Recently, at a dinner party, I was asked if I liked ballet. My answer was that there were a good number of works I would love to see staged: Le Sacre du Printemps, Debussy's Jeux, John Alden Carpenter's Skyscrapers, Constant Lambert's Horoscope, and many more. This was somehow taken to mean that I was not a dance enthusiast. I take that I would be if I were interested in seeing a dance done to Mendelssohn's violin concerto, which was not written for the ballet. Why are choreographers and Dance enthusiasts uninterested in seeing works staged that were written by great composers and mean to be danced to. Why do they look at you scornfully if you so much as mention Delibes's Sylvia? I tried to explain, but to no avail, that people who pay good money to see Roussel's Bacchus et Ariane in concert might well pay good money and in good numbers to see it as it was man to be seen: danced. Can anyone explain this to me?
Speaking as a composer who also studied modern dance for a few years (although no ballet, which to me has always seemed more mannered than natrual), I think your question is a good one: Indeed, why not stage compositions that were written for the dance? Many great ones exist that go often unperformed, it's true.
ReplyDeleteOne thing I can say: In my experience, dancers are among the least verbally articulate of those in the arts. LOL (They're kinesthetic rather than verbal people, for the most part.) Dance criticism isn't much better, to be honest. After all, the dance critic is supposed to evaluate, educate, and "translate" a non-verbal artform into a verbal artform. (As are music critics.) Sometimes poets do better than critics at this; the one dance critic who still stands above most others was Edwin Denby, who also an adventurous poet. (There's a book available that includes both his poems and the best of his dance criticism.)
I love dance concerts. It's about letting the impressions wash over you. It's sensual rather than intellectual, or ought to be. If there's a narrative, it's mostly to hang some set-pieces on a frame so that there's some kind of structure. When I saw Bill T. Jones' "Still/Here," it really moved me: not because there was any literal acting-out in the dance of the theme of the piece, but because the mood was sustained by the dancers and music throughout. I felt the same way the last Mark Morris concert I saw, although it was many shorter pieces rather than one big one. When I was living in Ann Arbor, I always saw Martha Graham when she came through, and loved it every time. Ditto Merce Cunningham, which is about as abstract as dance ever gets: pure movement, no narrative, the music not even directly connected to the dance.
(Although I wish they'd retire "The Nutcracker" for ten Christmases, so that when we all saw it again, it would be fresh and new, and we could enjoy it again for its many great qualities. As it is, it's become a parody of itself.)
Critics as well as audiences tend to be literal-minded rather than metaphoric. Poetry suffers from this too. (And, to be honest, many poets these days tend to be a bit too literal-minded as well.)
But one other thing I've observed from studying dance, from dancing in class, and from going to concerts: In my experiences, dancers are always looking for fresh inspirational sources. And because music is so tied to the history of dance, a lot of dancers look to music for inspiration. Some do look to other artforms, but music always tops the list. Always creating new works to be danced means always looking for new pieces to dance to. And frankly, composers don't write new dance pieces often enough; or maybe it's that dancers can't afford to commission them often enough.
Balanchine and his generation of choreographers radically changed dance's relationship to music by using a lot of "non-dance" music to create dances to. A lot of that was because they were making new dances faster than they could acquire new music. But it also came from looking to non-dance music for inspiration, including pop music that had never really been used for ballet before.
I think some of the snobbery that you ran into at that dinner party is derived from the post-Balanchine seeking outside the dance world for music trope. I'm sympathetic to this, even as I agree with you that I'd loved to see some of the classics staged, such as "Rite of Spring," etc.
Composers often share dancers' attitude that a new piece is always more interesting—to them, if not to the audience—than staging an existing piece, even if it's a classic. A balance has to be found in such performances between what the audience likes and is used to, and what the performers want to do. In fact, it's the performers' job to educate the audience a bit, each time out, to stretch them a little, to educate them as to what might be really enjoyable that they'd never heard of before. of course, this is what good critics also do. (I think of Denby again; and our own Terry Teachout, who's very good at this.)
Another issue is money: Music is expensive for dancers to use. A live orchestra is not possible except for the most well-funded troupes. Commissioning new works for the dance is similarly prohibitive. The Merce Cunningham Dancers were the exception, always taking their composer/performers with them on tour. most companies use recorded music.
But why indeed cannot more orchestras and dance groups collaborate, and share the costs. Some of it is that tendency towards wanting to always do something new. But in ballet, which is typically fairly conservative relative to other dance genres, it might also be that some of those grand works from the past are just too huge to put on anymore. You need a lot of dance extras, a lot of stage sets, etc. It adds up. I've never felt that economic limitations should dictate things, but sometimes creative solutions can be found on low budgets. So the truth is, it also has a lot to do with the dancers' attitudes, again.
One of the things I most enjoyed about the dance classes I had with Ellen Moore was that when she wanted us to do a dance improv class, we did it in silence. I loved hearing the ambient noises through the open windows, and the sounds the dancers themselves were making. Sometimes it felt like a sublime, relaxed, extended performance of John Cage's 4'33".
The best line in the Trillin piece was: "Still, this country is way past the days when cultural levels were geographically based." That's so true, especially now with all the new media avenues of encountering the arts. I love dance DVDs almost as much as I love music concert DVDs by favorite artists. Maybe the new media will restore the balance that you are questioning, in its absence.