Return of Tights Up

Well, it has been a very long while, but I think I want to try to come back to the semi-regular posting of my musings on ballet, on being an adult ballet student, and other (semi) related topics.

First, though, here is an entry I wrote three years ago and never posted, but I think it will provide some useful context going forward...

July, 2017

Balancing Acts

I’ve taken a long hiatus from the blogosphere, partly because I’ve been working on my second book, and partly because, well, life gets busy and middle-aged people get tired. But recently, I had an experience that inspired me to write again. Just to put the plug in up front, the experience in question was participating in Allison Debona and Rex Tilton’s Artémotion Adult Summer Intensive (https://artemotion-summerintensive.com/) at the studios of Ballet West in Salt Lake City. But more on that in a minute…

My mother, a pianist, was always fairly involved in the classical music scene in Seattle when I was growing up. Occasionally, as a wide-eared child listening in on adult dinner table conversation, I’d hear a scene that went like this:

Guest (apropos of a recent Seattle Symphony “pops” concert or the like): It seems so, I don’t know, middle-brow. It’s pandering to the general ignorance about classical music.

Mom: Well, perhaps, but you’ve got to admit, it sells out, and the conductor did slip in some more interesting stuff…

Guest: But it demeans classical music, don’t you think? All people want to hear is Ravel’s Bolero, or that sort of thing. There’s no sophistication.

Mom: Have you noticed that the season-subscribers are on average about eighty? I think that’s because the younger generations haven’t had the same quality of music education, and the older people were trained to appreciate music composed before about 1850.

Guest (snorts)

Mom: While I’d love to hear more twentieth-century music, and a wider range of composers, I think the first thing we’ve got to do, as a musical community, is get the word out that classical music is cool and fun. Kids are big part of this, but their parents – people in their twenties and thirties, are part of it too. And it can’t just be middle-class and upper-class white men…

Guest (shakes head at this radical, lefty, feminist opinion)

The point being, of course, that my mom is an incredibly cool, enlightened person. But also, she had a point, one that has been argued many times and in many ways by cultural critics struggling against the tendency to ossification and elitism in the realms of “high culture.” Namely, that for any “classical” art form to continue to thrive and develop, it needs an audience, and not just an audience, but many audiences. It needs cognoscenti, sure, but it also needs people who just like an occasional dose, people who thought it wasn’t for them, but discovered it was, young people, people of color, people who can’t afford the price of a standard ticket, people who will be inspired to make their own foray into the art form… it needs plurality. Back in the day, that is to say, when classical music, ballet, theater, and visual art were taking shape, there was certainly an element of elitism (patronage, class concerns determining content and form), but there was also the “pit” – the rowdy, diverse public that not only provided an audience for spectacles, but also frequently reproduced these art forms in new venues, radically reimagining and refashioning them.

Students learning puppetry at Northwest Puppet Center, Seattle, March 2016

This is something I came to appreciate last year, during my blog-sabbatical, when I co-produced, with a musicologist colleague, a seventeenth-century opera with a cast of student singers and musicians, and buratini, that is, giant, Italian, rod-puppets (and obviously, puppeteers). The puppetry tradition to which the buratini belong is a folk art, that is to say, an art “of the people” in which heroic narratives about Charlemagne and his paladins are told with a distinctly comic and satirical twist. The traditional southern-Italian and Sicilian puppeteers were “of the people,” meaning, not aristocrats, but peasants and laborers, often without formal schooling, often illiterate. Although the tradition can only be traced back to the eighteenth century in the historical record, it is in fact likely to be much older (my third book project, just taking shape, will deal with this question).  The point is, that these possibly illiterate, working-class people took the high-falutin’ literary tradition of the Charlemagne legends (as embodied in the opera we produced, which was written for the Medici court in 1625), and turned it into something wonderful and new, giving birth to a new audience, and a new way of knowing these stories and their characters.

What this all has to do with the summer intensive is this idea of audiences that do not sit passively and well-behaved on their butts in their seats, but that actively participate in the shaping and reshaping of an art form. Ballet, like so many other classical arts, has the problem that it is hugely appealing to those “in the know” but a bit hermetic and daunting to those on the outside. What Allison and Rex (and their many collaborators, more on them shortly), are doing with this adult program is inviting their audience (people interested in ballet, who may be occasional ticket buyers or season subscribers or even key members of the company’s volunteer group, and who may or may not have any experience with dance as an activity in which they themselves engage) into the temple, so to speak. In doing so, they offer an incredible opportunity to their participants to experience, albeit in a “light” form, the sheer effort, mental, physical, and emotional, that goes into making art.

Summer 2018 participants, Artemotion Adult Workshop SLC (photo: Artemotion website)

For some of the participants, the younger ones, the dance majors, and the dance teachers, I’m sure the workshop was more an episode in professional development. For me, and for some of the other middle-aged people who were part of it, though, it was like nothing else we’ve experienced. No matter how “serious” I was about ballet at fifteen, or even when I flirted with returning to dance in my early twenties, I never got this close to the flame. I just was not good enough, according to whatever standards I knew at the time. Maybe if I had been exposed to this kind of thing, I would have been more motivated to stick to it. Or maybe not. It doesn’t really matter.

What does matter is that now, when I go and see dance performed, I will be that much more aware of the backstory, that much more engaged in what I am experiencing not as a product, but as a moment in much larger process. Also, I now know people who are involved in the company’s volunteer organization, and I have a personal connection to some of the dancers, so when I go I will feel less anonymous. Quite frankly, the whole experience has led me to thinking about how I can be more involved, whether by giving time, or money, or both. I’m no longer just a “customer.”

If more people, and by that, I mean people unlike me, people without the immense privilege I’ve had in terms of early exposure to dance and other “classical” arts, in terms of my race, class, body-type, and nationality, etcetera, could be afforded a week of intensive exposure to the back-story of art-making, I think that the arts, as a whole, would be in much better shape in terms of attracting audiences now and in the future. And it’s not just the economic vitality of the arts at stake; their very reason for being, their relevance, depends on being “living” entities, open to change, development, iteration and variation, always in conversation with their own pasts while looking forward to the future.

So, props to Allison and Rex. And props to Adrian Fry, company principal, who made a dance on a rag-tag baker’s dozen of recreational and aspirational dancers ranging in age from 20 to 63, and who got us to work harder than I think many of us thought we had the strength to do. And props to Justin Bass, Patrick Cubbedge, and all the others who put us through our paces. We are grateful, and incredibly sore.