How can ballet move on?

[scherzo]

Sorry, this post is like a long series of questions, but bear with me!

How can ballet develop? Preservation of the classical idiom is important, but then how can anything really new be done with pre-existing steps? Has all the innovation that could be done already been done, while staying within the boundaries of 'ballet' - but then, what is ballet really? Anything in pointe shoes?

Do we need anything new to happen? Will a full-length classical ballet a la 'Sleeping Beauty' help advance the art?

And how can new ballets keep up with increasingly esoteric modern music - is looking to the past the answer?

Has real 'artistry' in ballet been lost to technique, and how do we get it back and regain the fire of the 'olden days'? Should we just be content with our videos and see where ballet goes from here?

Does ballet even need to 'move on'?

[Mel Johnson]

How can music develop beyond this point? After all, there are only twelve separate notes on a scale, counting accidentals. That was one of the reasons why the atonalists were using vastly stretched intervals and irregular meter and even aleatoric effects to extend the reach and grasp of the art. Much of it can now be regarded as experimentalism, but much of it can survive, too.

And IS music increasingly esoteric? There seems to be some retrenchment in new composers just coming on the scene, perhaps into a Neo-Romanticism.

What audiences will line up to see is what's needed. Whether it be of a Sleeping Beauty scale, or "Concerto Barocco" spareness, what will audiences see for the quality of the creation, not for sensation value?

Ballet will continue to evolve, imbibing the broths of the cookery around it, and still remain ballet as long as the five positions, turnout and the pulled-up torso and air-full movement is retained.

In the movie Sweet Liberty, a press agent played by Bob Hoskins tells the historian (Alan Alda) on whose book a movie is being shot, "Look, today you have do three things in order to get people to look at what you do.

1. Show disrespect for authority.
   
2. Blow things up.
   
3. Take people's clothes off."
   

As long as our æsthetics are above that standard, we're in pretty good shape.

[Kathleen O'Connell]

I think that modern music is actually growing LESS esoteric and could be a rich quarry for dance. While Webern may continue to baffle ballet audiences, dancers, and choreographers, I suspect few would find Arvo Pärt particularly inaccessible, for example. The list of still-living composers whose music would be readily enjoyed by a broad audience is by no means a short one, but their work is unfortunately not as available or well-supported as it could be. Let’s hope that the advent of the internet and the mp3 file gets this music out there and in front of an audience more successfully than mainstream arts and media organizations have, and that choreographers find it, too. Yeah, Wolfgang Rihm is a little fierce and formidable, but Nico Muhly certainly isn’t. And there’s no need to limit ourselves to “concert music” per se: there are plenty of pros writing film and video game scores who should be able to produce a full-length ballet score no worse than Drigo’s.

I threw up my hands in despair at one point last year when I realized how many of the new (to me at least) ballets I’d seen in the space of a couple of months were set to a hodge-podge of extracts from Bach and his contemporaries. Since none of them were particularly “traditional” (although they all used ballet vocabulary) it would be hard to argue that it was a case of old steps requiring old music. Here’s what the choreographers seemed to need: 1) propulsive, non-stop rhythms; 2) short, self-contained blocks of music that could be strung together to support short, self-contained episodes of dancing; 3) straightforwardness of form (e.g., a readily discernable A-B-A structure); and 4) (and I’m being very cynical here, and I apologize) music that telegraphed the seriousness of the undertaking to the audience – if it’s set to Bach, it can’t possibly be a trifle, can it? I don’t care for most of Peter Martins’ choreography but I give him full marks for setting complete works by living composers (and he generally sets complete works by dead ones, too, of course). He rarely chooses anything likely to be terribly controversial, but at least it’s recent and given to us intact.

[dirac]

How can ballet develop? Preservation of the classical idiom is important, but then how can anything really new be done with pre-existing steps? Has all the innovation that could be done already been done, while staying within the boundaries of 'ballet' - but then, what is ballet really? Anything in pointe shoes?

Interesting topic(s), scherzo. I’d say that a lot has been done and will be done with pre-existing steps (similarly to the way a short story uses pre-existing words; it’s not an exact analogy, but ballet steps are a language, too – it’s all in how you use it, and there’s no need to create neologisms just for the sake of doing something different).

[bart]

When Marie Taglioni did more than alight onto her pointes for a pose, it opened the floodgates to . . . well, you know.

Ditto the flexed foot. Was it Balanchine who made that acceptable? Not to mention a certain amount of hip/leg twisting as an alternative to classical developpe?

This is a wonderful topic. The responses so far have been so very helpful. I hope the thread goes on and on.

[Magna]

I agree 100% that the classical idiom must be preserved as we venture on and develop new ballets. Otherwise we will not learn from our own history. Early ballets such as Giselle were never preserved in their original forms, so we only have versions. It is essential that we preserve these versions before they, too, no longer exist.

One of the primary needs when creating new products (in this case: ballets, companies, etc.) is money. It is hard to get money for an art form that is often neglected. I believe the artistry and the aesthetic prowess of up and coming dancers, arts administrators, dance writers, and choreographers is well-versed. As a college student at a liberal arts school with an incredibly strong dance program, I can honestly say our generation has a great deal of technique, innovation, and dreams. To accomplish those dreams, however, we must make dance a well-known and well-respected art form...and get as much government funding as possible!

I love this topic because it addresses so many of the issues we think about in our academic dance classes.

One more note: It's shocking that ballet and modern don't seem to be more popular on TV, etc. because it has such an enormous fan base...

[Leigh Witchel]

I don't begrudge the original poster the question (questions are good!) but I do think it's a question that will no longer give us a productive answer.

We came out of a century where the preoccupation of art was defining itself. It was worth it; people came up with some amazing and daring definitions from Nude Descending a Staircase to 4'33". But it's a finite question and we've been asking it for so many decades that nobody's around who can remember that it wasn't always the center of art - it wasn't always so self-referential.

I wish we'd stop asking what art is, how to make it new or how to be relevant. I wish we'd start asking what it is we have to say and how we can best say it.

[bart]

One more note: It's shocking that ballet and modern don't seem to be more popular on TV, etc. because it has such an enormous fan base...

I wonder about this too. We;'ve addressed it here and there in the past, but never seem to come to a definite agreement about what should be done (within the realm of the possible).

I guess I come from the school that says: you can't explain changes in something like "dance" without looking at the social and economic institutions that surround it and upon which it depends. Is it possible to address scherzo's questions without addressing the issue of how dance performance is organized and made available to the public?

Dance in this part of the world isre too often scattered, localized, fragmented into small and under-funded companies each often trying to market itself with few resources and in isolation.

There's nothing wrong with a multitude of local companies. In fact it is probably quite healthy. But in general the American dance audience is seriously fragmented. Each audience lives in the bubble or one or two companies, a single region, a favored style, unless one is lucky enough to reside in a major international dance centeror has a particularly huge collection of dvds. We need an umbrella organization for "American dance" or "Canadian dance" that can promote, protect and make some sense of what one sees locally, and to work to build audiences for dance in general.

This umbrella was at one time provided by public television. But no longer. I'm thinking of the near demise of the "Dance in America" series and other public tv productions involving dance. Is ballet -- or dance in general -- all that terribly expensive to produce on tv? Especially when one is filming a program that would have been produced anyway? And when you consider the income potential from marketing the dvd internationally?

And what about the idea of investing to build audiences for the future?

Public television in the US has cut down its involvement in dance to the point that there is no follow-up to the rare individual performance, no sense of individual performances existing as part of a "series," and not even the guarantee that all or even most affiliate stations will ever show the peformance.

How, then, can you expect to develop an audience? Those who try to explain the cuts often say that people didn't support dance enough to justify the financial cost. But if dance audiences on tv have declined, isn't it equally possible that the causes are (a) fewer programs and (b) the inability to market them competitively?

"Dance in America" was a wonderful, healthy brand. It had a following and spread great work all over the country. PBS has allowed it -- along with other cultural brands -- to go down the tube as badly as Ford did with its once highly-successful, then long-languishing, and finally defunct Taurus brand. When a brand fails, those in the arts should try to figure out what the producer and the marketer did wrong. Don't just blame the consumer for moving on to other products.

Government subsidies are unlikely in the US (think "snowballs in hell"), but where are the foundations? I'd rather see foundation money go to revive Dance in America than another huge grant to an individual company, even one that tours. That includes NYCB or ABT, which has unlikely pretentions of becoming a company of some sort or other.

And, if public television can't or won't do it, why aren't recognized dance companies themselves LEAPING to investigate how the Met Opera's successful entry into movie theater market might be tweaked and exploited to expand audiences for dance? Or maybe they are?

[scherzo]

I think that modern music is actually growing LESS esoteric and could be a rich quarry for dance.

One of my music teachers said that music may eventually go full circle, as in we will start to look back to earlier music/forms and draw off them. Perhaps the same will happen to ballet?

I wish we'd stop asking what art is, how to make it new or how to be relevant. I wish we'd start asking what it is we have to say and how we can best say it.

I didn't mean to imply that it should become 'new', (especially not for the sake of it). And as for being relevant: it kind of defeats the point of ballet, I mean I can't quite see how the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale was very 'relevant' in the 1890s. Perhaps ballet succeeded because of its 'irrelevance'...

I guess the thread title is misleading because I don't necessarily think ballet needs to 'move on', though I was interested to know others' opinions. I suppose I was wondering (amongst other things) whether there is anything more than what's gone before, i.e. will ballet in x years' time look pretty much the same?