Alexandra

Yes, this is an old poll, that had an expiration date. (If you look at the very top, it says "poll closed.") I bumped this up for reading, not for voting -- sorry! And I also wanted these both in the 2002 Archive, when I move this thread down there.

[bump] Another one I forgot to move a few days ago.

[bump] I'd forgotten to move this one in the first go round. Now moved by request.

Before you get into a froth, Mel, I hope we eventually get to some of the lost distinctions before globalization destroys ballet's rainforest completely. How many identifiable styles are there? (No need to answer this today but it's something we could work on; it might be useful or of interest to people. I agree that style and technique are different things, but as has come up when we talk about how a company dances a "foreign work" we know well (BADLY!) compared to how we dance a foreign work (the way it should be danced), I think that style is often a matter of "I have no accent and you talk funny." At the 1979 Bournonville Festival, I'm told, Flemming Ryberg, who knows the Bournonville style as well as anyone alive, said, "Before you started asking us questions, we didn't know we had a style." It was just the way they danced. But people apparently would come up and say, why do you keep the back leg slightly bent in arabesque? (and probably adding, "don't you know you should straighten it? ) and they were bemused by this.

Just to clarify my intentions -- I hadn't thought of this as an "everything today is mediocre" question, but more that there is a school of thought, at least in critic/writer circles in England and America reflected in the quote from Kisselgoff's article), that in the long continuum of ballet history, we had the story ballets, and then we had the abstract ballets, and the abstract ballets are innately superior and represent an advance over narrative ballet, the way perspective represented an advance in art. (Where, for much of ballet history, until quite recently, ballets were judged by their content and, like painting, the subject matter determined ranking; heroic was highest, down to portraiture, landscape, domestic scenes. One will read that Ashton made baubles, Balanchine made "opening ballets.") I'd say that what's being created today is generally judged mediocre whether it's narrative or abstract but that wasn't what I was getting at -- it was the theory behind it, the assumption that narrative ballet, in and of itself, is innately inferior.

"Styles are eclectic. They borrow from all over." I don't understand what you mean, Mel. To me, a company's style, or technique, may have a bit of this and a bit of that -- the Royal Ballet's, to take an example, whichi took what DeValois considered the best of several schools -- but when that's coalesced, it's a style. (I agree with what you said about technique and the differences among schools. I'm not sure I'd agree that giving the exact same step a different name has as much to do with technique as with nomenclature, though, unless the "same step" is performed in a different way.) I'd say "Donizetti" is "Donizetti," a Balanchine ballet. "Bournonville Divertissements" was NYCB dancing a 20th century staging of a Bouronville ballet, which it certainly did in its own style, despite some coaching in Bournonville technique

I'll take that as a vote for both I think I'll put this as a poll. Please ring in.

POB was huge. That's why they had all those rankings. Three quadrilles of eight dancers each, then coryphees, then sujets, premier sujets, etc. up through the ranks. The Maryinsky was very large too -- and today, both the Kirov and Maryinsky have in the neighborhood of 200 dancers (unless this has changed recently because of economic constraints). They can take one full company on tour and leave another one at home, both doing full-lengths -- and probably have a troupe touring off in the provinces somewhere. POB has two theatres in Paris, and, as they're doing right now, can dance "Sylvia" in one of them and "Paquita" in another. The Danes were always a small, provincial company who had a big, world-class choreographer. It's ballet's fluke. The 19th century ballet world was totally different in so many ways, though. These companies were attached to opera companies or theaters. The dancers performed in operas (and, in Copenhagen, plays, and the actors performed in the ballets). At the Maryinsky, even though ballet was hugely popular, it was only given two nights a week. In some countries, "the season" ended with Lent. No one was dancing 6, 7, 8 nights a week 20 weeks a year. Today, I do think clicking the Swan Lake button is part of upsizing, and, especially here, bigger is better. (What a surprise!) A company with 100 dancers must be "greater" than one with merely 60 (the size of the Royal when it was dancing "Swan Lake" and "Sleeping Beauty" in the '50s). I think that in some cases, at least, the boards are driving this -- "We want to become one of the great companies, this means we must have lots of dances and a big budget;" and that line crosses with, "We need to have a big audience and they like story ballets; Swan Lake always sells." And there we are. (I interviewed one of the directors of the RDB during the recent Troubled Decade and he reacted to the criticism that the company was no longer a world-class company with, "We are a world-class company. I have 110 dancers!")

Just a note to say that I put up a post discussing style and technique, how those terms are used, on the Discovering Ballet thread. Leigh, to respond to one of the points you made in your initial post: Isn't this at the heart of one of the great arguments -- preserve or create? Is it the job of the NYCB to preserve Balanchine, the Royal to preserve Ashton, ABT to preserve Tudor? I'd say yes, but others would disagree. The other side to this is that the point of NYCB was to create new work. If the First Creator is dead, you need to do what Kirstein did: go out and find the very best choreographer you can, give him a home, give him basically anything he wants that's in your power to give him, and let him create. That is the only way you'll get new, great art. If you keep the First Creator's work around, and spend a lot of energy in trying to keep the ballets looking as though they did in his lifetime, you'll have the effect of squelching anyone who wants to choreograph in a different style. I was told by a very reliable source that Kirstein was floating the idea of asking Paul Taylor to take over the company after Balanchine, because he wanted the best choreographer available. What would happen to Balanchine if you did this? If you do bring in Forsythe or Tharp or Morris -- aside from the question of whether or not what they're doing iis ballet -- their accent is so distinctive that soon everything in the repertory will begin to look like Second Creator. Is the choice: One, preserve great works, have no new ones. Or two, have new works, have no past? Is there a way around this?

I'm posting a quote from Anna Kisselgoff's piece in today's New York Times for discussion: While I agree that form has (or can have) its own value, I reject the notion that "formal choreography can have a greater impact than any literal work." I think this is as off the mark as its opposite, that any work without content was a divertissement and unworthy of notice. It's a popular, perhaps even dominant notion in critic/aesthetic circles, though, and has been for several decades now. At the Ashton conference a few years ago, I was told (I didn't go) that one of the younger panelists asked one of the oldsters, who'd been watching the Royal since the late 1930s, "Tell me, when was it that you realized abstract ballet was superior to narrative ballet?" She was still sputtering in protest a month later. What do you think about this? Is abstract superior to narrative? Is narrative superior to abstract? Or is something superior to something else? Or not superior at all? Or whatever.

Anna Kisselgoff makes an interesting comment in today's Sunday Times: I think she has a point. It deals with one part of the issue I was trying to deal with above. I don't think you can institutionalize creativity. She put it much more concretely.

Style in ballet. There's one school of thought that says there is no such thing as style in ballet; it's all technique. By this, people mean that what one might call a stylistic difference -- the hands described in the post above, say -- is a part of the technique, and taught as part of the technique. It's not a choice to the student; it's how they have to hold their hands. If you're taking a Balanchine class, no one comes in and says, "All right, today we're going to do Balanchine style." You dance as the company wants you to dance. I can see that point, but I don't think that makes the word "style" useless, and it's a word that dancers and teachers use constantly -- my view on words and distinctions is that if people have to find a new word to express something, there's something new and different to express. While if you're taking that class what you're doing is a matter of technique, if you're a visitor who's only been taught Cecchetti, say, you're going to notice a lot of differences, and you call those differences "matters of style." I think the easiest analogue to use is language/accents. People born in Sydney, London, Glasgow, Chicago, Atlanta and Boston all speak English, but they sure sound different when they speak it!

The question of the difference between "style" and "technique" comes up from time to time, and is relevant to a discussion topic Leigh has put up in Aesthetic Issues, so I thought I'd address it here. Youl'll usually read about Martha Graham technique, Cunningham technique, Limon, Horton technique -- all modern dancers. Yet you'll read Ashton style, Bournonville style, Paris Opera style, etc. What's the difference? Why the difference? When I became interested in ballet in the 1970s "style" was usually applied to ballet and "technique" to modern dance to describe what was unique to each system or method or school (not in the sense of a building, but in the sense of the training and artistic sensibility related to a particular company). It was explained to me that ballet had one central codified language -- a series of steps, a vocabulary -- yet there were differences, often too small to be seen by the average fan yet monumental enough to teachers and balletmasters to be worthy of duels. One school wants the fingers of the hands to be free -- there should be space between the fingers, the fingers should dance. Another school wants the thumb and index finger to describe a circle and the remaining fingers to be pressed together. That's one of hundreds of examples. Each school's variation on the central, common language was a style -- like an accent in spoken language. In contrast, there was no central vocabulary for modern dance. Each of the major modern dancers invented a theory of expressive language specific to his or her way of moving, indeed, the very reason for and purpose of moving -- fall and recovery for Doris Humphrey, contraction and release for Graham -- and so it was called "technique." I'm sure others can come up with other reasons for the distinction, but that's the one I've read and was taught. Today, you'll also read Balanchine Technique, Bournonville Technique, Vaganova Technique -- and this refers to a system of teaching (in the case of the two Bs, not a system used by them but one put together by their pupils to preserve their, well, style). To keep this post from being too long, I'm about to put up a second one that deals with the question, "is there really such a thing as style in ballet?"

Another aspect of style -- is it lost? -- is to look at ABT when it was Ballet Theatre and really, truly had Tudor, Robbins, DeMille, Loring on the premises, making works, and Fokine and Massine coming in and staging their ballets. AND ballet masters who (I take on faith from reading) could stage "Les Sylphides" and "Swan Lake Act II" so you could tell which was by Fokine and which was not! Has any other company done that? Ashton and DeValois's styles jarred a bit, and DeValois withdrew. Ashton and MacMillan's styles clashed violently and Ashton went. Balanchine and Robbins certainly coexisted well, and there were Robbins dancers and Balanchine dancers, but I don't think one encroached on the other -- but Tudor did not fit in. So ABT remains, I think, the one company that really truly could maintain different styles and do them convincingly -- when those choreographers were around to work with the dancers.

It means that Balanchine choreographed in one style and Ashton in another, and both were very different from Fokine, Robbins and DeMille, in the same way Hemingway's writing style differed from Fitzgerald's or Faulkner's. Except, of course, it's more complicated than that. Each represents a different mindset as well as use of the body and dancers are trained in one style or another. There's been a debate for years whether a company should dance all works in its own style, or try to dance each work in its own style.

Thank you, Leigh I think I've figured out how to say what I've been trying to say unsuccessfully. Ari, I didn't mean to contrast classical and character dancing, but repertory emphasis. And I forgot to add one important thing in my long introduction which I think will clarify my meaning. In the terms of the day, a company followed the Diaghilev model or the Maryinsky model. DeValois took in the Diaghilev repertory, but she set her sights on being the 20th century Maryinsky, and the repertory reflected that. In contrast, ABT was a Ballets Russes-type company. Taking on the full-length "Swan Lake" meant they were switching to the Maryinsky model, and this meant they would need to develop their corps -- training, selecting dancers, rehearsing -- along that line, choose a classical dancer over a character dancer. It could not afford to have squadrons of both, a la the Bolshoi or Kirov. Ballet Theatre did do "Giselle" and "Swan Lake Act II," and it was known for the star performances in those ballets, but not for the ballets as a whole in the way the Kirov and the Royal were. ABT's calling card were "Pillar" and "Billy" and "Fancy Free." One of the complaints about ABT for years was that "it didn't have a corps" (it had one, of course, but it was more known for its soloists and principals, the stars.) Not because the dancers were "bad" but because they hadn't been selected as "cookie cutter corps" dancers. When Baryshnikov and Tchernicheva came in and expanded the company, as Victoria noted above, they were selecting women with exactly the same length of leg, etc. And when you have that kind of corps, the character ballets that depend on having a variety of body types can't really work. So it is an either/or. You can do both, but one will always suffer. The Royal did do new works and "the classics" (which Robbins and DeMille argued that ABT would not be able to do if they added the full length "Swan Lake"), but Ashton was the unifying force in that repertory and ABT didn't have a choreographer who would serve the same function. Ashton added choreography to Beauty and Lake so that the native repertory and "the classics" were danced in a similar style and he created ballets that used the corps. The Ballets Russes ballets in the Royal's repertory weren't their calling card, either. That was the classical ballets, the Ashton and the Ashtonized Petipa. I don't think any company today would face the same aesthetic crisis that ABT did because no company has as strong a personality -- perhaps the Joffrey would be the closest? The Joffrey switching half its repertory over to "Swan Lake" type ballets would mean a change in the way the company chose dancers, I would think. For the midlevel regional troupes that Michael was talking about above, it wouldn't so much be giving up something concrete -- so many companies of that type are doing the same ballets everybody else is -- but they would be facing one of the things that Robbins and DeMille were worried about: If you put all your money into Swan Lake, you won't have anything left over for experiments, nurturing new choreographers, etc.

I think you're right on your dates, Victoria -- the company did do Swan Lake Act II before they acquired the full version. The story of DeMille and Robbins fighting off the full length version is correct, though -- at least according to Charles Payne's "History of ABT." I meant to use "Swan Lake" as a symbol. It represented a crossroads for the company, moving from triple bills and new works into the full-evening ballet business. I think in the 1960s dancers did move back and forth between character ballets and classical ones, but I'd also say (with apologies and smilies galore ) that ABT wasn't doing "Swan Lake" on the same level as the Royal or the Kirov; the Blair was a smaler scaled version. Nor could it be expected to. It takes a long time to build up enough depth to do that. And through the 1980s, there were criticisms, well-founded, IMO, that the company looked far better in its "native repertory." I think this is true for most companies -- and I think it should be true. I wouldn't want to see NYCB doing "Onegin" or "Spartacus" and (although I know they're doing it) I don't want to see the Bolshoi's "La Sylphide". Kisselgoff was speaking of dancers of today, who've been dancing "abstract ballets" and then put into dramatic ones, when they came back in fashion, and expected to act. [Editing to add, since Ari and I were posting at the same time] I don't understand what isn't clear, I'm sorry [And editing again to say, ah, I think I do now and have posted about it in a separate post below; sorry!] I think there's a big difference between "Swan Lake" and that type of corps de ballet dancing and "Billy the Kid." I think we just disagree on the Royal. By the time I first saw them in the mid-1970s, I didn't think they were convincing in crowd scenes; I thought their character work was dry and perfunctory. But the point of the debate at ABT was about turning the company from one that concentrated on new works, and the Tudor-DeMille-Robbins repertory of new classics, and changing direction to be a mini-Royal. I think that's what smaller companies are facing today. Not that they have any Tudor-DeMille-Robbins rep to worry about guarding, of course, but they're moving towards being mini-ABTs. And I think the contemporary dance fans see this as a choice between being small ensembles without hierarchies doing new work, which is contemporary dance not ballet because ballet, as we all know is dead , or cookie cutter "classics" companies modeled on the bigger institutions.

I think mbjerk summarized all the issues beautifully. It IS hard to be a midlevel regional company -- or a top level regional company! In these competitive, market-driven days, when ballet companies are being told to turn to business models for development, everything is about getting into this mythical Top Ten (Remember the former Exec of Boston Ballet about a year ago.) And boards hear that as "Swan Lake." I totally agree with you -- if you can't do it right, don't do it. I also think that getting "Swan Lake" is the easy answer. Far more difficult, though probably less expensive in both the short and long term, is to devise an interesting repertory of smaller classics and new BALLETS (as you mentioned above) and educate the audience to appreciate it. For the past ten years, the small company solution is to get a "classic," or something that passes as a classic for much of the repertory and then a New Works evening (which is fine, except they're not commissiong new BALLETS). And this has created a split audience -- one for funky new stuff, the other for tutus and tiaras only.

To me, there's your institutional model (i.e., repertory, the notion of building on the past, preserving the best of it, creating new work that's passed on to the future, all within a general institutional aesthetic and style. whch has been the ballet model) or your ex-institutional model (most American modern dance companies; the style/technique comes out of the choreographer's body, it's of his time -- deliberately -- and so intended). I also think there's the problem that there aren't that many choreographers who COULD build a repertory, not just that they're not choosing to. I think if there were such a choreographer he'd build, or take over, a company very quickly. I live in hope. Building a repertory requires variety. I think there are some times when everything looks alike because it's new/strange (to the viewer) and the distinctions willl sort themselves out over time, if one has eyes and a brain. And there are times when you can look at it for years and then determine that it really does all look alike. I think the only determinant of that is time.

Ari, I'm sorry; I wasn't clear -- I agree with what you said about character dancing, but that wasn't what I meant. I meant that adding "Swan Lake" to ABT's repertory, just to take that case, changed the nature of the company from one that did primarily demicaractere ballets (now out of fashion, of course), and small-cast experimental works to one that would have a large corps to "feed." And different expectations from the audience, and different recruitment standards. If you have a repertory of Tudor-DeMille-Robbins ballets, you can have dancers with different body types (dresses hide a multitude of sins) and you'll look at an audition (or students in a schoo,l for companies that have one) for dancers who can do the sailors, or Hagar, or the Cowgirl -- and that's different from Siegfried and Odette. (My memory of the reviews of the Royal's character dances of the 1970s were "they sure aren't Russians!" and one review of "Petrushka" stuck in my mind: "The milkmaids couldn't have produced a pint of milk between them.") Can dancers be versatile and do everything? Yes and no, I think. The corps in the Royal's or ABT's Romeo and Juliet to me has always looked like a corps de ballet, not characters in a drama. And generally today, dancers have no training or models in character dancing and I don't find them convincing when they do works that require it. The acting is often amateurish. This is one thing on which agree with Kisselgoff -- she wrote this awhile ago -- that dancers have been trained not to act for 20 years and you can't suddenly throw them in a story ballet and expect them to perform like the Ballets Russes generation.

Thanks for posting that, Jorgen. I've been meaning to -- I got a review copy about a month ago. Odd photos (Scantily clad dancers cavorting in the grass, making you think that Denmark had a summer.) As the writer says in the book, the project was suggested by her seeing a performance of "La Sylphide" one night (with Hubbe, Schandorff and Englund) that was quite good, and then "A Folk Tale" the next night which was .... not. And she wondered why, and what went into this. (For those who are interested in the Bournonville tradition and what's happened to it over the past decade, there's a Bournonville Archive on the DanceView site, with interviews with dancers and stagers by Katharine Kanter and a long piece by me, printed in DanceView and Dance Now, called Bournonville in Hell Bournonville Archives Unfortunately, the book hasn't stirred up much debate there. Dance is out of fashion in Copenhagen at the moment. Several of the newspapers have told their writers that they're not going to cover it unless something earthshattering happens.

I think this is a related issue to the hierarchical structure debate that seems to be going on in European ballet, though hasn't reached America yet. But it will eventually, I'm sure. (The question being whether the traditional principal/soloist/corps rankings are still useful to ballet today, which is being discussed on another thread.) In the 1950s in Denmark and the 1960s in America there was a related debate in companies that did not have a female corps de ballet, or ballets that required a magnificent female corps de ballet a la "Swan Lake". In Denmark, this came to a head when Vera Volkova imported the Russian classics, as well as contemporary classics like "Symphony in C," which were seen by some as necessary to keep the company at international standard, and by others as anathema to the Danisih tradition -- Bournonville's ballets, "La Sylphide" aside, do not use a unified corps de ballet; he had crowd scenes, and every character had a name. The ballets were also dominated by male action heroes, one might say today, and the critics were befuddled by having to watch "Chopninana" -- why are we watching one man with all those girls? one wrote. And why is he so melancholy!!! In America in the mid-1960s, Lucia Chase wanted to add "Swan Lake" to the company's repertory, also in the spirit of competition, as the leading Western company was then considered by many to be the Royal Ballet, and that company's calling card was "the classics" and its well-groomed corps. Jerome Robbins and Agnes DeMille fought this fiercely, saying that it would change the company's aesthetic, which had always had an emphasis on character ballets and new work, and would damage their ballets, because dancers trained to dance in a corps would not be able to suddenly become character dancers in "Rodeo" or "Fancy Free." They also feared the expense, and what would happen to the new, large corps de ballet on non-"Swan Lake" nights. The traditionalists lost, of course, and one of the ways that regional ballet companies in this country have sought to enter the big leagues is NOT through new ballets but through acquiring "the classics". "Swan Lake" was entry level, "Sleeping Beauty" meant you hit the big time; now it seems to be "Jewels." Sorry for the historical background, but it's necessary to understand the question. Say you're a small company, mid-level regional ballet company, that wants to grow. What do you do? Do you raise money to acquire "the classics"? Do you gradually change from having 24, 30, 36 dancers to 50 or 60 by adding a corps? Why I say this is part of the hierarchical debate is because the old Ballets Russes model certainly had stars, but otherwise could make a claim that they were companies of soloists. A company's nature changes when you add a corps. (Lest I be misunderstood, some of the most beautiful moments in my life have been provided by the corps. In the big companies -- Paris, Kirov, Bolshoi now -- the corps is the soul of the company. So I have nothing against corps de ballets at all, and the greatest respect for them, in whole and dancer by dancer. But if you aim for one of those corps, you're changing the nature of your company. And your stature as a company will be judged by how well that corps performs, and whether you have enough dancers with ideal bodies to create the proper "look.") Whew. Again, apologies for the long introduction, but: Where does ballet go from here? Should every company go down "Swan Lake" road? Or is there room for old-style or new-style all soloist companies?

Mel, it's a tabloid. Truth is not part of the equation!!!

The Russian system was once more like the opera training system -- stars were stars and chorus was chorus, and the very special ones were singled out early and coached in the big roles in their employ -- but I'm sure that's long gone. A friend of mine who's an ABT watcher once said something about the difference between Cynthia Harvey, who spent a long time in the corps, and Susan Jaffe, who was plunked down in the company as a junior principal (whatever her official rank) is that when Harvey danced on of the big roles she seemed to be one with the corps, to have come out of the corps, while Jaffe, for awhile at least, was separate from it. I think she had a point -- it's different for every dancer, at least, but dancing in the corps is a good way to assimilate company style. I also remember Darci Kistler wanting to dance her corps parts when she was dancing quite a few big roles -- you just want to DANCE, and especially in NYCB, many corps roles are so meaty that one can understand why!

Good question! I believe Marcelo Gomes is dancing Albrecht -- I'd be curious to see that, because I think he is one of the most promising young men I've seen in while. For pleasure, I'd see Ashton's "The Dream," though, because I can never see it enough.