From 'The Tablet' 16 June 2005

In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated - Daria Pavlenko


When Uliana Lopatkina steps on to the Royal Opera House stage in Swan Lake next Monday, she will portray not only the spellbound Odette, victim of an evil sorcerer, but also something altogether deeper: the essence of the Russian soul. Lopatkina is considered the prima ballerina of her generation. As her body unfolds, she suggests a deep fatalism with an instinct for sorrow beyond fathoming. Lopatkina is a star among the many stars of the Kirov Ballet (Royal Opera House to 30 July). She has a special place in her company, with an unusual license to accept or decline offered roles.

Intriguingly she will not appear in one of the highlights of the Kirov season, a programme of works by the American choreographer William Forsythe (24 July at 2.00pm and 7.30pm). The reason? “Their ideas are not based on human feelings, on the human soul. The concept of the ballets is plasticity and pattern.” When Lopatkina speaks of ‘soul’, a religious nuance can be assumed. Like many Kirov dancers, she is a committed member of the Russian Orthodox Church. (A telling Kirov image: standing in the wings waiting to dance a difficult solo, dancers frequently make the Sign of the Cross before they go onstage.).

While William Forsythe is a cult figure in the West, Kirov dancers disagree about whether the company should dance his ballets. Detractors see his work as a frontal assault on the ‘gracious rhetoric’ of classical ballet. Forsythe has sought, in his own words, “to manipulate the language of ballet to see how far it can go before it becomes unrecognisable.” His works are characterised by athletic attack with disjointed movements and positions. Bodies curve away from their central axis. Dancers in duets are combative rather than mutually supportive. According to the German critic Horst Koegler, “It is as if the molecules of classical ballet have been dissected, marinated in acid and put together again, though not in their former form.”

Forsythe finds classical ballet’s strict insistence on form and precision oppressive, dismissing it as a fetish. A flavour of this emerged in an exchange between Forsythe and the German Jesuit and art historian Friedhelm Mennekes. Fr Mennekes recalled how at the Offertory the priest washes his hands (“Lord wash away my iniquities, cleanse me from my sins”). He is not worthy, he acknowledges his humility. Here, argued Fr Mennekes, “We find the connection with art, since art also makes people humble.” But Forsythe, in response, could point to no similarly redemptive strain in his art. “If we talk about sin, in terms of ballet we have all lost, haven't we? Ballet is something that you can only approach and it is only meant in its arrogance to be failed at. From the experts' point of view, you cannot perform a successful ballet.”

Forsythe says that his opponents confuse ‘deconstruction’ with ‘destruction’. That, he says, is not his aim, but – rather – to make the forms of classical ballet suitable for the twenty first century. There is sense to this, as a grammar forged in the formal dances of the court of Louis XIV is scarcely relevant in every circumstance today. What is also true is that Lopatkina’s pleading of soullessness in Forsythe’s work can be read as aesthetic and social conservatism.

The debate has particular force in the context of the Kirov. It is not merely a great lyric theatre company, but also a powerful moral presence in today’s Russia. Founded by the Tsars, it survived the Communist era because Lenin accepted that “a theatre is necessary not so much for propaganda, as to rest hard workers after their daily work. And it is still too early to file away in the archives our heritage from bourgeois art.” Under communism dance explicitly served the state. Technical virtuosity and bravura exhibitionism projected the values of the USSR. If the Bolshoi in Moscow was the quintessence of this, the Kirov managed to preserve the refinements of the pre-Communist era. It was, after all, the company that gave the world the three great Petipa/Tchaikovsky ballets The Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake and The Nutcracker.

The conductor Valery Gergiev, who is the overall artistic director of the Kirov (and more influential in Russia than many politicians), sees one of his theatre’s vital functions as being "to agitate souls." Hence the introduction of new choreography from the West. Many Kirov dancers welcome the opportunity to dance Forsythe ballets. The ballerina Daria Pavlenko, one of the company’s emerging stars (and also a religious believer), told me last week how much she enjoyed dancing Forsythe’s Steptext (which is altogether the deconstructive exercise suggested by the ballet’s title). “It emphasises femininity, but the femininity is expressed more strongly. I can express it more openly and more frankly than with those beautiful movements with a straight back of classical ballet. It’s not ugly – just different.” If, Pavlenko argues, a great art gallery exhibits contemporary work alongside old masters, so also should the Kirov.

Audiences in London will see Pavlenko dance the lead in Forsythe’s In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated, a plotless work, which is more aggressively cool than classically decorous. Pavlenko is meticulous in her preparation for her classical roles such as Giselle and Odette/Odile in Swan Lake. She reads herself carefully into the history of the works and the background myths in which they are rooted. I asked her how she prepared for In the Middle. “Don’t laugh. I have been reading Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. It’s not that I am trying to portray the character of Nastassya Filippovna. I avoid talking about direct associations. But even though a hundred years has passed, I can feel a link. It’s a little bit frightening and scaring. But, yes, I can feel its resonance, when I come to dance Forsythe.”

And so, it seems, the Russian soul is being smuggled through the back door into the ballets of William Forsythe.

Steven McRae, Federico Bonelli and Johan Kobborg in Frederick Ashton's Symphonic Variations.

Review for The Tablet 11 June 2005


While Frederick Ashton was serving in the RAF during World War II, he made sketches for a new ballet. Symphonic Variations (to Cesar Franck’s score) is a hymn to classical beauty. It asserts values that people were desperate to reclaim in peacetime.

It had its premiere in 1946 and was Ashton’s first ballet for Covent Garden. He had never before made a work for such a large theatre. Every step, every gesture had to be thought through, so that it could register with the most distant members of the audience. In the circumstances there is something counter-intuitive about Symphonic Variations. It is spare, almost a chamber work, with just three couples in Greek-inspired versions of white practice dress, who are on-stage throughout its eighteen minutes. Despite the economy of its scale, it is a major artistic statement, in effect Ashton’s credo, and perhaps the truest reflection of the Royal Ballet’s founding style. It is the centrepiece of the company’s final programme of the season (Royal Opera House to 18 June).

Although Symphonic Variations is plotless, Ashton was influenced by the Carmelite mystics Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, whom he had read during the War. He had considered a ballet about ‘dedication’ and absorption in divine love, perhaps about the experience of a nun taking the veil. Further sketches suggested a fertility rite with an ecstatic union (“Art and faith united in one unseverable bond.”) In the end, most of the working ideas were stripped away, surviving as subterranean layers in the eventual ballet. But the suggestion of mystical experience survives with choreographic sequences etching a progress from watchfulness to joy, and on to the stillness at work’s heart.

Symphonic Variations is demanding on its performers, who have few rests and are never off-stage. Costumes and lighting design expose cruelly any lapses in dancers’ technique. The work was new to most of the opening night cast. While they danced it well (and I was hugely struck by the young Steven McRae, recently graduated from the Royal Ballet School), what I missed was a certain quality of abstraction which is very important to the work. Ensemble was also lacking at times, though this might have been an opening night problem.

The programme began with Bronislava Nijinska’s Les Biches (to Poulenc’s score). Nijinska was Ashton’s mentor (they had known each other in Paris in the 1920s) and, as director of the Royal Ballet, he made sure that Les Biches, along with Nijinska’s other great work Les Noces, were preserved in the company’s repertoire. Les Biches (literally ‘hinds’, female deer) is best translated as ‘the little darlings’. Set at a rather louche house party, its novelty in its day (France in 1924) was the use of the language of classical ballet to comment on contemporary chic and sexual mores. Its designer, Marie Laurencin, was commissioned for her “ambiguous blend of innocence and corruption.” But Nijinska’s choreography, with its unsparing depiction of narcissism, voyeurism and sheer sexual opportunism removes any lingering doubts. Darcey Bussell as the treacherous hostess and Leanne Benjamin as the icy androgyne danced the principal roles knowingly. But for the satire to work, the entire cast must be in on the game. Some seemed a shade naïve.

A Month in the Country, which ended the programme, is Ashton’s ‘free adaptation’ from Turgenev’s play and a classic of dance storytelling, the Royal Ballet’s strongest suit. The ballet distils the love triangle between Natalia Petrovna, her ward Vera, and the newly arrived tutor Beliaev. Sylvie Guillem, who danced Natalia, showing that in late career she is still a highly distinctive performer with delicious technique.

The programme completed the company’s year-long homage to Ashton, its founder-choreographer on his centenary. A new generation of dancers have learnt his distinctive style, and works not seen for many years in London have been dusted off and given handsome new productions. But questions linger over the company’s creativity. The Royal Ballet made its name through the works of three choreographers - Ninette de Valois, Frederick Ashton and Kenneth MacMillan. Today it no longer has a resident choreographer and new works are a rarity. Dancers need to be nourished by having works created on them. Ashton’s work affirmed generations of dancers as artists and memorialised their careers. Most of today’s dancers will never know similar fulfilment. There is a more profound underlying question: whether ballet still has the confidence to comment on life in a new century, as Ashton and Nijinska did in the last, or whether its future is one of slow decline and as a museum art.

Paul Ricoeur 1913-2005

"There would then certainly be the need to distinguish -- between the arts of one time and the arts of two times, those where the existence of the work coincides with its creation -- painting and sculpture, for example -- and those where the existence of the work requires a second time, which is that of its recreation: theatrical representation, musical execution, choreographic realization beginning with the writing of a libretto, of a score, of a script. One could then ask what is the status of a ballet, or of a musical score when they are not played, while awaiting their performance. It is perhaps here, in this indefinite capacity to be reincarnated, and in a way each time historically different, but substantially and essentially founding, that the profound signified of the libretto or of the score occupies the status of the sempiternal. "

Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake

DANGEROUS LIAISON

(The Tablet 18 December 2004)

If asked to name one ballet, most people, even if they know little of the art, would probably answer Swan Lake. With its symmetric lines of ballerinas in tutus and its theme of impossible love and tragic resolution, it is the quintessence of nineteenth century romantic dance. For traditionalists it is an inviolate text, not to be tampered with. But ten years ago, Matthew Bourne gave the ballet a gender twist and his corps of male swans took the West End by storm. Now back in a revival (Sadler’s Wells to 16 January and then on tour in Japan), Bourne’s Swan Lake is as fresh now as it was at its premiere.

In his version, sometimes called 'the gay Swan Lake', Bourne faces head-on perceptions of the sexual ambiguity of the male dancer, offering a glamorous male swan as hero. He places the action in today’s Britain. Several of his characters recall members of the Royal Family (there is even a snapping corgi), and his story, which is told with verve, has both satiric edge and political message.

In the original ballet, a prince, under pressure from his mother to marry before he becomes king, happens on a flock of swans, while hunting. Their leader reveals herself as a princess cast under a spell by a wicked sorcerer. The spell is ultimately broken by the redemptive power of love. But Bourne’s passionate reworking lacks any romanticism. His prince is not a saviour, but a victim, starved of affection by a distant and manipulative queen, and overwhelmed by the heartless rigidities of the court (here the sorcerer is, perhaps appropriately, the press secretary). There is a clearly unsuitable girl friend, conjured up by the press secretary, who also engineers the prince’s subsequent public humiliation when he is thrown out of a nightclub.

In the prince’s lostness, he retreats into fantasy and encounters a flock of male swans, becoming infatuated with their leader. These swans are not the ethereal and quiescent creatures of the nineteenth century ballet. Although lyrical, they are also feral and - ultimately - a destructive force. The prince finds no resolution in the saving power of love, and no external evil is vanquished.

On one level the denouement takes place in the prince’s mind, in which he cascades into ever deepening psychosis (Bourne was influenced by Peter Shaffer’s Equus and its account of a stable-boy’s psychotic relationship with horses.) On another level, he is destroyed by his relationship with an outsider, represented by the Swan, who stands for the freedom and power the prince so clearly lacks. Their relationship can be understood in a homosexual sense, but not inevitably so.

For early audiences for Bourne’s Swan Lake, there was a frisson in watching a passionate male duet (it seems less transgressive now), and in seeing men dance parts so associated with the feminine in ballet. The swans’ costumes by Lez Brotherston do not evoke the tutus of the classical original: instead the men are bare-chested and barefoot, wearing white feather breeches. They dance with hissing menace, ultimately turning with fury on their leader for daring to love a human. Bourne has a sharp instinct for the power of movement. His duet for Swan and Prince establishes both their bond of sympathy and a subtle synchronicity between man and bird, while a witty dance of the cygnets, recalls not the deftly drawn steps of the feminine original, but rather the laddishness of young teenagers. For a male dancer, the role of the Swan is irresistible and Jason Piper’s performance was a compelling sketch of ferocity, tenderness and sexual allure, with Christopher Marney a convincingly demented prince, and Nicola Tranah, a glacial queen.

Over at the Royal Opera House, Anthony Dowell’s stylishly traditional production of Swan Lake returns to the Royal Ballet’s repertory (22 December – 25 January). Meanwhile that other Tchaikovsky Christmas favourite, The Nutcracker, is at the London Coliseum in English National Ballet’s production (21 December – 8 January) and in Scottish Ballet’s production at the Theatre Royal Glasgow until 30 December.

The Royal Ballet production of Sylvia by Frederick Ashton

The Royal Ballet's Sylvia, review for The Tablet, 13 November 2004

In 1952 the Royal Ballet premiered Frederick Ashton’s Sylvia, which he choreographed as a star-vehicle for the ballerina Margot Fonteyn, then in her prime. It was a curious work for its day. Only a year before, the Festival of Britain had proclaimed Herbert Morrison’s vision of “a new Britain springing from the battered fabric of the old." Instead Sylvia is a glance in a rear-view mirror at the Paris Opera’s traditions of the nineteenth century. Sylvia was wrong for Ashton’s audience, whose eyes were determinedly set on the future, and it did not long survive in the repertory.

More than half a century later, and forty years after its last performance, Sylvia has returned to Covent Garden and it turns out to be a gem. The ballet is a miracle of restoration. No choreographic score had ever been written down and the only reliable record was a grainy film of a rehearsal. Christopher Newton who staged this latest production supplemented the evidence of the film with the memories of dancers who had been cast in the original production. (Newton is one of the anonymous cultural heroes of our time. It is thanks to him that there is a proper record of Stravinsky’s and Nijinska’s masterwork Les Noces).

The plotline, it has to be said, is complete nonsense. Eros tricks Sylvia, a huntress and nymph sworn to chastity, into falling in love with Aminta, a shepherd. She is then kidnapped by the evil hunter Orion, but escapes and fends off the wrath of Diana, the huntress and goddess of chastity to marry her beloved. Curtain. But Sylvia transcends the slightness of its story. However archaic it seems on the surface, it breaks with the nineteenth century romantic ballet’s ethereal image of woman as fairy or sylph. Instead, the heroine is presented here as a maiden warrior.

At the performance I saw, Sylvia was danced by Zenaida Yanowsky, who is a coolly intellectual dancer, with a powerful stage presence. In some ways Yanowsky is the very antithesis of Fonteyn, Ashton’s original muse. Despite this she was believable, elegant in a dance style which is not native to her, and brought to it a combination of seriousness, musicality and contemporary wit.

What is principally striking about the revival of Sylvia is the cumulative aesthetic force of the performance - choreography, music and design. The musique dansant score by Delibes is a delight, in George Balanchine’s words, “a floor for the dancer to walk on”, and Tchaikovsky wrote of Sylvia, “If I had known this music before, I would not have written Swan Lake.” The score was first performed at the Paris Opera in 1876 with choreography by Louis Mérante. For Ashton’s 1952 version, the designers, the brothers Robin and Christopher Ironside, recreated an appropriate and luxuriant vision of antiquity, expressed in the style of the period of the original Paris production, that of the Second Empire of Napoleon III. Ashton’s choreographic style too owes much to the nineteenth century (his contemporary, the dance writer Richard Buckle, playfully – and with some truth – accused him of living in a nineteenth century dream world).

Dance is perhaps the most ephemeral of all the arts. It lives only in dancers’ bodies and is not easily captured either in dance notation or on film. If works are to survive, they must be performed and that performance tradition must be nurtured. Sylvia was very nearly lost, and it has been revived successfully, primarily because there are former dancers still alive who remembered the ballet in their bones. This is no threadbare exercise in archaeology. Although the Royal Ballet needs to settle into the work, Sylvia is theatrically credible and from its opening performances it has come alive as a striking evocation of the sensibility of another time.

Royal Opera House to December 3. http://info.royaloperahouse.org/

Nao Sakuma and Robert Parker of Birmingham Royal Ballet in Frederick Ashton's 'The Two Pigeons' 

Birmingham Royal Ballet - review for The Tablet, 6 November 2004

Birmingham Royal Ballet (BRB) ploughs a different furrow to that of its sister company at Covent Garden. It is a touring ensemble, which aims to reach non-traditional audiences. David Bintley, its Catholic artistic director, has broken with the more incense-laden aspects of ballet culture – and with notable success. BRB routinely packs such theatres as the Empire in Sunderland, where its Romeo and Juliet had such impact that Sunderland FC chose the Knight's Dance from Prokofiev’s score as its theme tune. Back home in Birmingham, the former Aston Villa striker Dion Dublin is one of Bintley’s noisier fans.

Bintley won this new audience (boosting attendances from 29% to more than 90% in Sunderland alone) without ‘dumbing down’ or compromising the repertory. He has kept faith with the Royal Ballet’s founding traditions, in ways unmatched by his counterparts at Covent Garden. Frederick Ashton, the Royal Ballet’s founder-choreographer virtually anointed Bintley as his artistic successor (“You’re the only one”). In his turn, Bintley took particular care with Ashton’s own ballets. When both the London and Birmingham Royal Ballet companies performed at this summer’s Lincoln Center Ashton season in New York, the New York dance critics warmed principally to BRB, and to its performances of Ashton’s Enigma Variations.

This week and last, Birmingham Royal Ballet has been in London and Plymouth offering two programmes, the first which included Ashton’s The Two Pigeons, loosely based on a fable by La Fontaine. High art Two Pigeons is not, with a score, by André Messager, that is even less demanding than the storyline. A pair of lovers (Robert Parker and Nao Sakuma) have a tiff. The boy, a young Parisian artist, then has a fling with a sultry gypsy seductress (Molly Smollen). Eventually, his girlfriend takes him back and the lovers are reunited in a rapturous pas de deux (“this is a truly Christian ballet”, a sceptical critic wrote after the first performances in 1961). At the final curtain, the lovers sit against a wicker chair, a pigeon perched on the back. Then the bird’s mate flies on-stage to complete the picture.

The Two Pigeons is almost a music hall entertainment - indeed British ballet has roots in the Victorian music hall. While ballet itself is high artifice, Ashton never loses sight of the human heart. He is very in love with the vocabulary of ballet, but this love is at one with his emotional purpose. With his use of the vocabulary, and, in particular with the touching little flutters of the feet for his lovelorn ballerina (a dance metaphor for a beating heart), Ashton lifts the story to another level. BRB’s cast members were spot on, dancing with the necessary sincerity. They got under the skin of the work and Ashton’s choreographic style looked right and unforced.

The following programme, in contrast, featured a suite of three David Bintley works to jazz scores, two by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn and the third by Colin Towns. Here again, Bintley harks back to a founding Royal Ballet tradition; that the artistic director should also be a choreographer. But the Covent Garden company has not had a director/choreographer since 1986 and it has a declining record in commissioning new work. Bintley, in contrast, has been prolific with a constant flow of symphonic and story ballets and – crucially – ballets plainly intended as crowd-pleasers. Nutcracker Sweeties is a case in point. Ellington and Strayhorn jazz up Tchaikovsky’s score, while the classical ballet characters mutate into American popular cultural fantasies. There’s an ‘Arabesque Cookie’, a ‘Peanut Brittle’, while the ethereal Sugar Plum Fairy here becomes the sultry ‘Sugar Rum Cherry’ (Monica Zamora). While the choreography has a contemporary demotic edge, there’s no doubt about its origins, with Bintley’s debt to Ashton’s style very clear. It’s all good fun – and an appetiser for Birmingham Royal Ballet’s more traditional Nutcracker (Birmingham Hippodrome from 3 December – the best Nutcracker on offer from any British dance company).

But – and it’s a big but – this second programme, as a whole, did not work. Dance programmes (story-ballets excepted), featuring works by a single choreographer, tend to lack necessary contrast. Here the offence was compounded by the jazz motif. The relentlessness of a single aesthetic meant that the night was less than the sum of its parts.

A 1972 rehearsal photograph of Sir Frederick Ashton with Antoinette Sibley of the Royal Ballet ( BBC)

 

A choreographer in Carmel (The Tablet 11 September 2003)


Frederick Ashton’s ballets have strong roots in the Catholic world into which he was born a hundred years ago.


FREDERICK ASHTON, the Royal Ballet’s founding choreographer, brought to his art a distinctly English accent, arch and witty. He had an entertainer’s instinct, a gift for storytelling, and he made his masterwork, Symphonic Variations, after he discovered the writings of the Carmelite mystics. Next Friday the Royal Ballet celebrates the centenary of his birth.

He was not Catholic but grew up in a Catholic world. His family lived in the Peruvian capital Lima, where as a child he was taught by Dominicans and regularly served Mass for the city’s cardinal archbishop. That experience, he told his biographer Julie Kavanagh, taught him “the whole rightful measure of things and the ecstasy of ritual”. In later years Ashton visited the Brompton Oratory in London to pray and light a candle each time he started work on a new ballet. He created small altars to St Anthony at his homes in London and Suffolk. While these observances might be dismissed as affectations, the evidence of his ballets suggests otherwise – that Ashton’s artistic identity had authentic roots in a Catholic imagination.

When Ashton was 13, he saw a performance by the great Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova in Lima. From then on he was determined to dance, an ambition from which he never wavered, despite a miserable English public school education and an unhappy first career in the City of London. He took ballet classes, but although he was an able dancer, Marie Rambert encouraged him to explore his true gift – the ability to make dances.

In 1934 Ashton went to New York to choreograph ballet sequences for Virgil Thomson’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts, based on the lives of Teresa of Avila and Ignatius Loyola. Remembering the Catholic processions of his childhood, he decided that the production should have an entirely black cast. There were few black dancers with ballet training and so he recruited a cast at a Lindy Hop club. Despite the drawbacks, Ashton was pleased with the work. “I did Four Saints well. I say this though I made it, because I am devout and the Negroes are devout and I am plastic and they are plastic.”

Twelve years later Ashton again sought Carmelite inspiration. In the meantime, Ninette de Valois had brought him to the Vic Wells Ballet, the Royal Ballet’s predecessor company. During the Second World War he was a singularly ineffective intelligence officer with the RAF (a posting arranged by John Maynard Keynes). He discovered the writings of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. Under their influence, he became, in his words, “contemplative and almost mystical” and reconciled to the idea of sudden death. Out of Ashton’s dark night came his Symphonic Variations (1946), a triumphant affirmation of the post-war light and – arguably – the finest British ballet of the century. Choreographed to César Franck’s score, its starting point is John of the Cross’s meditation on quiet detachment: “The soul waits in inward peace and rest”. As the score unfolds, the ballet explodes into joy. Although it is a “plotless” work, Ashton told his biographer that in her hypnotic stillness, Margot Fonteyn (who led the original cast), represented a soul in a state of grace, in that state of suspension during which, according to St Teresa, “visions so sublime” can appear.

The Royal Ballet will perform Symphonic Variations towards the end of its Ashton season (http://info.royaloperahouse.org/). Before then, there will be a revival of his 1953 ballet Sylvia and a programme including his Scènes de ballet (also to be shown on BBC4 on 11 December). Scènes, set to Stravinsky’s score, is a celebration of mathematics, an exercise in pure dance, based on Euclid’s geometry, which seems to parallel Symphonic Variations in its post-war optimism for science and the future.

The hallmark of Ashton’s style is intricate footwork in combination with épaulement, the rotational use of the upper body. This style can variously suggest wit, strength, in the case of Scènes an almost glacial distance, and – just as often – goodness and love. Ashton’s upper-body language derives from his early fascination with Pavlova’s style, and his emphasis on detailed footwork from the fact that he had to perform on tiny stages in his early career.

Ashton (from 1963 Sir Fred) is perhaps best loved for his story ballets such as La Fille mal gardée (to be shown on BBC2 in the new year) and Cinderella. Both have characters, in the case of Fille the Widow Simone, and in Cinderella the Ugly Sisters, danced en travestie by male dancers. Ashton cast himself as one of the Sisters, one of the roles for which he is best known. Joan Acocella, the dance critic of the New Yorker magazine, finds a note of charity in many Ashton ballets. “At the end of Ashton’s Cinderella, the wicked stepsisters aren’t just sent packing. They apologise; they’re sorry they were mean. Cinderella kisses them and forgives them. The world is made whole again.”

Central to any Catholic reading of Ashton is his Enigma Variations (Birmingham Royal Ballet, 13-16 October http://www.brb.org.uk/). Like its score it is a set of portraits of the composer Edward Elgar – himself a Catholic – and of those close to him, which explores the sustaining qualities of love and friendship. The ballet is tinged with melancholy and a sense of the separateness of the artist. Its hero finds peace in his membership of a community of friends. Enigma, ostensibly about Elgar, reveals something too of its choreographer.

Ashton emphasised community to a degree not often found in classical ballet. This may have had something to do with his homosexuality, his sense of being an outsider, and his yearning for acceptance. What is also true is that this sense of community was in the weft and warp of the Catholic world into which Ashton was born. He had lived and breathed Catholicism in his formative years. That experience was woven into his creative identity. Without it he would have been a very different artist.

CROSSING BOUNDARIES
 
- Brendan McCarthy -
 
The distinguished British theatre director Declan Donnellan has staged the Bolshoi Ballet’s new production of Romeo and Juliet.
 
 
There are two great choreographic texts of Romeo and Juliet, MacMillan’s and Lavrovsky’s. They leave powerful afterimages. For a choreographer to propose a new text of the work is an act of considerable self-belief.  But for a theatre director - with no dance experience - to undertake a dance version, requires confidence of an altogether higher order. Yet that is what Declan Donnellan has done – and on the Bolshoi stage where Leonid Lavrovksy memorably brought Prokofiev’s score to life.
 
Declan Donnellan has a reckless gene. He has faith not so much in his own creativity as in his sense of curiosity. Creativity follows curiosity, he argues, and with good reason. He first became fascinated with theatre when he was 16. He describes an ‘epiphanic moment’ after seeing Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet and Peter Brook’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. MacMillan’s choreography had a powerful impact and he repeatedly returned to see it. “That experience gave me a sense of release – for which I am terribly grateful – and I always wanted to return to that moment and to engage with it in a more vital way.” Now he has.
 
Along with his partner, the designer Nick Ormerod, Donnellan directs the ensemble Cheek by Jowl, celebrated for its innovative approach to the theatre classics and - in particular - to Shakespeare. It was scarcely a surprise when the Bolshoi invited him to Moscow to direct an opera; Donnellan has often worked in Russian and his work is greatly respected there. Also, the director’s path from the theatre to the opera stage is a well-trodden one. What surprised the Bolshoi was Donnellan’s reply – that he would rather direct a ballet. Astonishingly, it agreed. Within months Donnellan was rehearsing dancers in his own Romeo and Juliet. Russian critics applauded the Moscow premiere last December, Kommersant praising its ‘penetrating intensity’, with Izvestia noting that the dancers “cast away their pointe shoes and achieved real freedom.” This week London audiences can judge for themselves at the Royal Opera House.
 
Donnellan had few preconceptions about how he might work with his cast. It was not even clear to him at first that he would need a choreographer and he imagined that he and the dancers might work together to generate sequences of movement. A choreographer, if one were needed at all, might work in the background.  But Donnellan soon changed his mind, and decided to work with the Moldovan choreographer, Radu Poklitaru. While Donnellan was the unquestioned creative leader, their relationship seems to have been relatively lacking in friction.
 
He was slightly taken aback by his first contact with the Bolshoi dancers. Whenever Donnellan starts rehearsals with a new cast, work begins with warm-up games and exercises, with the participants told to run around the studio, touching walls, to raise their energy levels (“even Claudio Abbado has done it.”). But this time the dancers froze. Clearly Donnellan needed another approach. Instead he asked Poklitaru to give the dancers clear precise movements, which the dancers could then change as their confidence grew.  “Ten minutes afterwards the sun came out and it was all absolutely delightful.” 
 
With Nick Ormerod now also on board, the team began to unpack the Prokofiev score - often unspecific in dramatic terms - and to create the mise-en-scène. “We went right back to the mythic heart of Shakespeare’s text. Not all the stories are choreographic. But we tried to get at the heart of the story in a way different to telling it through pantomime.” The image of the balcony is central to Donnellan’s Romeo and Juliet. He is struck by the fact that this great emblem of romantic love is one, not of intimacy, but rather of separation. Donnellan gives the balcony human form – with the corps de ballet representing the forces that divide the lovers. Deep in the human condition, says Donnellan, is the notion that there is no love without separation, “and we don’t like that.”
 
Donnellan did have some problems at the Bolshoi, which mirrored those experienced by Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer when they staged their Rite of Spring reconstruction for the Kirov Ballet. The Bolshoi dancers were cast in as many as twenty-eight ballets a month. Co-ordinating the Romeo rehearsals with the dancers’ other commitments was “really quite hairy”. Donnellan does not speak much Russian, but he soon learnt to recognise an ominous word - ksojelenio – ‘unfortunately’: invariably the prelude to a new setback. Nonetheless, rehearsals were relatively smooth, even if dancers arrived in studio wearing costumes from Don Quixote or La Sylphide. Importantly, the artistic path was clear. “The company was so up for change that I had no persuading to do.  It was important I was not an expert. That was my strength. I did not know what traditions I was throwing over. It was natural to me that girls would not dance on pointe.”
 
As the rehearsals continued, Donnellan discussed the shape of the narrative with Poklitaru, as well as the characters and their stories. They sketched scenes with dancers, Donnellan watching as Poklitaru began to choreograph, and intervening every so often with his own ideas. He frequently asked if something could be ‘simpler’ or ‘stiller’. This meant asking the dancers to work counter-intuitively.  “Dancers love moving in the way that actors love acting”, he told me. “But often the most powerful theatre can be when the actor stops acting or when the dancer stops dancing. Stillness can be incredibly powerful.”
 
Maria Alexandrova, who will dance the role of Juliet at Monday night’s opening at the Royal Opera House, told Dance Europe magazine that “sometimes we even felt that we don’t have enough steps, we have to express emotions, and the scene is continuing, but we don’t have enough steps.”  Recalling WB Yeats’ question, “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” Donnellan asserts that the dance exists not in the body, but also in the imagination. While Juliet may not move, “that forward energy is still inside her when she sees the terrible outcome of having to marry Paris and not be with Romeo.”
 
I asked Donnellan if he directed his dancing Juliet rather as he would have done an actress working with Shakespeare’s text.  “Not really”, he answered, “ I spent a lot of time getting people to see things rather than to show things. That matters, because it is very important in theatre that what you see is more important than what you show.”  He was powerfully struck as a teenager by Lynn Seymour’s portrayal of Juliet in MacMillan’s ballet; and how she sits at the bed while the music surges. “That is a wonderful moment in ballet when she just does not move. Of course we could not do that because it has already been done. And we have another solution to that moment.”
 
Donnellan believes in the Wagnerian concept of the gesamtkunstwerk, the total artwork, and in theatre as a collaborative union of different art forms. In the twentieth century this belief was embraced by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Since he died, ballet has lapsed into autism, lacking in contact with the other forms. Donnellan finds it remarkable that although he had worked in the theatre for 25 years, he had met five ballet dancers in that time. Now, he says, he understands why. “Dancers actually do work harder than anyone else. I’ve ever met. Lawyers works hard – so do teachers and nurses and doctors. But dancers work harder – and there is something intrinsically isolating about that.”
 
Last year, when Donnellan was rehearsing in Moscow, I asked several British choreographers if they would have been prepared to cede their leadership of the creative team for a new ballet to a theatre director. None would. “There is room for a dramaturge”, one told me (and the other choreographers agreed), “but if we had fisticuffs about something, I would have the final say. I feel that choreographing ballets is the same as a director directing a play. I should be in charge and I should be responsible.” Donnellan was sympathetic to this view – he accepted that it was different for a choreographer to yield. In the case of Romeo and Juliet, Radu Poklitaru had been “extraordinarily generous”. But, he argued, a long narrative ballet was a particular case:  to dramaturge such a work was a very specialist skill.
 
Donnellan would not be drawn on questions about ‘the state of ballet’ or whether the art was ‘stuck’. But, he pointed out, many of the greatest theatre-creators have been humble enough to take things from the outside world  - and this had also been true of Diaghilev and MacMillan. There was a danger for any art form that was too enclosed. “Various laws of physics show that circuits which are completely closed to outside energy die.”
 
I wondered if Donnellan might have preferred to work with contemporary dancers, less constrained by grammar. On the contrary. It is ballet’s highly specified language that attracts him, just as he is also drawn to another stylised form, French classical tragedy. “The cage is there to hold in - to give pressure to an animal instinct that wants to come out. I feel  very much in ballet that you are not just watching an elegant move: that you are watching an animal moving in this way that the rule is generating something that’s bigger inside. And that’s fantastic.”
 
But a stylised form repels him when it is lifeless. A singer’s top C or top F may be technically faultless, but empty virtuosity is ‘boring’. “An artist’s virtuosity is only there in order for life to be able to pass through in an extraordinary way. That is what is great about great dancing – that you are in the presence of life; it just comes to you in a very stylised way. You do very often discover that when people can do these extraordinary things, that they often have the ability by grace to transcend them.”
 
The Bolshoi has asked him back.  This week Donnellan will discuss a possible new work with the company’s artistic director Alex Ratmansky (“It is nice to have another career!) He has no set ideas about what that new work might be. First, he says, he needs research time with dancers to experiment with movement and that might be more practical in London.
 
There is a further practical question – one of time. Donnellan has three productions on the road. His ensemble, Cheek by Jowl (“one of the ten great theatre companies in the world, according to Tim Magazine), is performing Othello in Hong Kong this week and then moves to Australia. There is also a production of Nicholas Erdman’s The Mandate for the National Theatre, and shortly Donnellan will return to Russia (to a dacha in a pine forest near Moscow) to begin work on a new production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters.  He loves Russia. “I don’t feel so eccentric there and my priorities are very shared.” He finds in Russia a ready acceptance of his vision of the theatre as telling deep truths about human intimacy and what people share in common. As Donnellan’s dancing Juliet, Maria Alexandrova, explains, “"With every performance of Juliet, I feel like I've led a complete life, that I'm actually born and then at the end I actually die." 
 
Brendan McCarthy is arts editor of The Tablet, where a version of this article also appears 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

New York City Ballet dancers Carla Korbes and Ask la Cour in Christopher Wheeldon's 'Shambards' 

UNMASKING SCOTLAND’S TARTAN FICTIONS

James MacMillan’s score for Christopher Wheeldon’s new ballet interrogates some of his country’s guiding myths.

The poet Seamus Heaney was careful to distance himself from the political tensions of his native Ulster. Criticised for lack of engagement, he reflected ruefully in one poem, Whatever you say, say nothing, on the impossibility of luring “the tribal shoals to epigram and order”. In Scotland the composer James MacMillan is in some ways a comparable cultural figure to Heaney. But unlike him, MacMillan refuses to “say nothing”: he has persistently claimed that Scottish society has a resilient strain of anti-Catholicism. Last month he repeated the charge in a contribution to a collection of essays by supporters of Glasgow Celtic FC.
Now MacMillan has taken his critique of Scottish society to a new level in the unlikely setting of a ballet by the talented young British choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, for which he has written the score. Shambards was given its premiere by New York City Ballet on 8 May, with MacMillan himself conducting the orchestra. Its title derives from Scotland 1941 by the Orkney poet Edwin Muir, an excoriating critique of a version of Scottish culture propagated by such figures as Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns. Muir harks back to what he sees as the purer Scotland of Wallace and Bruce and to a sense of tribe and family dismembered by John Knox and the Calvinist reformers. Then he twists the knife:

Now smoke and dearth and money everywhere
Mean heirlooms of each fainter generation
And mummied housegods in their musty niches
Burns and Scott, sham bards of a sham nation
And spiritual defeat wrapped warm in riches
No pride but pride of pelf.”

Muir’s words resonated so much with MacMillan (“a cleansing hard poem for us Scots to take”) that he dedicated Cumnock Fair, his musical fantasy for piano and strings based on eighteenth century dance tunes, to Muir’s memory. Christopher Wheeldon heard Cumnock Fair when he was seeking a score for a ballet at the Royal Opera House in 2002. At twelve minutes, it was too short for his purpose: instead Wheeldon made his ballet to Tryst another of MacMillan’s works.
But Wheeldon continued to believe in the dance possibilities of Cumnock Fair. He persuaded MacMillan to extend it as the basis of a new piano concerto (MacMillan's second), which would be Wheeldon's first specially commissioned score for a ballet. When a choreographer commissions a score, there is always an element of danger. It is a far easier option to make a dance to a well-known symphonic score. With a new work, the choreographer does not know what he will get. In this case, Wheeldon had the advantage of knowing Cumnock Fair, which makes up the first section of the new ballet. But when I talked to him during the early stages of the work, there was little hint that he knew of the political twists that were to come. In the event, MacMillan called the whole work Shambards and its constituent movements, Cumnock Fair and – after Muir - Shambards and Shamnation.

Recently Christopher Wheeldon told the writer Chip Brown that he wished that his choreography had greater social meaning. “I'm in awe of people who can express a strong opinion about life or society or politics. I have strong opinions but I wouldn't know how to express them in dance. In a way ballet is too beautiful to be opinionated. As soon as you go up on pointe, you're going somewhere unreal, invented, artificial. Most choreographers who are trying to express how they feel about the war in Iraq don't do it in the pointe shoe. You can't be real in a pointe shoe.''

Not so. Bronislava Nijinska’s Les Noces (to Stravinsky’s score) makes searing use of pointe to depict the oppression of women in pre-revolutionary Russia, while Kenneth MacMillan would have railed at the suggestion that “ballet is too beautiful to be opinionated.” However Shambards may have given Wheeldon – despite his self-doubt - a new political voice. Ballet was at its most artistically powerful in the hands of the Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who was insistent that the form was a gesamtkunstwerk, a total artwork, comprising not dancing merely, but music and design as well. Ballet’s present creative crisis may owe something to the decline of such cross-collaboration and to its overwhelming use of music written primarily for the concert hall. One consequence can be the creative isolation of the choreographer. For the most part choreographers get little useful advice from artistic directors. But the necessity to clarify one’s thoughts to a creative colleague in the enterprise, in this instance a composer, can lead to a more refined result and can seduce choreographers away from the more self-referential temptations of their craft. James MacMillan may have rendered Wheeldon such a service, while in return Wheeldon may have rendered a service of his own. Ballet can make big politically unmissable points: the danced dimension gives incalculable extra force to MacMillan’s underlying argument.

“Whatever you say, say nothing” is an unpromising prescription for an artwork. Instead, Shambards is a politically opinionated creation - and not merely from the composer’s perspective. Wheeldon not merely - to use his word - ‘painted’ the score, but he has also, in the eyes of several critics, given expression to his own satiric instinct. Robert Johnson of the Star-Ledger characterised both music and dance as “thick with invective”, describing the premiere as a major creative event. According to the veteran critic Clive Barnes of the New York Post, the MacMillan/Wheeldon collaboration was a “great match - a magical mix of artistic originality and a common touch.” Anna Kisselgoff, the New York Times reviewer, was more reserved, finding the work “surefire”, albeit “overstuffed with ideas --- mainly a working experiment.”

Notwithstanding such flaws, Shambards – both music and choreography – may come to be seen as a landmark artistic and political tract about inauthenticity. It bodes well for the developing creative relationship between MacMillan and Wheeldon, who share a deep artistic empathy – and who have further plans for collaboration. Their work also realises a principal aim of New York City Ballet’s Diamond Project - the commissioning of new scores (in contrast to the Royal Ballet, which last commissioned an original score in 1992 – from Brian Elias for Kenneth MacMillan’s The Judas Tree). According to Andrea Quinn, the company’s music director, NYCB is prepared to take risks in the service of new music for dance. The company has a ‘very healthy attitude’, Quinn told me last year. If a score is commissioned and then not choreographed, “it is not the end of the world.” Shambards justified the risk. Sadly, however, there are no early plans for a dance performance of Shambards in the very country to which it might speak with greatest force.

Brendan McCarthy is arts editor of The Tablet

DANCER, SOLDIER, SEARCHER, PRIEST (The Tablet 10 April 2004)

Father Colin McLean has a remarkable second life away from his parish. Choreographers say that his body language is mesmeric.


It was one of his earliest ambitions to dance. Instead Colin McLean became an army officer, then - briefly - a Trappist monk, and now he is a parish priest in West London. In his mid-sixties the threads of his life all came together: he started to dance, choreographers began to notice his remarkable body language, and he now performs regularly. Here is how Nadine Meisner, dance critic of The Independent, pictured him in Rosemary Lee’s work Passage. “His angular body explodes into frenetic bouts of movement, scribbling out jagged anarchic air calligraphy, the panels of his loose coat flying.”

His dancing gene surfaced early. As a young officer in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, he became adept at reels, strathspeys and sword dances. “It was as much part of discipline as parade-ground drill and bound up with regimental tradition and pride.” While in officer training at Sandhurst, he saw John Gilpin, one of the finest classical dancers Britain has ever produced, perform with Festival Ballet. He was enthralled and wrote to the Royal Ballet, asking if he might be accepted. “They wrote me a charming letter back saying I was a little old and that it might be difficult to transfer from the Royal Military Academy to the Royal Ballet School”.

Instead he spent 25 years in army service, much of it in the Persian Gulf. He was constantly on the move: life in the mountains and the deserts catered to his restlessness. Once he visited Ethiopia’s Plateau of Lalibela, noted for its rock churches. He watched Coptic monks, carrying T-shaped prayer sticks, who danced the Psalms. They moved in canon, turning and swaying in alternate lines. It was a revelation. “I suddenly realised what the Psalms were about. The way the monks moved echoed the antiphons of the psalms themselves.”

Colin McLean is a convert –he grew up in the Church of Scotland. He remembers being very struck by a French missal, brought home by his father – an ardent Francophile. It used the text of the old Lyons rite. What struck him more than the simplicity of its liturgy, were the accompanying photographs, depicting the celebrant’s gestures. It made a deep impression: this sense of beauty would be one of his thresholds to becoming a Catholic.

Many years on, he now runs the parish of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Fulham. A few years ago he saw a notice in a nearby community centre: Amici, an integrated dance group for disabled and able-bodied people. was looking for members. He soon found himself roped into a performance at the Greenwich Dome. Choreographers quickly noticed a very individual character to his movement. Rosemary Lee found this quality mesmeric. She said of him “he’s a real live wire. I cannot stop him moving.”

I asked Colin McLean what it was about his style that attracted others. “I don’t know”, he replied, “People say ‘I love the way you move’. I’m fascinated by others who move well, but I find it hard to receive that message myself.” McLean suffers from a chronic health problem, which had affected his attitude to his own body. Dance, he finds, has brought him a degree of healing and affirmation that he has found nowhere else. Whatever his diffidence, contemporary choreographers cast him in a steady stream of work. His body language is wiry and rubbery and he has a dramatic face. It is not hard to see how he might dominate a stage.

There has been a transforming effect on his prayer life. When at school he acted in dramatisations of bible stories. He remembers in particular playing the part of David and the biblical text ‘David danced mightily before the Lord’. Citing the Jesuit John Coventry, he insists that dance is a primal form of prayer. As a priest, he exploits the power of gesture to the full at Mass, emphasising to his congregation the prayer-enhancing qualities of bowing, kneeling, the supplicant outstretching of arms and the exchange of the peace. “Movement is my way of praying”, he told me, “If I stay still, I nod off. But I can dance joy or sorrow.”

Age, of necessity, limits his movement. But ageing bodies do not lack for theatrical quality. The integrity of a dance movement, in a diminished form and without the amplitude, can be touchingly purer and more visible in the body language of an old person, who used to dance. The best-known example of this is McLean’s great . hero, Merce Cunningham, perhaps the greatest modern dance choreographer of the twentieth century (and who like several other well-known choreographers served Mass when a child). Cunningham still appears briefly on stage to add, as it were, an imprimatur to his own dance pieces, cutting a Puck turned Prospero image as he does so. Choreographers are increasingly drawn to the possibilities of ageing bodies. Pina Bausch, the director of the German company, Tanz Theater Wuppertal, memorably put 26 elderly people on stage in a gruelling performance, Kontakthof, a brutal set of physical encounters set in a seedy dance hall. While Bausch’s take on ageing was in many ways unflattering, its message was essentially one of optimism - that the child within lives forever. For all its participants’ body limits, it compelled attention for its full two hours.

Like Cunningham, there is something too of Puck and Prospero about Colin McLean. His heartbeat is irregular, and he has recently been fitted with a pacemaker, but it has not stopped him in his tracks. He is fascinated by Butoh – a Japanese expressionist dance form, whose performers usually appear on stage with white painted faces and shaven heads. With the choreographer Nicola Gibbons of ‘Coaxial’, he is in rehearsal for a rather startling duet Half-Life, to be performed later this month in which he and a fellow-performer will envelop themselves in long long tubes of stretch nylontranslucent sheets, dancing out the tension between youth and age.

As I leave, he reaches towards his bookshelf. He reads a quote to me from Merce Cunningham, which has become a personal manifesto: “You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back – nothing but that fleeting moment when you feel utterly alive. It is not for unsteady souls.”


Colin McLean will dance with Coaxial at the Blue Elephant Theatre Camberwell, 28 April- 1 May. Details at www.blueelephanttheatre.co.uk.

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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Twyla Tharp’s ‘The Creative Habit – learn it and use it for life’ is a hybrid, at once a self-help title and a self-portrait, and a recognisable one at that. She is a Puritan, has great certainties and is impatient of ambiguity (“I don’t like grey. That is how I am.”). The truculence is all there, but also a redeeming self-knowledge. She is an admitted obsessive, expecting an almost religious allegiance from her dancers. Are they committed? Are they producing ideas? At the very least, she expects ‘insane commitment’. She wrote the book, while rehearsing ‘Movin’ Out’, which was to become a Broadway hit. An advance on the book’s royalties helped finance the show. The core of her argument is in the book’s title: that creativity is less a matter of genius than of disciplined work habits. Her rituals - notably her daily two-hour gym session beginning at 5.30 a.m. - matter; not merely because they shape her day, but because they are a source of strength when creativity is barren and inspiration comes slow.
Many of her anecdotes echo the best creativity research. Sensibly she lives by a lawyer friend’s litmus test of a job’s worth: “what’s in it for me?” If there is no good answer to that question, she advises, don’t do it. The absence of intrinsic motivation erodes the very core of creativity, as Tharp once found to her cost. Obligated to a composer who had once done her a favour, she spent six weeks rehearsing sixteen dancers on a poor piece of music called ‘The Hollywood Kiss’. Because she had little conviction in the work, it did not come together. Despite the expense, she dropped the project. Obligation, she ruefully reflected, was a flimsy basis for creativity.

Instead of ‘intrinsic motivation’, Tharp prefers to speak of ‘gut instinct’. Her decision to trust it led to her choice of direction. She could have been a painter – she had the talent. Going with her gut, and not her head, removed an arbitrary element of choice.

She learnt about failure early. In 1966 the Evening Standard’s critic (sadly unnamed) wrote: “Three girls, one of them named Twyla Tharp, appeared at the Albert Hall last evening and threatened to do the same again tonight.” The review was memorable enough to rankle. But failure is part of the creative process. Jerome Robbins said that he had done his best work after his biggest disasters. Tharp agrees. For her, failure is therapeutic, clarifies artistic identity, and - at best - enlarges it.

When Tharp speaks of her creative ‘DNA’ she uses the metaphor of ‘focal length’ like that of a camera lens. Jerome Robbins, she suggests, viewed the world from the perspective of the middle-distance and this might have been rooted in his childhood wish to be a puppeteer. Balanchine, in contrast, portrays life in its essence, rather than its detail. For her part, Tharp experiences a duality – an ability to create dances about a life force, in tandem with a need to make dances that tell a specific story. Tharp’s Broadway success, 'Movin’ Out', has this bifocal quality. She is her own dramaturge and her preparatory research has an obsessive quality. “I’m not sure everyone would log time reviewing U.S. army training films from the Vietnam era. That’s the mildly over the top research that tells me that I’m prepared – and arms me with confidence when I get down to the real work of creating.”

Tharp’s thoughts on resources chime convincingly with creativity research findings that there is a ‘threshold of sufficiency’ beyond which resources make no difference. Limits, she says, can be a secret blessing, while bounty can be a curse. Her early poverty forced her to discover her essential dance vocabulary. Even Balanchine in the seeming plenty of New York City Ballet liked to feel he worked under resource restrictions. Asked how he made dances, he replied “On union time.” For Tharp, who has seen many artists dry up when overwhelmed with adequate resources, the moral is clear: ‘whom the god wish to destroy, they give unlimited resources.” She contrasts her own experiences at NYCB and ABT. Four years ago, invited by Peter Martins, (“any dancer you want, all the rehearsal time you want, whatever musicians you want”) she choreographed 'The Beethoven Seventh' for City Ballet. Mesmerised by the available resources, she cast too many dancers, and predicated the project on the mantra of ‘bigger, bolder, grander’ – making a large statement. In a moment of hubris, she even demanded that the Austrian conductor Carlos Kleiber be flown to New York to conduct the performances.

The eventual work, while not a disaster, was tepidly received by critics and audiences. Immediately afterwards, she began work with ABT on the work that became The 'Brahms-Haydn Variations'. The budget was minimal, there was a fortnight’s rehearsal time, and principals had to fit rehearsals between other performances. Yet Tharp considered the piece the most satisfying of her career.

Tharp’s prescriptions – there are a number of creative exercises in the book – are sometimes idiosyncratic and personal. Her focus is on individual creativity rather than on managing that of others. Even so, there is much common sense here and some useful brainstorming exercises to jump-start creativity. Perhaps most characteristic is her prescription of self-induced rage when stuck for ideas. While anger is a cheap adrenalin rush, she allows, “When you’re getting nowhere and can’t get started it will do.”

Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit, Simon & Schuster (£13.54 from Amazon.co.uk)

‘LES NOCES’

Brendan McCarthy explores why Nijinska’s masterpiece has stood the test of time and discusses the background to the Kirov and Royal Ballet productions of the work.


Les Noces is a prism through which are refracted many of the social, artistic and political currents of its time. Bronislava Nijinska, who brooked little argument from her artistic collaborators, choreographed it with great singularity of purpose. “An entire Red Army division seems to be involved as well as crowds of working class people”, Andre Levinson wrote of Les Noces after its first performance in 1923. “It seems like electrification applied to ballet.” Les Noces is one of the Ballets Russes’ most piquant works. It reflects the sensibilities of old Russia and of the new Soviet Russia then struggling to be born.

The Royal Ballet’s version of Les Noces enjoys a particular patina of authority, both because it was staged by Bronislava Nijinska herself in 1966, and because it has been documented with notable scrupulousness in notation and on video. Since then Nijinska’s daughter, Irina, has asserted authenticity for versions of the work that she has staged. There are several alternative Benesh and Laban scores, and at least four televised versions of the work. Crucially, Nijinska staged her classic on a Royal Ballet, then schooled in Ashtonian style, which adapted with relative ease to her work. Today’s company, with a different aesthetic, might perform it differently.
This month the Kirov Ballet brings its own version of Les Noces to London in a production which has a somewhat different history to that of the Royal Ballet. It was set on the Kirov by Howard Sayette, the former balletmaster of the Oakland Ballet, who in 1981 learnt the work from Irina Nijinska. Her knowledge of the work was based on memories of having danced in a 1933 production of Les Noces and of having assisted her mother at the 1970 staging at the Teatro della Fenice in Venice.


Background to the work

Les Noces (in Russian, Svadebka) was ten years in gestation. Diaghilev commissioned the score from Stravinsky in 1913, intending that it be choreographed by Nijinsky. In the event, it fell to Nijinsky’s sister Bronislava to realise the work. Les Noces is important because of its choreography, its score, and its subordination of design to Nijinska’s vision of the work. While it has echoes of Nijinsky’s Sacre, unlike the earlier work it does not altogether eschew ballet, as is evidenced by its innovative use of pointe. Les Noces echoes the intellectual ferments of its time: its creator, recently returned to Paris from Soviet Russia, was intent on developing ideas that she had incubated at her ‘School of Movement’ in Kiev.

While in Russia between 1914 and 1921 Nijinska refined her own choreographic beliefs. She sought to train a “new type of ballet artist”, who could dance her brother’s ballets. Among her pupils was Alexandre Exter, the avant-garde designer, a leading figure in the emerging Ukrainian constructivist movement. Exter and her contemporaries applied a Cubist vision to the social demands and industrial tasks of the new Soviet Union. Her preoccupations were reflected in Nijinska’s own. Influenced by the analogies between bodily movement and that of machines, Nijinska emphasised movement, and its dynamic quality, rather than the static points of pose, position and gesture. She was also influenced by the social purpose of the constructivists. The feminist academic Sally Banes sees Les Noces as akin to “an agitprop piece designed to be taken to the villages in order to educate peasant women about the injustices they had long endured”.

The Russian peasant name for the wedding ceremony, svadebnaya igra or wedding play, accents the identity of the participants as dramatic actors or participants in a liturgy, with pre-determined parts. Nijinska may have had a proto-feminist intent, but she also saw this wedding as a sacred drama, as became clear when she cast it in London. According to David Drew of the Royal Ballet, Nijinska insisted that the bride’s face have a ‘spiritual quality’, and for this reason chose Svetlana Beriosova. Other members of the 1966 Royal Ballet cast remember that she cast a non-dancer, Ray Roberts, as the bride’s father on the basis of a perceived spirituality alone.

The ballet and its tableaux

The religiosity of the occasion is in the weft and warp of Les Noces from the very beginning. The conductor Leonard Bernstein spoke of Stravinsky’s opening “cruel chord, made crueller with the lack of preparation”. The opening bourrées on parallel pointe to the side stab downwards, while the chorus (singing the bride’s assistants) evoke the ‘match-maker unmerciful’. The dancers, intended to resemble the icons of Byzantine saints, seem abstracted, making no eye contact with the audience. This is less a moment of theatre than the performance of a rite. It is also something else: a declaration that the language of classical ballet is pliable and not inevitably shackled to Petipa and Ivanov. The Bride may be “sold” into her marriage, but the steps she dances in pointe shoes dyed brown (intended by Nijinska to express the rhythm of braiding), free ballet from its Imperial past and are a manifesto for its continued place in the dance of the 20th century.

This scene has a further significance: it is Nijinska’s filial tribute to her brother, and, by extension, to Sacre’s Chosen One. The Bride’s braids recall the braids worn by Nijinsky’s Sacrificial Victim. So too do some of the ballet’s later poses. The bride’s resting of her face (at an angle of 90 degrees) on a hand supported by an upwardly bent arm, vividly recalls the Chosen One. They might both be sisters and martyrs; the Bride almost a Christian Martyr, as Les Noces’ ‘sorrowful mysteries’ unravel. The scene ends with the Bride looking over a pyramidal formation of her friends, their faces turned sideways with their eyes tracing a near vertical line from apex to base. This, with the later friezes, suggests a world of irresistible social forces, in which individuals have little choice, but are overwhelmed by predetermined necessity.

It is often said of Les Noces that the wedding ceremony itself is missing. While that may be so, strictly speaking, Nijinska sought to escape literalism and instead to express deeper choreographic truths through the movement of her ensembles and the dynamism of their body language. The second scene tableau, The Consecration of the Groom, explicitly recalls religious gesture, both in the seeming anointing of the groom by his friends and in his Mother’s blessing. Meanwhile the choir prays that the Madonna, the Apostles, and saints of the Russian Orthodox Church will attend to the wedding. Les Noces is not a heavily classical work and draws heavily on folk steps in this scene. What is new is Nijinska’s shaping of the upper body in a way without precedent in ballet. Arms are not outstretched but held in check, imprisoning the body rather than extending it. This scene has two further formations: a wedge (almost a walking wall) of the bridegroom’s assistants, and a pyramid, echoing that of the bride and her friends, but more surely dominated by the groom.

The third scene synthesises the first two, beginning almost cinematographically with a repeat of the bridal pyramid. The choir continues with a litany of invocation, interleafed with expressions of her Mother’s grief at parting. The corps’ increasingly frenetic hops were, according to Irina Nijinska, intended to evoke the jolts of a bridal carriage on a bumpy road. If the religious heart of the wedding is in the choreography it is here: represented not as the couple’s ecstatic union, but with the Bride’s mother’s grief at the loss of her daughter.

In the final scene, The Wedding Feast, the principal characters are ‘backgrounded’ on a raised platform or cell downstage, which leads to the bridal chamber. The corps, carries the increasingly excitable action as the words sung by choir and soloists become more and more disconnected. This marriage is a triumph of community, the realisation of an essential ‘social fact’. But the principal actors are divorced from the euphoria of their fellow-villagers. Reconnection is made with their departure to the wedding bed, the tolling of a bell and the formation of a new pyramid, dominated by the groom’s friend, which speaks of the moment of sexual union.

The aesthetic of Les Noces

Stravinsky originally conceived of the ballet as a modernist work - a rumbustious Joycean collage depicting a Russian village wedding. Nijinska added a searing gloss of her own – that this marriage was “an act of immolation”, in which personal inclination had no place. The choreography could scarcely make this plainer, with the dancers virtually anonymised in Nijnska’s efficient collectivisation of their bodies. Nijinska aimed to lift the corps de ballet to a “higher artistic level in which the whole action would be expressed”. There would be no soloists; rather, all would be moulded in one throughout the movement. The betrothed girl and her friends would be bound together in common expression; similarly the groom and his friends. The parents would be secondary characters, “virtually blanks”

The characters are almost anonymised (they are named only by the chorus – Nastasya, the bride, and Khvétis, the groom). Because the singers do not always sing the same characters, the bride’s and groom’s identities are fragmented and made mere symbols, or even ciphers, swept along in the collective celebration of an overwhelming social necessity. Like the score and libretto, the choreography is something of a collage in its own right with the action of the individuals, in Nijinska’s words, “not explained by themselves as individuals, but by the whole.”

The aesthetic of Les Noces is spare. This is even true of the music, originally conceived for a large orchestra. The set is minimal; dancers wear simple costumes evoking both peasant and practice dress. In Les Noces, “design is fate” with the dancers’ individualities subsumed by geometry, as the choreographic tide aggregates them in pyramids, phalanxes and mounds. Bride and groom alike are almost passive in their own fate and have no solos. The mass-groupings are all important. In Nijinska’s words, “no question of love entered into it. How can it be possible for two such creatures to feel rejoicing?”

Nijinska had refused to accept Nathalie Goncharova’s original designs, dismissing them as more apt to an extravagant opera about Boyars, than to a peasant wedding - altogether “impossible for a ballet.” Diaghilev and Goncharova relented. Nijinska had overturned the Ballet Russes’ artistic committee approach; the first time a choreographer had done so. Simplicity was all - décor and costumes were strictly functionalist and accented anonymity. Later, Nijinska wrote: “Goncharova fell in completely with my ideas”. Goncharova did make one decisive intervention, the insistence on brown rather than blue costumes

For the American critic, Edwin Denby, writing in 1936, the ballet recalls the ‘didactic heroics’ of the early nineteen-twenties. The downward thrust of the bodies, he wrote, gave them “a sense beyond decoration” and the conventional pyramid at the end (in which the Best Man sits on the shoulders of a cluster of five dancers) that of “a heroic extreme, of a real difficulty.” Other writers of the time were bemused. Even HG Wells, approving as he was, wrote of the ‘amusing’ and ‘delightful display’. It was Andre Levinson in his hostility who most nearly grasped Les Noces’ intent (Levinson had spent some time in Soviet Russia), castigating the closing scene (celebrated later by Denby) as “a sort of practicable stage property constructed with flesh and blood (with)…the living man reduced to the pathetic emptiness of a mannequin.

Questions of Movement

The Royal Ballet’s completed score of Les Noces has a special shorthand particular to the work (with complex notation for movements such as ‘small handbag’, denoting Nijinska’s broken English for ‘small and back’). Unlike a typical Benesh ballet score, it needs to state throughout that feet are parallel. The introduction to the score reads:

“Les Noces is a representation of a typical peasant wedding in pre-Soviet Russia. The dancers do not portray individual people but a typical bride and groom. All the dancers should maintain totally blank facial expressions throughout. The style is not balletic. It is heavy and strong, both for men and for women. The feet are never pointed but are held in a bad pointe, when off the floor – i.e. they should not dangle loosely. Throughout the score this symbol will be known as small handbag. “Dancers should maintain totally blank facial expressions”.

Nijinska’s use of pointe was a milestone, not merely in that Les Noces was the first Diaghilev ballet in which all woman dancers wore pointe shoes, but also in that it asserted the adaptability of pointe as a means of expression. With Les Noces and with Nijinska’s next work Les Biches, the American dance historian Lynn Garafola writes, began the “reclassicizing of avant-garde ballet”

Les Noces runs counter to the Petipa aesthetic in its turn from hierarchy and in its preference for the dynamic of movement over pose and position. Diaghilev’s recent London staging of Petipa’s Sleeping Princess may well have reinforced Nijinska’s intent. She saw it as an embarrassing retreat from the Ballets Russes’ founding principles – ‘an absurdity, a dropping into the past’

Feminist interpretations

Feminist dance scholarship has focused on Nijinska, not merely because of the content of her ballets, but also because she is one of a handful of women choreographers of her time. According to the feminist critic Sally Banes, Nijinska introduces feminism to the ballet stage, with woman’s image, balletically represented, finally coinciding with her social reality Lynn Garafola is more explicit, observing in Nijinska’s ‘stabbing pointe’ an intimation of the violence of the marital bed. Les Noces is not the idealisation of marriage (Walter Bagehot’s “brilliant edition of a universal fact”) found in Firebird or Sleeping Beauty, but ballet’s first expression of its bleaker realities.

For Sally Banes, Nijinska appears to break with Sacre, or even to answer it, by interpolating resistance to the ritual. She traces an evolution in the representation of woman in the Ballets Russes works from the supernatural ‘other’ of The Firebird, to the sacrificial victim of Sacre, to the woman in context of Les Noces. For both Firebird and Sacre, Banes suggests, woman represents a political metaphor: monarchy or the nation, while in Les Noces, she represents herself and her class. “Nijinska’s modernism”, Banes writes, “distances the bride’s point of view from that of the other characters, allowing her gloomy inner life to cast the entire festivity into shadows. Les Noces is a watershed work, obdurately shifting the terms of the ballet wedding’s significance from the male to the female perspective.”

Music and Choreography

Les Noces was longer in gestation than any of Stravinsky’s other works, and, according to Robert Craft, Stravinsky’s close associate, has traces of autobiography. He writes: “The lament in the epithalamium at the end of Svadebka is as much for the loss of Holy Mother Russia as for the virginity of Nastasia Timofeyvna.”

Originally conceived as a work for a 150-player orchestra, it was finally scored for four pianos, and soloist singers, recalling the ‘folk orchestra’ of a Russian peasant wedding. Stravinsky’s process of artistic assimilation reflects a shift from his Russian works and towards neoclassicism. Although Les Noces embodies elements of both, it exemplifies the mechanical precision of the 1920s aesthetic and its fascination with emerging sound technologies. According to Robert Craft, the volume of sound in Stravinsky’s later versions remained quite small with the third and fourth pianos not being added until the final score.

Rhythmically the work is testing for its performers, with frequent changes from phrases on the musical pulse to others on the half-pulse, notably at the beginning of the second scene for the Bridegroom and his friends. Although usually sung in Russian, Paris Opera Ballet performs a French language version and Stravinsky abandoned a planned English translation. Nijinska thought it ‘absurd’ to make the choreography conform strictly to the asymmetries of the score. Instead she devised ‘choreographic bars’, running across several bars of music, which ‘submitted always to the sonorities of the music’. Nijinska’s daughter Irina told Millicent Hodson that the Ballets Russes dancers beat out the choreographic rhythms to the rhythms of the language, not the music. “Irina danced out the little steps on parallel pointe. They actually learnt the steps to the syllables of the scenario in Russian. When they do those little tendus, they don’t count. They do it to language syllable by syllable.”

Stravinsky insisted on the impossibility of a translation of the sound-sense of Les Noces. Even if it were possible, it would be ‘through a glass darkly’, according to Noel Goodwin. This makes it all the more surprising that at the original Royal Ballet performances the text was sung in English translation.

Les Noces and the Royal Ballet

With the passing of the Ballets Russes, Les Noces was almost lost to memory. It survived only because it had made a powerful impression on the young Frederick Ashton. He decided to restore it when he became artistic director of the Royal Ballet in the 1960s. Les Noces was acclaimed by a new generation. One of the Ballets Russes survivors, Lydia Sokolova told John Drummond: “It is the only ballet of its time that has survived in revival, really survived. With the others one feels that so much is lost.”

Christopher Newton, who notated and staged the work for the Royal Ballet, has danced in several Les Noces casts: in the original production as one of the Groom’s friends, and, in later productions, as the Bride’s father. Work began on the Benesh score five years after the original Royal Ballet production, when Newton returned to the Company to stage the work. The score, substantially assembled in tandem with Liz Cunliffe, was finally completed last year by Harriet Castor. Irina Nijinska, the choreographer’s daughter, used the embryonic Benesh score, begun by Newton, when she staged Les Noces for Paris Opera Ballet. The Royal Ballet’s score has a strong claim to being the most authoritative record, backed as it is by a film made by Edmée Wood in 1967 and Bob Lockyer’s television version in 1978. A subsequent score was created by the choreologist Juliet Kando in October 1981 in tandem with Irina Nijinska. This was to mark Oakland Ballet’s first performance of Les Noces; at the same time, Jerome Weiss created a Laban score.

Nijinska explained nothing, communicating her intentions by gesture and feel, with the company learning by osmosis. She used few words: ‘yes it was right’ or ‘no it was wrong’. She literally pushed people to where she wanted them. The actual grammar of Les Noces was not altogether alien to the Royal Ballet. In 1966, the company, schooled as it was in Ashtonian technique, was well accustomed to a movement style that, while grounded, was also fleet. Ashton may, of course, have absorbed this from Nijinska.

Rehearsing the work, Nijinska insisted on the qualities of weight and heaviness. Instead of language, she grunted and used her body to demonstrate to the dancers what she required. Nijinska was very exacting about the style, about Les Noces’ friezes, and carriage of the head, hands and body. Several patterns were asymmetric. If dancers queried this, her response (as to many of their other questions) was “No-no-no: this is not Swan Lake” When Gerd Larsen, the Bride’s mother in the first Royal Ballet production, attempted to enlarge her character with facial expression, Nijinska reprimanded her: ‘no emotion, no emotion, no emotion’. She similarly insisted that bride and groom in the ‘cell scene’ at the ballet’s close must have no facial expression. No facial muscles should move, she insisted; emotion must come purely from within.

Despite its success in London, the ballet was poorly received in New York when the Royal Ballet performed it at the Metropolitan Opera a year later. New York City Ballet were simultaneously performing Jerome Robbins’ version at the State Theater. The Robbins version is more theatrical and the New York audience preferred it to the bleak aesthetic of Nijinska’s original. Interestingly the same four pianists, singers and chorus performed for both companies. Having performed with NYCB at the State Theatre, they then made their way across town to the Metropolitan Opera House to accompany the Royal Ballet.



Issues of authenticity and meaning

Dance, of necessity, allows more performance latitude than the other arts, without overly worrying about compromise to a work’s identity. This is notably true of the 19th century classics, but less so of the works of a 20th century choreographer, such as George Balanchine. Les Noces is an interesting case: in 1966 did Nijinska mount a restoration, a revival, or even a reconstruction? When Lydia Sokolova suggested that the ballet ‘really really survived’ in revival, was this because Nijinska reproduced her original 1923 version in 1966, or because she powerfully evoked the original? It is impossible to tell.

History is a social and political construction, which, at best, approximates to ‘what really happened’. This is not to say that the past is beyond access. Nijinska’s 1966 restaging of Les Noces for the Royal Ballet is a source of the highest quality, reinforced as it is by the existence of a contemporaneous rehearsal film in the Royal Opera House archive. There are other sources; the Benesh score and the memories of dancers from the 1966 cast, many still living and some still involved with the Royal Ballet. But difficulties arise with the ballet’s transmission to a new generation. The past may be accessed, but cannot be lived. No records, however excellent, can bridge that ontological gap.

Those who stage the ballet in future will need to address what it means to ‘pass on’ a ballet such as Les Noces in its integrity. Dancers are trained differently, 40 years on. Can the Royal Ballet reproduce any longer the aesthetic that Nijinska intended? And would it matter to today’s audiences if they could not? This is where the issue of latitude is crucial.

Early music scholars have already rehearsed these debates. Richard Taruskin dismisses the ‘search for authenticity’ as folly and any attempt to ‘realise the author’s intentions’ as equally misguided. There were five Stravinsky recordings of Sacre. Which is authoritative, Taruskin asks. In ballet, it might be equally asked which of Petipa’s five versions of La Bayadère were authoritative? Nancy Reynolds of the Balanchine Foundation takes a pragmatic view of the issue: “What Balanchine did was history and fair game for exploration in any way we choose.”

The audience perspective too is important. The 1966 Royal Ballet production of Les Noces was at the height of the Cold War. Nijinska’s pyramids will have confirmed many audience members in their preconceptions of the Soviet Union, its totalitarian nature and the eclipse of the individual. A young audience coming to Les Noces in 2003 would be highly unlikely to view it in this way. For the notator Muriel Topaz, literal (or imitative ‘Mickey Mouse’) stagings can fail to evoke the real artistic intent behind a work. Instead, she suggests, the person staging a revival should grapple with the prevailing ideas when a work was originally made. Topaz concedes this: “It is inconceivable that a strong restaging will radically depart from the actual sequences the choreographer invented or put together”. Just as English National Opera is staging Berlioz’s The Trojans in a contemporary urban setting, might Nijinska’s choreography be conceivably detached from its 19th century Russian landscape and, with integrity, be situated in the 21st century? Nijinska’s grammar is so sui generis that it might very well survive a transposition in time and background. New readings of Les Noces might elaborate its feminist subtexts. Perhaps they might be detached from the marital context and become a choreographic reflection on men and women in organisations. Would it still be Nijinska’s work? Arguably yes – as long as the production reflected her original choreographic signature.

Productions on Video

There are two commercial video recordings of Nijinska’s Les Noces. Paris Opera Ballet’s version (1991) was staged by Irina Nijinska and directed by Colin Nears (“under studio conditions”). A BBC/Royal Ballet version was recorded in 2001 at the Royal Opera House. Bob Lockyer’s 1978 recording for the BBC is not available commercially. Lockyer filmed the Royal Ballet cast at Ealing Studios over three and a half days, with individual dancers placed to allow for highly detailed shots. Filming took place section by section. The cameras were on tracks, and like the cast, could be moved. The work was filmed ‘front on’. As a result, Lockyer’s film renders very faithfully the architecture of Nijinska’s choreography.

The 2001 Royal Ballet version was filmed at the Royal Opera House under restricted circumstances. The director, Ross MacGibbon, had three ‘passes’ at a live performance, using immovable cameras at a distance from the stage. Sustained frontal filming, using cameras positioned at the back of the Opera House, would have lacked depth of field. Instead MacGibbon interspersed frontal images with a series of side shots, introducing the crucial third dimension. “The steps look better from the front”, he acknowledged. “But perhaps there is a scene downstage camera left, which is interesting, and a nice foreground to the person doing the arabesque. The trade-off is “it’s a nice shot for television”, against whether it will work sufficiently for the dance to make sense of the architecture. But at the front you lose the power of the frame”.

Both video versions destabilise in different ways Nijinska’s intended aesthetic; the MacGibbon version ‘smooths’ the work, breaking with the relentlessness of its frontal quality. Although Paris Opera Ballet’s version was filmed in a theatre “under studio conditions”, is not as relentlessly ‘frontal’ as the BBC 1978 version. It is sung in French, arguably breaking with the intended relationship between the steps and the Russian libretto. There were further difficulties with the cast who visibly struggled with Nijinska’s use of parallel pointe, and seemed to slip into fifth position.

Contested claims

Until recently only the Paris Opera Ballet’s version of Les Noces was commercially available. The critic Robert Greskovic thought it reliable because Irina Nijinska had staged it. She has cast a shadow across the Royal Ballet’s interpretation arguing that its Benesh score (the embryonic version, which she herself has used, but which has since been completed) lacks important information about dancers’ heights. She also criticised its lack of information on emotion and on expressions of the movement. When the Royal Ballet performs the work, there may be an element of ‘tacit knowledge’. Notes with the completed score indicate that there is to be ‘no emotion’. But there is a lack of elaboration of the score (no prose notes). Unless the ‘tacit knowledge’ of a company, with its memories and muscle memories can become ‘explicit knowledge’, it may indeed be difficult to transmit a heritage in all its vibrancy.

‘Beware relatives’, is a frequent warning. They may have a malign affect on the transmission of an artistic heritage. Irina Nijinska is a special case. She danced in the 1933 production, and assisted her mother both when she staged Les Noces for Colonel de Basil’s company in New York, and when she staged the work in 1970 at the Teatro della Fenice in Venice. She could undoubtedly claim important ‘tacit knowledge’ of her own and it must have been a useful addition to the Royal Ballet Benesh score, to which she acknowledges a debt. Interviewed for Ballet Review in Spring 1992, she said, “I basically used the same original Nijinska choreography my mother used when staging the work for the Royal Ballet in 1966.”

The Kirov’s Les Noces derives from the 1981 production, which Irina Nijinska mounted for the Oakland Ballet. This was the first American company to perform the work and it used a reduced cast of thirty-six, as against the forty-two dancers who were cast in Bronislava Nijinska’s Royal Ballet production. It was there that Howard Sayette, who stages the Kirov version, learnt the work and the Nijinskaya Trust has since given him the rights to the score.



On the evidence, there is an eloquent case for the authority of the Royal Ballet’s performances and records. Nonetheless, this is a crucial time for its custody of that heritage. The generation that received Les Noces from Nijinska is edging into retirement and into forgetfulness. Its recently completed score is the work of a young choreologist. The danger is this: that with increasing gaps between performances, that ‘tacit knowledge’ and muscle memory of the work may be lost with the resulting loss of the vital third dimension. Although there were frequent performances of Les Noces during Ashton and MacMillan’s directorships, its appearance since then has been sporadic, with performance gaps from 1984 to 1991 and again from 1991 to 2001. The Royal Ballet will be giving it again in May 2004.

In 1966 James Monaghan of the Dancing Times wrote that Les Noces belonged to “that much rarer category of ballets, which have a meaning and vitality not only for their own period, but for all foreseeable time.” As time passes, meanings must be unlocked. Les Noces in 2103 will not be a facsimile of Les Noces in 1923 or 1966. That would be impossible, and might not make sense even if it were. The vitality of Nijinska’s work will depend on the verve with which future dancers interpret it and make it their own.