Where Were You Sitting?

Piffle Pieces: Camargo in D.C.,"Giselle" in Phoenix, and dance criticism in America

The National Gallery has moved Camargo again. They are renovating the 18th century French rooms, and Nicolas Lancret's beautiful little painting, La Camargo Dancing, has been moved down to the back corner of the farthest room on the ground floor. I take my students there to see her every autumn, when we study early 18th century French ballet history, and it took us some time to find her. Pre-Revolutionary French painters such as Lancret and Fragonard are out of fashion now (too pretty, too pastel), but, out of fashion or not, La Camargo is still there, dancing at a party, the beautiful ankles daringly exposed, the feet, in their heeled shoes, twinkling. Walking through the Gallery, I couldn't help but notice how many paintings there might be considered unfashionable if one considered only their subject matter: paintings of minor Greek or Roman myths, of dukes and knights and dragons, of pampered women and children and their little dogs. Not what one would see at the mall or on TV, but there they are, masterpieces of the past, looking the viewer square in the eye, as if they were important. Not once did the students (aged 16 to 18) grouse that they were having to look at old paintings, or ask where was something new and now that spoke to Them. Not once did they even seem momentarily bored. Instead, they were genuinely interested — beguiled, as millions of people have been before them, to see the humanity shining from those 500-year-old eyes, or how a particular painter was fascinated with light, and bent it to his will.

Breaking News!

The Royal Opera announced Friday that Sir Elton John will be named Resident Composer immediately, if not sooner. Spokesman Reginald Foggybrane broke the news, which stunned the opera world and caused other Rocker Knights to spit nails.

"When the Ballet appointed Wayne McGregor as Resident Choreographer, well, that was a real wake up call for us," Foggybrane explained. "We could not be left behind. We don't want to lose out on the youth movement that's desperate to see the lyric arts, if only they could relate to them.”

What We See is What We See

by Alexandra Tomalonis
copyright © 2004 by Alexandra Tomalonis

Judged by the Washington ballet audience’s response to last week’s visit of the New York City Ballet, the one act ballet isn’t dead yet. Nor is it necessary to do pop ballet to sell out the house; I saw only a handful of empty seats in the orchestra back. After a season where several companies played to less than full houses and tickets were released to the half-price booths to fill seats, this must have been welcome news to the Kennedy Center and ballet lovers here alike. And what a nice 100th birthday present: Balanchine sells!

The Right Giants

Lincoln Center Festival
Ashton Celebration
July 6-17, 2004

by Alexandra Tomalonis
copyright © 2004 by Alexandra Tomalonis

When Sir Frederick Ashton died in 1988, one obituary quoted him as having said during one of his frequent bouts of insecurity—this time about the Bolshoi, whose broad, expansive scale he admired, though it went against his own instincts of lyricism and a soft classical perfection—"But what if we're the right pygmies, and they're the wrong giants?" Despite his qualms, Ashton is certainly one of ballet's giants; with George Balanchine (with whom he shares a birth year and whose works we've been celebrating this season), Ashton is one of the two great classical choreographers of the 20th century.

From 1949 until the late 1970s, when the Royal Ballet's regular visits to New York, and its cross-country tours in America, stopped, he was one of the most beloved as well as one of the most admired here. Again, with Balanchine, Ashton helped form America's eye and taste for neoclassical ballet.  But the late 1970s is a long time ago now, and Ashton's work is barely known to many younger balletgoers. Although Joffrey Ballet has its own Ashton tradition, dating to Ashton's lifetime, and American Ballet Theatre has dipped its toe irregularly into Ashtonian waters, Ashton's ballets are just beginning to enter American repertories. After ABT's triumph with "La Fille Mal Gardee" a few seasons ago, and the televised production of its staging of "The Dream," one can hope that this 100th birthday summer is the beginning of an Ashton rediscovery, and that company directors will start looking for Ashton works to add to their repertories. If this happens, Lincoln Center may well be able to take a large share of the credit by getting audiences and dancers excited about Ashton again.

Bournonville's Next Steps

Commentary
Bournonville's Next Steps
by Alexandra Tomalonis
copyright © 2004 by Alexandra  Tomalonis

In June of 2005, the Royal Danish Ballet will celebrate Bournonville’s 200th birthday with a Bournonville Festival, its third, at which it will present the surviving ballets. It will be a festive time, but also a sober one. This may be the last chance to make the case for Bournonville. There are no credible opportunities for another Festival for years to come. Will the Danish audience, and the Danish dancers, want to keep him around for another century?

Starting Over

Suzanne Farrell Ballet
Eisenhower Theater
John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
December 2-7, 2003

by Alexandra Tomalonis
copyright © 2003 by Alexandra Tomalonis

Watching the Suzanne Farrell Ballet this past week, I kept thinking that what Farrell is doing goes beyond starting a ballet company from scratch. She's reminding us of why Balanchine's New York City Ballet was so treasured and so important. I don't mean to say that she's doing this deliberately. It's more likely she's merely trying to produce dance as though the aesthetic atmosphere Balanchine built were still in place.  For her, it clearly is. But the rest of us have lived through two decades during which not only his ballets, but also many of Balanchine's precepts, have become misunderstood or distorted. "Just dance it, dear," for example, once an instruction to resist layering artificial acting onto movement whose meaning was built in, now seems to mean, "just do the steps; nothing else matters," and is applied religiously to ballets that, indeed, contain nothing but steps. Everything is so overhyped that Balanchine's, and Farrell's, modest way of simply doing and letting the rest of the world figure out what they're doing—or not—can seem naive. It's hard enough to be heard when you're whispering. It's impossible when everyone around you is screaming.