© UPotS Renee Renouf reviews

At the outset, therefore, someone like myself is hard pressed to know visually what Gay-White is describing, a genuine handicap. Admirers of Bejart will doubtless find the text to be duck soup, particularly American balletomanes with access to Suzanne Farrell's productions this summer which includes some of the works she danced while a member of the Ballet of the Twentieth Century at the Theatre de la Monnaie in Brussels.

Gay-White makes no attempt to make her comments a definitive biography. Rather she approaches Bejart from a contextual framework, seeking to place him, his thinking and his creations within the aesthetic landscape influenced by Baudelaire, Artaud and Nietzsche before detailing several works and including parts of interviews with Bejart himself; in their respective order, the dancers interviewed were Angele Albrecht, Diane Grey-Cullert, Suzanne Farrell, Daniel Lommel, Jorge Donn.

Knowing the vast difference between the comparative youth of the United States and Europe's cultural maturity, one comprehends why Bejart failed to cut a wide swath in North America's ballet-going public. This is not to say he did not gain devoted adherents. The late critic Stephanie Von Buchau, as well as one dance-going friend of mine, were reduced to tears when the company danced at Zellerbach. At the time, Americans were still into mastery of surfaces; whatever depths being explored in dance tended to emanate through modern dance and artists like Paul Taylor whose subject matter embraced satire and irony rather than the reworkings of European masterpieces such as Faust. Our culture was based enough on devil admonitions to escrew the brief success of the old philosopher.

 

Like many other American balletomanes, my exposure to Bejart has been limited; New York City was the place where his company was most frequently seen. My exposure to the company were limited to perhaps two U.S. tours, when they danced at Zellerbach in Berkeley, and to his version of Firebird when San Francisco Ballet danced it under the Christensen-Smuin hegemony , Gary Wahl in the title role. I was turned off because of Bejart's use of the allaripu of Bharata Natyam in his Hinduized ballet Bhakti, He took this opening devotional section of the conventional Bharata Natyam solo concert where, as the musical base the dance master recites bols to the rhythms of the double-headed drum, the mdrangam, to make a vehicle en pointe, with men, for Suzanne Farrell. This was not the sincere-minded man lavishly touted as such, but an anthropological colonialist at work, like Balanchine's treatment of Bugaku. distorting that classical dance form which found its permanent home in Japan amongst the Imperial Household Musicians. When I mentioned this to Violette Verdy dancing in San Francisco with Edward Villella for Pacific Ballet, she remarked, "Oh, everyone knows he is a plagiarist." Gay-White adroitly calls this metissage, "an artistic borrowing of many forms and styles, which are at once spectacular and dependent upon the autobiographical signature."

Gay-White certainly has done her homework as it relates to Bejart's sources; she also is cautious and qualifying. Perhaps her greatest service is to assert that Bejart brought dance and his subsequent mixture of theatrical styles to a wider public; she claims his service is a sociological one; she may very well be right. The U.S. was galvanized more by individual artists like the three Russian defectors than by multi-media treatments of European classics, artistic or philosophical. I suspect it is based on the functional-oriented basis of our society, built on the absence of deep formative cultural patterns existing in Europe.

I found myself noting typos here and there and also wondering who Gay-White's editor was, given her particular form of phrasing ideas or comments. I concluded the years of working with the French language automatically would find its way into English sentence patterns. Bejart and Modernism, therefore, could easily be translated without rephrasing into that Romance language. I would hope the French language version would not be so costly as this one published in English.