Showing What Our Kids Are Thinking

[Alexandra]

Ari pulled this quote from Ismene Brown's (interesting, as always) review in the Guardian today about the Royal's new Triple Bill:

Overall, plenty to pick at and criticise, but nevertheless this is an evening that decisively alters the stakes. Let's all reflect: yet another stale Romeo and Juliet - or a night that shows what our kids are thinking?

I wondered what people would think about that. Do you go to the ballet to find out what your kids are thinking? Other comments?

[And here's Ari's post for the urls to that, and other, British reviews]:

More reviews of the Royal Ballet's new quadruple bill of ballets by Mark Morris, Russell Maliphant, Wayne McGregor, and William Tucket:

• Clement Crisp in the Financial Times

  Alas for good intentions. In an Opera House-based troupe, where financial survival depends on trotting out yet another full-length ballet, the artistic air gets stuffy, stale as the audience's responses and the dancers' dutiful performance.
  For a company with as rich a treasury of one-act works as the Royal Ballet — few ensembles have repertories more varied — to neglect these is a denial of identity. Yet triple-bills are rare, and the public has lost faith in them when seat-prices are stratospheric in cost and uncertain in focus.
  And, since the death of Kenneth MacMillan, the company has not had a resident choreographer, nor a candidate fit for the role, in itself a failing. Instead, bought-in goods, some wonderful, some frightful, papered over the chasms in artistic policy.

• Ismene Brown in the Telegraph

  It's Lara Croft meets The Matrix, it's the world of today, and it's finally arrived at Covent Garden. The young choreographers have taken over the Opera House in this bold programme, and show in a blast of differences what they think and see. Ballet, for Russell Maliphant, Wayne McGregor, Mark Morris and William Tuckett, is not the literary romances and musical inspirations of the past.
  This is a world of gyms, computer graphics and international travel. . . . Overall, plenty to pick at and criticise, but nevertheless this is an evening that decisively alters the stakes. Let's all reflect: yet another stale Romeo and Juliet — or a night that shows what our kids are thinking?

• Zoe Anderson in the Independent

  The Royal Ballet has commissioned three works this season, and put them on the same bill. It's as if they're getting a quota out of the way, shuffling all the new stuff into the same corner. In spite of starry casting, it isn't popular: seat prices have been reduced, then reduced further. In an unfortunate sense, this is an experimental evening. The new works don't look ready for the main stage.

There are lots of issues here:

1. Do you want Romeo and Juliet (stale three-acters -- SIMON, where are you!) or new works?

2. Are those the only two alternatives?

3. How do you encourage new work -- experiments -- in an opera house? If the works aren't ready for the stage, should they go on? Is the process part of the pleasure?

[Leigh Witchel]

To ask a larger question; why do people assume that culture needs to work destructively, ie, my art pushes out and supplants yours? There is an element of that in the process (ask Galeotti about Bournonville. . .) but why are people looking for new art as a replacement to what came before rather than as an addition (ie, yes, Bournonville's rep replaced a lot of Galeotti's, but they were both part of a greater chain, and it was that generation's contribution to it)? Is that just how we look at art and artists, or is that how it's always been?

[Alexandra]

That's a good question? I think at some times -- right after the French Revolution, say, and again at the beginning of the Romantic Rebellion -- where the new art did push out the old. (Although Gautier's claim that it happened overnight, I was shocked to learn later, is exaggerated, the claim of a passionate advocate. Older ballets did coexist with the new ones for quite awhile.) Bournonville's pushing out of Galeotti was partially circumstantial; he came in when the company was reduced in size from Galeotti's day, there had been a long hiatus in between their tenures and many artists had retired, and since Galeotti's original Romeo and Juliet had been in their 50s when the work was created, you can imagine there weren't too many Galeottians around. He also had a theater chief that was trying to revive the theater by bringing in.....a new audience! Where have we heard that before? (He did stage Galeotti's "Romeo and Juliet" and wrote about it in Theater Life, saying that he did respect the work, and cast it well -- i.e., did not try to sabotage it as some were apparently saying -- but that the fashion had changed so much that the audience didn't accept it. Who knows if that is true?)

I think earlier in this century, in the heyday of Modernism, there WAS a respect for the past -- look at Diaghilev bringing back Giselle, and showing Swan Lake in Paris, not to mention Sleeping Beauty. This was Mr. Avant-Garde. And Balanchine and Ashton both kept older ballets around (Ashton's revival of Les Noces being one of the great heroic acts of an artistic director in the 20th century, IMO. He wasn't afraid to have masterpieces in repertory standing beside his own work.)

How we got to endless performances of (usually bad) productions of the 19th century classics and R.J./Manon is a mystery to me. It happened very suddenly, and it's now entrenched.

[Helene]

I think that sometimes "old" art gets replaced by "new" when the training for and dancing to the "new" art changes the technique or impetus, and the "old" art can't be danced the same way.

Thinking pessimistically, I've read endless references to the change of training during MacMillan's rule at Royal Ballet, and how dancers trained to do his ballets could no longer dance Ashton properly. I also compare a lot of NYCB performances I've seen since Martins took over, where there is sharp technique, but where the movement impetus doesn't seem to be universally grounded, to the performances I recently saw of Suzanne Farrell Ballet. I wouldn't go so far as to call them a troupe of random pick-up dancers, but they gave me a sense of dancing from the root that I rarely see at NYCB, especially now when my visits to NYC are limited to 3-4 times a year, and I can't compare several performances.

I'm not sure how many differences are based in conflicting approaches as well. For example, when NYCB performed Bournonville Divertissements, coached by Stanley Williams, are the dancers unable to grasp the Bournonville style and technique -- certainly RDB men have joined NYCB and picked up Balanchine technique like sponges -- or are they trained to dance it like another performance of Balanchine? I'm thinking of Arlene Croce's review from 21 Feb 77:

McBride's troubles in Bournonville are purely technical.  Her turnout is not great, and this dims her croise positions and deprives the extended leg of the arrowy sharpness it should have.  She lacks ballon, an essential element in Bournonville.

and

And there is nothing for her to do with the period coquette manners of the piece but guy them.  Still, every effect that is wrong for the piece is right for her, and strangely interesting.  It's Farrellized Bournonville--an independent show within a show.

Croce seems to suggest "both."

(These quotes are from Afterimages.)

I also wonder if dancers have the technique or disinclination or direction to perform Cechetti-based ballet with the proper "square" alignment; for example, is it impossible to perform a square arabesque without opening the hip, and without the energy and attack that's standard now?

[dirac]

I wonder if we're comparing two dissimilar situations, however. Isn't joining a new company and gradually assimilating its different stylistic demands another story from dancing roles in a new ballet unique to the repertory with different stylistic demands? (And when Croce talks about McBride's turnout and ballon, she's not talking about differences between Balanchine and Bournonville so much as characteristics peculiar to McBride, I think.)

I remember Farrell talking about that ballet in her book, saying firmly that she danced it with the same energy and focus she gave to everything else (she wasn't taking down that leg for anybody, buster.) That approach was right for her, I imagine – indeed the only practicable one given the circumstances.

[Helene]

I guess my question is really when the "old" is replaced by the "new," how much damage is done so that the "old" can't be recaptured?

[dirac]

I'd suggest that sometimes the old can't be recaptured, and even when it's recaptured "successfully" it's not what it was. Sometimes this is "damage" and sometimes it's just the way of the world. (I should note that this is not meant as a license for wholesale disregard of the past, or that attempts at preservation should not be made.)

[sandik]

I'd suggest that sometimes the old can't be recaptured, and even when it's recaptured "successfully" it's not what it was.  Sometimes this is "damage" and sometimes it's just the way of the world.  (I should note that this is not meant as a license for wholesale disregard of the past, or  that attempts at preservation should not be made.)

Although I think that art can show us a great deal about who we are and what we believe, I don't necessarily look to ballet to tell me what my child is thinking. I do think that Ms Brown is presenting a false dichotomy, though -- either zippy new choreography or stodgy old 3-acters. The tricky part is the nature of dance. For so many years we've relied on the bodies and brains of former dancers to retain the truth of our history we're nervous about using any other form of preservation. We can't have old work along with new, so dance has often followed a cult of the world premiere -- like vampires, we long for fresh blood. (this is true in modern dance as well as ballet -- the number of companies performing work more than 10 years old is depressingly small)

On the preservation thread -- the mixed response that the Kirov's restagings of Sleeping Beauty and Bayadere are a part of this. The dance historian part of me is thrilled that an organization of such resources is willing to make that commitment. As these works have been gradually stripped of their more dramatic elements in contemporary productions (like mime sequences) they have become less of what their creators meant them to be and more like dances made new today. I'm heartened to see those components returned, but I'm also aware that current audiences find them difficult to follow.

Being the Pollyanna that I am, I think there is a place for both in a company repertoire. Dancers and audiences need to see the older works as they were meant to be performed, or we will never understand how the art form came to be as it is. But there has to be new experimentation as well, or dance loses the momentum it needs to survive.

[Mel Johnson]

I also wonder if dancers have the technique or disinclination or direction to perform Cechetti-based ballet with the proper "square" alignment; for example, is it impossible to perform a square arabesque without opening the hip, and without the energy and attack that's standard now?

Yes, a square arabesque was impossible even in Cecchetti's day, it is not possible now, and unless the human body changes drastically, it will not be possible in the future. As to attack and energy, they have the ability to dance legato, it's just that ballet masters are, by and large, not asking them to do that.