Populism and the American Ballet Theater.
My friend Andy had only been to the Met for opera. "Opera fans are fatter," he announced after a long look at the crowd on his first trip for ballet purposes?specifically, for the American Ballet Theater, the resident ballet company. "But these guys are old." Indeed. The median age of the ABT audience hovers around 55. These guys got hooked during the ballet craze of the 70s, and they will keep showing up into their dotage. But then what?
ABT has responded to the eventual demise of its loyal patrons with an ad campaign?in the Times, the New Yorker, Time Out, at bus stops and on tv and radio. The message: Ballet Is for Everyone?or at least anyone dopey enough to take the ads' random imperatives seriously. With thick-tongued authority, they urge us to go to the ballet and Be Moved: to daydream, to not marry for money, to take up the guitar.
Ballet shouldn't have to compete in the same market as inspirational seminars and Adam Sandler movies. ABT has everything it needs to draw an audience of its own: a large, well-trained corps, excellent coaches, a smartly conducted orchestra, brilliant, ardent principal dancers and a palpable group pleasure in exuberant performance. So what's the problem? Why isn't the Met bubbling over with new life? Why hasn't ballet maintained its popular appeal?
Because while the ads may welcome the hoi polloi (at least those with some disposable income), the companies themselves aren't sure they want us. Let's consider this ambivalence where it hurts the most?in ABT's staging of the very dances that most avidly embrace the world, with its spectacular fun and injustice: the psychologically and socially knotty ballets of the St. Petersburg ballet-master Marius Petipa.
Petipa, creator of The Nutcracker, La Bayadere, Swan Lake and many others, is to ballet what Shakespeare is to theater, and not just because he never grows old. He resembles Shakespeare in his capacity to travel great distances in a single work, moving up and down the social scale and from genre to genre, all to great purpose. He may digress from the plot, but he doesn't stray from the story, which is in motion at even the silliest moments. Both men's work responds to their own vexed position as servants of royalty, graced by and at the mercy of absolute power: Petipa was above all a servant of the czar.
Petipa is also thoroughly 19th century. He smacks "Ode to a Nightingale" up against Anna Karenina and a folk-tale sorcerer. The improbable collision gives the dances their dramatic force and ABT its difficulties.
The company is devoted to the man?his work forms the backbone of its classical repertory. When it does a comic Petipa like Don Quixote, it crowds the stage with life. The dances of toreadors, flower girls, a rich girl and the poor boy she loves tumble one after another. The trouble comes with the tragedies. ABT stages the ballets' idealized centers, such as the opium dream of eternity in La Bayadere, with great care and understanding. But it treats the dances of the world?all the court processionals, the rituals of the fakirs, the character dances presented for the pleasure of the prince?as filler. These contrasting scenes should provide context. As it is, you're stuck either waiting for the ballet to get on with the action or accepting the proposition that there isn't any action to speak of?the ballet is a pretty little thing, with nothing much on its mind. In turning a deaf ear to the real-world clatter that Petipa set next to pristine melodies, ABT misses the point.
Take Swan Lake, which Petipa choreographed with his visionary associate, Lev Ivanov. (The ballet arrives at the Met this week. Do not miss it; ABT has some of the best swans and swains in the world.) It begins with our hero, Prince Siegfried, celebrating his twenty-first birthday with friends and local peasants. Given the libretto and precedent, the action might go like this: One festive number by the peasants chases the next and the next under the big arc of Tchaikovsky's waltz; the prince responds by leaping and twirling with boundless vigor. Then his mother arrives. She tells him it's time to stop messing around and find a wife. At the specter of new constraints and demands, he flees to the woods, where he discovers the swan queen. Although she is not free?she is the prisoner of the evil magician von Rothbart?she offers in her beautiful, reckless dancing a vision of freedom that the unsupervised fun he just enjoyed only hinted at. The bird, he decides, is the one he will wed.
In the ABT version, the swan still does beautiful crazy things, plunging deep into penché , head to knee and a leg to the sky, and falling backwards again and again into the prince's arms. The party beforehand doesn't prepare us for them, however. The peasants dance around the maypole as prissily as ballet dancers: The character dancing has no character. All the group numbers look severely underpopulated; a wan little party this is. Judging by the company he keeps, Siegfried is a docile child who wouldn't be bothered by his mother's demands nor interested in the swan, other than that she's a looker. The swan no longer reflects his hidden dreams; she is no longer vital to him.
As with the peasants and Odette, so with the princesses and Odette's evil twin, Odile (performed by the same dancer), who steals Siegfried away. We know Odile is wicked?she handily ruins two lives?but Petipa also wants to make clear that she's a type: the material girl, intent on the material world. He makes his point by setting her among cosmopolitan princesses, who also dance theatrically. ABT, however, hands the princesses such uniformly dull steps (and so few of them) that they don't even seem to belong to the same species as the dazzling Odile. The princess from Pyrotechnica wins the day and the man, not as a paragon but as an anomaly.
The drama of Swan Lake lies in Siegfried's choice between two women, two esthetics, two lives; the tragedy is that he cannot choose. Petipa's life was a variation on this theme. One minute, he is faithful to Odette, complaining to a reporter, "Ballet is a serious art form and not all sorts of jumps, senseless spinning and the raising of the legs above the head. That is not art?but a clown act." The next, he is infatuated with Odile, incorporating into his own ballets both the senseless spinning and its perpetrators, the Italian stars whom the public adores. On the one hand, he knows, as one Russian critic put it, "that the majority of our theater-goers understand precisely nothing about the ballet. They look at the most brilliant adagio as a cow looks at a passing train." On the other, he is obliged to respect the know-nothings' requests for their favorite ballerinas doing their favorite tricks.
Petipa must have often been desperate to free himself from the demands of a fickle public and the czar, and get on with his art. But he put the politics of his ballets' production to good use: It became the drama of the ballets, which have enjoyed greater renown than any other. He set his ballets in a land of stock characters and make-believe, but the stories mattered.
The story needs the peasant and the Polish princess, as well as the pristine swan. ABT doesn't have faith in the peasant or the princess: These people are only vulgar. So ABT doesn't have faith in the story and how it comes from the world. It doesn't yet have faith in us. When it does, ABT will win the new, large audience it almost already deserves.