Sunday, February 16, 2014

Ballet is hard, change is harder



In a recent interview (http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/feb/12/ballet-grand-dames-gillian-lynne-bery-grey-push-dancers-limit) , Beryl Grey and Gillian Lynne, former Royal Ballet stars now in their eighties, criticized the culture of contemporary ballet for coddling dancers, for making them soft through such pampering treatment as nutritional counseling, physical therapy, and rest days. Never mind that more dancers are maintaining longer careers and retiring with mental and physical health intact these days than ever in the past; these lionesses protest that they worked longer days and longer seasons on starvation wages and were glad to do it. “Ballet is hard,” they say. 

Beryl Grey
I have immense respect for these women, who were indeed tough-as-nails swans in their day; it takes a certain degree of fortitude to compete with Margot Fonteyn. However, their griping is just more of that “in my day, we had to walk uphill in the snow BOTH ways,” self-aggrandizement that Saturday Night Live made such good fun of years ago. In fact, dance has changed in ways that would make the hours they worked crippling and I find it hard to regret that artists are now accorded the some of the same prerogatives as other working athletes. I cannot imagine a retired NBA player decrying the fact that players today have access to ultrasound therapy for strained muscles. And as for the talk of dieting and the valorization of anorexia, I am sorry, but how does being physically weak and mentally ill make you a better, more expressive artist?

The athleticism of modern ballet also comes under fire from Grey and Lynne on the grounds that dancers, though technically more skilled and versatile today, are less “soulful.” Codswallop! This is another one of those commonplaces rooted in cheap nostalgia and, I suspect, an insidiously anti-feminist, class- and race- based set of expectations about the ballerina. She should be delicate, pale, trembling, a veritable wraith (a Sylphide!). Visibly muscular women, women of color, tall women, none of these have a place in the Victorian imaginarium in which traditional classical ballet was for so long invested. But more and more, the color of the ballerina, and along with that, the range of acceptable body types, is becoming more open to difference.

This week, I am in Chicago, and I was able to sneak away from the conference I am attending to see a performance by the Joffrey Ballet at the historic Auditorium Theater, just a few blocks from the hotel. All three works performed on the triple bill http://joffrey.org/contemporary were of relatively recent genesis: Crossing Ashland, by Brock Clawson, Continuum, by Christopher Wheeldon, and Episode 31, by Alexander Ekman. Each of them had a distinctly different relationship to classical ballet, with Clawson closest in his investigation of using the body as an emotional glyph to European choreographers, like Jiri Kylian,  Wheeldon typically hewing close to Balanchine’s starker neo-classical idiom, and Ekman more kindred in spirit to Bob Fosse (if Bob Fosse took speed and went clubbing in the 1990s).  What all three works shared is that incredibly technical and percussive athleticism that I have commented on before in writing about contemporary ballet. 

Ballet dancers today, unlike in Grey and Lynne’s time, are routinely asked to use their bodies in a huge variety of very risky and unfamiliar ways, hurtling through space, colliding with the floor, dragging and dragged, stomping, falling… For example, in Ekman’s piece, the central pas-de-deux involves two men in stocking feet, moving to a spoken-word recording of children’s poetry that sounded like it was from the 1950s, and their interactions compound martial-arts-like combat, contact-improv like rolls, and lifts drawn from the classical repertoire, except made more challenging by the fact that one is lifting a 150 pound man, not a 100 pound woman. Yet this strange passage was, for me, the most compelling part of this odd, wacky ballet; it got at the desire and the anxiety at the heart of ritual combat (wrestling, boxing, dance-offs) between men while at the same time infusing this potentially murky stew with a dash of peppery self-mockery. In other words, it was emotionally, as well as physically challenging for the dancers.

Karel Cruz and Maria Chapman, PNB, in
Wheeldon's After the Rain.
I am surprised that Grey and Lynne and the legions of other more conservative dance observers who repeat the same old saw about today’s athleticism in dance coming at the cost of emotional expression can overlook the entire oeuvres of such choreographers as Pina Bausch (on the one hand) and Christopher Wheeldon (on the other). Wheeldon’s work, in particular, has always struck me as sailing dangerously close to the wind in terms of soppy romance. I will not lie. I adore watching After the Rain, especially the more sensual second act, but that enjoyment is always tinged with my awareness that this might just be the corniest and most sugar-coated ballet romance since, well, since Giselle. Plus there is the whole weird racial thing; it is usually cast with a white woman and a dark-skinned man (it was originally set on Wendy Wheeldon and Jock Soto) -- I would like to see this discussed and maybe challenged a bit more. What about casting say, Misty Copeland in the woman's role, or just ANY different pairing than white woman/"black" man? Alistair Macauley has criticized Wheeldon for his heterosexism in his preference for the pas-de-deux, but even he doesn't plumb the really troubling race politics at issue in the bizarrely conformist casting of After the Rain.

Barnett Newman, The Beginning, image from
The Art Institute of Chicago website
It is possible, indeed even probable, within the modernist idiom of any art form, to tend toward a kind of dewy-eyed romanticism, and Wheeldon is for me the dance-equivalent of Mark Rothko; deeply saturated fields of emotional color thinned out and merging into dark tones around the edges, the classical core breaking up into cloud-wisps, the light fading. Continuum, set to Ligety’s unrelentingly modernist piano music, has the same structural rigor as a painting by Rothko, or actually, more like something by Barnett Newman, that echt-technician of Abstract Expressionism, whose 1946 The Beginning I had seen earlier on the same day that I saw the Joffrey. It is, like Continuum, both spare and lush. Oh yes, and it shares the same color palette.

If you take So You Think You Can Dance as a gauge of “what dance has become” it is indeed the case that athleticism and technical prowess have trumped the deeper, affective and intellectual pleasures of the art form. However, that is a product of the particular strictures of the television dance-competition form; those young dancers (many of them no doubt deeply engaged with dance and capable of far more reflective and mindful expression under other circumstances) have to learn new choreography very quickly, and they are not given time to develop much of a relationship to either the movement or the music, both of which are in any case often vapid. Any "emoting" they do is very superficial and often tied to the uber-cheesy "lyrical" pieces set to pop ballads.

However, in real contemporary dance, athleticism is just one brush in an ever expanding (and ever more physically and intellectually demanding) quiver that artists are expected to bring to the studio. When you think about the disconnect between the ballet training that most kids get in this country, with its emphasis on traditional forms and technical mastery, and the feats of imagination and strength that are asked of professionals in a company like the Joffrey, the fact that dancers can identify and make visible the affective qualities of the very difficult choreography they are asked to perform is all the more impressive.

"Bah, humbug!"
Not all of them can do it. There was one dancer in the Wheeldon piece who seemed too happy; she just grinned and beamed like a showgirl the whole time and it drove me nuts since it meant she did not engage with her pas-de-deux partner so much as with the audience. But that lack of emotional sensitivity is in fact so rare among dancers I have seen in recent years that it stood out. 

In the end, as we age, we have choices. We can look at what the world is becoming and marvel at it, try to wrap our minds around the possibilities it offers, try to articulate the challenges it presents, and try to stay relevant. At forty-five, no longer young but facing what I hope is a long future of being not-young, I can only hope I have the courage to take this route. Having spent a week at this conference where the up-and-comers in my field look so bright and fresh and daring, I have had to be quite firm with myself about singing that tired old tune of “Well, back in my day…”

And that is option number two: we can turn up our noses and sniff about the inferiority of the moment in which we now live to the world of our youth. There is nothing so repellent as an old snob.

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