Music Matters R3 discussion Ismene Brown Reviews Kenneth MacMillan pages

Richard Coles: Who could hear the dance of the little swans without thinking of four fluffy inline cygnets, arms crossed, delicately traversing the ballet stage: an image so permanent that it survives even Morecambe and Wise interpolating themselves into the line-up. But who owns it? And how is it transmitted? Is it the same at Sadler’s Wells in 1995 as it was at the Maryinsky a hundred years earlier in the version that Ivanov and Petipa made canonical?

A court case last month in the United States might go some way to answering the question. A federal judge ruled that only one dance out of many left by Martha Graham to her heir Ron Protas belonged to him. The rest were found either to be in the public domain, like the famous Appalachian Spring, or, like another signature piece, Primitive Mysteries, to belong to the Martha Graham Dance Center. In a few cases it was unclear. The decision meant the Center could get back to work after a two year enforced furlough. But it has important implications for the entire dance world. To discuss intellectual property and choreography, I was joined earlier by the dance notator Jacquie Hollander, who was in the Royal Ballet for many years, working with, among others, Kenneth MacMillan, and by the Daily Telegraph dance critic, Ismene Brown. I asked Ismene Brown if this case in the United States has a bearing on similar, though as yet untested, cases in the UK.

Ismene Brown: I think there are very different problems in America and Britain. The Ron Protas and Martha Graham row is an extreme of what has been happening in America by tradition, which is a great deal of protectiveness by the heirs of choreographers over the futures of ballets, their works and their survival. In Britain we have the opposite problem. We haven’t got enough protection of the work here. We have the genius choreographers,

"The problem of authenticity is unique to ballet. You don’t get it in drama; you don’t get it in music" Ismene Brown

above all, Frederick Ashton, whose works have been lost. Only a handful are still performed. Then Kenneth MacMillan, who died more recently, ten years ago, and who now has been in the news, because of a row when his widow felt the Royal Ballet were not looking after his work properly. The problem of authenticity is unique to ballet. You don’t get it in drama; you don’t get it in music. Because there you have a text and, above all, when people argue about what a work of art is, they’ve got the script, they’ve got the score. In ballet there is no score as such. There is no text. It is partly, if you’re lucky enough, that the work has been notated, that the steps have been put down. But then there’s a whole host of other essential information for ballet, the designs, the quality of the music making, the quality of the casting, the amount of directorial eye over the dramatic intervention and the colours that are portrayed in the performance. Because, ultimately, ballet only lives in performance.

Richard Coles: Kenneth MacMillan is better served than Frederick Ashton because he had Jacquie Hollander doing notation for him. Jacquie is ballet notation, Benesh notation, which is your version of it, is it the same as the relationship between a music score and music? Is that essentially what it does, or is it more complicated than that?

Jacquie Hollander: It is a way of notating the movement of every dancer on the stage at a given point in the music. So, if there are thirty-two bars of music, there are thirty-two bars of dance notation. It is very very accurate.

Richard Coles: Is it a tool that is powerful enough, if I can put it that way, to capture all the range of aspects that go into making a dance a dance, and making choreography choreography, the kind of thing Ismene was talking about?

Jacquie Hollander: If you’re the notator at time of creation, as I was lucky enough to be on Kenneth MacMillan’s Rituals and Mayerling, you then can reconstruct with great confidence. You were there; you heard everything that he said to the dancers. If you are using someone else’s score, doing a reconstruction several years later, I personally don’t feel that confidence. That’s when I really like to have the video and its dancers to give that extra bit of input. But I do think it’s a combination of everything, starting with the notation.

Richard Coles: Presumably with notation now you will be able to hand to each dancer his or her part and then, in order to recreate a ballet, at least they have something solid, a foundation on which to build. They can learn the steps, putting the steps together; they’re better armed as they go into the process?

Jacquie Hollander: I wish that was true. For many years now we have been teaching students of dance at most major ballet schools to read the notation. In fact there is a notation component in the A level dance syllabus. Unfortunately, I don’t know the reason, but one or two of the major ballet schools have dropped notation completely from their syllabus. So it means that there is a generation of young dancers going into the company, who have probably never seen notation.

Richard Coles: That seems extraordinary to me, Ismene Brown, it’s almost like sending musicians out into orchestras unable to read music?

Ismene Brown: I find it absolutely scandalous because, if notation is being dropped, then dancers are even more vulnerable to the problems to the problem of authenticity in the future. Marie Rambert, who founded British ballet, said from the first – she came from music, as I did – dancers need to read notation as naturally as musicians

"Marie Rambert, who founded British ballet, said from the first – she came from music, as I did – dancers need to read notation as naturally as musicians read scores" Ismene Brown

read scores. It’s their bedrock. Then they can take it away; they can study the grounding, the steps, through the notation. Then, when they come to the studio, it’s a much more economical by the way, and saves a lot more money in terms of coaching, they can come ready primed to the steps and then start to add on these most important questions of meaning and interpretation. But if people don’t read notation as naturally as they breathe in dance, then notation itself will die, apart from anything else. But the other point is, I think, that choreographers have no chance to study previous works. I mean, young choreographers cannot take notations of people like Ashton and MacMillan away with them and study them in the way that students in other disciplines study great masters. They can only study what they see on stage, and, if it doesn’t happen to be being performed at that time, they will never have that experience of seeing why certain choreographers are great.

Richard Coles: What about something harder to pin down, something harder to notate, for example, the tradition of a company. We see the Kirov, we recognise the Kirov tradition; the Royal Ballet has its traditions; all ballet companies have their traditions. Is that something, Ismene that can be pinned down, in the way that a step can?

Ismene Brown: I think that’s the nub of the problem. It can’t really be. You can mark a fifth position but four companies will do fifth position in different ways. For a choreographer who writes a phrase in a certain way, the way that they do that fifth position whether it’s feet or arms, is going to make a big difference to the shape of the phrase that they finally create. Now I think that when Jacquie was talking about ex- dancers that knew the work coming in and adding the little bit extra, I would say it’s not just a little bit extra. I would say it’s almost critical. And you can get – and this is going to happen, because it has happened with the Ron Protas case in Martha Graham’s company – individual who believe that they know best, because they saw this, or they had some particular communication with the choreographer. When a dancer comes in and remembers something, a phrase, or even a scene that was actually made for them, that they did, the notator may actually have a different version written down. Now the differences will not just be in little steps. The differences will be in impulses – even floor plans, for instance. It’s very important that, when you’re covering the stage, if you’re being gentle and timid you cover a small part of the stage, but if you’re going to be impassionate and impetuous like Romeo and Juliet, that you go crazy and that you cover the whole stage to the point where you’re almost falling over. Now, to mark the kind of danger levels that you need and the levels of calm, tonal matters, emotional colours, that is much more difficult to do in notation and that is something that is partly up to dancers themselves interpreting and finding for themselves, and partly with great help from previous people. Now where this has become a big problem in English ballet is that so many past dancers who created key roles and made these ballets great have not been involved with the restagings of these works. Now this was partly because they all came from one sort of generation and personal differences arose, and things like that arose, and jealousies can get in the way. But the result of that, whatever it is, is that an awful lot of ballets that were really important in their time have gone, because the people have died and, because those who were in the back row of the corps de ballet, can’t remember the solos, or whatever it is. It is essential, it seems to me, that you get all these pieces of information together.

Jacquie Hollander: If I could just come in here, and be slightly difficult about something Ismene said. I was lucky enough to notate Dame Ninette De Valois’s Checkmate in 1972 after it hadn’t been in the repertoire

"No, no my dear, it is not a big développé. It’s a tiny one" Dame Ninette De Valois recalled by Jacquie Hollander

for a long time. Dame Ninette had broken her hip and was not around at the time. We did get dancers from past productions coming in and teaching the ballet. I duly recorded it all. Then, about five years later, we redid it at Sadler’s Wells and I trotted along with my score and religiously taught exactly what I had notated a few years before. At this stage Dame Ninette was there and it was so interesting hearing what she would say. “No, no my dear, it is not a big développé. It’s a tiny one.” And dancers over the years had quite liked the movement and so it had got a bit exaggerated and arm gestures had got bigger. There we had an instance of the notation actually being inaccurate because of the dancers’ memories.

Richard Coles: It takes you back to the question, doesn’t it, who owns choreography? It’s not a choreographer sitting there with a notator writing it all down, as a notator might a score, or as a novelist might a manuscript. It’s something more complicated than that, informed by different sources and ownership there is dispersed, isn’t it, across a wider field. A difficult one to settle in court perhaps?

Ismene Brown: I would say that you have got two very good examples of choreographers who feared exactly this sort of mess that can evolve after they’re dead. Frederick Ashton used a four-letter word about posterity. William Forsythe, who is still alive, the great American-German choreographer in Frankfurt who has said: “It is written in my will that when I die my ballets die with me.” Now that caused a huge fuss and everybody said: “how dare he say that.” And there was huge controversy about precisely who does own the choreography. I would say that you have got

"It is written in my will that when I die my ballets die with me" William Forsythe

somehow to arrive somehow at an understanding that a work of art ultimately has to be available to everybody – books and pictures are easy to make available to everybody through photographs, galleries, and bookshops. Ballets can only be made available by performance and that means that it is essential that heirs are objective enough to be able to put their work into some sort of objective art trust to enable these things to go ahead. Ultimately, after an heir of a choreographer passes it then on to another heir, who is to say that, that heir has the right motives, or any interest, in what they possess? They could simply stop performances altogether of a great piece of work. So it is essential, I think that heirs of Ashton and MacMillan should, in due course, plant the copyright, the ownership of these works, along with this massive research material, which must be gathered and which is not being gathered and which is an absolute priority, must be put into a trust, whereby everybody schools, young choreographers, who nowadays under 30 year old choreographers do not, shockingly, know MacMillan’s work, or Ashton’s, except for the stuff that has been performed in the last few years at the Opera House. There is no other way that they can know their work. They can’t study it as arts students study Rembrandt.

Jacquie Hollander: Really what we need now is funding to employ specialist notators to go back an look at these old works and interview dancers and look at old video tapes and perfect these scores, so that they become archival instruments, and not just very good aides-memoires which is what they are a lot of the time.

Ismene Brown: Because, above all, what must be is that the work of art should live on stage and not just be some dusty reconstruction. There have been reconstructions, so called, of Vaslav Nijinsky’s historic works, The Rite of Spring and Jeux by academics from completely incomplete records, without notation, with merely photographs, memories, critical reviews and so on. I am appalled that this has happened. Because there is nothing left there of what Nijinsky himself actually did. We watch these dry as dust reconstructions and we say “oh - how sweet.” There is no sense that you are looking at genius or that you are looking at the man who changed 20th century ballet. None. And that is because somebody, through misguided reasons, has gone to incomplete records to put this work on stage. It’s essential, above all, that works of art should be put on, living, because the worst thing is that people watch it and then say, “why is everyone making a fuss about this choreographer?” That’s the ultimate ultimate ghastliness that could occur.