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Millicent HodsonPutting the Pieces Together: The Work of Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer by Suzanne McCarthy |
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Millicent Hodson, choreographer and dance historian, and her husband Kenneth Archer, art historian, work as archaeologists. But, instead of finding lost cities in the jungles of Central America or tombs of the pharaohs, they search for the remains of lost ballets. Because of them audiences have had the opportunity of a “sidelong view”, as Judith Mackrell put it, of ballets that are pivotal to the development of dance (The Guardian, 9 May 2000). Their work is not, however, without controversy. Hodson did not start out wanting to be a reconstructionist. It happened to her. Since her postgraduate days at the University of Berkeley, California she has felt that dance needs to have a “useable history”. As she points out, artists in other media have a strong, vivid sense of their own heritage, which is a valuable asset in their work. Dance seems to want for this foundation, with each new generation of choreographers seeming to lack the desire to discover their predecessors’ work. It was this mission to rectify the gap, shared equally by Archer, which brought them together. Their work has dovetailed nicely with the current postmodern agenda to return to sources and to reassemble, reanalyse and deconstruct them.
Hodson and Archer have completed more than 10 reconstructions with Nijinsky’s Le Sacre de Printemps being the most famous. The others include Nijinsky’s Jeux and Till Eulenspiegel, Borlin’s Dervishes, Within the Quota, Skating Rink and Man and La Création du Monde, and three by Balanchine, La Chatte, Cotillon and Le Chant du Rossignol. Currently they are working on the 1968 Tudor ballet, Knight Errant. Each reconstruction is time consuming and expensive, and they therefore chose each projects with care, applying five basic criteria:
Some may question, in particular, whether a 50% minimum level is really sufficient. To Hodson and Archer this percentage is merely symbolic, but, as she explains, they must have enough material at the start if their excitement is to be triggered, for it is that ingredient which generates the accumulation of material.
 Kenneth Archer and Millicent Hodson with conductor Myung-Whun Chung Photograph © and courtesy of Millicent Hodson
It is instructive to consider why some ballets pass the Hodson/Archer tests while others fail. What all the ballets they have chosen share is an intense originality that speaks to them; a birth of something radical and powerfully innovative combined with visual excitement. This is not surprising considering that their partnership is based equally on the attractions of both dance and design. With Sacre it was the highly stylised deformities of technique, with La Chatte it was the combination of extremely acrobatic and Olympian gymnastic movement influenced strongly by the paintings found on ancient Greek vases studied by Balanchine and Danilova in the museums of Berlin, London and Paris.
One ballet chosen for reconstruction was Balanchine’s Song of the Nightingale, Chant du Rossignol, which they staged for the Ballet Monte Carlo in 1999. The choreography for Stravinsky’s original ballet suite was created by Massine (with Matisse designs) for Diaghilev in 1920 and then revived for Balanchine to recreate in 1925. This was Balanchine’s first full-length ballet, which he choreographed when he was only 24 having just left the Russian revolutionary avant-garde and the Maryinsky. Hodson describes the work “as a fascinating study of Balanchine’s aesthetic because he clears the decks and gets rid of a lot of detail in the props and costumes and streamlines the movement”. She continues that, “while it is a very eclectic work, with a lot of detailed quotes from Petipa and the Meyerhold Russian Constructivist theatre, all kinds of things are brought in with the general aesthetic very clean”. To coincide with the Matisse/Piccaso exhibition’s move to Paris, Hodson and Archer have been asked to restage excerpts from this work for the exhibition’s opening night at the Petit Palais. They intend to project the decors on to the walls and produce it more like an event than for the theatre. Their rejection of Massine’s Ode (1928) is illustrative of why a work may fail to attract them. Hodson describes this ballet as an elaborate spectacle combining mechanical dolls like effigies that move along a track, choreography on the floor and film projections on the backdrop. While they had a wealth of material, over 70% due mainly to a particular Parisian’s desire to see the work again, they decided in the end that they could not discover its essential “spark of life” - its special and unique quality. Hodson muses that possibly finding the still missing film might make the difference. Hodson and Archer have also rejected several early Balanchine works for various reasons. For example, while Balanchine used Le Bal (1929) to marry satirical costumes with classical technique, the choreographer did not forge a new way of dancing in this work. Further, Danilova’s death has probably made this an impossible project, as she had danced the key female role. Sometimes Hodson and Archer review a previous rejection. Borlin’s remarkable La Creation du Monde (1923) is a case in point. This ballet is noted for its big Leger costumes which showed Borlin trying to come to terms with an African aesthetic that was new to 1920s Paris, and for that reason alone Archer had long been attracted to the work. However, the dancers who had performed the piece told them that these costumes were so heavy that it was demoralising to dance the ballet. Further, a lot of the technical and mechanical objects used in the piece simply had not worked. Considering these various facts, the piece was initially rejected because, while they felt the ballet worked visually and musically (Milhaud), it failed as a dance masterwork. However, the sponsor and artistic director for this project, a former prima ballerina, urged them to rethink their position and agree to greater artistic licence with the work so that it could live again.
Reconstructing works from the early decades of the last century is one thing. It is something else to reassemble a ballet such as Tudor’s Knight Errant (to music by Richard Strauss), which was performed as recently as 1968 by the Royal Ballet’s Touring Company. (Margaret Barbieri, Elizabeth Anderton and Alfreda Thorogood were all in the original cast. David Wall was meant to dance the male lead, but he was injured.) Together with Shadowplay, this piece marked Tudor’s return to the English stage after a long hiatus in the States. The ballet is based on one letter from Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and was Tudor’s means of addressing the issues of sexual licence and libertine values during the sexual revolution of the 1960s. It is more blatant and “hotter” than anything else Tudor had done previously including Pillar of Fire, and, Hodson explains, it unfolds like a bedroom farce verging on the sinister. It represented such a departure for Tudor that a number of individuals, notably David Leonard, urged them to take on the project. The commission offered to them by the Tudor Trust came about because Bruce Marks, a former start of American Ballet Theatre and ex-director of Boston Ballet, American audiences, seeing the reconstruction of Nijinsky’s Jeux, was struck by the resonance with Tudor’s work. A number of domestic and foreign companies are interested in performing the ballet. But is it necessary to use the Hodson/Archer techniques to reconstruct something so recent? According to Hodson, there is no choice. Even in the late 1960s videotaping was not regularly done, and, as far as they can discover, no ballet notation score exists for the work. However, an added bonus for them of a relatively recently performed ballet or a work that has remained in a company’s repertory (such as Balanchine’s 1932 work Cotillon) is that there are often still a number of people alive who have either performed or seen the original. This enables Hodson and Archer to assemble other levels of testimony. The down side to this is that such witnesses often disagree among themselves requiring Hodson and Archer to “listen between the arguments”. This was certainly the case with Cotillon, but ultimately there was in that case agreement among those involved with what Hodson and Archer produced.
 The Chosen One - Shaking with fear and embracing her fate Sketch by Millicent Hodson ©. Source 'Nijinsky's Crime Against Grace', by Millicent Hodson, Pendragon Press 1996
This leads to the question of how Hodson and Archer locate the original work when a piece has changed over time to, say, accommodate a different dancer or company, the needs of a performance venue or simply because the choreographer wants to vary his previous work. To accommodate this, Hodson and Archer apply a margin of error while attempting to remain true to finding the freshness that belonged to the original intention. Balanchine’s La Chatte (1927) exposes well where such difficulties may lie. It was created for Olga Spessivtseva, but she was injured on the day of the premiere and was replaced by Nikitina, who was more in tune with the fashion of the time than Spessivtseva who was at heart a Russian classicist. Instead of appearing as the latter intended with a Giselle hairstyle, Nikitina, with her bob and spit curls, brought the cat alive as a flapper. So there is the dilemma. Is the Spessivtseva version the original even though it was never performed, or Nikitina’s performance or the way it was later danced by Markova? To further confuse things, the work was actually created by Balanchine behind closed doors and after hours on Danilova with whom Balanchine was living. She and Markova were their main sources for this reconstruction, and Markova believed that her interpretation of a very athletic cat came closest to Balanchine’s vision. Hodson and Archer concur with her view. Hodson acknowledges that, in the end, they must favour that production to which they have the greatest access. Having said that, they always try to explore the original intention and recreate the ethos of the work as it was developed by all the main contributors – the choreographer, the composer, the designer and, often, the principal dancers.
Often the intensity of their work inevitably leads them to a forceful appreciation and understanding of the minds of the choreographer and their collaborators and allows them to “live in their parameters”. Archer begins to think like the artist, seeing relationships between the costumes and the décor and making connections that before were not possible. Inevitably, as Hodson explains, you begin to think “this is the way Nijinsky reacted to groups, to that kind of density of music, to finding stillness at certain moments…”. One wonders if this is the main reason why they have rejected several of Massine’s work for reconstruction for, as Hodson admits, while she actually met and talked with him, she has never felt herself drawn into his creative process. No reconstruction can truly come alive without dancers, and Hodson uses them to work through possibilities. Before rehearsals Hodson builds choreographic phrases dancing on her own in a studio for months – sometimes years, and does a lot of drawings of the dancers’ movements, but it is in rehearsals that the details are completed. Sometimes, particularly with solo or duet work, she will set the dancers problems and get their answers before she reveals her own. Alternatively, she may have them listen to the music, read them something from a review or show them a number of sketches. Whatever the work there must be always some level of experimentation even when Hodson knows exactly what she wants to do from the documentation that survives. Because, as she acknowledges, what if there is an option she hasn’t thought of? To find the answer Hodson approaches the work as if she was creating it from the beginning, so that, as she puts it, the dancers are not “getting bottled water, but water fresh from the stream”. This marries well with her determination not to simply to describe the work as once performed, but to bring it to life. Her goal is “to find the difference in the kinaesthesis of Balanchine, Borlin and Nijinsky” and thereby to bring both the dancers and the audience as close as possible to the choreographer’s real aesthetic. Hodson and Archer’s work has been the subject of criticism. To be fair to them, it has always been others who have submitted, possibly in a state of over enthusiasm, that what they produce is the original work reborn. They, on the other hand, have been careful to describe their work as being “after” a particular choreographer and only a reasonable facsimile. In fact their contracts specify this wording. They acknowledge that another person working on the same piece would probably put the pieces together slightly differently. But, as Hodson points out, even a company putting a work back into the repertoire would do it slightly differently for this is the nature of human movement that there occurs “slippage, intentional shifts, improvements and so forth”.
At present Hodson and Archer are, in some ways, returning to their original interest of developing dance within museum settings, as is the case of the restaging of Chant du Rossignol at the Petit Palais. As a student at Berkeley, Hodson began to set programmes of performing arts in museum settings as a way of maximising the visual space with choreographic work. This way of working also satisfies Archer’s interests. Their last reconstruction in 2000, Le Creation du Monde from the Ballets Suedois (with huge cubist costumes by Leger), for example, was mounted in Geneva at the Museum of Art and History in a large courtyard on a specially made stage. This marked their reentry into museum dance projects.
Hodson and Archer hope they will be able to pass on their techniques and methods, and some years ago there was talk of a summer programme being established at the University of Surrey, but nothing has come of this as yet. However, there is currently interest at several American universities. It has to be hoped that they will have the opportunity to train others in this work so that the fragments of the ballet “puzzles” that exist can be pieced together before the whole is forever lost.
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