GEORGE PIPER DANCES, QUEEN ELIZABETH HALL, LONDON (27th March 2004). This review first appeared in The Tablet, 3rd April 2004.

In the nineteen thirties, Hugh MacDiarmid wrote a nine-page poem praising ballet as “the revolutionary art of the future”. If he were still alive, he would likely have been disabused of his optimism. The art is at ebb tide, with doubters questioning if a form rooted in the dances of the Bourbon court can still speak eloquently to today’s audiences.

If ballet has a future, it rests with the likes of Michael Nunn and William Trevitt. They describe themselves as “jobbing dancers”. Bored with the security of life in the Royal Ballet, and a constant diet of the nineteenth century classics, they left the company. They now live a more precarious life running their own ensemble, which they call after their second names, George Piper Dances (Queen Elizabeth Hall 23rd- 27th August). They commission new ballet works with a contemporary twist and have attracted an audience to which ballet has had little appeal.

Trevitt is something of a matinee idol, while Nunn has the cheeky opportunism of an East End barrow boy. Their series for Channel 4, Ballet Boyz, a video-diary of dancers’ lives, made them. It established them in public imagination and taught them useful filming skills. Their theatre performances are sandwiched with brief camcorder vignettes. Usually the dancer is known only by the dance. These film-clips fill out the picture with glimpses of their personalities, their playfulness, and of the wear and tear of touring and rehearsal.

Extraordinarily they have persuaded some of the world’s leading dance-makers to create work for them: the three works in their current programme are by choreographers who all have a background in the classics. One, Russell Maliphant, has virtually turned his back on the form, claiming to explore “sculptural possibilities beyond the courtly shapes of ballet”. Christopher Wheeldon, New York City Ballet’s young resident choreographer, works within the classical tradition, giving it contemporary expression, and the third, William Forsythe, the director of Ballet Frankfurt, is torn between a preoccupation with grammar and a frustration with the very limits of dance.

Forsythe, who created Approximate Sonata I, IV for George Piper Dances, eschews prettiness, questions the necessity of the connection between dance and music, and refuses to accept the boundaries of classical grammar. The basic positions of ballet are there, but deconstructed and detached from a ballet landscape. The choreographic mood is disrupted by spoken stage directions and the dancers breaking the spell of the rituals of performance, standing aside occasionally as if in a rehearsal studio. William Trevitt and his partner Monica Zamora dance a tortured asymmetrical duet. Forsythe’s is a bleak, disconnected and rather hopeless world. But his vision of that world compels attention and it has a springiness and a fluency that is visibly rooted in academic dance.

If Forsythe is preoccupied with bending the physics of ballet, Christopher Wheeldon is more preoccupied with its architecture. To many he is the shining hope of the classical tradition, and his work has much more affinity with ballet’s past – with its generous carriages of the arms, its bends and its circles. Wheeldon’s Mesmerics is accomplished and lyrical, but it feels conventional. He has an honest instinct for beauty and for the meeting point of physics and metaphysics. Where Forsythe represents brokenness, Wheeldon portrays beauty, community and grace. But he seems to fall some way short in this work. Perhaps Wheeldon has not suffered enough? Perhaps it was that the score, a collage of excerpts from various Philip Glass quartets, was not demanding enough? In other ballets Wheeldon has risen to the challenge of demanding scores from such composers as Gyorgy Ligeti and James MacMillan. Philip Glass just didn’t seem to touch the vital creative nerve.

The night’s final work from Russell Maliphant, Broken Fall, was just that: a dance essay in the various permutations of broken falls to a score by Barry Adamson that was pure schlock. It was more Cirque du Soleil than art, with underwhelming gymnastics unsupported by any underlying artistic statement – an unusual lapse for a company that gets so much so right.


Details of George Piper Dances’ Spring tour at http://www.gpdances.com/info.htm

“ONLY GOD CREATES, I ASSEMBLE” (The Tablet 23 January 2004)

George Balanchine redefined classical ballet. Along with Igor Stravinsky he believed that creativity had divine roots.

George Balanchine was born in St Petersburg a hundred years ago this week. He ranks with Picasso and Stravinsky, with whom he collaborated, as one of the great artists of the twentieth century. He made more than 400 ballets, fundamentally reshaping the art. He crafted some of the century’s most memorable representations of women: sexy, sassy, rangy, commanding, yet highly feminine, a far cry from the fragile heroines of such nineteenth century ballets as Swan Lake and Giselle. Wearing only practice dress – Balanchine preferred a spare aesthetic – the dancers of the company he founded, New York City Ballet, devoured the stage, forging images as expressive of their time and place as the buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Balanchine and Igor Stravinsky, his greatest collaborator, transformed the relationship between dance and music. Stravinsky loved ballet for its clarity and for setting itself ‘the tasks of beauty and nothing else’. For his part, Balanchine – an accomplished musician – insisted that dance should ‘show the music’, illuminating rather than merely decorating it. He believed that dance was its own justification and that it did not always need a storyline.

Balanchine left Russia in 1924 with a small group of fellow dancers from the Maryinsky Ballet to tour Western Europe. He did not return, instead joining Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Paris, where he met Stravinsky. They not only established an instant artistic rapport, but also shared a belief that creativity had its beginnings in God - in Balanchine’s phrase, “Only God creates, I assemble”. At the time they met, Stravinsky was rediscovering his need for religious faith. He immersed himself in the writings of the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, returned to his Orthodox faith and became a regular communicant.

Apollo, Balanchine and Stravinsky’s first great collaboration, was the fruit of the composer’s inner journey. The critic Richard Buckle described the score as ‘holy music’, and Balanchine’s choreographic images are equally profound. Apollo, the young god of music, is instructed by the muses of poetry, of mime, and of dance. The duet between Apollo and Terpsichore, the Muse of Dance, is one of the most eloquent in the ballet repertoire. They express their union with a finger touch, Balanchine deliberately evoking the touch of God and man on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling. The ballet is spare and lean, the choreography revealing the essence of the music.

Balanchine was fascinated by religious ritual. His uncle was the Archbishop of Tibilisi and as a boy, Balanchine took part in Orthodox liturgy, ‘playing church’ at home, and blessing objects in these private theatricals. There is a parallel here with another great choreographer, Frederick Ashton, former director of The Royal Ballet. Ashton served Mass as a boy for the Archbishop of Lima, an experience, which, he said, taught him the fundamentals of ritual, of proper timing, and of “the whole rightful measure of things.” Respect for gesture inspired Balanchine and Ashton with a lively sense of dance’s liturgical core and its ability to address the deepest questions.

Agon, part of the Royal Ballet’s forthcoming Balanchine programme, is a special kind of ritual. Agon – in Greek, a contest – is a racy twentieth century gloss on Renaissance court dances. The ballet is notable for another reason. For its first performance in 1957, Balanchine decided that Arthur Mitchell, New York City Ballet’s first black dancer, would partner Diana Adams in the ballet’s central pas-de-deux. One of the cast, Melissa Hayden, remembered, “It was really awesome to see a black hand touch a white skin. That’s where we were coming from in the fifties.” With Balanchine, sexual and racial equality were rehearsed on the ballet stage, long before they became accepted in American society.

Balanchine was not precious about his art, even calling himself a ‘circus man’. This was literally true. In 1942 Ringling Brothers Circus asked him to choreograph a ballet for its elephants. He agreed, as long as Stravinsky wrote the music. "What kind of music?" asked Stravinsky, "A polka," Balanchine replied. "For whom?" "Elephants." "How old?" "Young." "If they are very young, I'll do it.” The score's dedication reads: "For a young elephant." At the premiere in Madison Square Garden, Miss Modoc, the circus’s star elephant led a supporting cast of fifty elephants and fifty ballerinas, “all in fluffy pink.”

Balanchine’s The Prodigal Son, also part of the Royal Ballet’s programme, made soon after Apollo, powerfully characterises the returned son cradled in his father’s arms, everything else insignificant. But it is in one of his final works – Mozartiana – made in 1981, with death increasingly on his mind, that Balanchine particularly reveals himself. New York City Ballet’s Suzanne Farrell, who was Catholic, led the cast. Balanchine was deeply infatuated with Farrell. She resisted his advances, but rekindled his sense of the sacred. The curtain rises to Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus. Farrell spoke the words to Balanchine in rehearsal and they animate his choreography. Farrell opens her arms, palms upward, a pose from a statue of the Virgin at the nearby Catholic parish, which Balanchine knew Farrell attended. “I hovered about the stage in a series of simple quiet gestures of prayer”, Farrell remembers in her autobiography. “I was a metaphor for all the beauty in Balanchine’s soul. It was a hymn, an offering that could happen only in movement and music, not in words.”

George Balanchine died in 1983. Born in Tsarist Russia, he spent most of his life in New York. In his hands, the art of St Petersburg, his native city, came to express with great élan the style and pace of his adopted country.

Balanchine’s Agon, The Prodigal Son and Symphony in C at the Royal Opera House on 28th, 29th January and 4th, 19th, 21st, 23rd, 25th February.
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