Angelsapollo’sa history of ballet

jennifer homans

apollo

’s ang

elsjen

nifer h

om

ans

Angelsapollo’sa history of ballet

jennifer homans

Contentstable of

table of

france and the classical origins of ballet

light from the east: russian worlds of art

chapter 1 Kings of Dance 3

chapter 2 The Enlightenment and the Story of Ballet 49

chapter 3 The French Revolution in Ballet 98

chapter 4 The Rise of the Ballerina 135

chapter 5 Scandinavain Orthodoxy: The Danish Style 176

chapter 6 Italian Hersey: Pantomime, Virtuosity, and Italian Ballet 205

chapter 7 Tzars of Dance: Imperial Russian Classicism 245

chapter 8 East Goes West: Russian Modernism and Ballets Russes 290

chapter 9 Left Behind? Communist Ballet from Stalin to Brezhnev 341

chapter 10 Alone in Europe: The British Moment 396

chapter 11 The American Century I: Russian Beginnings 448

chapter 12 The American Century II: The New York Scene 470

III

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iBookfrance and the classical origins of ballet

We are all accustomed to the ballet of today. The

tutus, the pointe shoes, and the timeless stories.

But where did all this come from? France was

a poineer in classical ballet as we know it today.

What started as entertainment for kings and

royalty turned into what we see today.

Ballerinathe rise of thechapter 4

She is birdlike, quaint, and al-most cloyingly sweet, and if there is a thought in her head, it is lost in the mists of her vaporous ethereality. She is the pink-tights-and-toe-shoes ballerina of girlish dreams-and feminist nighhtmares. Yet Marie Taglioni was one of the most important and influential ballerinas who ever lived. She galvanized a generation and drew some of Europe’s best literary minds to dance; she was an international celebrity celebrity — ballet’s first — and set the pattern for Margot Fonteyn, Melissa Hayden, Galina Ulanova, and others to follow.

e feel we know Marie Taglioni. We know her from prints

of La Sylphide, the Parisian ballet that made her famous in 1832:

she is awispy, winged creature, a confection of white tulle and

rose perched delicately on toe, torso tilted slightly forward

as if she were listening to a faint song.

More than that, she radically changed the art: La Sylphide laid the way for the toe-shoes-and-tutus ballet we know today.

If Taglioni’s dainty, candy-coated image seems to undercut her artistic significance there are reasons. First, the image cannot tell us how she moved: it is static and incomplete, an inaccurate representation of her talents. But most importantly, it is anachro-nistic: what Taglioni looks like to us now is not what she looked like to audiences in the 1830s. They saw something quite different. To understand why she became

Marie Taglioni was also known for shortening her skirt in the performance La Sylphide, which was considered highly scan-dalous at the time. dreamsof poets taken seriously.”

théophile gautier“Ballets are the

W

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When the French king Henri II wedded the Florentine Cath-erine de Medici in 1533, French and Italian culture came into close and formal alliance, and it is here that the history of ballet begins. The French court had long reveled in tournaments, jousting, and masquerades,but even these impressive and lavish entertainments fell short of those traditionally mounted by the princes and nobility of Milan,

Venice, and Florence: flaming torch dances, elaborate horse ballets with hundreds of mounted cavaliers arranged in symbolic formations, and masked inter-ludes with heroic, allegorical, and exotic themes.

The ballet master Guglielmo Ebreo, writing in Milan in 1463, for example, described festivities that included fireworks, tightrope walkers, conjurers, and ban-quets with up to twenty courses served on solid gold platters with peacocks wandering on the tables. On another occasion, in 1490, Leonardo da Vinci helped to stage Festa de paradiso in Milan, featuring the Seven Planets along with Mercury, the three Graces, the seven Virtues, nymphs, and the god Apollo. The Italians also performed simple bur elegant social dances known as balli and balletti, which consisted of graceful, rhythmic walking steps danced at formal balls and ceremonies, or on occasion stylized pantomime performances: the French called them ballets.

top This painting by Laumosnier depicts a meeting between Louis XIV and Philippe IV in 1659: two principals pose in mirror image with Louis’s courtiers gathered like a corps de ballet. bottom Catherine de Mediciright La Libera-zione di Tirreno

4

Catherine (who was only fourteen when she married) dominated the French court for many years after Henri’s death in 1559, bring-ing her Italianate taste to bear on French courtiers — and kings. Her sons, the French kings Charles IX and Henri III, carried the tradi-tion forward: they admired the floats, chariots, and parades of allegorical performances they saw in Milan and Naples, and shared their mother’s keen interest in ceremonial and theatrical events. In their hands, even strictly Catholic processionals could morph into colorful masquer-ades, and both monarchs were known to promenade through the streets at night dressed en travesti, adorned with gold and silver veils and Venetian masks, accompa-nied by courtiers in similar attire.

Chivalric themes enacted with dancing, singing, and demonstra-detions of equestrian skill made for impressive theatrical collages, such as the joust held at Fontaine-bleau in 1564, which included a full-scale reenactment of a castle siege and battles between demons, giants, and dwarfs on behalf of six beautiful nymphs in captivity.

These festivities, so seemingly gay in their extravagances, were not mere frivolous diversions. Sixteenth-century France was be-set with intractable and savage civil and religious conflicts: the French kings, drawing on a deep tradition

A position of the body, in profile, supported on one leg, which can be straight or demi-plié, with the other leg extended behind and

at right angles to it, and the arms held in various harmonious positions.

Arabesque[a-ra-BESK]

5

6

God”“Dancers are the athletes of

albert einstein

7

In the early twentieth century all of this changed with the arrival of the Russians, the tsar’s Imperial dancers. Some came with Diaghilev; others followed in the wake of the First World War and the Russian Revolution. Diaghilev booked his company into the Metropoli-tan Opera House, but most, including the renowned ballerina Anna Pavlova, toured the vaudeville circuit. By then, vaudeville was a tightly organized syndicate of theaters and booking agents, run our of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, and like her French and Italian predecessors, “Pavlova the Incomparable” appeared alongside minstrel shows, baseball-playing elephants, and other popular acts. If the theatrical fare tended toward the light, however, Pavlova and her audiences had no doubt about the seriousness of her art. Her natural charisma and ardent commitment left a powerful impression on an entire generation of American and European performers. “She half hypnotized audiences, partaking almost of the nature of a divinity,” the choreographer Agnes de Mille later recalled, “my life was wholly altered by her.” De Mille was not alone: when Pavlova died in 1931 scores of dreamy American girls reportedly fell spontaneously into a state of hysteria.

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Pavlova was the most famous but there were dozens of Russians like her: they toured America in various Ballets Russes spin-off troupes between the wars (some carried on into the 1960s), in-troducing—and converting—sev-eral generations of audiences to classical dance. The work could be grueling. One tour of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in 1934-35 took the dancers to ninety cities and towns in just six months: the artists covered some twenty thousand miles, with countless one-night stands and stops at “Voolvorts,” where the dancers could order ham and eggs and stock up on toiletries and extra costume jewelry before getting back on the road. Nonetheless, like Pavlova, these performers were Imperial subjects and saw themselves as standard-bearers for

an aristocratic art: they may have dined at “Voolvorts,” but they presented themselves in furs and silk stockings, and they never lost sight of the sanctity of their art. “They bound together in com-mon need like Blitz victims,” de Mille would later note, “they are bound together by training and heritage. They are doing the most difficult and interesting work in the theater.”

Four years later Mikhail Barysh-nikov followed. Born in Riga, Latvia, in 1948, Baryshnikov owed his beginnings in ballet to his mother. She was poorly educated

baryshnikovmikhail

Born in Riga, Latvia, in 1948, Mikhail Baryshnikov owed his beginnings in ballet to his mother. She was poorly educated but adored ballet; she took him to performances and enrolled him in the prestigious Riga School of Choreography, the city’s state ballet academy, where he received excellent training. When he was twelve, however, tragedy struck: one afternoon his mother left him with his grandmother and committed suicide. In 1964, when he was just sixteen, Baryshnikov traveled to Leningrad with the Latvian National Opera Ballet and successfully auditioned for the Vaganova School. He was taken in by the teacher Alexander Pushkin, who had also kept and trained Nureyev. Pushkin became a mentor and surrogate father. Baryshnikov rose rapidly: he joined the Kirov in 1967 and became the scar of the company’s 1970 tour to the West.

lifeDancing is my obsession. My

mikhail baryshnikov

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Russianbeginnings

It is hardly surprising, then, that in America ballet was generally regarded as a foreign art, a fact that constantly dismayed visit-ing Europeans for whom it was a second cultural skin. When Paul Taglioni (Marie’s brother) ar-rived from Berlin with his wife to perform La Sytphide in 1839, for example, he found to his surprise that the women of the corps de bal-let—local gals hired on the spot for the occasion—were poorly trained and thought nothing of loung-ing indecorously onstage between steps and dances. Forty years later, not much had changed: one

critic described the dancers in a production he had seen as “an awkward squad of overgrown girls, with gauze-garnished limbs and dissipated-looking blond wigs.” “In the old country,” an Italian ballet master bitterly lamented, “the ballet is everything; in this, it is... nothing.”

Not nothing, just part of the popular culture mix. Ballet came to America through vaudeville, variety shows, musicals, and (later) film, through kick lines, gymnastic routines, and spec-tacles of beautiful girls. This was

nothing unusual: until the late nineteenth century, theater and opera performances typically mixed and matched Mozart with local popular songs, Shakespeare with acrobatic acts and interludes. Ballet was no different. Thus in 1866, to take just one early ex-ample, the Kiralfy brothers (lmre and Bolossy, from Pesch, Hun-gary) produced a bloated but ex-traordinarily successful theatrical production packed with spectacu-lar dances entitled The Black Crook at New York’s Niblo’s Garden Theater. It featured a company of more than seventy ballet dancers

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from Europe, and ran for so long (on and off for some thirty years) that many of them never went back. The shows star, a ballerina trained in Milan at La Scala, later opened a dance school in New York, and others moved on to theater and vaudeville.

Indeed, by the late nineteenth century, Italian dancers in par-ticular were much in demand: reared on Manzotti’s brazenly populist pageants, their technical bravura and sensational tricks were enthusiasticallywelcomed by American audiences who saw ballet as little more than a fun entertainment. After The Black Crook the Kiralfy brothers went on to produce Excelsior—Manzocti’s extravaganza and a predecessor to Ziegfeld’s Follies, the Rockettes, and Busby Berkeley.

Anna Pavlova was the illegitimate daughter of a laundry-woman. Her father was probably a young Jewish soldier and businessman. When she saw The Sleeping Beauty performed, Anna Pavlova decided to become a dancer, and entered the Imperial Ballet School at ten. Although the young Pavlova was considered frail and not exactly beautiful, she was nevertheless very hard working. She worked very tirelessly, and on graduation began to perform at the Maryinsky Theatre, debuting on September 19, 1899.

eliteThere is no dilettantism in the professional ball player, pianist, or violinist ... is a word to be fought for.

lincoln kirstein

merrill ashley, a dancer for Balanchine, demonstrates tondus in three directions.

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Pointeshoe

history of the

1832

1895

1990the dancer:Marie Taglioni often gets the credit and the blame for being the first to dance on pointe. But no one really knows for sure. It is established that in 1832 Marie Taglioni danced in the full length La Sylphide on pointe.

the shoe:Taglioni wore soft satin slippers that fit like kid

gloves. They had a leather sole and some darning on

the sides and under, not on, the tip. That’s all. It must have been a lot like

standing barefoot. The blocked pointe shoe with a stiff sole as we know it

today did not evolve until much later.

the dancer:The Italian school pushed technique to the limit in order to achieve dazzling virtuosic feats. They also had better shoes. Pierina Legnani was the first to do thirty-two fouettés on pointe and she caused a huge sensation. The Italian ballerinas were dancing in Italian-made shoes that were actually quite soft, harder than Taglioni’s but nothing like today’s shoes.

the choreography:Improvements to pointe shoes empowered dancers to do more on pointe, and thus expanded the ballerina’s vocabulary and the art as a whole. Petipa, as a choreographer, made great use of this new “equip-ment” for the feet. He made multiple pirouettes on pointe, sustained balances and promenades and hops on pointe all obligatory for the ballerina. Petipa’s hallmark Grand Pas requires the ballerina to perform all of the above if not more.

Todaythe shoe: Although pointe shoes have evolved in that they have become harder and boxier, their basic construc-tion materials are still antiquated: Leather, burlap, paper, glue and nails. They provide su-perior suport and alow the dancer to perform the skills of yesterday and the revolutionary tasks of today.

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2

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1 ribbonsSewn on by the dancer themselves, the ribbons aid in keeping the shoe on while contstantly changing between en pointe and flat foot.

2 soleThe sole of a pointe shoe is usually made of natural leather and provide grip when the dancer is off pointe.

3 shankAvailable in varrying stiffness and lengths, allows the dancer to customize the amount of support they recieve.

4 toeThe toe is the platform on which the dancer bal-ances. It also comes in varrying sizes based on the dancer’s preference.

5 toe boxThe toe box consists of several layers of sacking and textile fabrics glued tgether.

6 vampThe vamp length is an element used in fitting shoes to the dancer. The longer the vamp, the more support.

apollo

’s ang

elsjen

nifer h

om

ans

For more than four hundred years, the art of

ballet has stood at the center of western civiliza-

tion. Its traditions serve as a record of our past.

Lavishly illustrated and beautifully told, Apollo’s

Angels–the first cultural history of ballet ever

written–is a groundbreaking work. Jennifer

Homans, a historian, critic, and former profes-

sions ballerina, wields a knowledge of dance

born of dedicated practice. Her admiration and

love for the ballet, as Entertainment Weekly

notes, bring “a dancer’s grace and sure-footed

agility to the page.”