The 50th anniversary of Baryshnikov's defection

[Helene]

The people who were in the company knew about it, and Bujones wrote about it.   By the time he wrote his memoir, Bujones had retired and had his own company, so speaking out publicly wouldn't have hurt his career at all.  If he hadn't, it might never have become public at all, even if ballet insiders knew.

Even now with the internet, with social media, blogs (making a comeback), YouTube, and self-publishing, ie, a few people in the mainstream media controlling access, very few dancers are willing to burn bridges publicly, whatever they might say among themselves about their management.  Dancers either make their peace, ie, decide that their situation is better in than out, or they leave/retire/transition to a new profession, just like anyone else with a job.

[Meliss]

11 hours ago, Helene said:

The people who were in the company knew about it, and Bujones wrote about it.

Here is what journalist Tamara Bleskina writes about the end of Baryshnikov's work as artistic director of ABT:

"By the way, the argument "did not assemble the hall" was also heard in the press, only in relation to Baryshnikov himself, when his contract was not extended five years later. The artistic director was accused of driving the theater into the financial abyss by making the wrong decision to say goodbye to the classics so beloved by the audience and switch to modern. The chosen direction, as it turned out, not only contradicted the long-standing traditions of the ABT, but, most importantly, the public did not like it. They reacted with their wallets by stopping buying tickets to ballets of a "different style". 

[Drew]

I can't speak to everything being discussed --and definitely there were money problems under Baryshnikov. But just as a fan, I would say that he didn't simply say "good by" to the classics and classical tradition. For one thing the quality of the classical corp-de-ballet dancing improved when he was director.  And several stagings/premiers happened under Baryshnikov that certainly reflected his and the company's classical heritage rather than his or the board's wish to modernize the repertory.

Just going from memory here: he staged the Petipa Jardin Animé scene from Corsaire -- and gave interviews in which he talked about its greatness. I don't believe that any American company had done it at that point.  I enjoyed it and it's one of the main reasons I remember observing that the corps had improved.  Baryshnikov also invited Macmillan to stage Sleeping Beauty, a production which has since been taken up by English National Ballet. I didn't see it with ABT but have seen it with ENB and it is a traditional and, in my opinion, a solid production. The Kenneth Macmillan website claims that Baryshnikov was not as reverent towards the traditional text as Macmillan but the fact remains that he brought Macmillan in to stage the ballet and the production was still holding up at ENB when I saw it in 2018.

Baryshnikov also  revived Les Sylphides --even his very first year: I understand from other fans/critics that he used the version of the male solo he learned at the Mariinsky--not ABT's version (which dates to a different Fokine staging): some critics didn't like that change in ABT's traditions. I guess I understand why but when I saw Baryshnikov himself in the solo, I thought he gave the single most beautiful performance I had ever seen him dance. Silky and fluid and possessed by the music. If he had always danced like THAT, then he would have been one of my absolute favorites.  (And at the time I was even a bit prejudiced against him because of the dispute with Kirkland!!) 

On the modernizing front, I don't think inviting Tharp was a bad idea for ABT -- Tharp works had been popular with its audiences -- but somehow the new creations weren't her most successful works--at least with audiences they weren't. One of the most modern or even modernist Tharp works that was created for ABT under Baryshnikov, "Quartet," I thought was genuinely marvelous, but I can easily believe it didn't sell tickets.

Adding quite so much Balanchine to ABT's  repertory as Baryshnikov did, was a risky idea in New York City because in New York ABT dancing Balanchine would always be compared to New York City Ballet and any fan who cared passionately about Balanchine would be going to see NYCB anyway.  Occasional Balanchine at ABT seems suitable to me--but not at the scale Baryshnikov seemed to want. Many, many observers have made this point.

P.S. to say that in her heyday Chase, too, was a modernizer.  And though she may have been less of one later, when she had been around a long time, still...when I went to see  ABT in 70s I saw not just older ABT classics by De Mille and Tudor, but premiers by those choreographers and works by Ailey, Feld, Neumeier, Robbins, Tetley, Tharp and the occasional Balanchine including Theme and Variations which had been created for ABT.  Not all of this was work of equal quality and some of it was older (the Robbins--Fancy Free--and Balanchine)  but I never thought of ABT as primarily the classics + Romeo and Juliet and other full lengths story ballets.  I think of that as more a post-Baryshnikov phenomenon and likely a response to the box office issues.  I don't think my memory is that off....??

Edited August 14 by Drew
missing particle

[volcanohunter]

Baryshnikov also staged his version of Swan Lake in late 1988, the one in which Odile wore white (the better to fool Siegfried). Some critics didn't like it, but apparently the national tour leading up to the New York summer season of 1989 broke box-office records. Like all of Baryshnikov's productions, it left the ABT repertoire when he did.

[Marta]

Very well said, Drew.  I didn't see the Swan Lake but I remember Les Sylphides.  Baryshnikov's performance was exquisite.  Here's a comparison of several dancers in the male variation that I found fascinating.

 

[California]

32 minutes ago, volcanohunter said:

Baryshnikov also staged his version of Swan Lake in late 1988, the one in which Odile wore white (the better to fool Siegfried). Some critics didn't like it, but apparently the national tour leading up to the New York summer season of 1989 broke box-office records. Like all of Baryshnikov's productions, it left the ABT repertoire when he did.

Baryshnikov also did some tinkering with ABT's Swan Lake in 1981 when he was artistic director and performed it with Makarova. 

https://www.nytimes.com/1981/05/08/arts/ballet-for-baryshnikov-a-debut-in-swan-lake.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Ck4.DH9-.oVTT2cFOhYkL&smid=url-share

[volcanohunter]

MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet has been a consistent hit for ABT since it entered the repertoire in 1985.

I also think that rescuing Balanchine's Symphonie Concertante from oblivion was a noble endeavor.

(It would be stupendous if the same could be done for Tudor's Romeo and Juliet.)

[Meliss]

15 hours ago, Drew said:

several stagings/premiers happened under Baryshnikov that certainly reflected his and the company's classical heritage rather than his or the board's wish to modernize the repertory.

Yes, Godunov also talked about this - they said that there would be no classical ballets and now they dance my entire repertoire (not exactly, but that's the point).

[Meliss]

12 hours ago, volcanohunter said:

Baryshnikov also staged his version of Swan Lake in late 1988, the one in which Odile wore white (the better to fool Siegfried). Some critics didn't like it, but apparently the national tour leading up to the New York summer season of 1989 broke box-office records. Like all of Baryshnikov's productions, it left the ABT repertoire when he did.

I have always been surprised by the desire of Nureyev and Baryshnikov to stage new versions of classical ballets. Did they really think that they would do it better than those who actually staged these ballets for the first time?

[Meliss]

12 hours ago, California said:

Baryshnikov also did some tinkering with ABT's Swan Lake in 1981 when he was artistic director and performed it with Makarova. 

https://www.nytimes.com/1981/05/08/arts/ballet-for-baryshnikov-a-debut-in-swan-lake.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Ck4.DH9-.oVTT2cFOhYkL&smid=url-share

A very interesting article. I can't understand this passage - what's wrong with the role of Siegfried?

"Through his nuanced acting he offered a dramatically fascinating Siegfried, but it is, in the end, a role that is too narrow for him."

Before Baryshnikov, many great dancers performed it - and there seemed to be no narrowness of the role)).

[California]

16 minutes ago, Meliss said:

A very interesting article. I can't understand this passage - what's wrong with the role of Siegfried?

"Through his nuanced acting he offered a dramatically fascinating Siegfried, but it is, in the end, a role that is too narrow for him."

Before Baryshnikov, many great dancers performed it - and there seemed to be no narrowness of the role)).

I remember those performances at the Kennedy Center in 1981. The Sunday Post had an item that he would be performing with Makarova, so many of us raced to the box office to get tickets. (This was pre-internet, of course!) In press coverage at the time, they noted that Baryshnikov had never performed this role before and found Siegfried to be a boring character, but was doing it as a favor to Makarova. 

[volcanohunter]

8 hours ago, Meliss said:

I have always been surprised by the desire of Nureyev and Baryshnikov to stage new versions of classical ballets. Did they really think that they would do it better than those who actually staged these ballets for the first time?

Unlike, say, Gorsky, Messerer, Burmeister or Grigorovich? 🙄

Those choreographers deposited so much junk into the ballet that many a choreographer since has had to strip away their accretions.

Edited August 13 by volcanohunter

[volcanohunter]

33 minutes ago, California said:

In press coverage at the time, they noted that Baryshnikov had never performed this role before 

Apparently, this wasn't actually the case. According to the Royal Ballet's archives, he danced Siegfried opposite Merle Park in 1975.

https://www.rohcollections.org.uk/performance.aspx?performance=14142 

Edited August 13 by volcanohunter
link

[California]

Just now, volcanohunter said:

Apparently, this wasn't actually the case. According to the Royal Ballet's archives, he danced Siegfried opposite Merle Park in 1975.

https://www.rohcollections.org.uk/performance.aspx?performance=14142 

Perhaps he meant that he had never performed it with ABT, although he had been with the company since 1974.

[Helene]

I'm not sure how much press it would have gotten in the Soviet Union if dancers said they found Siegfried dull as a character.  Or how management would have reacted.  There were political pressures on the classical productions as well, to be able to justify why ballets about nobles should be considered valid art, unlike in China, where new ballets reflected different kinds of heroes and heroines.  It could have been more than professionally dangerous to speak up against official art.

Neither Nureyev nor Baryshnikov needed to be reverent about Soviet art, and Nureyev, at least in terms of steps and variations, seemed to be interested in having more to dance.

[volcanohunter]

1 hour ago, California said:

Perhaps he meant that he had never performed it with ABT, although he had been with the company since 1974.

At least we know that when Baryshnikov spoke about his disinterest in the role, he was speaking from experience. 

[Meliss]

4 hours ago, California said:

Baryshnikov had never performed this role before and found Siegfried to be a boring character, but was doing it as a favor to Makarova. 

I think the point was that Baryshnikov was not suitable for the role of a prince. He said it himself in an interview.

[Meliss]

3 hours ago, volcanohunter said:

Unlike, say, Gorsky, Messerer, Burmeister or Grigorovich? 🙄

Those choreography deposited so much junk into the ballet that many a choreographer since has had to strip away their accretions.

After all, no one thinks of "making new versions" of Tchaikovsky or Chopin's music. And with ballets, you can.

[Meliss]

2 hours ago, Helene said:

  There were political pressures on the classical productions as well, to be able to justify why ballets about nobles should be considered valid art,

And why should they?

[Helene]

I think you’d have to find this in the history books.  Western writers have attributed the continued existence of the Imperial Ballet classics to the ability to make them consistent with political ideology of the time, or they would have been banned for being degenerate or bourgeois art.  They may have gone the route of the Chinese and made good Communist ballets with true Communist heroes and subjects, I’d the schools and institutions weren’t destroyed before they could pivot.

I don’t know how Soviet and Russian writers have explained it.

[California]

39 minutes ago, Helene said:

I think you’d have to find this in the history books.  Western writers have attributed the continued existence of the Imperial Ballet classics to the ability to make them consistent with political ideology of the time, or they would have been banned for being degenerate or bourgeois art.  They may have gone the route of the Chinese and made good Communist ballets with true Communist heroes and subjects, I’d the schools and institutions weren’t destroyed before they could pivot.

I don’t know how Soviet and Russian writers have explained it.

Scroll down for an interesting discussion of ballet in the Soviet Era: https://www.britannica.com/art/ballet/The-era-of-the-Ballets-Russes

Interesting observations here, too: https://www.culturematters.org.uk/index.php/arts/theatre/item/2484-dancing-up-a-storm-the-1917-revolution-and-russian-ballet

[Meliss]

47 minutes ago, Helene said:

Я думаю, вы должны были бы найти это в учебниках истории. Западные авторы объясняют продолжающееся существование классического имперского балета способностью привести его в соответствие с политической идеологией того времени, иначе он был бы запрещен как дегенеративное или буржуазное искусство. Возможно, они пошли по пути китайцев и создавали хорошие коммунистические балеты с настоящими коммунистическими героями и сюжетами, если бы школы и учреждения не были разрушены до того, как они смогли развернуться.

Я не знаю, как это объясняли советские и российские писатели.

"The love story of the young Prince Siegfried and the beautiful swan girl Odette, overshadowed by the insidious wizard Rothbart and his daughter Odile from the 19th century to the present day continues to touch the hearts of viewers. Pyotr Ilyich did an incredible thing - he created a work where ballet and music are one, and chose the theme of love and betrayal, something that will excite people forever".  

That's how they write, for example. But what's the Imperial ballet got to do with it?

[nanushka]

6 hours ago, Meliss said:

I have always been surprised by the desire of Nureyev and Baryshnikov to stage new versions of classical ballets. Did they really think that they would do it better than those who actually staged these ballets for the first time?

2 hours ago, Meliss said:

After all, no one thinks of "making new versions" of Tchaikovsky or Chopin's music. And with ballets, you can.

Music has a very detailed, long-standing system of notation, so we can know more or less what Tchaikovsky and Chopin wanted musicians to do when performing their works. (That hasn't stopped some modern musicians from "making new versions" of older works, though.)

No system of notation or recording existed to tell us in nearly as much detail exactly what the original audiences of the 19th-century ballets saw onstage.

[lmspear]

2 hours ago, Helene said:

I think you’d have to find this in the history books.  Western writers have attributed the continued existence of the Imperial Ballet classics to the ability to make them consistent with political ideology of the time, or they would have been banned for being degenerate or bourgeois art.  They may have gone the route of the Chinese and made good Communist ballets with true Communist heroes and subjects, I’d the schools and institutions weren’t destroyed before they could pivot.

One instance Swan Lake being adapted to fit the Communist ideology rally tickled me the first time I saw a Soviet era production of Swan Lake--there were no peasants on the stage, only courtiers in Act I. Everybody was equal except for the royals.  You couldn't see anybody being outranked or oppressed.  If you don't see the peasants suffering, the ruling class can remain heroic, for storytelling purposes, on on the Bolshoi stage. 

[Helene]

9 hours ago, Meliss said:

After all, no one thinks of "making new versions" of Tchaikovsky or Chopin's music. And with ballets, you can.

They do quite regularly, by changing orchestrations that are stylistically inauthentic or by making piano versions of orchestral or works for strings or vice versa, and through substantial editing.  Popular songs have been written using or based on the music of both composers.  Figure skaters, gymnast, dressage athletes make drastic cuts, change endings, mix their music with other composers' music, and make some pretty questionable changes, between cuts and tempo distortions.

However, as long as the scores existed, the works could be reclaimed.  That is not the case with ballet, where the tradition is oral, learned from one body to another, and where "the truth" can be a long game of Telephone.  Stepanov's notations weren't widespread, and there hasn't been a standard notation system that stuck and was used widely for classical ballet.   Video is the common form now.

 

7 hours ago, Meliss said:

But what's the Imperial ballet got to do with it?

The Imperial Ballet was the keeper of Petipa's works, or the changed versions of Petpa's works that were already being made in his lifetime, which he was not happy about.  Had the Communist government decided that ballet was elitist and too closely associated with the monarchy and Imperial Ballet and should be banned, or had they decided to ban the Petipa classics on ideological grounds, the entire classical ballet tradition in Russia could have been lost.  The classical ballet tradition was still strong enough in Europe and eventually the US, but it could have been buried, with schools having to start from scratch.

Luckily there were a few people who argued successfully against this, and ballet training and performances were able to form again in the Soviet Union.