I just finished reading an online article by Gia Kourlas for The New York Times entitled “Can Ballet Come Alive Online?” The article will appear in print on Sunday; but, since it was about the “virtual seasons” of the New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theater, I figured that reading the article online was consistent with all of my recent online viewing of ballet performances. Sadly, I discovered that very little of the article actually had to do with ballet and that most of the point Kourlas was making had to do with the way in which online presentation provided affordances for supplementary material, material that one does not necessarily encounter in a program book.
By the end of the article, I realized that Kourlas had almost entirely prioritized individual dancers, leaving little room to say anything about choreography. Now, to be fair, I have known balletomanes that are primarily fanatical about specific dancers, often with little thought to what they are dancing. Indeed, I have known them all the way back to when I first started writing about ballet during my graduate student years in the late Sixties. The balletomanes will always be with us; but, as those that have followed my own approach to writing about the dance should know by now, I believe, as I have always believed, that the choreography comes first. What Kourlas wrote about choreography in her article amounted to more than a hill of beans, but not by much.
I suppose that what motivates me to write about ballet in the first place is the capacity for imaginative relationships between structure and movement. The ballet that received the most attention in Kourlas’ article was George Balanchine’s “Diamonds.” Some of her descriptive prose was spot on the money, but it seemed consistently to dwell on breathtaking moments.
On the other hand, I just did a text search for “Tchaikovsky” in Kourlas’ article. It appeared once when she was quoting Sara Mearns, the pas de deux female soloist in “Diamonds.” Here is Kourlas’ text:
She [Suzanne Farrell, for whom Balanchine created that part] also told them [Mearns and her partner Russell Janzen] not to try to be as big as Tchaikovsky. “You’re not going to win,” Ms. Mearns said, recalling her words.
I found this more than a little perplexing, particularly in light of the fact that Balanchine had “repurposed” Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s score to serve his own ends, allowing the pas de deux to serve as a spinal cord around which the individual movements of his Opus 29 (“Polish”) symphony were structured.
This is why, in my own account of “Diamonds,” I invested most of my writing in describing and justifying that underlying structure. (I also made note that Balanchine’s structure had almost nothing to do with the way Tchaikovsky had structured his Opus 29.) Once I had achieved a satisfactory description, I felt that the choreographed movement could take care of itself, writing about little more than the centrality of how Mearns and Janzen interpreted that pas de deux. That fact is that writing about movement is no easy matter, because movement is so ephemeral. So much so that one almost expects it to vary from one performance to another. Only the structural framework remains the same from one performance to the next.
I suppose I am most motivated to write about the movement when I have more than one instance of it. If I had been writing about several performances of “Diamonds,” it would have been clear that, for the most part, the differences would be in how movement is approached and executed and what gives each performance its own individuality. However, such an approach to writing needs a structural foundation as a point of departure. Since “Diamonds” was streaming for about half a week, I figured that the best thing I could to was provide those planning to view a later streaming with the necessary foundation; and that foundation had everything to do with structure, rather than movement!
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