Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet," by Jennifer Homans.
The teacher who set me on the path to the profession was
a physics doctoral student at the University of Chicago who had himself
once been a professional dancer. Ballet, he made me see, was a system
of movement as rigorous and complex as any language. Like Latin or
ancient Greek, it had rules, conjugations, declensions. Its laws,
moreover, were not arbitrary; they corresponded to the laws of nature.
Getting it “right” was not a matter of opinion or taste: ballet was a
hard science with demonstrable physical facts. It was also, and just as
appealingly, full of emotions and the feelings that come with music and
movement. It was blissfully mute, like reading. Above all, perhaps,
there was the exhilarating sense of liberation that came when everything
worked. If the coordination and musicality, muscular impulse and timing
were exactly right, the body would take over. I could let go. But with
dancing, letting go meant everything: mind, body, soul. This is why, I
think, so many dancers describe ballet, for all its rules and limits, as
an escape from the self. Being free.
Why
did Louis care so deeply about ballet? To describe the precise
relationship—for there is one—between the full-blown absolutism of
Louis’s reign and the emergence of classical ballet as a fully
articulated theatrical art, we must turn to the early years of Louis’s
life and to the very particular character of his court. Under Louis XIV,
dance became much more than a blunt instrument with which to display
royal opulence and power. He made it integral to life at court, a symbol
and requirement of aristocratic identity so deeply ingrained and
internalized that the art of ballet would be forever linked to his
reign. It was at Louis’s court that the practices of royal spectacle and
aristocratic social dance were distilled and refined; it was under his
auspices that the rules and conventions governing the art of classical
ballet were born.
Before
Peter the GREAT there was no ballet at all in Russia. Indeed, it is
worth recalling just how isolated and culturally impoverished the
country was before Peter came to power in 1689. For centuries, church
and state had been inseparable: the Russian tsar was an Orthodox prince
and Moscow was cast as a “third Rome.” Western Europe went through the
Reformation, the Renaissance, and the scientific revolution, but Russia
remained cut off and bound up in the timeless liturgies of the Orthodox
faith. It had no universities and no secular literary tradition; its art
and its music were almost exclusively confined to icons and sacred
songs. Musical instruments were considered sinful, and dance was
something peasants did. Court ballet did not exist.
In
striking contrast to their west European counterparts, the Russian
elite lived unadorned lives: they dwelt in wooden houses and slept on
benches (or on top of the warm stove) and their clothing and manners
resembled those of peasants: rough and indecorous. Men coveted long and
bushy black beards, which they took to be a sign of godliness and
masculinity (God was bearded and women couldn’t grow one). Only demons
were depicted as clean-shaven. Fancy foreign dress was prohibited, and
foreigners living in Moscow were quarantined in their own “German
Suburb,” a ghetto of European culture coveted by a few and dismissed by
most. Muscovite society was not society in any form recognizable in the
West: it was rigidly segregated by sex and men and women mixed little in
public; on those rare occasions when they did, ladies were expected to
be quiet and bashful with downcast eyes. In the mid-seventeenth century a
trickle of Western theater and fashion (mostly Polish) began to seep
in, but nothing could have been further from the Russian cultural
imagination than the refined artifice and etiquette of classical
ballet.
With Peter the
Great, however, all of this changed. Peter despised the claustrophobic
rituals that governed life in old Muscovy: he gravitated to the German
Suburb, learned Dutch and German, took fencing and dancing lessons, and
wore Western clothes. He was clean-shaven. But this was only the
beginning: what Peter wanted for himself he also wanted for Russia. In
the early years of the eighteenth century he thus invented and planned
an ambitious purpose-built and European-style city: St. Petersburg.
Constructed from the ground up by sheer force of labor and at great
human cost on a swampy, barren strip of land at the westernmost edge of
the country, the city was a self-conscious metaphor for Peter’s
Westernizing project. The idea was not only to shift the country’s
center of gravity away from Moscow and “open a window” onto the West; it
was to radically re-create Russian society in a European image—to make
Russians into Europeans.
To
this end Peter subordinated the Church, incorporating Orthodox
institutions into his own vastly expanded bureaucratic apparatus and
placing himself, as tsar and emperor (he was the first to take the
title), at the apex of Russian society. Indeed, Peter the Great imagined
himself as a Russian Louis XIV: the Peterhof Palace was modeled on
Versailles, with gardens and vistas precisely measured to match the
original. And although Peter himself never learned to speak French, his
courtiers—corralled at his new court in his new city—were encouraged to
do so. It was an extraordinary cultural transformation: by the end of
his reign the Russian elite had relegated their native tongue to the
backwoods of their imaginations. Decrees in the early years of the
century forced the point home on other fronts too: Western dress was
mandated and beards prohibited for all men, regardless of rank. State
inspections were routinely conducted and fines—and eventually a beard
tax—levied on those who failed to conform.
Peter
controlled his courtiers through strict rules and hierarchies. The
Table of Ranks, established in 1722, created fourteen civil ranks (based
on German titles) each with its own special uniform; etiquette up and
down the ladder was formally prescribed and carefully observed. To
acquire proper comportment and manners, aristocratic children were
taught to dance from an early age by French and Italian ballet masters,
and courtiers were required to learn the latest dances for balls and
ceremonial events. The rules were carefully laid out in The Honorable
Mirror of Youth, a compilation of Western courtesy books designed to
educate courtiers in the intricacies of refined behavior, including
dancing. And because foreignness conferred authority, Peter arranged
marriages for his children to European nobility and made his own
personal life a parable of Westernization: he sent his first wife, who
hated his modernizing ideas, to a monastery and married a Lithuanian
peasant girl who successfully recycled herself into a paragon of
elegance and fashionable beauty. Peter crowned her empress of Russia.
Classical
ballet thus came to Russia as etiquette and not as art. This mattered:
ballet was not initially a theatrical “show” but a standard of physical
comportment to be emulated and internalized—an idealized way of
behaving. And even when it did become a dramatic art, the desire to
imitate and absorb, to acquire the grace and elegance and cultural forms
of the French aristocracy, remained a fundamental aspiration. Thus from
the moment ballet entered Russia, it was inextricably bound up with the
Westernizing project that would shape the country’s history for
generations to come. It was part of “making Russians European,” and its
prestige owed everything to its foreign, and especially Parisian,
stature.
Perhaps
more surprisingly, Western ballet resonated with Eastern Orthodoxy. The
Russian Church was (and remains) opulently theatrical: faith has less
to do with doctrine than spectacle. It is best seen and heard, rather
than read or talked about. Indeed, anyone who has attended an Orthodox
service will immediately sense the parallels with the theatrical arts:
the crowd of worshipers gathered in attentive suspense awaiting the
ritual opening of beautifully decorated gates and doors, the unveiling
and revelation of sacred icons of great richness and splendor (gold,
deep blues, inlay), and above all the power of music and visual beauty
to draw the “audience” into a concrete but otherworldly life. Echoes of
this kind of liturgy could also be found in the ceremonies enacted at
court. The entrance of the tsar to a ball or formal function, to take
but one example, was an elaborate and highly staged affair in which a
crowd of attentive courtiers, all with assigned roles, stood in awe as
the magnificent ballroom doors were thrown open to reveal the Orthodox
prince and his entourage in their dazzling splendor; a full procession
with musical accompaniment followed. It was but a step from these
religious and courtly rites to the lavish theatrical productions that
would grace the Russian ballet stage.
Classical ballet was the de facto official art of the Soviet state.
Why
ballet? Why did this elegant nineteenth-century court art become the
cultural centerpiece of a twentieth-century totalitarian state? The
answer is complicated, but it had to do above all with ideology. The
consequences of the shift from aristocracy and the tsar to revolutionary
“workers” and “the people” were deep and lasting. Under Communist rule,
the whole purpose of ballet changed. It was no longer enough to
entertain or to mirror court hierarchies and styles; ballet had to
educate and express “the people”—and it rose to prominence in part
because it was thought ideally suited to the task. Unlike theater,
opera, or film, ballet had the virtue of being a Russian performing art
that did not require Russian in order to be understood or appreciated.
No matter its Imperial roots, it was a universal language accessible to
anyone, from barely literate workers to sophisticated foreign
ambassadors—and especially (during the Cold War) the Americans.
Music
had this virtue too, of course, but it was ideologically harder to
interpret: you could never be quite sure what a string of notes meant,
and composers were routinely suspected by the authorities of encrypting
their music with “riddles” (Stalin) and tricks designed to fool
apparatchiks and undermine the regime. Ballet might have had this
problem too: steps, after all, are inherently abstract. But the
ambiguity of a ballet could be diminished by pinning its every step and
pose to a story: Soviet ballets, as we shall see, were literary and
didactic, mute dramas (or dumb shows) designed to depict or illustrate
life in a socialist paradise. Indeed, the line separating dance from
propaganda was often perilously thin, and deliberately so.
Of
all the performing arts, ballet was perhaps the easiest to control. In
the worst years of Stalin’s rule—when a line in a poem could lead to
arrest or execution—writers, composers, and even playwrights could
retreat into inner exile and work privately; they could secretly stow
their work in the desk drawer, to be retrieved in gentler times. But
ballet had no desk drawer: it lacked a standardized written notation and
could not be reliably recorded, much less scribbled down and set aside.
Dancers and choreographers thus had little recourse. Their work was by
nature public and collaborative, and in the 1930s, especially as Stalin
consolidated his power, a vast web of Party organizations reached into
every aspect of production: script, music, sets, costumes, and
choreography were all subject to review by unions, Party officials, and
committees of (competing and often vindictive) workers and peers. The
ideological justification for these intrusions was that workers and
“their” Party must be the best judges of art, but the consequences were
often absurd: before the ballet Bright Stream (1935) was mounted in
Moscow, to take but one example of many, a Theatrical Criticism Circle
from the Kaganovich Ball-Bearing Plant attended a dress rehearsal and
offered suggestions for revisions, which had to be duly noted.
For
artists, control meant compromise. Ballets produced under Soviet rule
had no single author, nor did they represent a freely expressed artistic
vision in the ways we take for granted in the West. Most Soviet ballets
represented a complicated negotiation between artists and the state,
between dogmatic and creative thinking. If a dance was found, as many
were, to contradict the (frequently shifting) Party line, the pressure
to accommodate—to change steps, revise the music or plot, or to alter
costumes (the Party was notoriously prudish)—was intense. Every artist
knew that months of work could end in disaster: productions, careers,
even lives might be ruined. Self-censorship was thus an ingrained mental
habit. A Soviet ballet was never just a ballet; it was, quite
literally, a matter of state.
When
the curtain went up on Romeo and Juliet on October 3, 1956, Cold War
hostilities momentarily ceased. The British were overwhelmed by the
scale and magnitude of the production and by the emotional depth of
Ulanova’s dancing. Ulanova was forty-six years old but had no trouble
conveying the youth and tragedy of Juliet. The British dancer Antoinette
Sibley, who had seen Ulanova in a stage rehearsal for the ballet, later
described her astonishment: “She was a mess. Like an old lady … she
looked a hundred.…And then she just suddenly started dreaming. And in
front of our very eyes—no make-up, no costume—she became fourteen … And
our hearts! We couldn’t even breathe. And then she did that run across
the stage after the poison scene: well—we were all screaming and
yelling, like at a football match.” Things were no different on opening
night: Ulanova received thirteen ovations and ecstatic reviews. A few
critics grumbled that Lavrovsky’s choreography was old-fashioned and
heavy (“a lumbering three-decker pageant” full of “violent, histrionic
episodes”). But audiences didn’t care: they adored Ulanova (a BBC
broadcast that year of the ballerina performing Swan Lake drew some
fourteen million viewers), and the power of the Bolshoi’s art would be
remembered for decades to come.
Classical
ballet was everything America was against. It was a lavish,
aristocratic court art, a high—and hierarchical—elite art with no
pretense to egalitarianism. It had grown up in societies that believed
in nobility, not only of birth but of carriage and character; societies
in which artifice and fine manners—so different from America’s
plainspoken directness—were essential and admired attributes. Worse
still, ballet was Catholic in origin and Orthodox in spirit: its
magnificence and luxe seemed sharply opposed to America’s simpler and
sterner Puritan ethic. Likewise its sensuality and (at times) open
eroticism: when the Ballets Russes arrived to perform Schéhérazade in
Boston in 1917, the local authorities insisted the harem mattresses be
replaced with rocking chairs.
But
above all, perhaps, classical ballet had always been a state-supported
art whose purpose—from its beginnings in Paris and Versailles to its
later development in Vienna, Milan, Copenhagen, and St. Petersburg—had
been, in no small measure, to promote and glorify kings and tsars. The
American state, by contrast, had been founded to free its citizens from
overbearing centralized power and to liberate them from the ceremonial
pomp that had corrupted (as the Founding Fathers saw it) European
political life. Anything resembling a national or state-sponsored art
was widely regarded as either an immoral luxury (John Adams visited
Versailles and disapproved) or suspiciously constraining and “unfree,”
tethered to the interests of state—that is, propaganda. The arts in
America were thus traditionally considered a private and commercial
affair, and the state kept a distance.
It
is hardly surprising, then, that in America ballet was generally
regarded as a foreign art, a fact that constantly dismayed visiting
Europeans for whom it was a second cultural skin.
