January 07, 2007: Everything is no Longer Beautiful at the Ballet

Regular readers, as well as those surveying my current Tag Cloud, have probably detected my interest in opera; and, here in San Francisco, that interest is well satisfied by the San Francisco Opera. As is often the case, our Opera House divides it time, roughly equally, between the San Francisco Opera and the San Francisco Ballet. So I am frequently asked if I spend as much time at San Francisco Ballet performances as I devote to the Opera. I have answered this question in the negative so many times that I think I am now well-enough rehearsed to express it in text!

Those who know more about my than Google is ever likely to reveal know that, back when I was working on my doctoral thesis, I was fanatical about the dance, writing regularly for Boston After Dark and sending dispatched from Boston to Dance Magazine. New York was the place to be for such fanaticism, but Boston was not that bad. In fact, it was in a used bookstore in Boston (one of the best places to gather material about dance history) that I first met Leslie Getz, who probably had the most awesome collection of dance-related literature I had ever seen, all in an apartment in Palo Alto! Leslie was the one who taught me the aphorism of dance history that shaped much of my personal aesthetic: Fokine was the Father, Balanchine was the Son, and Ashton was the Holy Ghost. Two other choreographers eventually shared close proximity with this "holy trinity:" Anthony Tudor and Merce Cunningham.

On the popular front this was a time when Jerome Robbins was attracting a good deal of attention, particularly after the impact of West Side Story. He came up through the ranks of the early efforts in American ballet choreography; and, at a time when I would drive from Boston to New York every chance I had to catch the New York City Ballet at the New York State Theater, his "Afternoon of a Faun" was a fixture in the company repertoire. Similarly, Ballet Theater would do his "Les Noces" regularly. With all this as context, Robbins decided to "return to his roots" by introducing "Dances at a Gathering," a near-epic setting of Chopin piano music, complete with an on-stage pianist. (If imitation is the greatest form of flattery and parody the highest art of imitation, then the greatest honor to Robbins' effort came when Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo added "Yes Virginia, Another Piano Ballet" to their repertoire!) I was never particularly happy with Robbins working at this scale (I was even less happy when he tried to take on the "Goldberg Variations"); but this was where the "buzz" was (even if we did not use that noun in those days).

Run the time-line closer to the present when I discovered that San Francisco Ballet was going to include "Dances at a Gathering" in one of their seasons. My wife had never seen it; but she was curious about the company and had a lot more enthusiasm for Chopin than I usually do. I had not seen the company since 1967, when they had visited Jacob's Pillow; and they had gone through a lot of changes since then. So we went, and I am afraid that it did not take me long to start grumbling. What I began to realize was that the days of my fanatical interest in dance were actually the "twilight period" of the "good old days;" and it was unclear when the sun would next rise.

Back in those days, of course, one could not live by Balanchine, Ashton, Tudor, and Cunningham alone; but the alternatives could be pretty disappointing. Robert Joffrey and Gerald Arpino tended to have the strongest hold on consistently putting out disappointing stuff. Time magazine may have been excited about Joffrey's "Astarte;" but all I ever remembered was the way in which the cyclorama had an erection! Nevertheless, even the most rabid fans would still go to see the Joffrey Ballet because they performed "The Green Table;" and they did it very well, probably because the original choreographer, Kurt Joos had an active had in its reconstruction. Also, when we could not go to "live" performances, we would seek out movie revival houses, not just for old ballet films but for Hollywood musicals with "real" choreography in them. Balanchine frequently confessed to being a great admirer of Astaire, and you do not have to watch many of the RKO films with Ginger to see why.

So why is there now such a long dark night of an art form I once loved so passionately? The best explanation I can give is that it all comes down to energy. From the evidence I have gathered, "The Green Table" is a perfect example because Joos understood the role of energy in both theory (some of which he apparently got from Laban) and practice. Both Astaire and Kelly were masters of energy control; and, in Astaire's case, that came in through his very conception of choreography. Every now and then I see a choreographer (such as Forsythe) who seems to understand the role of energy; but that understanding does not matter very much if the dancer's can't "get it." Here in San Francisco I really could not fault the local company on any of the steps in "Dances at a Gathering" (particularly since, given the volume of them, my memory was not that strong); but my grumbling all had to do with the fact that I experienced no sense at all of how to control energy in order to turn the steps into dance.

Will this trend change? That is impossible to predict. When Balanchine came to the United States, no one expected that American ballet would rise to a level that had been associated almost exclusively with its Russian heritage; but, between Lincoln Center, City Center, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York could justifiably claim to be the Dance Capital of the World. Perhaps it will regain that title. Perhaps San Francisco will make a serious play for it. More likely, however, we now live in a digital culture with far less admiration for such performing arts, which means that the best we can hope for is that any records we have of any of those art forms be properly preserved for posterity!