Giannandrea Poesio's Weblog

“If it ain’t French it ain’t Romantic ballet…”

Let’s face it. Ballet culture suffers more than any other art-related culture from a truly blinkered knowledge of the art itself.  The fact that the few still preformed 19th-century classics are not, historically speaking, representative of what went regularly on in the dance world between 1832 and 1898, is generally overlooked or totally ignored. And I am not talking from the layperson’s point of view. Scholars, critics and dance writers have long indulged in what is a culturally vitiated and historically incomplete vision of ballet history.

If one was to believe them, Romantic ballet was almost exclusively French in the first part of the 19th-century and Russian in the second half. Indeed, La Sylphide and Giselle were created in France, in 1832 and 1841 respectively, and the famous “ballet of the nuns” from Giacomo Meyerbeer’s opera Robert Le Diable – first seen at the Paris Opéra in 1831 – was arguably one of the first instance, if not the very first, in which diaphanous clothing and pointe shoes were used as effective theatrical devices. Yet there were “other” forms of Romantic ballet, for Romanticism developed all over Europe in different ways.

The international rediscovery of the splendid repertoire by Auguste Bournonville, the father of Danish ballet, is indeed a fairly recent phenomenon, whereas little has been done to explore and/or revive what Romantic theatre dance was like in Austria or Italy or, for what matters, in Russia before the advent of Marius Petipa. Each European country preserved carefully its own choreographic modes on top of the imported ones, as demonstrated by a number of collections of playbills, librettos and programmes relating to dance works only few have ever heard about. And in some instances, the choreographic discrepancies and stylistic dissimilarities between those “other” ballets and the ones that survived as, more or less erroneously, representative of that epoch, are truly amazing.

The fact the majority of  those “other” ballets did not survive, is fairly irrelevant; what matters, at the end of the day, is to have an in-depth knowledge of the artistic – as well as the social, political and cultural – contexts that surrounded, informed and underscored the creation of the 10/11 surviving masterwork we still see today (namely La Sylphide, Giselle, Pas de Quatre, Paquita, Le Corsair, Don Quixote, La Bayadere, Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, Raymonda). Only then, it is possible to appreciate in full the greatness of the works that managed to survive by being such outstanding exceptions. It is through an advanced understanding of those contexts, moreover, that it is possible to find the means to keep those classics alive. Yet some of the most eminent dance writers keep overlooking or ignoring these facts, and prefer, for reasons that is better to ignore, to rely on a conveniently flawed view of dance history.

Luckily, there are those brave enough to oppose the trends of such a superficial culture. Fed up with nonsensical theories on ballet stemming from partial and historically flawed notion of history, a number of scholars have started to react against what an eminent colleague and friend of mine has aptly referred to as “ignorance-induced mental masturbation”. If male dancers were scarce in France as from 1860, they were certainly not scarce in Italy, in Denmark, in Russia and in other seldom studied parts of Europe. Nor were they relegated to lesser roles. Think of the celebrated Enrico Cecchetti and the myriad – literally – of predecessors and followers who populate the Italian stages. This is not, alas, the sort of information one finds in conveniently packed dance history manuals which often filter any knowledge of ballet’s past through the contemporary perception of what ballet is – namely that repertory of no more than 11 titles. While the flawed content of those manuals is somewhat excusable – the aim of most of them is only to provide a general overview – the laziness and ignorance of scholars who approach romantic ballet, 19th-century male dancers and female ones is hardly justifiable. The world provides today all the possible means to interact with different materials and archives, and the duty of a serious scholar is to leave no stone unturned. Yet one still finds glaringly flawed statements.

Just pick any of the new feminist based analyses of ballet and you will discover that they have all been written by people who naively think there were only two forms of Romantic ballet: the French and the Russian. Needless to say their theses and conclusions thus stem from a bunch of absolutely untenable and historically laughable generalisation.  Or take those eminent practitioners of the teaching profession who, in order to bestow significance and lustre to their art and, expound all sorts of superficial equation of the kind “Blasis taught Lepri, Lepri taught Cecchetti, hence Cecchetti’s teachings contain Blasis’legacy”. Lovely, but totally untrue, as a number of independent scholars  have recently proved.

But why are these voices are seldom heard? Music history and musicology in general is a constant battlefield in which new readings contradict existing ones all the time, thus feeding in to a constantly vibrant and lively debate. In the ballet world this does not happen. A flawed cultural “status quo” seems to be what is wanted by the majority of those responsible for ballet culture, probably for fear of seeing old, moth-ball scented beliefs crumble with dire consequences for a well-protected, cocooned establishment. Do not be fooled… react. Question whatever you are told and do some research on your own ( do, in other words, what those writers and scholars do not seem to have time or the will to do). You will be surprised of what you can find even without having to gain access to the most famous and somewhat impenetrable ballet archives of the world. Let’s the revolution begin…

Posted by Giannandrea at November 4, 2004 08:42 AM