© 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. Millicent Hodson interview

Issue 1

On a recent edition of BBC TV’s Newsnight Review, Deborah Bill spoke of the “Benettonization” of culture. Anyone who has walked the main street of more than two Western cities knew what she meant. And not just Western cities. With economic globalization has come the pressure to standardize. Ballet companies from one country to the next seem to be presenting much the same repertoire – many of the same shorter works for triple bills, most of the same evening-length ballets. Lewis Segal of the Los Angeles Times remarked that Romeo and Juliet had become “the warm weather Nutcracker”. Between the two world wars of the twentieth century, universities underwent a similar process in establishing a “canon” of traditional and modern literature. So everybody read the same books. Not until the 1970’s was this monolithic thinking substantially challenged by the activism of ethnic minorities, pacifists and feminists. So – in the admittedly small breathing space of choice, after box office and board pressures are satisfied – what can ballet directors now do to ensure diversity and specificity in dance programming? What roles do national and company traditions play in the choice of existing repertoire and new commissions? How can your decisions increase the public’s sense of history and artistic possibility?

Issue 2

More than any other art form, ballet, that is, classical dance with its unique requirements, depends upon youthfulness. Classical dancers often sacrifice some of the privileges and pleasures of youth, education especially. Many professional dancers, particularly in the United States, it seems, abandon fundamental education at high school level. Others, who have managed to finish that level, carry within themselves for years the conflict about not going on to college or university. Could there not be a more creative liaison between institutions of higher learning and ballet companies? There are signs of progress in this direction. At the prestigious New York School for Social Research in New York, there is now a degree programme for professional dancers run by the former ABT/Joffrey ballerina Rebecca Wright. That is an excellent option for those whose situation enables them to enrol for a degree.

Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer with Paris Opera Ballet dancers (1992)
Photograph © and courtesy of Millicent Hodson

What is also needed is an initiative to bring intellectual and aesthetic inquiry into the daily lives of practicing dance artists. Education of the dance public – as distinct from dance artists – has grown by leaps and bounds in the past few decades, with ever more imaginative opportunities on offer. The public love study days and pre-curtain talks, as arts administrators and theatre education departments realize. But dancers themselves seem to be left out of the equation. For every ballet that is staged there is an energy field full of questions worth asking – about how and why it was made, about the connections to its time and place in culture at large. The response to such ideas must inevitably be: “not enough time, not enough money”. But imagine how much could be gained in one hour devoted to a dance company’s education for each act of Swan Lake or Onegin or for each item on a triple bill. Who knows how dancers might grow if they had the kind of briefing that actors take for granted?

Issue 3

During the last several decades a variety of reconstruction approaches have evolved for ballets from the past four hundred years – back to the Medicis and up to the moment. Changing technologies have stimulated the process. But passion for knowledge is what animates it. How can directors tap this passion in and for ballet?

Millicent Hodson and her husband Kenneth Archer are best known for their reconstructions of Nijinsky’s ballets Le Sacre du Printemps and Jeux. They have also reconstructed three Balanchine ballets, La Chatte, Cotillon and Le Chant du Rossignol. They are currently working on the 1968 Antony Tudor ballet, Knight Errant.