An Uninformed Take on Ballet

     A few days ago I watched a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty at the Bucharest Opera House which, though it was built in the early years of the in the communist era, might pass for a venerable Eastern European concert hall if the observer squints just a bit. Seating less than a thousand people, it is an unusually intimate venue for dance on the grand scale. We had splurged, buying the costliest tickets and sitting in the center of the third row for twenty dollars each.
     Though I am utterly unqualified to comment on ballet, having seen little and studied less of the art, I venture some impressions here. The performance was ravishing. It was an effortless three hours, just gazing in wonder at the spectacle on stage. I was dazzled by the mere athleticism of the performers in the same way that people who know little of ice skating can enjoy an Olympic competition. The spectator is struck speechless by the dancers’ beauty and grace while executing of moves of great difficulty.
     The principals are set in a rich context, coordinated with a sizable troupe sometimes amounting to seventy-five or more at a time All are costumed sumptuously, all move in such a disciplined and elegant synchronization that at times the effect slides from beauty to what might better be called spectacle.
     The plot, though, is so mythic (even if it suggests an appeal to the youngest audience -- and there were some little girls in tutus in attendance) that it maintains a certain gravitas along with its gorgeousness. The problem is that the dance movements are often generated for their own appeal and recur from one passage to another, having no necessary connection to the story being told. When many danced at once the figures were virtually always rigidly symmetrical, as regular and unimaginative as Bollywood or Busby Berkeley. This emphasis on formal perfection saps the story of its emotional and thematic potential. In this performance there was a lengthy series of individual and pas de deux dances by all the secondary dancers which interrupted the narrative providing an opportunity for each to display what was in fact a brief individual dance with little connection to the work as a whole.
     For me ballet offers the perennial pleasure of young and healthy bodies in action, a delight to audiences from ancient Greek choral odes to Broadway or Las Vegas shows. I can appreciate the difficulty of the moves performed and the years of training that underlie the skills of even the lesser dancers. Ballet is a spectacle and a spectacle of prettiness as grand and as simple as a field of roses in bloom. In my exceedingly limited experience, though, it sacrifices a large part of the human emotional and aesthetic sensibility in all-but-exclusive pursuit of these few strengths. The dancer surely must lose much in concentrating on presenting a dazzling tour de force – entrechats, for example, are standardized and judged like gymnastics without reference to the particular story of a given work. Between these highly technical values and the necessity of following the composer’s music, what is left for the dance to express?
     Ballet strikes me akin to the sort of academicism satirized as l’art pompier or, on the other hand, the constrained writing techniques of the Oulipo group. While demanding, such works have not proven to be particularly meaningful or moving. I am too ignorant to know to what extent my own strictures are similar to those of Isadora Duncan and the other pioneers of modern dance, but I am profoundly sympathetic to their enterprise in devising new forms of dance as beautiful, expressive, and free as modern art is with the visual vocabulary or modern poetry with words. I would welcome the opportunity to see another such grand ballet production, but I think the next time I would not expect to experience the sort of breadth of response stimulated by a great novel or symphony or opera.