Summer and Survival

At our little ballet school in the mountains, summer classes for teens and adults are wildly popular, despite the heat (often in the 100s during the day) and the lack of reasonable cooling in the historic building where the school has its home. This really cheers me; people love to dance, and love the rigor of classical ballet, and are willing to put up with a lot just to get some into their lives. 

This photo, which went the Facebook rounds recently, perhaps testifies to the degree to which ballet at least in  part an art of survival, and of survivors (I don't know how staged it was). That these young women and their teacher were living amid the most wretched conditions of war, poverty, homelessness, and starvation, and still driving themselves to practice and to teach is absolutely stunning to me (if indeed they were... again, we're talking USSR so propaganda is not to be ruled out). So often ballet is perceived as or presented as an effete, elite art form, too dainty for the real world, cultivating fragile personalities, and promoting a kind of frailty both physical and emotional through its aesthetics and its narratives. 

And it’s true, as I’ve complained here before, that one does occasionally wish there were not quite so many wilting damsels waiting (usually without hope) for a prince to rescue them in the classical story ballets. On the other hand, I’ve always felt that Giselle,

Giselle, Het Nationale Ballet

the original wilting damsel, gets her own back in Act II. She may be dead, but she’s tough as nails, compassionate, and more human than any of the living characters; she stands up to Mean Old Myrtha, rescues the pusillanimous Albrecht, and restores the audience’s faith in the human capacity for love. Lots of heroines who return from the grave get to act out the fantasy of “You’ll be sorry when I’m gone,” but to my mind only Giselle really gets to rise above that. Pretty good for a fairy zombie.

Ballet itself is something of a survivor. Like opera and classical music and a few other art forms that are resolutely rooted in the deep past, it seems like it keeps coming back from premature diagnoses of morbidity. There is always talk about how the audiences for these art forms are aging and a crisis is coming, but strangely, there always also seem to be new “older” people discovering and falling in love with them. Not to say there aren’t challenges, but I think one thing that is frequently overlooked in the critical press is that ballet is happening in all sorts of venues away from, say, the Koch Theater or Covent Garden; your local amateur company’s productions may not be pushing the envelope of the art form or showcasing the next Nijinsky, but they are encouraging young people and their families to care deeply about ballet, and to engage with it. The recent death and reinvention of the Omaha Ballet as Ballet Nebraska demonstrates, I think, the incredible tenacity of ballet dancers and their audiences in the face of fiscal challenges and waning governmental support for the arts. These people are heroes!

Recently, reading a book about human evolution since the emergence of anatomically modern Homo sapiens, I came across the theory, developed by some paleoanthropologists, that human speech evolved from bodily gestures (this is not a universally held view). If this were the case, then dance would be somehow more fundamentally human, or more primordially human anyway, than verbal language. And maybe that’s why ballet, despite it’s old-fashioned vocabulary and its oblique way of conveying meaning, persists. Even in a sweltering studio in the Utah summer.

Sweaty Swan