right there, life itself, vividly depicted. The Abstractionists want to see life at one remove, the ideal, the possible, not the actual. And I don't think the two points of view, or tastes, will often be satisfied by the same work.

I did want to say something on Cranko's borrowing of steps -- Simon may well be right about Cranko's sources, but everyone borrows, or quotes. I think it's only plagiarism when you see an obscure work in an obscure place, and come home and mount it proudly as your own, knowing full well that no one will be able to "catch" you. I'm sure someone will come in with a list of things that Balanchine or Ashton "plagiarized." There's a lot in Petipa that is awfully close to Bournonville, but Bournonville may well have gotten it from Louis Henry, or Perrot, or Taglioni pere -- I've long harbored a suspicion that there was one long, very long, ballet made back in about 1649 and everything since has derived from it!

I hope others will jump in -- but Simon, do you see any possibilities for the three-act form in classical ballet (or dance generally)? Audiences are drawn to it. John Martin, an ardent fan of modern dance, wrote in a NY Times Sunday piece back in 1956, after the Danes brought Ashton's "Romeo," that [paraphrasing] "Fifty years from now, when the 3-act ballet is once again ascendant, we will look back to this "Romeo and Juliet" as the start of its revival." He saw Ashton's "Romeo" as a revivification of the three-act form, yet that it was contemporary, and poetic, and classical ballet (I'd agree). So I think it is possible. What do others think?

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It's like someone rewriting all the children's stories and renaming the characters Scary, Good and Evil as a shortcut.

Isn't that what Disney did? You can tell the characters just by the way they're drawn, and they don't usually have much more depth than that in the dialog.

This is exactly what Mike Myers was making fun of when he introduced "Dr. Evil" as the ultimate villain in the Austin Powers movies.

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I did want to say something on Cranko's borrowing of steps -- Simon may well be right about Cranko's sources, but everyone borrows, or quotes.  I think it's only plagiarism when you see an obscure work in an obscure place, and come home and mount it proudly as your own, knowing full well that no one will be able to "catch" you.  I'm sure someone will come in with a list of things that Balanchine or Ashton "plagiarized."  There's a lot in Petipa that is awfully close to Bournonville, but Bournonville may well have gotten it from Louis Henry, or Perrot, or Taglioni pere -- I've long harbored a suspicion that there was one long, very long, ballet made back in about 1649 and everything since has derived from it!

I hope others will jump in -- but Simon, do you see any possibilities for the three-act form in classical ballet (or dance generally)?  Audiences are drawn to it.  John Martin, an ardent fan of modern dance, wrote in a NY Times Sunday piece back in 1956, after the Danes brought Ashton's "Romeo," that [paraphrasing] "Fifty years from now, when the 3-act ballet is once again ascendant, we will look back to this "Romeo and Juliet" as the start of its revival."  He saw Ashton's "Romeo" as a revivification of the three-act form, yet that it was contemporary, and poetic, and classical ballet (I'd agree).  So I think it is possible.  What do others think?

Firstly Citibob, I think Disney deserves an honourable exclusion from the accusation of simplicity. The cartoons are masterpieces not only of animation, of which they are some of the greatest innovations within the animated form; but in terms of script, character, artistry and the miraculous ability they have in making one care for two-dimensional fantasy characters. Much like classical ballet actually.

IN FACT, you have a point Citibob about the modern Disney stuff, it's nowhere near as good as the vintage, in terms of artistry and merit.

IN FACT, could this allegation of deterioration in form of modern work as opposed to its classic forebears be not so much a problem within ballet, but across a whole plethora of artisitc forms?

(I put in the big IN FACTs because the ideas suddenly hit me as I was typing - I wanted to share the impact of them hitting me as I was typing.)

Alexandra, you're right plagerism was too strong a word. I think perhaps I meant that lifted out of context were these movements robbed of power and weight when put into the context of Onegin, and in this case Onegin only. The thing about those incredible Bolshoi lifts is that they come at the end of pas de deux and are limited to make a point. They are the apogee of the pas de deux. In Onegin in which the pas de duex are an ongoing series of lifts, they are robbed of impact.

The Grahamesque backward falls. Well, I don't like modern done by ballet dancers it's just a personal aesthetic thing. But I do think that the huge gravitational weight of those delicious deep falls sits badly on ballet dancers whose technique is rooted in killing gravity.

On a related point has anyone seen Duets by Cunningham done by ABT. There's a video of it with Kathleen Moore. It's just not that great. When a Cunningham dancer extends it's like they bring the earth with them.

Modern three act ballets? Hmmmmmmmmm, well there are quite a few made by smaller scale ballet companies the Draculas, the Peter Pans etc etc and can anyone remember one passage from any of those?

The time and attention to making a three act in the classical mode may be outside the budget and time constraints of any company even the huge ones.

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The fairy tales the classics are based on are not as superficial and silly as they seem at first--they are layered with symbolism and their renditions in another artistic form, be it ballet, opera, &c add another layer to that if done by a skilled artist. Petipa's Sleeping Beauty easily fills three acts and a prologue without dragging because he knew what he wanted to put in each act and how to pace the story as told through dance, and he had a clear vision of a complex but harmonious and balanced composition.

I feel that such a sense of the entire composition is lacking today. Choreographers put in elements ("villager dance," "pas de deux") because they're in the classics, but they don't seem to have an idea of the larger picture; they seem to see a ballet more as a sequence of events or dances. A "general dance" in the classics wasn't just thrown in as a time-filler to let the principals rest or because there's one in every ballet of a certain length and it has to go somewhere or because Act II isn't taking long enough; it was part of an orderly sequence of dance and mime that had a beginning, middle, and end, all of which related to each other.

And about ballet dancers trying to do modern, I agree. They just don't have the technique for it.

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Choreographers put in elements ("villager dance," "pas de deux") because they're in the classics

The other thing is that a villager dance means so little to us today, since very few of us have any experience with rural village life. Same thing with kings and princes. That's probably why American ballet companies are so frequently criticized for ignoring the male archtypes --- because we have no conception of a king in our consciousness. And those we DO have sometimes ignore the archtypes as well: witness the king in Shrek.

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Yes, Hans -- they go for a formula, and they're using a 19th century formula, and it all FEELS like a formula.

I hadn't responded to Simon's comment about MacMillan being the Andrew Lloyd Webber of ballet. Yes and no, I'd say. (Barnes has always been harsh on MacMillan, yet very supportive of Cranko, from what I've read, and I'd say Cranko was more ALW in some ways.)

I like some of MacMillan's short ballets, but not the full-length ones (we've had this discussion before, and there are many people on the board who love "Manon" and "Romeo and Juliet," and of course, you're more than welcome to that opinion!!!)

I'm one of those who thinks that MacMillan's full-lengths are mostly padding, and manipulative -- pushing the audience's buttons, deliberately tearing at the heartstrings, putting a comic scene after a tragic one, or vice versa, just, it seems, to make an effect, etc. (I'd also add that in the mid-1970s, I saw some splendid performances of Romeo and Juliet -- beautifully danced, thoughtful interpretations.

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I agree with Hans about SO many things -- first off, that ballet tells some stories better than any other medium, and they only become silly when they get paraphrased into an idiom that won't support hte deep values.

And I should add that Hansel and Gretel are important figures in my life, and Gretel in particular is a really brave person.

not that I've seen a great ballet version of Hansel and Gretel, but there could be one.

The GREAT challenge in a three act ballet is finding the pallette -- what movements belong, what imagery needs to be developed, what qualities of weight, rhythm, "color" go together to make this entire Gestalt come into being and have a life as real as Reality's?

Swan Lake has that great image of the arabesque that shows a bird being buffeted by hte storm -- arabesque always shows, by its nature, the direction you want to go in -- it's the result of taking a step forward, ennobled and enlarged; but the swan arabesque is thwarted, the arm goes up, not forward, the back leg is bent slightly, there is no way out except transcendence. It's all there in that arabesque -- but there are so many ways to develop the idea, and the story offers so many opportunities for lyrical episodic intensification, that you don't have to LEAVE the idea before you get to dwell on it and all its implications.

All the great story ballets have their own plastiques.

I'd like to mention a ballet nobody seems to admire, for the plastique is so remarkably consistent, metaphorically powerful, and profound -- the ugliness of Spartacus has made many people hate it, but I find that to be a fantastic achievement -- to take the forms of classical humanism and distort them until they figuire forth the rhetoric of brutal temporal power. Virtues like those of Spartacus and Phrygia ARE rare; they are truly heroic, and the world they live in would have to be as ugly as it is in the ballet to call UP those virtues to oppose it. Crassus and his horrible wife are great roles, and if the ballet is nearly unendurable, well, it IS a tragedy, and the nobility of the protagonist is given a setting that makes it shine across the centuries. If the brutality of the Romans looks a LOT likethe brutality of Stalin, well, all the more credit to Grigorovich for sneaking this past the censors. (The same holds for Lavrovsky's Romeo and Juliet, which I admire enormously, I love it.)

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Simon - as I wrote in the NBoC forum on Onegin, I'm not sure I saw a great ballet (heck, I know I didn't), but I did see a great performance this weekend. Like you, what stayed with me were not dance moments, but theatrical ones.

It's interesting to note that most of the modern attempts at three-act works falter in their use of the corps. Another example of this is Lar Lubovitch's Othello. The corps in that is used obligatorily, but it looks like what he really wants to make is The Moor's Pavane. Present day choreographers, especially if they aren't coming from a classical ballet background, don't understand the purpose of the corps. Of course, this assumes the Petipa model, which is corps as mirror of society. Alexandra can attest that's not Bournonville's model for the corps at all, but then again, Bournonville made story ballets, but not "the three acter" that we seem to be referring to - that's a Petipa model.

If a new choreographer were willing to embrace the idea and purpose of the ballet blanc (it doesn't need to be all in white, just with that concept - and I don't mean just stick one in, I mean embrace the purpose of it) would we see more successful three act ballets?

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Regarding 2 act ballets (or hour-long 1 acts), it seems very difficult for artistic directors to decide what else to present alongside them.... always a sort of an off-balanced evening... I'd almost rather have the third act filled with lecture demo or panel discussion than another piece.

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Seveal more good points raised. (Amy, I agree with you on Spartacus. It succeeds, in that it does what it set out to do, and it makes its points through choreography.)

Leigh's point about embracing the ballet blanc is an interesting one -- in the great ballets, that's the heart of the matter. In lesser works, it's filler. A classical ballet doesn't need a big set piece, but it helps -- better a ballet blanc than yet another Dance of the Harlots. But here the classical/realism divide comes in. If you want to stick to vivid, linear storytelling, a ballet blanc gets in the way. In fine, or sophisticated, choreography, the divertissement, or set piece, or ballet blanc complements the story, perhaps presenting a poetic image or an abstraction of a central point.

I'd second Hans and Amy about ballet telling SOME stories better than any other medium. A line from Bournonville -- hee thought Faust was better suited to ballet because Faust's speeches "became tiresome."

And this is related to the debate over Onegin -- I've seen wretched, average and sublime performances of this ballet, and it's a wonderful vehicle to discuss "what is a great performance" -- must there be great choreography, or is a skeleton that can be fleshed out by great artists enough?

BUT I wonder if we're so used to choreography being defined as steps and patterns that we forget the power of gesture (which is why some stories are told best by ballet, or dance). Some of my most vivid memories of dancers are of a single gesture or look -- the turn of the head, a hand barely raised. These, to me, are dance. They're not classical dancing, or virtuoso dancing, but they're dancing. (Whether Tudor would appreciate this or not, I don't know, but I always remember "Lilac Garden" as a series of still photos -- the freeze, the Episode's jump onto the Man, the Lover and Caroline looking to the wings. And am always surprised anew when I realize how much movement and classical dancing there are in that ballet.

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Amy Reusch raises the question of the two-act ballet, which can often be ranked alongside a three-acter as a full evening work.

Back in the 1960's, the Royal Ballet scheduled Ashton's two-act ballet The Two Pigeons with Nureyev's version of Kingdom of the Shades from La Bayadere. At least one critic hailed it as the perfect pairing. Some years later at the RB, Giselle was frequently presented on a double bill, sometimes preceded by Ashton's Symphonic Variations. The Bolshoi, when on tour often give Giselle as a double bill preceded by the grand pas from Paquita. This is rare now though and from my point of view a matter of regret.

The two act ballet as a full evening work is alive and well and has taken root in Paris, as in the past year I have seen both John Neumeier's version of Sylvia and Roland Petit's Clavigo, both hugely impressive works. Sylvia of course has the advantage of one of the greatest (and least often heard) ballet scores of all time. The one I imagine Tchaikovsky was referring to when he claimed that Delibes was a better ballet composer than he was. Neumeier has taken a Greek myth and given it a modern setting along with reflective ideas about unrequited love. I found it especially moving in its final scene. For his ballet Clavigo, Petit uses a literary source from the romantic era, which he transforms into a very credible story of love and lust. The score was commissioned and was highly enjoyable. It would be fair to say that reactions to both works have been mixed, but in the main favourable.

I am glad to hear some mention of Spartacus and agree with the comments about it made so far. Spartacus has far too many repetitious passages for my liking, but with the right cast it can be an exciting ballet to watch. Surely Grigorovitch must be the only choreographer of the past fifty years or so who has ONLY produced three act ballets, though sadly he seems to have few admirers outside of Russia. Eifman too, favours the full evening work, though perhaps it's fair to call Eifman a minority taste.

Then of course there is Bejart, that incredibly prolific creator who will seemingly tackle any subject on earth, from Freddie Mercury to Mother Theresa, to mention just the two last works of his I have seen. Bejart loves the full-evening work, but I have to say that on the occasions when I have found myself appreciating something of his, it has always been one of his much rarer one-acters.

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Alexandra, I think Clive Barnes' comments on later MacMillan carry a lot more weight exactly because he hasn't always been harsh about him - in the early days he was extremely supportive and admiring, but gradually became disillusioned - in common with many others, especially where the three-acters are concerned. Maybe we're all harder on those who've disappointed our highest hopes.

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