Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 389

 

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.