Behind the Tutu

After three years of lockdown, I’ve spent much of my summer trying to catch up on the visual and performing arts. Fortunately, discounts abound. Just in the last couple of weeks, I saw:

• Rock and Roll Man, in which a dying Alan Freed, the disc jockey who organized the first rock and roll concert and popularized the phrase, fantasizes about his life’s ups and down, featuring dazzling portrayals of Little Richard, Chuck Berry, LaVern Baker, Buddy Holly, Bo Diddley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins.
• The Comeuppance, a “chillier Big Chill,” focuses on the midlife crises of five millennials who gather together to celebrate the 20th anniversary of their high school graduation and proceed to expose each other’s secrets and lay bare the lies they live by.

• Good Vibrations, the theatrical version of the sweet 2012 film about a Belfast record store owner who transformed himself into a punk rock impresario and record producer in the midst of the country’s Troubles—a rather unlikely paean to cross-cultural reconciliation, along the lines of Hamilton.

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I also visited a near-empty Brooklyn Museum, with its extraordinary Egyptian and ancient Near East collection, Center for Feminist Art, fully-furnished 17th-, 18th- and 19th-century U.S. period rooms and extensive holdings in African and African American art, a place for contemplation and reflection, wholly unlike its overcrowded Manhattan counterparts.

But I must say that the high point of the past fortnight was Giselle, the 1841 romantic ballet that is the oldest classical ballet to be continually performed and among the first to make a prima ballerina its central character.  

A classic tale of love and betrayal, class conflict, madness and death, the supernatural, and redemption and forgiveness, Giselle is, with good reason, among the most celebrated ballets in the romantic repertoire. Its emotional expressiveness, technical demands, iconic choreography, the richness of its musical score, the depth and complexity of its characters, and its dramatic climax are extraordinary.

Indeed, Giselle played a key role in “the radical reorientation of ballet in the decades after the French Revolution, away from the courtly and masculine dances of kings and toward a more popular and feminized art of dreams, eroticism, the irrational and otherworldly flights of imagination.”

Classical ballet, I fear, is an endangered species.  It’s even more vulnerable than opera to the claim that it is elitist, sexist, Eurocentric and white. Also, the training is so grueling and the demands on the dancers so intense that ballet can easily lapse into abuse, physical, mental and sexual. Yet the beauty, the skills, the grace and the veiled athleticism of the dances are awesome to behold. As much as I adore modern dance, classical ballet exists on another dimension. “Ethereal” is the apt word.

Ballet, in one writer’s words, is the “visual evocation of the grace, beauty and dynamic energy of the human body.” It is “a living embodiment of music and movement.” Or, as another writer observes, “By watching beautiful ballets, we become more noble versions of ourselves.”

As you watch the pirouettes, the leaps, the carries and the intricate steps, you can scarcely believe that human beings are capable of such moves. When the ballerinas dance en pointe, it seems as if gravity has lost its force. “Ballets,” Théophile Gautier wrote, “are the dreams of poets taken seriously.”

If classic ballet is in trouble, the villains are many. Public schools have abandoned arts education or confine it to drawing and band. Alternative entertainment options are cheaper and easier to appreciate. Fewer and fewer children take dance lessons of any sort.

Ignorance about ballet is widespread. The vast majority of the public is wholly unfamiliar with ballet’s vocabulary and grammar. There’s:

• Plié, the bending of the knees to denote as submission, readiness or humility;
• Relevé, rising up onto one’s toes to express feelings of joy, aspiration or reaching for something;
• Saut, the jumps that signify excitement, joy or freedom;
• Tour, the turning that expresses a shift in perspective or disorientation;
• Pirouettes, the spinning turns that convey feelings of joy or exuberance;
• Battement, the kicking of the leg that can express a range of ideas such as defiance, strength or determination;
• Arabesque, in which a dancer stands on one leg with the other leg extended straight behind, to convey feelings of longing, reaching or striving;
• Port de bras, the movement and positioning of the arms to express grace and elegance or, conversely, tension or urgency;
• Pas de deux, a duet, often used to express a romantic relationship, often combined with lifts and holds suggesting trust, intimacy and support;
• Attitude, a pose in which one leg is raised behind the body, but bent at the knee, expressing defiance or contemplation; and
• Pas de bourrée, the quick steps that can communicate feelings of confusion, excitement or quick thinking.

Also, the broad public tends to have little sense of how to judge dancers’ technical precision, artistry, bodily expression, theatricality or the inventiveness or originality of the choreography. Ballet is also challenging to read. Unfamiliar with ballet’s special language, spectators often find it difficult to interpret character, emotions, narrative or themes. To appreciate ballet on more than a visceral level requires an observer to decipher body language, including the meanings of a particular movement, gesture, pose, facial expression and mime, grouping or positioning.

In her magisterial 2010 cultural history of ballet, Apollo’s Angels, Jennifer A. Homans, The New Yorker’s dance critic, a best-selling author and a former professional ballet dancer, has written an “elegy,” a “eulogy” and a “valedictory” for this mute art form. In her words,

Homans’s classic account makes several compelling arguments about ballet’s history.

• The art form’s development can’t be divorced from specific cultural, national, philosophical and political contexts. As the dance writer Marina Harss observes: “Ballet’s aesthetic and philosophical roots lie in the seventeenth-century French court and that ballet is a fundamentally aristocratic, idealistic art, concerned with grace, proportion and civility.” It was envisioned, initially, as a ritual re-enactment of a hierarchical aristocratic order, drawing upon various Renaissance and Baroque court dances, including sarabande, galliard and branle. But the revolutionary events of the past 250 years, above all, the French, Romantic and Russian Revolutions, challenged that earlier courtly vision.

Allegorical tales based on Greek myths, combining pantomime, older dance forms and upright, formal steps, celebrating monarchical power and courtly etiquette and elegance, gave way to something very different, “less artificial” and “more sophisticated,” directed at a new bourgeois audience.

Works like Giselle “broke the hold on dance of words, pantomime and the story ballet and completely shifted the axis of the art—it was no longer about men, power and aristocratic manners; classical gods and heroic deeds; or even quaint village events and adventures. Instead, it was an art of women devoted to charting the misty inner worlds of dream and imagination.”

As Homans demonstrates, ballet’s history was inextricably tied to the rise of the bourgeoisie and to the process of nation building, international competition and the emergence of distinctively national art forms. In a few instances, ballet even served as an instrument of political protest. Following World War II, ballet became a Cold War battleground, pitting the Bolshoi and Kirov against the New York City Ballet.

• Ballet has repeatedly lost its vitality, only to be revived and revitalized. There have been many times when ballet lapsed into spectacle, unimagined imitation or formulaic or tasteless rigidity. But repeatedly, a new generation of choreographers and dancers brought the art form back to life.
• Ballet, the most artful and delicate of the arts, stood, ironically, at the forefront of the emergence of artistic modernism. Pavlova, Diaghilev, Nijinsky and the Ballets Russes reinvented ballet and set the stage for modern dance. They succeeded in repositioning the art form away from aristocratic traditionalism and associating ballet with all that was progressive, not just artistically, but sexually.

Homans concludes her history on a deeply depressing note. She argues that in the decades since the death of the New York City Ballet’s George Balanchine in 1983, the art form has lapsed into torpor, lacking the vitality of his productions. Like the symphony and opera, ballet has become synonymous with the revival of old classics.

Apollo’s Angels concludes with words that will break your heart:

It’s not an accident that one review of Homans’s book was titled “The Dying Swan” and another “An art form that’s dying on its feet.”

More than any other art form, ballet defies language; in its reliance on pantomime and movement, gesture and posture, it is almost “inexpressibly beautiful.”

Ballet has also become, at least in the United States, a woman’s art form. Look online and you’ll see many dismissals of ballet as sexist. These attacks insist that ballet reinforces traditional stereotypes about masculine strength and female frailty and treats ballerinas as if they were works of geometry or sculpture. It’s, of course, true, the ballet repertoire is populated with wilis, virgins, sylphs and sleeping princesses. In many romantic operas, a woman’s love is betrayed and she must suffer and die. To make matters worse, the classic ballerina’s body is as normative as Barbie’s.

But the world of ballet is also a female-centered world, in which the male dancers, with few exceptions exist as “usually nothing more than glorified chairs and ladders in tights. While they are occasionally showcased in brief solos and pas de deux (a duet for two dancers, typically a male and female), they exist primarily to showcase the ballerina. They lift her while she dances and stand there as she spins.”

Ballet is a world of fantasy, of self-control, elegance and seemingly effortless grace laced with the erotic and the acrobatic, which treats the female body an object of art. Not surprisingly, the audience overwhelmingly consists of girls and young women who see their aspirations and desires embodied in ballet.

The handful of feature films that treat ballet seriously focus on the art form’s gendered appeal. There’s The Red Shoes (1948), in which an aspiring ballerina is torn between her dedication to her craft and the allure of love.

There’s The Turning Point (1977), a contemporary take on the classic woman’s picture or “weepie.” This picture centers on the reunion of two former rival dancers, one who chose marriage and motherhood and the other professional success, forcing them “to confront the choices they made, the resentments they kept hidden and the emotional truths they must face.”

Then, there’s Billy Elliot (2000), a coming-of-age story about a coal miner’s son whose love of dance challenges his society’s norms surrounding masculinity.

More recently, there’s Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky’s 2011 ballet psychodrama starring Natalie Portman. All the sentimental clichés are there: the pushy, reviled stage mother; the driven, frail, anorexic, bulimic, psychologically fragile dancer; the backstage rivalries, histrionics and backbiting; and the lecherous, demanding, paternalistic impresario. But the film also offers a realistic behind-the-stage view of the ballet world: the physically grueling, mentally punishing training regimen; the pursuit of technical perfection; the cutthroat rivalries; the dancers’ emotional insecurities; and the treatment of ballerinas as mere instruments in the choreographer’s hands.

Let me close with a few reflections about why college students should study the arts in general and ballet in particular. Many of the claims for arts education don’t rise much above the level of cliché. Still, arts education remains essential. It enriches students’ culturally literacy, enhancing their appreciation of beauty, excellence and creativity and increasing their cultural sensitivity and awareness. In addition, arts education promotes a deeper understanding of human emotions, motivations and perspectives and teach students to better appreciate the training and practice that artistic creativity requires.

Let me add yet other reason to study the arts. Post-pandemic, our institutions have acted as if many, perhaps most, of our students are suffering from one form or another of severe psychological distress, including depression and acute anxiety. Some of this, I would submit, is the very normal experience of growing up, facing new kinds of problems, getting used to a new environment and being on their own. Many are isolated socially; some, due to the pandemic, failed to develop effective interpersonal skills. We must be careful not to misdiagnose despair or loneliness as a severe or chronic psychological disorder.

The creative arts can contribute to students’ mental well-being in a variety of ways. Engaging with the creative arts through study or practice can serve as an outlet for stress and provide a way to express or come to terms with complex or difficult emotions. The very act of artistic creation or performance can serve as a form of mindfulness, allowing students to fully immerse themselves in the present moment and provide a healthy, if temporary, distraction from their other concerns. In addition to providing a sense of accomplishment, participation in the arts can help cultivate the sense of community that comes out of taking part in a shared experience. Then, too, the arts can encourage introspection and self-discovery and provide an opportunity for emotional release or catharsis and even moments of transcendence.

Ballet, in particular, can help students develop greater visual acuity and attentiveness to the nuances of bodily expression. This art form can introduce students to a world that is richer, more beautiful and more suffused with meaning than the world of the everyday. Ballet can elevate, inspire, provoke more than any other art and teach us how to communicate ideas, emotions and narratives without language.

Unlike music, ballet lacks a script or a widely accepted form of notation. As a result, as Homans writes, “we will never really know how Vaslav Nijinsky moved—or how his many other predecessors created, defined and refined the dance.” Ballet is passed down one performer or choreography to the next. If that chain is severed, ballet’s tradition will be lost forever. Let’s ensure that the circle remains unbroken.

Ballet’s combination of artistry, technique and word-free storytelling is among our richest cultural inheritances. All students should feel that it’s a part of their artistic patrimony and birthright.