Silly Hats and Serious Fun

Just back from a performance by Ririe Woodbury, Utah's homegrown modern company, now fifty years old. Amazing athleticism and verve. Six dancers, six pieces, very little downtime.

Okay, now I will start using complete sentences, since Twitter this ain't. It was a treat  to see the company perform in the lovely and intimate performance hall on the USU campus. I've heard a lot of chamber music there, but had my doubts about it as a dance venue. It does not have a traditional proscenium stage, and the floor area is small. For the small size of the troupe and the direct and personal styles of the choreography they presented, however, it worked well. In a physically challenging and complex piece by Ann Carlson ("50 Years"), the dancers provided the sounds as well as the movements, vocalizing rhythmically, and because the Perf Hall (yes, we call it that) is so acoustically sensitive, you could hear every gasp, grunt, inhalation, which gave a deep, visceral rootedness to the whole thing.

Ballet West, Petite Mort

Even if some of the pieces were of a lighter nature, this was serious dance. By this I mean, the dancers and the choreographers clearly approached their art with the intent to communicate something important and to engage with the big questions that dance allows us to ask. What does it mean to live in a human body? What are our relationships, through space, time, and gesture, to other people and to the non-human world? Where do feeling and thinking intersect, and what is the body's role as the vessel of both emotion and intellect? Modern dance, as Adam Sklute remarked at the pre-performance lecture at Ballet West that we attended the other night, can access interiority in ways that are denied to ballet, with its origins in court dancing and the world of public, social performances. Okay, those are my nerdish words, but that was what I took away from his description of the tension between the earthier, modern elements of Jiri Kylian's Petite Mort and the more formal, balletic passages. He did not say this either, but think that in that particular work the modern passages are about sex and the ballet passages are about the rituals that frame sex and civilize it, make it not just animal mating. (I mean, the piece is called Petite Mort, you know?)

Silly hat and silly headgear

But to return to this idea of seriousness, if I may. Ballet West's program included Firebird,  in a reconstruction of the version original to the company (it premiered under William Christensen's direction and with his choreography in 1967). It is not the first Firebird I have seen, nor will it probably be the last. Most people love this ballet-- it has that unbelievably memorable music, for one thing. But really, let us be honest; it is a frivolous thing, perhaps among the most frivolous items in the repertory of most major ballet companies. Act One, the hero runs around in the forest in a stupid hat, and some magic stuff happens. He catches and releases a magic bird with drag-queen eye-makeup. An enchanted princess dances with him. A bad magician and his creepy myrmidons show up. The bird saves the guy in the silly hat. Am I going out on a limb to say that this is not much of a story? Act Two is just a wedding, a group wedding, involving more guys in silly hats. My daughter, who had not seen Firebird  before, got the giggles about the Bishop's mitre. She had never seen its like and had no idea it signified "bishop" so to her it was just a conehead like thing.

The silliness of Firebird has its historical origins in the absurdity of modernism trying to seduce the public by going around with a tarted up folktale on its arm. The problem in 1910, as in 2013, is how to get audiences to come see ballet, and Diaghilev certainly had his finger on the pulse of popular sentiment. Thus, Firebird.

Bayadere: Dance of the Shades

Do not take this to mean I hate Firebird or that I think it is stupid. Not at all; most story ballets are profoundly silly in their narrative structure, their stock of cliched characters, and so forth. As in opera, lovers of the art form put up with a large dose of the ridiculous so that we can indulge our taste for spectacle at the same time we devour the technical and artistic merits of the performance (which are often somewhat divorced from the story). The presence of a ballet blanc in the middle of say, La Bayadere, really makes almost no sense in terms of the supposed cultural setting of the story, but also anchors the whole ballet to the history of the art form and to its essential aesthetic values.

However, really serious dance, it seems to me, has to get at something more than romantic claptrap or faux-folklore. It needs to bite into the business of being human in some really toothy way. I suppose I'm advocating some form of realism, which is tough for an art form based on ordering human movement and human bodies in ways that are clearly not the "workaday" ways that such things operate. But I really saw this seriousness in a few of the Ririe Woodbury pieces tonight, even when they were making me laugh. "50 Years" had the greatest number of passages in which the threads of humor and pathos were intertwined.

This is the cast I saw tonight. For a video, click here.

For example, at one point, the group, which has been moving almost as a single body, vocalizing in ensemble, suddenly breaks apart into a field of individuals, each making self-referential, inwardly directed movements and cawing, semi-linguistic sounds.

There is something comical about this brief attempt to break away from the hive mind, but also something tremulous and fragile about it. At another point, one of the dancers sneezes and all of the dancers collapse, hard, on the floor; the audience laughed, but there was tragedy in the total surrender to gravity as well.

Bill T. Jones. Serious Fun.

The funny thing is that some of the most serious dance of our time (Kylian, Carlson, Morris, Bill T. Jones) is also deeply humorous. I am not talking about inadvertent humor (stupid hats in Firebird), or campy humor (the cheesier parts of a Trocks performance), but real humor, in the Greek sense of a contest between lightness and sobriety, or maybe even between life and death, that exposes the absurdity of life at the same time that it produces a feeling of pleasure in being alive.

Girl-positive ballet: inconceivable?

Oh no, no, no!

A while ago in response to something I had read about how local and regional ballet companies need more marketable repertoire, I proposed, facetiously, a ballet based on The Hobbit, but this article from the Guardian on Disney’s now-in-development stage play version of The Princess Bride got me thinking; wouldn’t THAT be fun as a ballet? My ballet teacher, a long-time member of our civic ballet, tells me that the company is pretty constrained as to what it can perform and still break even once sets, costumes, and the cost of the theater rental are taken into account (nevermind the dancers… they’re not paid!). Nobody will come see anything strange or unfamiliar (just to give the full sense of what this means… they decided they couldn’t do “Don Q” because the story was not recognizable to local ticket buyers). Basically, they’re stuck with anything Disney has already done as a film, e.g. Sleeping Beauty. Oh, and Nutcracker, of course. They do a mean Dracula some Octobers, and they also have an Ashton-esque Cinderella, an Alice in Wonderland, a Coppelia (a bit challenging for the locals), and a few other things up their puffy sleeves. But, as she noted, it’s tough. As a dancer, she admits to being a weensy bit bored with Beauty in particular. And who on earth would blame her?

So, what about Princess Bride? It has all the classic elements. Princess? Check! Dashing hero? Check, check! Court scenes? Got em! Comic interludes and potential for silly stage business? Fezzik, Vizzini, and Inigo Montoya at your service! But, and this is a big but… there are an awful lot of boy roles and really, in the end, Buttercup is the only girl role worth mentioning. So, maybe not. 

Wuv, twue wuv!

Ballet, as George Balanchine opined, is woman. Or at least, in regional and local ballet companies, ballet is mostly girls between the ages of 15 and 22. So, lots of stuff for the corps to do, some nice solo work for your more accomplished students, and not too many male roles, please. I take a light tone, but it is a real challenge and a serious one if you’re trying to keep ballet alive in a smaller community, such as ours. I have huge admiration for the woman who founded our civic company 30 years ago and has kept it, and the school, together all this time. She must be exhausted. But she doesn't look it.

One of the attractions of The Princess Bride is its humor, and the way it spoofs the conventions of the fairy tale. On the other hand, there’s nothing particularly feminist, girl-positive or radical about it. Buttercup has always seemed a bit of a blockhead, really. So maybe it is no loss that it will not be coming to a ballet stage near you any time soon. 

Which leads me to the question of whether, given that story ballets are the inevitable sustenance of community-based ballet in vast swathes of this country, there are ANY good alternatives to the entrenched, Romantic, anti-feminist tenor of so much of this stuff. Alison Bechdel, the subtly subversive cartoonist and graphic novelist, proposed a test of films for real commitment to their women characters. The test is simple. For a film to be feminist

Alison Bechdel

1. It has to have at least two [named] women in it

2. Who talk to each other

3. About something besides a man

This is hardly a new thing – I think she first put this out in her great cartoon strip “Dykes to Watch Out For,” in the mid-eighties, but recently it has become the meme-of-the-moment and has taken on a life of its own with various media watchers who monitor recent films, track the record of independent versus Hollywood films, look at the historical trajectory of films that do and do not meet this standard… Evidently the Swedish National Film Board has adopted it as a ratings standard.

Many, though not all, ballet stories would fail, even if you replace “dance to each other” and even though for at least two centuries traditional narrative ballet has been mostly populated by women.  Number three would get them. Some examples:

• Giselle has at least two named women (Giselle, Myrtha, Bathilde) and Giselle and Myrtha do a lot of mime-talk. But, sigh, what do they talk about? Albrecht, the cad! 
• Raymonda features not only Raymonda, but also her dour aunt, Sybille, her friends (who have names) and the White Lady (is that a name? I’m not sure), and they do a dire amount of pantomime. But, again, it all has to do with men… good ones, bad ones, and so forth
• La Fille Mal Gardée features Lise, her frustrated parent Simone (does it count when a woman character is played by a man???), and more than half of the stage time in most modern versions seems to be taken up with Keystone Kops pratfalls that pass for communication (or miscommunication) between the protagonists. However, all of Lise’s interactions with her mother focus on their battle of wills about whom Lise will marry… Colas or the buffoon Alain?

Feminist tales are rare enough, and ballet-friendly feminist tales even rarer. The most perfect and simple of all feminist fairy tales, Robert Munsch's Paper Bag Princess features only a girl, a dragon, and a petulant prince named Ronald, so it would not adapt well to the needs of a small company with many little girls eager to go on stage. A friend of mine, maybe it was a Girl Scout camp, had a book called Tatterhood, which included only traditional folktales that featured strong heroines who did not sit around waiting for a prince. 

Lauren Mills, "Tatterhood and Isabella Dancing"

Several of those would make interesting ballets, not least the title tale, from Norway, weird in the way that Scandinavian folktales so often are. It has a queen who, with the help of a witch, overcomes her infertility and gives birth to twin daughters, the elder ugly and fey, the younger beautiful. But the younger sister falls victim to a goblin prank (they steal her head and replace it with that of a cow), and the elder must rescue her (or rather, her head). On their way home after the successful rescue, they are guests of a king and his son. The king falls in love with the younger sister and proposes to her, but she will only marry him if Tatterhood maries his son, and it takes quite a bit to convince the prince to take this ugly, goat-riding, wooden-spoon-wielding hag as his bride. In the end he relents. As they ride home from the wedding (a double wedding! a story-ballet waiting to go nuts!), he is dejected, and gently, Tatterhood manipulates him into asking her questions. Why does she ride a goat? A goat! This is no goat but a beautiful horse! He looks, and it is! Why does she carry a spoon? It is not a spoon, but a silver fan! Why does she wear that dreadful hood? What hood? You mean the golden crown? Why is she so gray and hideous? Me? Gray? Hideous? In fact she is more beautiful than her sister… 

Would this pass the Bechdel test? Maybe not. Except for Tatterhood nobody has a name in the original version. In Lauren Mills' retelling (from which I borrowed the illustration above) the younger sister is Isabella, a good name for a pretty girl. But there is plenty of discussion between women about subjects other than a man. For example, the Queen woos the witch to reveal her secret method of (man-free) conception, and Tatterhood must negotiate with her mother to be allowed to rescue her sister. And ultimately, though it does conclude with a marriage, one has the sense that Tatterhood, and nobody else, is running the show.

I think my daughter would agree... this is not all that inaccurate, at times.

The problem with all this is that Disney has never made Tatterhood into a film and therefore nobody will buy tickets because they do not recognize the story. Once upon a time, I would have despaired that Disney would ever make a film about a girl who pretty much takes charge, and not only that, but does not feel in any way obligated to gracefully resign agency at the very climax of the story (uh, Tangled, Pocohantas, Mulan, anyone?). However, with the most recent entry in the "Disney Princess" genre,  Brave, a twinkle of hope has dawned. There you have a Bechdelian feast – the main romance, after all, is between the girl and her mother, and while their initial interactions do primarily concern either Merida’s marriageability or her potential marriage partners, ultimately, their discourse shifts and they are mostly concerned, painfully, wrenchingly, and horribly concerned, with understanding one another and learning some mutual sympathy. 

The most heartbreaking panel in any cartoon, ever.

Bechdel’s own graphic novel, Are You My Mother? (a follow up to the tragic and yet hilarious Fun Home) covers precisely this emotional territory too, though predictably in a less sanguine vein than Brave. That is to say, Bechdel’s mother never really turns back into a person, having become a bear. But neither does she threaten to eat her daughter... she just stops giving her a goodnight kiss when she is seven. Seven!

From The Princess Bride to Are You My Mother by way of the challenge of dancing to your audience in a small town in the West? Jeez, I love the freedom of the blog format!