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 ne of the adult
pleasures of Christmas is the chance to see some ballet. Both my
kids have been in performances of The Nutcracker: the 6-year-old
as a Cossack in a short, light version for elementary schools, the
8-year-old as a soldier in a full-length, full-dress production
by Huntington Ballet Theater, an excellent and very professional
local troupe out here on Long Island.
I love ballet,
though I don't get much opportunity to see it nowadays. In my bachelor
days in London, I had a flat in Bloomsbury, just 20 minutes walk
from Covent Garden (that first word, by the way, is pronounced "cuvn't")
and a short subway ride to Sadlers Wells. I had got
hooked on opera and was going to Covent Garden pretty much weekly
to see the Royal Opera. Then summer arrived, the opera company disappeared
for the season, and the house was taken over by the Royal Ballet.
I kept going from sheer inertia, though I knew nothing about ballet;
and soon I was hooked on that, too.
I find it hard
to explain why. Ballet is an even more absurd and artificial way
to tell a story than opera is. People stand around with their feet
splayed out in a most unnatural fashion, hugging invisible pumpkins
in their arms, bowing and smiling to each other and moving their
lips without making a sound. The stories are mainly the lower, sappier
grade of folk-fairytales. The music is rarely first-rate, though
I will except the Tchaikovsky "big three" from that, and
the Enigma Variations, and one or two others. The humor is
deeply unfunny — I did not realize that La Fille Mal Gardée
was a comedy until I was told so afterwards.
The nearest
I can get to explaining ballet's appeal to me, personally, is that
it is a combination of the beautiful and the raw physical —
a taming of the brutish vigor of the human species, turning
it into something sublime without sucking out its vitality. Of the
physicality of the form there is no doubt — for the punishment
it inflicts on the human body it is very nearly in the same league
as heavyweight boxing. The dance correspondent of the London Daily
Telegraph told me that if you want to strike up a conversation
with a ballerina, an infallible opening move is to enquire about
her latest injury. I once had seats near the very front of the stalls
for a performance of the MacMillan Manon, and noticed that,
as the principals froze in the final position of the last act, the
male lead — it was Anthony Dowell — was panting like a
marathon runner and sweating like a horse. Physical, definitely.
And yet it
is all transmuted into grace, skill, and beauty. Because of the
contrast between the one thing and the other, the transformation
is especially striking with the male dancers. If you come to baseball
for the first time as an adult, you begin by watching the hitters.
Then, when you learn more about the game, you find that the pitchers
are taking over your attention. So with ballet. At first you are
dazzled by the ballerinas, and the male dancers are just props.
The more classical ballet you see, however, the more you understand
what a joint enterprise it is, and how perfectly, in a well-balanced
choreography, the vigor, virtuosity and strength of the men
complements the airy grace of the women. If I recall my own greatest
memories of the ballet, they feature men as much as, if not more
than, women.
Sample: I saw
Fernando Bujones once dancing the warrior in La Bayadère
at Covent Graden. If you want my opinion, La Bayadère
is not much of a ballet, the music uninspired and that business
with the ramp in Act Four conforming pretty precisely to Vladimir
Nabokov's definition of the Russian word poshlust —
overwrought estheticism. Bujones, however lit up this performance
like a night attack over Tora Bora. Here is what he did at one point...
Well, no, he can't actually have done this because it's physically
impossible. This is what he seemed to do: a stunning leap,
a grand jeté, clear from one side of the Covent Garden
stage to the other, landing perfectly and down on one knee with
arms outspread, all in a single flawless motion. Nobody in the house
that night could quite believe what they had seen. There was a moment
of stunned silence in the hall — Did that really happen?
— before the entire audience rose as a body and roared
their appreciation. You could see that Bujones had rehearsed the
thing a hundred times, and got it just the way he wanted no better
than 30; but when it mattered, on stage in front of an audience,
it had come out perfect. As he knelt there taking the applause,
his face was split with an inappropriate (he is supposed to be in
Hell at the time) but utterly irresistible grin of triumph.
Now I bring
out treasured memories: Nina Ananiashvili a couple of seasons ago,
doing Swan Lake at Lincoln Center. (I am a fool for that
ballet. I can judge the quality of a Swan Lake by the point
at which I start to cry. End of the fourth act — not bad. Middle
of the fourth — a good one. Third act — hey.) Alessandro
Ferri dancing Juliet with the Royal, before she defected —
that was how we Londoners thought of it — to American Ballet
Theater. Bryony Brind in some strange, oddly enchanting modern piece
to that same composer's music — the first time I ever saw any
point to Prokofiev. (And the only time I ever wrote a fan letter
to a stage performer. Bryony sent back a signed photograph and a
handwritten note, bless her. She has since made a bundle of money
from ballet-instruction videos. Beautiful, gifted and smart.)
I saw Nureyev himself onstage once. He was far past his prime and
couldn't do much; it was just a courtesy appearance with some young
Japanese troupe for which he had agreed to act as patron. But this
was Nureyev, and we applauded him for being who he was, and
for having done what he had done — a perfectly legitimate reason
for applause, far as I'm concerned.
You can even
make decent movies of, and about, ballet, a thing that, for reasons
I don't understand, doesn't work for opera. Remember Baryshnikov
with Anne Bancroft and Shirley MacLaine in The Turning Point,
and again with Gregory Hines in White Nights. Then there
was that late-1940s Moira Shearer classic The Red Shoes,
a great favorite of my mother's. The recent Billy Elliot
was not bad, if you ignored the ingredient of homosexual propaganda
that seems to be compulsory in British movies nowadays — some
edict from the European Union, no doubt.
And in times
like these, over and beyond the esthetic pleasures of ballet, I
feel a great pride in it, as having come from us, from our civilization.
Who but Western man has brought so much exquisite beauty out of
nothingness? This is ours, this is us, this surpasses
anything created elsewhere by a hundred, a thousand orders of magnitude.
Stand up for your civilization, your culture: Go see a ballet next
chance you get. Hey hey, ho ho, Western civ's the way to go!
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