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On Dance:
As for the Balanchine works, even under the best of rehearsal conditions it would be asking much of these Russian dancers--trained in such a different classical approach and routinely performing such different repertory--to absorb so much in the brief time that Francia Russell had to set Serenade and Apollo, and, in Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux, to rehearse Vishneva (who knew the role already) and her alternating partners. (Symphony in C was staged by John Taras and Patricia Neary.) Even so, as Russell explains in an interview to be published this winter in Ballet Review, the rehearsal conditions were frustrating to the point of despair. The key problem seems to have been that most of the dancers had never seen the ballets that she was trying to teach them, and so they had no inkling of what made them important to learn, and, with time, to inhabit. One or two went so far as to try to change the choreography to suit their personal skills. In addition to the dancers' resistance--worn down in some cases when they had the chance to look at videotapes of great performances under Balanchine's living direction--was the headache of trying to schedule the rehearsals themselves. Almost no one could be counted on to appear consistently, so nearly all of Russell's time was taken up in teaching the steps anew. She never got to the way the steps should be performed in any substantial depth. Her affection for the wholehearted commitment of the various casts to the actual performances is touching, yet the thousands of refinements to technical execution and musicality that make up the Balanchine style are not things that anyone can summon up on the spot through sheer inspiration, no matter how large the raw talent or how willing the heart. For New York dancegoers who knew the ballets well, most of the dancers looked stiff and four-square; and it is a testament to the structure and sturdiness of the ballets that they thrilled the audiences anyway. In truth, most of the dancers looked stiff and four-square in Petipa, too, for those who remembered casts from various countries in past decades. Yet Balanchine's choreography is more complex in its physical finish and in its coordination to the music, more dramatically isolated the small but unmistakable awkwardnesses. Dissolve, now, to jazz. About the time I was studying this new Kirov Ballet struggling to be reborn, I attended a public seminar about the dance elements in swing music, organized one summer afternoon at the Lincoln Center Plaza under the aegis of "Midsummer Night's Swing." The panel was moderated by the historian and connoisseur of jazz music and swing dancing Ernie Smith, and the panelists included the writer Albert Murray and the bandleader Illinois Jacquet, a protege of Count Basie. In the course of two hours, the discussion zeroed in on such topics as the nature of improvisation and syncopation, the specific numbers of beats in slow, moderate, and fast dance tempi--and, most important for the Kirov's rather tick-tock approach to Balanchine--the possibility of dancing to different rhythmic levels in a piece of music at different times. Balanchine dancers have talked about this, too. Suzanne Farrell has explained that on some nights she would choose to dance to the melodic line of a score while on other nights she would dance to other orchestral lines. Of course, as a ballerina, she could make such choices spontaneously. Sometimes, though, they are built right into the ballets. In 1980, I watched Arthur Mitchell rehearse Serenade with the Dance Theatre of Harlem and heard him correct the ensemble for listening to the melody in a certain passage when Balanchine had wanted them at that point to hear the accompaniment. Dissolve, now, to the State University at New Paltz. Closely following the Kirov's appearances, I visited the campus to hear the music critic and historian Harold Schonberg, whose specialty is piano playing, conduct a discussion of the leading pianists of the late-nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries. Schonberg brought tapes of such soloists as Ignaz Friedman, who played Chopin mazurkas with the ease of someone clarifying butter. The students were fascinated by the elegance and the liquidity of phrasing, by the allure of the sheer pianism, so exacting and yet so self-effacing that one doesn't hear it as virtuosity but rather as a sound of uncommon loveliness. This approach to the nineteenth-century repertory--evolved through a line of teacher-performers that included Liszt--appears to have vanished from the musical world. As Schonberg explained, modernist composers, Stravinsky foremost among them, controlled the performer in their music very tightly, reducing performance choices and profoundly affecting the expectations of both performers and audiences about how music ought to sound if it is contemporary. For this reason, the almost unearthly sensuousness of an Ignaz Friedman belongs to the antique past. Still, as two willing students in Schonberg's class showed, young pianists can be curious about how they, too, might produce such effects. In a gentle yet an uncompromising criticism, Schonberg began to give them a window on phrasing by asking them not to use the pedal so much, so as to permit more clarity in individual notes. He indicated how to vary the rhetorical eloquence in minute ways to achieve magnified effects, and he laid the seed for a way of thinking about the playing of Romantic music in general as a steady variation of texture and attack, with the object of keeping the listener's concentration fresh. What Schonberg was proposing could not be distinguished from what the swing-dance panel had proposed for dancers and musicians. And I should like to propose that these musical lessons might apply to classical dancers as well. For such tiny details of performance and such ethereal refinements of attitude are certainly part of the texts of Balanchine ballets, and possibly of the Petipa ballets, too. Sergeyev's notations, as individuals involved with them have testified, are only the basic sketch for the building: the elements that make the ballets live require artistic decisions for which Sergeyev did not provide, because he did not feel he needed to--the notations were in his possession and he would be right there to answer questions, or, in famous instances, to wreak havoc--or because he was unmusical, or both. Why should I think that it might be "historically correct," not to speak of practically helpful and aesthetically enhancing, to translate concerns of late-Romantic musical performance to ballet from the same period? My evidence is purely poetic, derived from the stage itself and, indirectly, from a memoir of a musical event that gives a clue to some of the anxieties invested in a spectacle that seeks to reawaken what dark energy has felled. Sergeyev made his notations of The Sleeping Beauty in 1903. During the 1903-4 musical season in St. Petersburg, the pianist Josef Hofmann and the violinist Jan Kubelik gave some concerts together, and an impression of them has been powerfully preserved in a memoir by a member of the audience, Osip Mandelstam, who attended them when he was about thirteen. Writing in retrospect two decades later, Mandelstam's description of both the audiences and the artists seems pertinent, not only to our understanding of what The Sleeping Beauty may have represented to its defenders during its time, but also to what its painstaking creation of lightness in the face of willful disorder might mean for our own. "The concerts [of Hofmann and Kubelik] would reach a kind of rage, a fury," Mandelstam observed. "This was no musical dilettantism: there was something threatening and even dangerous that rose up out of enormous depths, a kind of craving for movement; a mute prehistorical malaise was exuded by the peculiar, the almost flagellant zeal of the guards in Mikhajlovskij Square, and it whetted the Petersburg of that day (the year 1905 had not yet struck) like a knife." Later in the essay, the poet speaks of the music itself: In what followed, these little geniuses, holding sway over the stunned musical mob of maids of honor and girl students, fat art patrons and shock-headed singing coaches, would try with all the means of their art, with all the logic and splendor of their sound, to chain and cool the unbridled Dionysian element. I have never heard from anyone such a pure, primordially clear, and transparent sound, in the piano sober as spring water, and producing in the violin a voice of the utmost simplicity, indivisible into its component filaments; and I have never again heard such a virtuoso, such an alpine cold, as in the frugality, sobriety, and formal clarity of these two legalists of the violin and the pianoforte. But what in their performance was clear and sober served only to enrage and incite to new frenzies the crowd that clung to the marble columns, hung in clusters from the gallery, sprouted from the flower-beds of the orchestra, and thickened hotly on the stage. Such was the power in the rational and pure playing of these two virtuosi. It may well be that Alexandre Benois's famous description of falling in love with Tchaikovsky's music for The Sleeping Beauty--whose original run in 1890 the artist attended obsessively, from its second performance--and, through the music, of falling in love with both the rest of the ballet and the rest of Tchaikovsky's oeuvre, was not unique to Benois, but only uniquely articulated by him. If, indeed, music was the center of the culture of St. Petersburg, then the Kirov's new production of The Sleeping Beauty is being true to the spirit of the original--true, that is, precisely to the extent that it consigns dance to second place. This is a troubling idea for a dance
critic, and an astonishing idea to entertain in connection with
this company, which for decades was famous, even notorious, for
its distortion of composers' tempi in order to enhance the effects
of dancers. But today it is important to insist that it is not
by the music that this great work, and the other great works
of the ballet tradition, will be saved. If The Sleeping Beauty,
in this production and in others, is going to survive, it will
be because the dancers wish to retain it; and because audiences
wish to see it as well as to hear it. One of the great lessons
of ballet history is that administrations of state theaters come
and go, and so do conductors, but ballets are preserved because
of the needs of the dancers. Historically--alas, for many choreographers
and composers--music has rarely been among them. We would all
benefit if Valery Gergiev could somehow get the dancers of the
Kirov to cherish what they hear as much as what they do. But
lashing them into line is not the solution. |