© 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

Lynn Garafola is one of America’s foremost dance historians. She is best known as author of 'Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.'

In the last generation or so, the world's major ballet companies, with the notable exception of the Kirov, have chosen to ignore their roots. They have all but abandoned their defining repertories and the techniques that supported them. When works from those repertories are staged, they tend to be poorly danced and little understood, both by the performers and by audiences. The living link with the past has been broken.

In dance, memory is a matter of institutional power. Ballets survive because companies exist to perform them. Virtually all of Leonide Massine's post- Diaghilev works disappeared because the "international" or émigré companies

“In dance, memory is a matter of institutional power. Ballets survive because companies exist to perform them.” Lynn Garafola

that created them and were identified by them collapsed and left no direct heirs. Oblivion was inadvertent--a product of changing taste, of a changing artistic environment and marketplace.

The oblivion at work today is different in that it is willed. Institutions exist but prefer not to remember the choreographers and kinds of works that once defined them.

ABT’s rediscovered heritage

Consider the case of American Ballet Theatre. So long as Lucia Chase was at the helm, works by Antony Tudor, Michel Fokine, Agnes de Mille, and Jerome Robbins, the vast majority created in the 1940s, held their own within the company's eclectic repertory. This changed in the 1980s, when Mikhail Baryshnikov became artistic director. Neither Baryshnikov nor the company's other "new" Russians had any knowledge or interest in ABT's older repertory. They were interested in the "classics," as these were defined in Russia and extended by Balanchine, or, in Baryshnikov's case, in postmodern dance, beginning with Twyla Tharp. As staff changed and older dancers left, the thread with the past was cut. When Tudor was danced, mothballs seemed to obscure the choreography. The ballets looked dead.

But, as ABT's very recent seasons have proved, they weren't dead. Donald Mahler's revival of "Offenbach in the Underworld" last October at City Center was alive and full of detail, choreographic as well as mimetic. And the company's revival of Robbins' "Fancy Free" during the same season was superb.

ABT invested time and money in bringing these ballets back to life, just as it did with Frederick Ashton's "La Fille Mal Gardee" and "The Dream," the highlights of the previous spring season at the Metropolitan Opera. All were well rehearsed, full of passion, faith, and imaginative belief.

NYCB’s squandered inheritance

This is not the case at the New York City Ballet with regard to its Balanchine repertory. Although fewer and fewer Balanchine ballets are performed, they are hastily thrown together, with little care for detail or emotional focus--this, despite the best efforts of individual dancers to breathe new, often idiosyncratic life into what not so long ago was perceived as a masterpiece.

The fault does not lie with the dancers or even the rehearsal masters, but with the allocation of resources. New

“As the centenary of Balanchine's birth approaches, keeping his works in good repair does not appear high on the list of NYCB’s priorities.” Lynn Garafola

works, however trivial, look good, because they are sufficiently rehearsed. Balanchine works look the way they do, because they are not. It's as simple as that.

One may plead poverty, and certainly NYCB has suffered in the present economic slump. But the issue isn't money per se. It's what the company chooses to do with the money it has. As the centenary of Balanchine's birth approaches, keeping his works in good repair does not appear high on the list of priorities. As the Kirov's performances of "Jewels" last summer sadly revealed, NYCB has ceased to be the sole or even outstanding guardian of the Balanchine legacy.

The need to remember

Others can speak more authoritatively about the Royal Ballet, which has experienced a similar loss of direction in the last thirty years. As for the Bolshoi and Kirov, one wishes they would salvage something from their lost experimentalist legacy or the era of "choreodrama," or excerpts from ballets by Marius Petipa, Lev Ivanov, Alexander

“The past should be neither a morgue nor a millstone, but a living museum, a vital link between a company's defining legacy and its future.” Lynn Garafola

Gorsky, or Fokine that have survived as "concert" works or through school performances. Russian ballet is more than a half-dozen full-lengths performed ad infinitum, even when refurbished by "original" choreography (as in the case of the Kirov's "old-new" "Sleeping Beauty") or "modernized" with ultra-high extensions.

The past should be neither a morgue nor a millstone, but a living museum, a vital link between a company's defining legacy and its future.