redbookish

From an old, old post on The Other Board:

Did you know that most theater historians consider that theater as we know it began with dance?

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Well, the word "tragedy" comes from the Ancient Greek transliterated as "tragoeidia" (I think that spelling is roughly right), which translates as "goat song" ie the song you sing while you're sacrificing a goat ...

* knock knock * Theatre historian hat on - in relation to what Hans has said about ballet as a display of power - it's been argued that the organisation of space in what we see now as the "traditional" prosc. arch theatre was a way of ensuring that the monarch in the royal box in the centre of what is now the stalls was the centre of attention & had the best sight lines etc. So the organisation of space in the theatre as a whole was a reflection of his/her power. In the mixed bills of the early 19C English theatre which included the truly Romantic ballet (eg Giselle as both ballet and spoken melodrama!), there are many examples of theatre and dance causing a row - to the extent that there was strong censorship - and you don't have censorship unless the powers that be are scared of something! And I imagine Alexandra can come up with some specific examples from the history of ballet.

But it might also depend on what you mean by "changing things" or how you might want to interpret any art politically. This is particularly the case with self-consciously innovative artists - you can read Martha Graham's work as an important precursor of 1960s/70s "Women's Liberation" - similarly for Mary Wigman's work, or even Isadora Duncan. I think what a contemporary choreographer like William Forsythe does physically with the certainties of a classical ballet style honed in the heydays of the great European empires - French, Russian, English - could be read as a radical destabilisation of the aesthetic certainiites of those cultures. Or Bill T. Jones' piece "I'm Still Here" (I think I've got that one right?) as an answer to certain hysterically homophobic responses to the HIV/AIDS issue. But then I tend to argue that the aesthetic is never diosconnected from the broadfly political - or what you might call the ideological.

Probably this way of arguing won't win you any arguments either ...

Kate

PS A colleague of mine has a T-Shirt which readds: "Stand Back - This Calls for a Theatre Historian" as an example of a slogan you'd never actually find on a T-shirt. But this conversation suggests otherwise perhaps

Yes, I thought it was funny - but the humour was for those already "initiated" and in the know. Even the title - ballet for the clueless - was a joke. For me the humour came from the contrast between the performance I imagined from the bits of description in the "review," and the reactions of the reviewer. But then maybe I have an odd sense of humour ...

Dirac, you're absolutely right there about the dire consequences of throwing away the hard copy once things have been digitised. I could bore you all with many stories from my own experience of this, going to libraries and finding that things have become inaccessible! (Obviously, I spend far too much time in libraries! ) The British Library, for example, planned to chuck all their hard copy newspapers once they were microfilmed - I think that stopped because of the outcry. The worst, I think, was in a large public library in Australia, where they photographed the old card catalogue, and put the facsilmiles on a computer catalogue (no money to actually do a proper searchable data entry), and then put the old card-catalogue in storage, with an ongoing debate as to whether they should just chuck it. But some of the old, hand-written cards are unreadable in their fuzzy two or three-generation photograph, scanned into a computer programme. So much so that cards for books which I know I have had in my hand had disappeared - and thus, in many ways, the book "disappeared" - although I know it's in physical existence, I couldn't access it on my last visit there. And when I complained and did the whole academic "my research is important/do you know who I am?" (It has to be done in extreme emergencies ) the librarians really didn't seem to care - they were just old books that "no-one" read regularly ... But don't get me started on the intellectual poverty of much of Australia's public life, I'll only offend other members of this board ...

I do think, however, we need to flexible about some things - print and the book as we know them, are technologies just as computers, hypertext, the Web and so on. I heard literary hypertext guru George Landow speak last week at a conference at my university here in the UK. He had a very useful little mantra: with all transformations or changes in media, there are gains and there are losses. We need to be as clear as we can about both gains and losses. What would we do without the Web now? I can remember in the early 1990s using Unix text command e-mail programmes, and finding the first GUI web browser (Mosaic in black & white!) amazing and extraordinaty - but also irritating because I had to upgrade my computers (v expensive then) ...

This is a really important debate in which all readers should participate everywhere there's a library or an 'information resource.' It's just a pity it's an agenda usually run by cost

As some time Library representative for my Faculty at my university, there's an additional issue here which is to do with the increasing concentration of journal publication into a handful of global publishers. Not so much in the Humanities but in the sciences, a lot of knowledge is transferred via publication of articles in quarterly or biannual scholarly journals. These are specialist publications, for niche markets, but absolutely essential for the scholarly disciplines. So, guess what? The publishers who publish and distribute these can basically charge whatever they can force the market to bear. Some Physics journals' subscriptions for university libraries are in the thousands of dollars per annum. So shared and networked electronic publication is one response to spiralling costs. But print will survive - I know I always download the PDF and print it out to read on the bus!

If it is that the NY Philharmonic seeks the best players, and the best are women, and typically Asian, then it says something about the state of things.

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I'm sorry - I might be misreading your tone here - it's all too easy to do on a message board rather than a face to face conversation - but your use of the phrase "says something about the state of things" could imply that you think the predominance of women and Asians is not a satisfactory state of affairs? Readers of your posting could infer that you think the "proper" state of things is that the best players are white males? I hope this isn't the case ...

Not a Londoner, but a Brit abroad in Washington DC (wonderful city) and about to catch a BA flight home tonight (Thursday). I am wondering what it will be like when I get to Dulles anf then Heathrow and try to get home. A bit antsy about it all, and wishing I were home now! BUt we travel in hope, as they say, and the important thing is to keep going about our business in as normal a fashion as possible.

Fascinating conversation! Here are two European takes on the Highbrow/Middlebrow debate: this lovely funny essay by Virginia Woolf Middlebrow. A defence of Highbrow culture but not a pretentious defence! For a more scholarly investigation, I'd recommenmd Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction. It's a big book, and sometimes rather densely sociological, but you can dip in, and find very thoughtful analyses of both qualitative research (with lots of transcripts of interviews) and quantitative research - including diagrams which map visual arts appreciation habits against income - fascinating! He brings together a lot of evidence to look precisely at Paul Parish's sense that it's as much intellectual class as social class that's at stake here. Bourdieu actually comments that there's an inverse relationship between economic capital and cultural capital, but also delivers lots of evidence to show that (in the French bourgeoisie at least) cultural pursuits and cultural production are part of the intricate webs of social and economic capital that constitute people's self-identity in terms of class (he says it much better).

But I'm interested in the US defence of the middlebrow - here in the UK, in academia and parts of the performing arts, the attitude to the middlebrow is generally one of resigned tolerance, with outbursts of Woolf-like defence of the highbrow, as well as very deliberate slumming it with popular culture (so bad it's good ...)

Kate

Among some of us here (a species known as "Guardian readers" & suspected of eating müsli and wearing sandals), the Daily Telegraph is known as the "Daily Torygraph." The obit of Mr Stretton seems overly exercised by some of those old Tory principles, and particularly snide about Stretton's non-Britishness (I think I detect a whiff of old imperial contempt for colonials ...) and his importation of 'foreign dancers' and imported ballets. As I'm sure many of you already know, the Royal Ballet is not just a ballet company - it's seen by many of its faithful audiences as a specifically British cultural institution, and implicitly expected to reflect this Britishness in the ethnic makeup of its dancers and repertoires. Of course, this is not overt policy, but the cultural (ideological in the broadest sense?) context in whioch the RB operates. But the ethnicity or nationality of the RB causes passionate debate (see ballet.co.uk for some of those debates). I'm not saying either side is right or wrong - just doing my cultural historian's observation thing - but I think that that kind of context would make it tricky for anyone who comes from the perceived 'outside' to try to innovate.

Hmmm, as a Brit performing arts academic, this is a fascinating conversation on which to eavesdrop! The idea of the artist as someone who offers an (oppositional) commentary on events is a fairly conventional one here, with the strong British tradition of politically engaged art (often supported, of course, by state subsidy!). But in the US, isn't this an increasingly perilous undertaking? I'm thinking of the (to us over here) terrible course of events suffered by Steve Kurtz, whose performance art work has been in a difficult encounter with US Homeland security issues: Critical Art Ensemble. I know plenty of Americans are shocked by these events as well, and in many ways, it's you guys who have the real battles between art and expression and repressive state measures now! Perhaps UK artists have reached a rather complacent accommodation with state policies ...

Kate

I remember seeing Ross Stretton during his time in the Australian Ballet in the late 70s & 80s, and particularly his extraordinary and heroic dancing in their production of Spartacus. Such sad, sad news.

WOw, it beat out the 3 volume Cambridge histry of English Theatre....

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Yes, a couple of the judges comment on this in the comments that the STR web-site publishes. I'm reviewing the Cambridge History right now for a scholarly journal, and it's an extraordinary intellectual undertaking. But I think the STR tries to keep a nice balance between scholarly and more generalist books. This is one of the organisation's strong points as a meeting place for academics and enthusiasts (not that the two categories are mutually exclusive!).

In Britain - and specifically London - in the first half of the 19th C, female performers were rarely only 'ballet dancers' - they were dancers, but usually also singers and actors as well. The theatre as an industry didn't really separate out into wholly stage play/ballet/opera/ repertoires until the middle of the century, when certain theatres became identified with particular genres of performance.

And performers were certainly not anywhere near middle-class! It was a sure way to lose class status for a woman to adopt the stage as a profession, although the connection between 'chorus girl' and 'prostitute' was one of legend rather than fact - msee Tracy Davis, Acresses as Working Women (Routledge 1991) for a good scholarly discussion of this.

That is not to say, however, that performers - male or female - could not enter into respectable society, particularly if they were part of some of the great performing dynasties (Fanny Kemble is a good example here). For a more commercially-oriented family doing theatre - including dance - at a much more populist level in London, the Conquest family is worth looking at. They ran theatres and the companies which played in them, and combined family-raising (to provide the next generation of performers!) with a dancing school which trained the chorus for their oantomimes and so on. There's a good (if rather old-fashioned) biography by Frances Fleetwood, Conquest: The Story of a Theatre Family, (London: W. H. Allen, 1953).

My comment on an article I'm writing having inadvertantly sort of started this thread, here are my viewings: a regional company I see a lot of in Germany (in NRW) has done Peer Gynt, Taming of the Shrew, and Alice in Wonderland. I've seen the Australian Ballet do Anna Karenina and of course, Romeo and Juliet! And (19th C theatre historian alert), Giselle appeared on London stages in the 1830s as a play/melodrama, with a bit of dancing in it. More about that on the 19C dancers thread.

Thanks for the welcome. I spend rather a lot (too much!!!) of time on Ballet Talk for Dancers, and don't get to this side of the board often enough. As for the STR web-site spelling & so on, I can only say that I think the document was put together quite quickly after the AGM, and taken from various speakers' notes and e-mails, and obviously some glitches weren't proof-read out . The STR is run by true amateurs (as in lovers of the art), so sometimes these things happen... As for my reading now, I'm procrastinating on an editor's deadline for a chapter on Ibsen and Realism for a book on British theatre. Not much ballet in that, I'm afraid ...

I posted this on the Ballet Talk for Dancers board, but realised it should go here as well!

Margot Fonteyn biography