The art of ballet is at the point of death. Or it’s moribund, awaiting transformation. Such are the points of discussion between two of its foremost critics, Jennifer Homans and Robert Gottlieb. Homans is the dance critic for The New Republic and the author of the recently published Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet (one of The New York Times top ten books of 2010), in which she argues that the art she has devoted her life to is coming to an end:
“After years of trying to convince myself otherwise, I now feel sure that ballet is dying. The occasional glimmer of a good performance or a fine dancer is not a ray of future hope but the last glow of a dying ember, and our intense preoccupation with re-creating history is more than a momentary diversion: we are watching ballet go, documenting its past and its passing before it fades altogether.”
Gottlieb, dance critic for the New York Observer, former editor of The New Yorker, and present editor of The New York Review of Books, reviewing Homans’ book in the NYRB, argues not for a revival but for evolution, like the way dinosaurs are said to be still among us, transformed into birds:
“I would like to believe that even if no new master comes along, the long-running love/hate relationship between [ballet] and modern dance . . . may yet lead to a fusion that will both preserve and reinvigorate classicism.”
He goes on to suggest that ballet may take a new form in a new place, say Brazil or Asia, as it once did in Russia. Or harking back to the impact of “Italian exhibitionistic tricks on pointe” in the 1820s, argues that “social dances like hip-hop may infuse ballet with a new approach and energy.” So maybe it’s not over yet: not until the fat lady . . . dances?
Salt Lake City offers a particularly rich vantage point to witness this epoch. Take any point on the progress of present-day dance charted by Homans and Gottlieb, and we have examples on display. One of the vital alternatives, modern dance, has strong proponents here. For both choreography and performance, consult Shawn Rossiter’s coverage of Charlotte Boye-Christensen and Ririe-Woodbury Dance (above). But the late phases of ballet are here as well. Consider the current season of Ballet West, as we were able to with a concert given late last year.
Many of us got our first taste of high culture at a Christmas performance of The Nutcracker Ballet, which may be combined with a first visit to Temple Square and the Hospitality Center. Such was the agenda laid out for me a dozen years ago when I first came to Utah, when at day’s end we made our way to the Capitol Theatre for the ballet. Whether seeking a silent film classic, the opera, another ballet, or just downtown parking, whenever I see the Capitol I’m reminded of that evening, when winter’s gloom gave way to light, music, and magic. It may be an annual childhood travesty, as inescapable as fruitcake, and a fund-raising warhorse for the theater community, but somewhere lost beneath those associations The Nutcracker is, along with Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake, one-third of what may be the greatest portfolio of dance music by a single composer ever. Just as it’s important to recall that Tchaikovsky didn’t intend his music to unleash the bathetic emotions many in the audience feel, but was trying to perfect the avant-garde art of programmusic, so it’s helpful to let Ballet West’s serious yet accessible presentation replace the sentimental, shopworn version that gradually accumulates in our heads. Part of witnessing the death or transfiguration of ballet is periodically reminding ourselves what is at stake, and why it’s worth paying attention.
It’s a dozen years later and, just before winding up the year with another inevitable Nutcracker, Ballet West offered two dance landmarks that speak volumes about the evolving state of ballet: George Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments of 1946, set to music by Paul Hindemith, and John Butler’s Carmina Burana, created in 1959 and one of several ballet settings of the surprisingly popular score by Carl Orff. Performance of the first, an early experiment by a man whose death, 28 years ago, marks the effective end of ballet for many observers, exemplifies Homans’ “intense preoccupation with re-creating history.” The second is, of course, not a ballet at all. Although the composer, Carl Orff, wanted to create a theatrical form fusing choreographed dance, visual design, and stage action, Carmina Burana performed by choir, orchestra, and soloists quickly became the most popular cantata, or cycle of songs, of the modern era. The various staged interpretations may be justified by Orff’s wishes, but the urge to share in the popular success of a rare audience-pleasing 20th-century work cannot be discounted.
Much of today’s audience is too young to remember how the music of Paul Hindemith once seemed the perfect expression of everything that felt new and contemporary about the 20th century. To one young listener, the sound of The Four Temperaments suggested Danish furniture and the boomerang-shaped designs of her grandparent’s era. Still, Balanchine’s strange, zoomorphic postures and intricate, Tango-like footwork, executed with brisk flair by Ballet West’s artists, proved dance just as capable of expressing cerebral states as emotional ones. In place of a conventional narrative, Balanchine provides an episodic structure in which pairs of dancers alternate on stage to establish the themes, followed by ensembles that diminish in number from seven to five, then climax with a solo, after which the entire force performs a finale recalling what has preceded. The four temperaments are shown to be emotional predispositions, their measured, almost diagrammatic presentation disproving the Romantic idea that passion is the only truth. Balanchine and Hindemith are neoclassical paragons, with the emphasis—appropriately for Modernism—on the neo: on the presentation of old wine in new bottles. Like Joyce’s use of the Odyssey to lend resonance to Ulysses, The Four Temperaments uses medieval pseudo-science to structure its psychologically-based exploration of how character influences human interactions. If anything, the expression of a humor (today we might say a hormone) reveals more about itself than about the situation wherein it acts (or, as the Classical Greeks said, character is fate), and perhaps the most emotional moment here is the one where the viewer realizes that ballet is not just bewitched princesses (sometimes replaced by courting cowboys) or sylphs adrift in gauzy mists. There remains unexplored territory that towards which Balanchine’s direct approach pointed the way. But is this an open prospect or a lost cause?
Carmina Burana is one of those works that brings in people who don’t habitually attend “highbrow” culture. It and Ravel’s Bolero, Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concertos, and Pachelbel’s so-called Canon in D have all made fierce, joyous converts, but sometimes their enthusiasm doesn’t extend far beyond those critical orphans. At the same time, the distance between popularity and informed opinion (one critic called Orff’s masterpiece “Neo-Neanderthal”) isn’t anywhere close to a straight line. Not every universally popular piece of music is trivial; Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the Mona Lisa of music, after all. (And what about Leonardo’s smiling enigma?). And given the likelihood that one will leave the theater humming O, Fortuna, or find oneself faking scat-like medieval lyrics for days after, this may be the place where wise critics step out of doorways and try not to block halls.
Temperament appealed to Modern artists; Carl Nielsen built a symphony on them, while modal tunings and other harmonic schemes proliferated. If reason and instinct do battle in Balanchine’s domain, it’s youthful hormones that rule Carmina Burana. There is no storyline, the dancing is episodic, and soloists are required to act with their faces as well as their bodies. It’s a departure not just from pure dance, but from the ideal of dance. It feels like a hybrid of dance and film—or television. The source, a 13th-century collection of lyrics, includes drinking and carousing songs, carnal celebrations of love, and verses mocking the church and conventional morality. That they are written in Latin or the evolutionary ancestors of modern German or French undoubtedly explains why the work’s huge popularity was not met by condemnation from the pulpit or government bans. If only the visual arts could disguise themselves so easily! But the language barrier also got Orff past his contemporary censors, who happened to be Nazis with a grudge against anything they considered “degenerate.” His success under their regime prevented the emergence of a critical consensus on a backward-looking musical vision that ironically, through stripped-down melody and percussive rhythm, sounds perennially new. Orff and Balanchine alike use historical materials—medieval in this program—to anchor their leaps into tradition-shattering new approaches.
There’s something draconian about Modernism: something that apparently leads to thinking that painting is dead, or the novel, and now finally dance. Yet it’s obvious that whether in the works of dancers who followed Isadora Duncan’s revolt against the artificial rigors of ballet, or on stage in more popular form, or debased on TV, or out on the street, dance as an art with skilled performers in front of an audience still comes about as close as possible to being a universal art. But the formal, mostly European stage version that is close kin to, and nearly contemporary with, opera—with its roots planted in courtly pomp and ceremony and its flowers among the masterpieces of the Romantic Era—lost its creative urgency somewhere in the latter half of the 20th century. Yet the performance, the facts rising up from the floor, is as urgent as ever to dancer and witness alike, and Ballet West continues to train and exercise the skills, ready to be called upon if, or when, genius strikes again.
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