Ballet, then, is an art of memory, not history. No wonder dancers obsessively memorize everything: steps, gestures, combinations, variations, whole ballets. It is difficult to overstate this. Memory is central to the art, and dancers are trained, as the ballerina Natalia Makarova once put it, to “eat” dances—to ingest them and make them part of who they are. These are physical memories; when dancers know a dance, they know it in their muscles and bones. Recall is sensual, like Proust’s madeleines, and brings back not just the steps but also the gestures and feel of the movement, the “perfume,” as Danilova said, of the dance—and the older dancer. Thus ballet repertory is not recorded in books or libraries: it is held instead in the bodies of dancers. Most ballet companies even appoint special “memorizers”—dancers whose prodigious recall sets them apart from their peers—to store its works: they are ballet’s scribes (and pedants) and they keep whole oeuvres in their limbs, synchronized (usually) to music that triggers the muscles and helps to bring back the dance. But even dancers with superlative memories are mortal, and with each passing generation, ballet loses a piece of its past.
As a result, the ballet repertory is notoriously thin. The “classics” are few and the canon is small. We have only a handful of past ballets, most of which originated in nineteenth-century France or late Imperial Russia. The rest are relatively new: twentieth- and twenty-first-century works. There is some record, as we shall see, of seventeenth-century court dances, but the notation system recording these dances died out in the eighteenth century and has never been fully replaced. These court dances are thus an isolated snapshot; the before and after are missing. The rest is spotty and full of holes. One might suppose that French ballet would be well preserved: the fundamental precepts of classical ballet were codified in seventeenth-century France and the art form has enjoyed an unbroken tradition there to the present day. But we have almost nothing. La Sylphide premiered in Paris in 1832, but that version was soon forgotten: the version we know today originated in Denmark in 1836. Similarly, Giselle was first performed in Paris in 1841, but the versions we know derive from the Russian production of 1884. Coppélia, from 1870, is in fact the only nineteenth-century French ballet still widely performed in its (more or less) original form.
As a consequence, most people think that ballet is Russian. It was in St. Petersburg that Marius Petipa, a French ballet master who worked at the Imperial court from 1847 until just before his death in 1910, created La Bayadère in 1877, The Sleeping Beauty in 1890, and The Nutcracker and Swan Lake (both in collaboration with Lev Ivanov) in 1892 and 1895, respectively. Mikhail Fokine’s Les Sylphides, also widely performed today, was produced in St. Petersburg in 1907. The Maryinsky-trained Vaslav Nijinsky created L’après-midi d’un faune in Paris in 1912. George Balanchine was also born in St. Petersburg, and although many of his greatest ballets were made in Paris and New York, they drew on his Russian origins and training. The ballet canon, then, describes a tradition that is overwhelmingly Russian and only really begins in the late nineteenth century. It would be as if the Western musical canon began with Tchaikovsky and ended with Stravinsky.
But if ballet’s repertory is thin, its standing in the history of Western culture is incontrovertible. It is a classical art. To be sure, the Greeks knew nothing of ballet. But like so much in Western culture and art, the origins of ballet lie in the Renaissance and the rediscovery of ancient texts. Ever since, dancers and ballet masters everywhere have seen ballet as a classicizing art and have sought to root it in the aesthetic values—and prestige—of fifth-century Athens. Apollo holds a special place in the story. He is the god of civilization and healing, prophecy and music—not the noisy pipes and percussion of Pan and Dionysus, but the soothing and harmonious strains of the lyre, which set men’s minds at ease. His noble physique and perfect proportions represent an ideal: he is moderation and beauty, man as the measure of all things. Apollo, moreover, is of high birth and a god among gods. He is the son of Zeus and the leader of the Muses, who matter too. Cultivated and beautiful women, they are the daughters of Zeus and, not accidentally, of Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory; they represent poetry and the arts, music, pantomime, and dance (Terpsichore).
For dancers, moreover, Apollo is more than an ideal. He is a concrete physical presence, and they work daily, consciously or not, to remake themselves in his image: not only through imitation or the good fortune of natural endowment, but from the inside. All dancers carry in their mind’s eye some Apollonian image or feeling of the grace, proportion, and ease they strive to achieve. And as any good dancer knows, it is not enough to assume Apollonian poses or appear as he does in art and statuary: for the positions to be truly convincing the dancer must, somehow, become civilized. Physical problems are thus never merely mechanical but have a moral dimension too. This is why dancers look so concentrated when they stand at the barre each morning and place their feet in first position.
From Versailles to St. Petersburg and well into the twentieth century, the image of Apollo would tower over ballet. The ideas he represents lie at its core, and it is no accident that Apollo would be a constant theme and preoccupation of ballet masters everywhere. Indeed, his image frames our story. Renaissance princes and French kings liked to cast themselves in Apollo’s image, often surrounded by the Muses. In ballet after ballet they portrayed him in plumes and gold, their own elevated stature and achievements reflected in his perfect physique and divine proportions. His image was thus imprinted on the art from its inception. At the other end, some four hundred years later, George Balanchine created his own Apollon Musagète in interwar Paris; he would rework the ballet over and again to the very end. Dancers still perform Apollo today, and he continues to pull ballet back to its classical source.
What of angels? Ballet has also always been of two worlds, the classical and the pagan-Christian. It is inhabited by countless weightless and insubstantial creatures, winged spirits, sprites, sylphs, and fairies who dwell in the air, trees, and other natural realms. Like ballet itself, they are ephemeral and fleeting, the dream world of the Western imaginary. It is the wings that matter. “The function of a wing,” Socrates tells us, “is to take what is heavy and raise it up into the region above, where the gods dwell; of all things connected with the body it has the greatest affinity with the divine.”1 Among these airborne creatures the angels are special: they are closest to God. Intermediaries and messengers, they are the link binding man and god, heaven and earth. For ballet they are everything: a constant preoccupation and reference point that has expressed, in different ways at different times, the aspirations of the art. If Apollo is physical perfection, human civilization, and the arts, the angels are the dancers’ desire to fly, but above all to ascend: to elevate themselves above the material world and toward God.
But is classical ballet really just spirit and aspiration? Isn’t it also, and much more obviously, an earthly art, sexual and erotic? Here too the angels are our best guide: they are not themselves sexual, but they can (and often do) inspire erotic feelings and desire. Dancers infrequently experience their art as sexual: even when their limbs are wrapped around each other or they are joined in impassioned embrace, ballet is too unreal and contrived—pure artifice—and requires too much work and technical concentration to permit arousal. If anything, ballet is purifying, every movement physically honed and essential, with no superfluity or excess: it is a kind of grace. But if ballet is not inherently sexual, it is often highly sensual and erotic: the human body publicly revealed. If there is a tension here between physicality and spirit, earth and heaven, it is easily resolved: even at its most risqué, ballet remains an idealized art.
I wrote this history to answer the questions that grew out of my life as a dancer, but I found I could not answer them from the vantage point of dance alone. Because the ballets themselves are illusive and ephemeral, and because ballet has no historical continuity, its story cannot be told in terms of itself. It has to be set in a larger context. But which context? Music?
Literature? Art? Ballet has encompassed, in varying degrees at different times, all of these, and there are good arguments for approaching its history from each of these vantage points. What I have tried to avoid is rigid explanatory models: the materialist idea that art is shaped primarily (or exclusively) by economics, politics, and social relations, and the opposing idealistic view that the meaning of a work of art lies solely in its texts—that a dance should be understood in terms of its steps and formal requirements, without recourse to biography or history.
I have resisted too the kind of thinking that assumes a dance does not exist until it is seen by an audience—that it is the reception rather than the creation of a work of art that determines its meaning. In this view, all art is unstable and changing: its value depends entirely on who is seeing it, not on what the artist intended (consciously or otherwise) or on the kinds of vocabulary and ideas available to him at the time. This tyranny of the beholder seems to me unnecessarily rigid and anachronistic, part of our own contemporary fascination with instability and relative points of view. Even if we sympathize with the desire to say that all opinions are valid, the result is intellectually specious—critical evaluation reduced to mere opinion. I have thus tried to tell a story but also to step back from the story and evaluate the dances. This can be difficult since so many ballets have been lost; we cannot always point to this or that step or phrase to argue a point. But we must still try, in good faith and with open-minded attention to the evidence we do possess, to establish a critical point of view—to say that this ballet was better than that one, and why. Otherwise our story would be nothing but a disaggregate of names, dates, and performances: not a story at all.
In the end, what interested me most, and what drew me to ballet in the first place, was its forms. Why those steps performed that way? Who invented this artificial, archaic art and what were the ideas animating it? What did it mean that the French danced one way and the Russians another? How had the art come to embody ideas, or a people, or a time? How did it become what it is today?
I saw two ways to address these questions. The first was narrow and concentrated: stick close to the physical facts. I tried to get inside the art and to see it, whenever possible, from the dancer’s point of view. The sources are notoriously thin and the dances themselves mostly gone, but this should not deter us; rich and informative accounts of antiquity and the Middle Ages have been written from far fewer sources and evoked a far more remote time. Even the smallest shards of evidence—the sequence of a ballet class written out in longhand or a scribbled combination of steps—can cast light on the forms, ideas, and beliefs that animated the whole. Thus at every stage of this book I went back to the studio and tried to perform what we know of the dances—I did the steps myself and watched them performed by others in an attempt to analyze and understand what dancers thought they were doing and why. Ballet technique and its formal development are central to this story.
Ballet may not have a continuous record, but this does not mean it does not have a history. To the contrary: people have been practicing and performing it for at least four hundred years. Classical ballet grew up in Europe’s courts; at its origins it was an aristocratic etiquette and political event as much as it was an art. Indeed, perhaps more than any other performing art, the history of ballet is bound up with the fate of kings, courts, and states. What happened to the European aristocracy since the Renaissance also happened, in complicated ways, to ballet. The steps were never just the steps; they were a set of beliefs, echoing as they did the self-image of a noble caste. These larger connections, it seemed to me, were the key to an understanding of the art: how ballet began and what it became is best appreciated in light of the political and intellectual upheavals of the past three hundred years. Ballet was shaped by the Renaissance and French Classicism, by revolutions and Romanticism, by Expressionism and Bolshevism, modernism and the Cold War. It really is a larger story.
It is also a story that may have come to an end. Today, ballet is widely seen as old-fashioned and out-of-date: it sits uneasily in our accelerated and disordered world. For those of us who were there at the end of the last great era, and who experienced its vigor and its decline, the change has been momentous. When I first encountered Doubrovska, some thirty-five years ago, ballet was as relevant and vital as ever. Today it simply is not. There are still pockets of people who care and places where dance matters, and it may come to the cultural fore again in the future, but there can be little doubt that in the past three decades ballet everywhere has fallen from great heights. If this is to be regretted, it does have one advantage: we are no longer in the eye of a creative storm. Something has passed, at least for the moment, and we have time to look back and reflect. We can see the history more clearly and begin to tell it.
Music and Dancing, not only give great pleasure but have the honour of depending on Mathematics, for they consist in number and in measure. And to this must be added Painting and Perspective and the use of very elaborate Machines, all of which are necessary for the ornament of Theatres at Ballets and at Comedies. Therefore, whatever the old doctors may say, to employ oneself at all this is to be a Philosopher and a Mathematician.
—CHARLES SOREL
According to Aristotle, ballet expresses the actions of men, their customs and their passions.
— CLAUDE-FRANÇOIS MÉNESTRIER
The king’s grandeur and majesty derive from the fact that in his presence his subjects are unequal.…Without gradation, inequality, and difference, order is impossible.
— LE DUC DE SAINT-SIMON
It is to this noble subordination that we owe the art of seemliness, the elegance of custom, the exquisite good manners with which this magnificent age is imprinted.
— CHARLES-MAURICE DE TALLEYRAND
king Henri II wedded the Florentine Catherine de Medici in 1533, French and Italian culture came into close and formal alliance, and it is here that the history of ballet begins. The French court had long reveled in tournaments, jousting, and masquerades, but even these impressive and lavish entertainments fell short of those traditionally mounted by the princes and nobility of Milan, Venice, and Florence: flaming torch dances, elaborate horse ballets with hundreds of mounted cavaliers arranged in symbolic formations, and masked interludes with heroic, allegorical, and exotic themes.
The ballet master Guglielmo Ebreo, writing in Milan in 1463, for example, described festivities that included fireworks, tightrope walkers, conjurers, and banquets with up to twenty courses served on solid gold platters with peacocks wandering on the tables. On another occasion, in 1490, Leonardo da Vinci helped to stage Festa de paradiso in Milan, featuring the Seven Planets along with Mercury, the three Graces, the seven Virtues, nymphs, and the god Apollo. The Italians also performed simple but elegant social dances known as balli and balletti, which consisted of graceful, rhythmic walking steps danced at formal balls and ceremonies, or on occasion stylized pantomime performances: the French called them ballets.1
Catherine (who was only fourteen when she married) dominated the French court for many years after Henri’s death in 1559, bringing her Italianate taste to bear on French courtiers—and kings. Her sons, the French kings Charles IX and Henri III, carried the tradition forward: they admired the floats, chariots, and parades of allegorical performances they saw in Milan and Naples, and shared their mother’s keen interest in ceremonial and theatrical events. In their hands, even strictly Catholic processionals could morph into colorful masquerades, and both monarchs were known to promenade through the streets at night dressed en travesti, adorned with gold and silver veils and Venetian masks, accompanied by courtiers in similar attire. Chivalric themes enacted with dancing, singing, and demonstrations of equestrian skill made for impressive theatrical collages, such as the joust held at Fontainebleau in 1564, which included a full-scale reenactment of a castle siege and battles between demons, giants, and dwarfs on behalf of six beautiful nymphs in captivity.
These festivities, so se
emingly gay in their extravagances, were not mere frivolous diversions. Sixteenth-century France was beset with intractable and savage civil and religious conflicts: the French kings, drawing on a deep tradition of Italian Renaissance thought and princely patronage of the arts, thought of spectacle as a way to soothe passions and calm sectarian violence. Catherine herself was no saint of tolerance, as her role in the murder of Huguenots in Paris during the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572 proved. But the brutality of this event should not blind us to the fact that she, her sons, and many others also genuinely hoped that theatrical events might be an important political tool, assuaging tensions and pacifying warring parties.
It was in this spirit that Charles IX established in 1570 the Académie de Poésie et de Musique, modeled after the famous Renaissance Florentine Platonic Academy and drawing its members from a circle of distinguished French poets, including Jean-Antoine de Baïf, Jean Dorat, and Pierre de Ronsard.* Profoundly influenced by Neoplatonism, these poets believed that hidden beneath the shattered and chaotic surface of political life lay a divine harmony and order—a web of rational and mathematical relations that demonstrated the natural laws of the universe and the mystical power of God. Melding their own deeply religious beliefs with the Platonic notion of a secret and ideal realm more real than their own perceived world, they sought to remake the Christian church—not through the old practices of Catholic liturgy but through theater and art, and above all through the classical forms of pagan antiquity. Working with players, poets, and musicians, these men hoped to create a new kind of spectacle in which the rigorous rhythms of classical Greek verse would harmonize dance, music, and language into a measured whole. Number, proportion, and design, they felt, could elucidate the occult order of the universe, thus revealing God.
Apollo’s Angels Page 2