It would be interesting to know how many of us there are: men and women who picked up Jennifer Homans’s history of ballet, Apollo’s Angels, not because of any great interest in the dance but because the author is the widow of Tony Judt, one of the age’s great historians. And how many of us found that the books shared this curious strength: an agreeably efficient power to organize miscellaneous motes  of information floating through readers’ brains? Postwar reminded us that, contrary to sense as this seemed at the time, both parties to the Cold War shared the same planet and the same sunlight during the same decades. Apollo’s Angels teaches something similar, if from an inverted perspective: what we call “classical ballet” has, through four centuries of change and more, has generally depended upon the patronage of the state. 

There is a danger of circularity: one could easily define ballet in terms of state support. That would rule out modern-dance experimentalists and idiosyncratic choreographers along the lines of Martha Graham and Paul Taylor. But the connection is not so much one that Homans is at pains to make as a link that surfaces again and again as she tells her story. It also explains the valedictory character of her conclusion: the last two chapters of Apollo’s Angels, covering ballet in America and, in particular, in New York City, concern two ballet companies that, although they are both still very much with us, have never enjoyed so much as the semi-official backing bestowed (for example) on Diaghelev’s Ballets Russes. They were kept going by dancers and choreographers — most heroically, George Balanchine — who knew how things were done in the ancien régime that came to an end with the Tsars, and who were able to inspire wealthy benefactors to open their purses. What they could not do, these Petersburg exiles, was to reproduce themselves; the dancers whom they trained never knew what it is like to bask in the favor of sovereigns. I’m not talking about money alone. “We have grown accustomed to living in multiple private dimensions, virtual worlds sealed in ether: myspace, mymusic, mylife.” It may be that classical ballet cannot survive without the atmosphere into which it was born: the authority of princely courts. 

To fasten on the luxury and the discipline of classical ballet is to risk missing the point that, wherever it has flourished, it has provided a clear cultural idea of how those who are close to power — courtiers, originally — ought to move. There we have an explanation for the drastic decline in French ballet after Napoleon. The ballet that developed from court dances during the latter part of Louis XIV’s reign inevitably yielded to something wilder and more bravura during the Revolution, but the virtuoso dancers of the early Nineteenth Century were unwilling to abandon opulence. The combination of splash and flash was too rich for the rising bourgeoisie. “By the 1830s male dancers were being reviled as disgraceful and effeminate creatures, and by the 1840s they had been all but banned from Parisian stages.” In France, ballet was unable to suggest an acceptable model for masculine demeanor, and, without this ballast, it quickly degenerated into wispy attitudinizing and Folies Bergères kick lines. But in royal Denmark, the half-French, Danish-born August Bournonville was able to keep the old discipline alive — as a discipline. Much later, in the lurid twilight of the Tsars, ballet would burn with a gilded transmutation of folk exoticism that would explode in the early masterpieces of Stravinsky. Throughout Apollo’s Angels we encounter examples of the alignment of patronage and artistic triumph. And there is even an entire chapter — “Italian Heresy: Pantomime, Virtuosity, and Italian Ballet” — that shows what happened in the absence of patronage. (Short answer: Busby Berkley-esque kitsch.)

It is not a thesis that Homans belabors, and I’m not sure that you couldn’t argue just the opposite, that state sanction was more oppressive than liberating. But there seems to me to be a firm connection between the interest taken by the elites in ballet and the willingness of dancers to suffer for their art. Suffering enters the picture in a serious way with the career of Marie Taglioni (another demi-Scandinavian), an artist who learned to make her stumpy body flit across the stage en pointe. It’s with Taglioni and Bournonville that the day ceases to be long enough to accommodate the ideal amount of rehearsal. Dancers glow in the prestige of bejewelled archduchesses and beribboned grand dukes even as, in an increasingly bourgeois age, they display an awe-inspiring, arguably regal control of their bodies.

The great thing about Apollo’s Angels is that it complete distinguishes the history of ballet from the history of ballets — from the list of famous works that have come down to us, as well as the dances that have been lost. The individual dances are discussed, certainly, but Homans disavows the choreographic chronology that would attribute any given dance to the influence of its forebears. The best dancing has always thrived on a high degree of tension between conservative rigor and inspired innnovation. We can see this in the example of Swan Lake, a ballet that, curiously, it may be said that Tchaikovsky never saw; for it was only after his death, after the successes of The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker, that the earlier work was re-conceived, and by two men, not one. “This division of labor, however, turned out to be fortuitous: the enduring success of the ballet owes much to the tension between Petipa and Ivanov’s constrasting choreographic styles.” Homans is particularly lucid in describing the entry of the swans. 

This scene is often held up as the greatest possible achievement for a corps de allet: properly performed, the dancers seem to move as one, and audiences today still marvel at how “together” they are. It is often assumed, moreover, that they are so together because each dancer has been trained meticulously to calibrate her movements to those of her neighbor. But this is not really how it works.  Ivanov’s swans are not an assembly line or human machine, nor even a closely integrated community: they are an ensemble created by music. His steps do not so much fit the music as allow a dancer to find the phrase and sustain it in movement, making her way into the sound rather than moving smoothly across its surface. The unity is not “out” to one’s neighbors, but paradoxically a turning “in” and away; it is a togetherness based on musical and physical introspection, the polar opposite of show or ceremony. 

Over the course of centuries, classical ballet has developed a repertoire of music and gesture that, perhaps because of its wordlessness, seems to reinvent the known world in terms that momentarily deny the existence of that world. Thus the power of the great ballets on stage; thus, also, the claustral airlessness that is the signature of stories about the offstage life of dancers. Jennifer Homans manages to keep this gravity from overwhelming her story, which is always set in the secular world of Europe’s social history. That alone is why the book must be read: it so handily takes every scrap of ballet-related information that you have accumulated and puts it in its proper place. Significantly, the only interesting detail that Homans appears to have omitted is Mozart’s collaboration with Jean-Georges Noverre, the Franco-Swiss innovator whose career takes up the bulk of her second chapter. It’s no big deal: the name of the little ballet in question is Les Petits Riens.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 4th, 2011 at 6:00 pm.