© John Slater Ballet into the 21st Century Conference Ballet.co magazine coverage Ballet into the 21st Century forum... to link with the second Ballet Artistic Directors conference. Go and have your say in where ballet should heading. Introduction to Snape Conference Assis Carreiro interview Hodson and Archer on the future of ballet Giannandrea Poesio is also MA Programme Director for Postgraduate Dance at the University of Surrey

When Assis Carreiro was planning the Snape retreat, she sought advice from a steering committee, which included, among others, Deborah Bull, Cynthia Harvey and Jennifer Jackson (of BIG). Giannandrea Poesio of the Spectator was the one critic among them. Poesio is also a dance historian with an international reputation. Unlike many artistic directors, beleaguered by the pressures of running companies and generating new work, he has the opportunity to reflect on dance culture, and the ways in which that culture can both enhance and limit the form.

Dance is insufficiently aware of its heritage, Poesio argues. Because of a lack of dialogue between company directors and academics, practitioners do not always see the relevance of dance research to their work. New productions of the classics often fail to use valuable sources that could shed significant light. Companies were not altogether to blame for this. Dance academics have been fairly accused in the past of being overly analytical, and of having little of practical relevance to say to practitioners. This was changing: many of the new generation of dance academics, Poesio himself among them, have performance backgrounds. This should make for easier dialogue. But there is also an onus on artistic directors, who are crucial creators of dance culture. An exclusive focus on steps and “bums on seats” was to dance’s detriment, Poesio insisted. There is a gap to be bridged; the think-tank will be valuable if it provides the seeds of a new dialogue.

Ballet – not merely an art of form

Giannandrea Poesio accepts the charge that ballet is ‘stuck’. “I often ask myself when I attend performances as a critic, ‘is there a point in keeping all of this alive? Or is it just pure empty circus?’” The problem is complex. Poesio passionately advocates the notion of dance as theatre and performance, and argues that today’s ballet is

“...is there a point in keeping all of this alive? Or is it just pure empty circus” Giannandrea Poesio

increasingly an ‘art of form’, lacking in theatrical and performance qualities, which is just a matter of ‘putting steps together’. Dancers are not taught properly, he says, and not prepared to discuss and to analyse the background to the roles they play. The great dancers were great, precisely because they brought a creative and imaginative dimension to the roles they played, in a manner that transformed technical performance into high art. Dancers were blamed for inexpressivity, often unfairly, by critics for artistic sins more properly visited on the wider culture of dance. Today’s training focuses overly on dance’s physical dimension and neglects the ‘complementary disciplines’, dance’s social context and history. Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer, according to Poesio, had demonstrated with their reconstructions of Nijinsky’s ballets that dance history could be a live art.

The real dangers of globalisation

Globalisation may mean a common repertoire: this is not the core issue to be addressed, says Poesio. More serious is the lack of understanding of this repertoire and of its contexts. Companies suffer from a provincial and culturally blinkered approach to the repertoire and with dire performance results. “If you don’t understand what comes with a particular choreography created by someone in another country, that is the end of the story.” Rehearsing a few performances with a dancer from the past is not enough. In Russia, dancers learn systematically how to pass on heritage from one generation to the next. They learn to internalise the repertoire. This is crucial to all the theatre arts and ballet forgets this at its peril. The worry can be overdone: despite everything, ballet more than other dance-forms has kept a residual awareness of its identity as a theatre art. Choreographers from other disciplines have a keen awareness that this is a dimension of the art from which they can learn.

If ballet is alive today, it is primarily, Poesio says, thanks to those choreographers who revisit old texts and attempt to discover new meanings in what on the surface may have seemed like ‘silly story lines’, but which, in reality, were intricate webs of metaphors and symbols. “Sleeping Beauty is considered by many as a pretty ballet about

“Sleeping Beauty is considered by many as a pretty ballet about fairies and princesses. Let me remind everybody that it was created as pure political propaganda...” Giannandrea Poesio

fairies and princesses. Let me remind everybody that it was created as pure political propaganda. Let us see what we can find and how we can use that.”

Forging a new dance language

While the issue of the art’s potential for creativity is a key issue at the Snape think-tank, there is a risk of mistaking creativity for “new tricky ideas on a slight story”. Many stories do not translate into dance language and choreographers should not even attempt them. Creativity is also about stretching ballet technique, as Forsythe has done at Ballett Frankfurt. Giannandrea Poesio says that too many of today’s choreographers are mesmerised by masters such as Balanchine, and seem incapable of escaping his shadow. They need to move on and forge a language of their own.

The division between classical and contemporary dance is symptomatic of, in Poesio’s words, a “cheap and unacceptable” approach to dance culture. It stems from a blinkered provincialism, of which those in the contemporary tradition can be just as guilty as their counterparts in ballet. In some parts of mainland Europe the sense of a division is being comprehensively eroded and choreographers, who work in both traditions, are living proof that ballet and contemporary dance can nurture each other. Without dialogue and a lively sense of interdependence, both traditions will eventually die and become sterile. They need, Poesio insists, to rediscover a notion of total theatre.