Originally published in Dance Theatre Journal. For more information: Phone 0181 694 9620 email dtj@laban.co.uk web www.laban.co.uk

However, is all as healthy as it seems? The Royal Ballet's showing at the Festival Hall temporarily distracted audiences from the dramas and recriminations of the past year during which the dancers have been on the verge of industrial action, some of the most admired male dancers have decided to leave, and the company itself stared into the abyss of possible closure in the wake of critical government reports on the managerial upheaval and financial disasters of the Royal Opera House. The whole profession could not escape taint by association. Only twoof the thirteen finalists in the Gene Awards were from the UK, the majority of finalists and winners being Australian. As older generations of British trained dancers retire, a significant proportion of the leading dancers of all the major companies comes from overseas, nurtured by other training methods and dance cultures. Debate rumbles on about the loss of an identifying style that comes from a shared schooling and creative vision, and the increasing lack of differentiation between the styles and repertoires of the world's major companies. The choreographic highlight of London's ballet year was not provided by any of the UK's established companies, but by the brief visit of Ballett Frankfurt performing thought-provoking iconoclastic pieces by William Forsythe, which set new standards in performance, invention and theatricality. Amongst professionals, the perception of a ballet crisis is fuelled by the state of British ballet's flagship institutions which face the accusation of being unable to produce the dancers or the choreographers either to honour the heritage of the past or make the masterpieces of the future.

But what is happening elsewhere? ...In an interview with Christopher Bowen in 1994, Jonathan Burrows, who had left the Royal Ballet three years earlier, suggested that 'It is ballet as a cultural phenomenon, rather than a way of dancing, that is the problem. Some of the most exciting dance in the world today - like the work of William Forsythe and Amanda Miller in Frankfurt - comes out of ballet'. Outside London, David Bintley, a director who is first and foremost a choreographer, is building an audience for a different, largely new repertoire. On the British independent scene, some of the most challenging and influential work comes from classically trained artists. The recent Greenhouse Effect Conference focused, by default, on contemporary dance with little reference to classically based dance; but of the four works in the opening gala concert, two were choreographed (and danced) by ex-Royal and Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet members. In one of the other two, Wayne MacGregor chose to work with Antonia Franceschi, (ex-New York City Ballet principal who prefers to work, not as an employee of an established company, but as an independent artist). Introducing an evening of new works curated by Burrows at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in July 1998, Johann Reynierts, programmer for the Guy Theatre in Brussels, ventured the view that classical artists will be the most influential in the new century.

What exactly is it about British ballet, its structures and practices, that gives rise to concern?

Elitist, effete, exclusive, expensive
In Britain dance, and ballet in particular, currently subsist in a difficult cultural environment. Sedentary urban lifestyles and lack of opportunities for physical play do not promote the basic physical skills and sensitivities necessary for an effective education in dance. Short-termism, diminished attention spans, and the pressure to conform to every fleeting trend make in-depth engagement with the slow and rigorous development of a classic form more difficult. Postmodern fragmentation appears the antithesis of ballet's harmonious balance of opposites; a posture of ironic distance can seem at odds with a genre one of whose characteristic qualities is openness, the visibility of the self through the outward projection of the body. Many people are alienated by an image of ballet as elitist, effete, exclusive, expensive, over-funded, pink, light weight and immature. Such stereotypical impressions obscure the positive enduring aspects of a rich dance tradition. How can an art form of sound principles, internal logic and direct communication attract such negative and unenlightened press and be mute in response? The proliferation of clich, surface images, cheap jokes, loss of status and relegation to a 'secondary' (1) art form begs the questions: What is the ballet profession itself doing to reinforce those aspects which perpetuate the negative stereotype? Are ballet artists in touch with their age in the practice of their art and does the art live in their practice? What does ballet offer audiences who look at and appreciate contemporary art? Is ballet as an art form, which is largely represented by large institutions whose very structure is designed to prop up imperial hierarchies and a nineteenth century repertoire, an anachronism in contemporary Britain?

Leaving the institution
Ten years ago Michael Batchelor, Sheila Styles and ourselves ( all members of the Royal or Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet) left the cosiness of fifty-two-week contracts to launch Dance Advance. This was a small to mid scale company which was dedicated to commissioning, making and touring new ballets and to widening access to the art form both through the particular choice of venues and linked education programme. We wanted to contribute to the cultivation of an audience whose ideas about ballet did not derive solely from images of be-tulled women in works fashioned by choreographers of a different age, but one which would receive and perceive ballet in a contemporary setting, as a still vibrant and evolving movement language. Staging platforms for new ballet based choreography was in part an attempt to reveal the form afresh by changing the context in which it was seen, and to establish alternative structures and methodologies for making work.

The venture enjoyed only limited success - why? The funding bodies dictated the construction of the initial programmes: a combination of work by established choreographers and our own new, sometimes communal creations. As choreographers we struggled - attentions dispersed by the sudden expansion of responsibilities - for on-going funding, managing, directing, marketing of the project and planning for future activities as well as day-to-day scheduling, rehearsal and performance of the ballets. There were difficulties in adjusting to a fluid managerial system where the roles of director, dancer and choreographer were not neatly delineated. It was foreign territory for which psychologically all were ill prepared.

But there were important introductions to repertoire on a different scale, most notably Toer van Schajk's enigmatic Shrugs and Signs, and Kenneth MacMillan's Sea of Troubles based on Shakespeare's Hamlet. MacMillan, who lent his active support, found the working environment, away from the demands of big company repertoire and audience expectations, conducive to creativity. He made a startlingly original work, which did not fit easily into traditional ballet repertoire; a ballet for six soloists with a democratic structure and no stars - where each dancer played an aspect of specific named characters, each scene exposed a particular set of relationships, so the work developed, not in a linear way but cumulatively into a powerful and disturbing portrait.

Our attempt to place creative endeavours and new choreography at the centre of our approach was genuine, but the potential of the alternative structures was not fully recognised. However the experience prompted us to go back to first principles and re-evaluate the stuff of our art. Especially potent both then and subsequently as independent artists, was the notion of discovery, of going into the language and beyond the world we already knew. We began to find situations outside the safety of institutions in which to work; a world short of money but not short of creativity. In the words of Peter Brook 'If you don't search for security true creativity fills the space' (2).

Creativity is a buzzword of our age. A fast changing world demands the creative reinvention of all aspects of life, relationships, careers, societal roles, and reassessment of values. Especially rich is the creative potential in the dialogue and tension between tradition and innovation. How is an education in creativity catered for in a traditional form like ballet, and are young artists being equipped to address the challenges of the future?

The function of technique
Why is ballet, an apparently esoteric way of dancing, remote from current popular culture, still being studied? It is generally accepted that ballet provides an unparalleled technical dance training, of a breadth and depth that other western techniques cannot match; that it produces fashionably slim, elegant and streamlined bodies versed in a repository of widely used steps. It is regarded as a core subject on vocational dance training programmes, and accorded generous study time. Powerful teaching organisations and codified examination systems have evolved for the standardisation of early training in response to a wide public demand to acquire ballet's virtues of grace, strength and discipline in a format which satisfies parental pressure for recognisable achievements.

However, over recent years a lack of confidence in the technical results of British ballet schooling, a perception of British inadequacy compared to Russian, French or American ballet dancers, has spurred on efforts to explore other ballet training systems, improve the fitness of dancers, make more rigorous the physical selection processes whereby young dancers enter vocational ballet training. The sophisticated findings of well funded sports medicine research are yielding valuable insights into the physiology of dancers, and their impact on training methods is reshaping the bodies of dancers in a more athletic mould, to give muscular efficiency. But efficiency for what? Athletes in competition have clearly defined and universally recognised goals to achieve, concrete and measurable; the goals of the creative artists are much more indefinable, slippery and complex, not known until revealed through the work.

Ballet is after all a way of dancing - of dancing as art. Its technique evolved to facilitate the dance, through the refinement of a body of accessible and communal steps and moves. A full understanding of ballet technique is founded on an awareness of artistic, philosophical and aesthetic aims, rooted in classical principle and constantly evolving. Practical ballet training of students and professionals must focus on these complex artistic aims. By concentrating on mere physical fitness and technical prowess as end goals the very functioning of the technique is undermined and its purpose of poetic expression in a distinct language denied. The risk is that dancers will be trained neither to comfortably inhabit the full range of balletic movement, nor use it creatively in the making of dances.

Speaking ballet
In daily ballet practice - how is creativity manifested? Ballet class is a 'holy' place, the ritual preparation of the body and mind for the disciplines of working with the ballet language. For ballet dancers engage in a practice which makes seemingly impossible demands on the body - urging the flesh towards a beauty and purity of classical, abstract, geometric form that requires the imaginative engagement of the whole being. The language is learnt through the senses - a subtle interplay of feeling, looking, hearing, intuiting - a fusion of thinking and doing. The artist's capacity for intense concentration and discipline together with imaginative sensibility are qualities that ballet dancers bring to their daily practice.

But the class engages those qualities in an interpretative, rather than a compositional framework. Exploration of the ballet language is made from the performative perspective of training the dancer to reproduce existing steps - seldom from the aesthetic and analytical perspective of the choreographer wishing to understand and challenge, wrestle and experiment with the language in order to compose in it. A student often learns by rote, by looking and copying the basic outline of steps, by (negative) cross reference of her own mirror image with a fixed photographic image of A.N Other Dancer. Consider the psychological impact on the artist of an education which concentrates on re-producing existing images, where identity is defined by an external image without real exploration of the internal movement logic of the language or with no release of a personal 'dance' voice in which to 'speak' ballet? Small wonder that many ballet dancers claim to be hopelessly uncreative.

Where in ballet education and training is the individual given skills to have a dialogue with the art form with which they engage, and where is the opportunity for play? Opportunities for improvisation and composition are not generally inscribed in ballet syllabi, and they happen, rarely, at the discretion of individual teachers. In vocational schools students are making dances. But are they receiving an education in choreography that addresses the specifics of working in a balletic idiom and exploring the full potential of the form? How are the choreographers whose visions will shape the art form to emerge?

There is much to learn here from the vibrancy of contemporary and independent dance. In contemporary dance education, strong emphasis is placed upon new work and by definition, the genre will educate for it. Every dancer is seen as a creative artist with the potential to compose dances; guided choreographic investigation and play are a fundamental part of training, giving rise to a shared body of knowledge of compositional methodologies and structures, and the confidence to explore it. Choreography is associated with forging a personal movement language, and innovating in the tradition of those great modern dancer/choreographers of the twentieth century from whose work new dance techniques have emerged.

But the problem for a ballet choreographer is not to invent a new language but to create with one that already exists: to peer into the complex make-up and beauty of that language, to dismantle its grammar and syntax and re-order the parts from a personal and fresh perspective. The freshness brought to making dances in the privacy of the studio must also filter into the public arena to influence presentation of new work. As well as new methods for working with familiar forms, ballet choreographers need new contexts in which to present new work from old language, and new audiences to view it with new eyes.

A stodgy diet
Academic studies of dance have contributed both to the status and in depth understanding of modern dance theory and practice. Despite healthy expansion in theoretical academic studies of ballet and degree courses in vocational schools, there is still a gulf between these broader educational developments and the practical priorities of professional companies, struggling to compete in the market place. A programming diet increasingly full of three act narrative ballets discourages dancers and audiences from relating to the dance in broader terms, weighing it down with literal or visual realism. Lack of confidence in the ability of ballet to communicate unmediated by familiar conventions in design, music, subject matter or performing context has become institutionalised. A talent for narrative and dramatic work which has become one of the internationally perceived virtues of British dancers and repertoire, now proves to be a double edged sword, as both public perception and professional understanding overemphasise ballet as pantomime, storytelling without words.

Good-looking entertainment
Ballet companies created and managed according to imperial Russian models, designed to present 19th century repertoire with full orchestra, lavish spectacle and funding on a suitably imperialist scale manacle the art form ever more securely to its past. Repertoire decisions are audience, not artist led; in the hierarchy of priorities commercial pressure to balance the books appears to carry more weight than the making of art - ballet is limited to being good-looking entertainment. The climate created renders it more and more difficult for a management to take risks on presenting new work and providing the necessary time and support for its gestation and development. Maverick choreographic talents such as Michael Clark, Matthew Hawkins and Jonathan Burrows have long since left the establishment. Where does the responsibility lie for investment in the future?

Consider the complex implications of such commercial artistic policy for levels of subsidy. Arguably entertainment or commercial product needs no subsidy - this thesis has been effectively proven by the successes of Adventures in Motion Pictures, Riverdance, Stomp whereas art must depend on state or private patronage. Ballet companies that follow a commercial policy cannot maintain their position in the vanguard of artistic development and thereby forfeit their unchallenged right to the lion's share of the limited public funding available to dance - to the art of dance. Ironically the commercial success of an artist like Matthew Bourne implies that it will be harder for him to find funding for the sort of risk-taking that brought him success in the first place. In the case of the Royal Ballet at the Royal Opera House the cushion of subsidy and lack of accountability in administering that subsidy have fostered neither artistic nor economic rigour but arrogant management - the result of a confusion of responsibility in the service of a great tradition.

Healthy ecology
Narrow vision is limiting the art form and its range of expression - both internally and externally, in the practice and how it is received. How are the notions of diversity, multiplicity and breadth of vision reflected in the ballet culture? To elaborate on an ecological analogy thrown up at the Greenhouse Conference, in which a healthy dance community was likened to a meadow where great and small coexist and are foil for one another, ballet environments are like conifer plantations - grown commercially to produce tall, slim identical trees that are cut down young, and quickly replaced. Eventually however, nothing else can grow, the very lack of diversity threatens survival and breeds distortion. There are indeed dangers in recognising only one kind of administrative structure, of funding system, of performing space, of image, of body, of mind, one way of dancing ballet. Ballet artists and the form itself are constrained rather than enabled by funding policies which, instead of reflecting evolving needs in ballet, demand that the form take the shape of a moribund institutional system.

Institutions have been resourcing the concrete and short-term needs of classical ballet without regard for the future and the very function of art - which after all is not defined by the concrete. What is needed to bring art into the centre of the form? At all levels - in professional practice, in management, in education - it is essential that structures that emerge from the needs of creative practice and which reflect in depth knowledge and understanding of the form. In choreography, environments are needed that encourage experiment, contextualise failure and success in artistic process, welcome challenge and dissent and include formal feedback from professionals and public. And what is essential is the confidence to let go of the past and redefine ballet in the context of the present, affirming that ballet has something distinct to offer and is something distinct, of itself, definable on its own terms as art, not needing to be justified on sociological, educational or economic grounds.

Ballet Independents' Group (BIG) sees that the way forward for ballet as an art form lies in developing an ecology of diverse professional activity that is flexible and lively in its response, and relevant to the culture and economics of our world. BIG urges fundamental change from within ballet practice in the U.K. Unless aggressive creative energy is re-injected into education and training and today's conservative programming, unless ballet artists creatively re-invent the form from their perspective as artists on the edge of the new millennium, unless teachers, managers, administrators, bring contemporary thought and action to bear on the interior culture, 'ballet as we know it today will, overburdened with nostalgia, limp into the 21st century towards its just demise.' (3)

The Ballet Independents' Group (BIG) has been set up to facilitate activities that address issues concerning the nature and future of ballet, with the flexibility inherent in independent practice. BIG is run as a partnership by Susan Crow and Jennifer Jackson, independent ballet artists whose experience spans diverse areas of dance practice: as dancer/choreographers in large companies, as teachers and workshop leaders in education and as directors of independent initiatives promoting creativity and debate in ballet.

For more information about current activities and the BIG Discussion Forum:
tel: 0181 682 1385 or email: susiecrow@easynet.co.uk or jenjackma@aol.com

1 Roy Hattersley, Any Questions, BBC Radio 4 1998
2 Peter Brook, There are no secrets (Thoughts on Acting and Theatre) p 23, Methuen Drama 1993.
3 John Birchell Hughes, Ballet Independents' Group press release, 20 March 1998