The Beauty Of Ballet
Written by Ryan Landry Posted in Uncategorized
One of the few items that truly separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom, revealing the human spirit and soul, is art. In our 21st century cultural landscape, art is a degraded idea, made ugly by an intellectual crowd too happy to just be considered cool. Art is far too open to any amateur. The multicultural crowd slides into forms, where audiences are told that the alien-looking is on par with Rembrandt. We live in a society where simple representations of beach babe beauty creates online firestorms and real life bomb threats from feminists.
How do you fight it? Where can you still find art that reaches for the heights of human beauty? Watch ballet.
The beauty comes from the high hurdle to perform in a company in any major city in the West. You are seeing the best of the best express a story through choreography, classical music, costuming and lighting. To get onstage, you must be classically trained. Training starts young, and is grueling. You are not just technically competent, but the endurance required and selection for visual aesthetics, means the best technical and physical specimens are onstage. Maybe you dance well but your pointe work is poor, sorry, next in line?
The drive is to become a lead, so all are competing against one another throughout the company for that shot. The entire corps of the ballet company is stacked with dancers all trying to make it to Swan Queen, and ensemble pieces are synchronized beauty because of that. You cannot be a token and be a lead, and with how many gay men are involved, a woman rarely, if ever, could sleep her way to a lead.
When you see a ballet, you know what you’re going to get. The beauty within ballet is that there is order and tradition, and within that framework the performers breathe a living spirit. The terminology is centuries old and mostly French. All performers must learn and master these movements and positions. One does not hit the spotlight unless one has absorbed the same repetitive lessons of one’s contemporaries and predecessors. Even by being a lead and having solo dances, because of the long tradition of old ballets and classic movements, one becomes part of the historical memory of ballet.
Ballet may be rigid because of this tradition, but it is always reaching for new heights. The order and tradition poses an interesting challenge to choreographers, directors and performers alike. How does one make a production one’s own? Within the limits of order, how does one make this new thing special and creative? Ballet is so tough and so wonderful that one could say modern dance was created as an angry reaction to it by women protesting ballet.
The historical memory matters, and it is not just for ballet itself. Ballet is akin to a cultural ark for Western civilization. The godfather of ballet (one of several) Marius Petipa created many ballet productions still performed today. Working in the creative cauldrons of France and Russia, his work was completed by carefully talking to old masters and choreographers. Petipa researched old stagings, costume design, set design and choreography notes. He did this all to reconstruct old ballets for revivals and to help in creating new ones. His ballets are centered on stories from Europe’s cultural history like Don Quixote, Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker. Swan Lake was revived by Petipa, and still is part of the modern Western memory enough for Hollywood to make Black Swan. Petipa’s work is a cultural ark and a successful one because over 100 years after his death, the productions live on.
Unlike other art forms and other forms of dance, there is no lull in ballet. Spots at the top are so few that there is always an eager new performer climbing for the top. Training techniques have allowed performers to physically dazzle audiences more with movements than in years of old. There have been no new big productions, but the classics never fail to deliver. If anything, the rigidity, tradition and order of the ballet world has helped it persevere compared to other art forms.
It is not a democratic art form, as one must meet the rigorous demands to enter the select realm of professionals.
That makes it all the better. The filtration process from taking Ballet 1 as a child to center stage makes it certain that those onstage will be striving for awe inspiring performances for you the audience. If not for you, the performers labor, sweat and push their bodies for the tradition that is ballet and those who performed before them.
Great post.
I’d add that ballet dancers have to do a lot of hard work without making it look hard. Effort that appears effortless is completely at odds with the zeitgeist, unfortunately. But, for some daring individuals this could be an opportunity.
Ryan, I’d be curious to hear your opinion of Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes.
The general thrust is good, and I’m glad to see it here even with factual errors and misleading assertions.
I’ve been to scores of performances of New York City Ballet in particular, including many in the Golden Age with Balanchine still alive and still making pieces for the likes of Farrell, McBride, Verdy, Hayden, Villella, Martins, as well as much ABT, and some Royal Ballet, Paris Opera Ballet, the two big Russians Kirov and Bolshoi, Royal Danish, to name a few.
Everything you say about the rigour and the discipline is true and is one of the reasons why ballet is so inspiring. As a pianist, I used to play many ballet classes, although that’s dreadful in itself (and you quit…), you have to bang out beats (onstage ballets with piano, like ‘The Goldberg Variations’ are better on the pianist’s work, but still not like playing it solo). I wrote for 6 years at Ballet Alert! the top ballet discussion board in the world, and this has not only fans but critics from the Wall Street Journal, and occasionally dancers from the big companies (but not usually, since they’re being discussed.) I was thrown off there because ballet fans are much more unbearable than you may know or want to think; they moralize about the ‘horror of two POB etoiles being caught on video having a cigarette together’, and that ‘They must be ROLE MODELS!’ I said obscene things, and it was an “I quit, you’re fired” moment. Lots of dancers do smoke, btw.
“Swan Lake was revived by Petipa”
That’s true, but somewhat misleading, because ‘Swan Lake’ has long been associated as much with Petipa as ‘Nutcracker’ and ‘Sleeping Beauty’, so it’s never associated with Julius Reisinger except by dance scholars. I like your emphasis on Petipa, he was probably the greatest ultimately, because that was the true Age of Ballet in Russia, just as Franz Liszt was the greatest in the greatest period of the Romantic Pianist (so great he ended up in the Vatican after the countesses.) Also appreciate your including ‘Don Quixote’, which I know well, but it had never sunk in that that’s Petipa, because I always have to steel myself for the Minkus. I tend to think of Petipa and Tchaikovsky together. I think ‘Sleeping Beauty’ is the greatest, though, but ‘Nutcracker’ is by far the most popular single work in any field of the Arts, I think, maybe unless you say the Bible is the most famous book. All the little companies do it as well as the big ones every Christmas. Balanchine’s is probably the best, but I’m not a big aficionado of Nutcracker.
“Ballet is so tough and so wonderful that one could say modern dance was created as an angry reaction to it by women protesting ballet.”
Yes and no. If it weren’t for Martha Graham, I’d agree most likely, but her work is as great as the great ballet choreographers, and the pieces are often even called ‘ballets’.: They’ve gotten something you could not express in classical ballet. She’s got the only technique that’s a specific discipline. There’s, then, ‘The Graham Technique’, but no ‘Lar Lubovitch Technique’ or ‘Paul Taylor Technique’.
“The entire corps of the ballet company is stacked with dancers all trying to make it to Swan Queen, and ensemble pieces are synchronized beauty because of that.”
Not really. They usually know after not too long they’re not going to get out of the corps, and corps work has gotten very sloppy in many companies, and has been for years. You can tell this by seeing Paris Opera Ballet, which is perfect, stunning. They’re light-years better than our NYC companies by now, and consistently so even more than Kirov, which will hire prima ballerinas for mantis-like 180-degree extensions and little other major ability sometimes (Somova.)
“You cannot be a token and be a lead, and with how many gay men are involved, a woman rarely, if ever, could sleep her way to a lead.”
Balanchine did have 5 wives, all of whom were dancers in his company, although I wouldn’t say they ‘slept their way to a lead'; nonetheless, dancers being so physical, the fornication probably helped the dancing…but Suzanne Farrell’s refusal to marry (and sleep with, I guess) him led to her expulsion for 5 years, followed by a return to NYCB which was even more fabulous, so not ‘putting out’ helped her career (I saw her a lot.) But it’s not Hollywood Casting Couch, you’re quite right about that.
I was surprised, though, at the ballet board, to see that it was more common for the corps male dancers to be gay than the stars, most of whom seem to be straight. The most famous exception is Nureyev, of course, and he was probably also the greatest when young.
“Unlike other art forms and other forms of dance, there is no lull in ballet.”
I wouldn’t say so, and most agree that standards have indeed lowered (as my description of lazy corps work) and ballet still has to fight crazily for funding.
“Spots at the top are so few that there is always an eager new performer climbing for the top.”
That’s true of musical soloists and opera as well, and ballet being even more exclusive means that the stars are everything, and they do turn out fantastic new stars at ABT and the Russians, whether Marcelo Gomes, Natalia Osipova, Diana Vishneva, David Hallberg…
“There have been no new big productions, but the classics never fail to deliver”
Yes, there have, if by ‘new’ you include at least the 60s. Balanchine’s ‘Jewels’ is definitely as great as Petipa (and, at least, in that, NYCB is still great; I saw it again last May.) Balanchine’s one-act ballets are as great as the old full-length Romantic classics as well. And Frederick Ashton’s ‘A Month in the Country’ for RB, these are just two. Although, ‘seat-fillers’ are still ‘Swan Lake’ and ‘Nutcracker’, etc.
There ARE lots of better regional companies by now, that’s one improvement. I’ve seen a few of these, and they’re well-trained but not as good as the big companies by a long shot (even NYCB, less than it was, is still much better than Pacific Northwest, which is so sterile I call it the ‘Microsoft Ballet’. )
Apologies for length, there was a link to this about the buildings. Since I read several you NRxers, but have never commented (and it’s not that likely I will know enough to ever do so again, anyway don’t identify exactly as such), I’ll just mention here that I liked very much the post on Architectural Harmony and that my neighborhood in NYC (West Village) has become almost completely white over the last 5 years noticeably. I can see 1 WTC out the window, where it seems less unattractive with only the top 1/3 showing. Just saw some very good posts that I’ll have to get to, like ‘Momma’s Boy SJW’.
Interesting that an NRx blog would talk about ballet, but it’s always been royalist once Louis XIV started pointing the toes to Lully and then the imperial Russians really developed it. In the modern day, David Koch gave $100 million to NYCB and got the State Theater named for him.
“Ballet is so tough and so wonderful that one could say modern dance was created as an angry reaction to it by women protesting ballet.”
I’d just add to that that women who can make it in ballet (and aren’t Grahamesque geniuses) are just fine with it, and are deified there more than any place else. Balanchine himself said ‘ballet is woman’, yet he did want a certain type, and certain bodies like Patricia McBride were the ones able to deliver to his almost monstrously demanding will. But still, he was always looking for ‘the ideal woman’ (I know the feeling, not liking the others that much, which means about 1% of them), and usually got his way. The problem in that case was the NYCB is comparatively dull when it comes to the virtuoso danseur nobles, and you see much better at ABT, where they’re not afraid to really show what the men can do. Nureyev wouldn’t dance for Balanchine, anyway he had to be center stage all the time, and his early Kirov partner Alla Sizova, hated him–and vice-versa, because there is a clip of a very old graduation ceremony in which she upstages him in ‘Le Corsaire’, which oughtn’t be possible. I recomment the old Kirov ‘Sleeping Beauty’ movie with Sizova as Aurora; never saw a better dancer.