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The Avant-Garde as Tradition at New York City Ballet

2015; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 8; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/thr.2015.0060

1939-9774

Jay Rogoff,

Cinema and Media Studies

The Avant-Garde as Tradition at New York City Ballet Jay Rogoff (bio) Although ballet became a concert art some 350 years ago, in the court of Louis XIV, the tradition most of us think of as "classic ballet" reaches back only to the late nineteenth century. Classical tradition mostly means the work of Marius Petipa, the Frenchman who transformed Russian dancing as he re-choreographed ballets such as Coppélia and Swan Lake into versions still danced internationally, and created such new spectacles as Don Quixote, La Bayadère, The Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker. Even French Romantic-period ballets like the brooding love tragedy Giselle and the fizzy peasant comedy La Fille Mal Gardée have survived chiefly in choreography Petipa remade decades later for the major Russian companies, the Mariinsky and the Bolshoi. With the signal exception of the Royal Danish Ballet, which still performs Romantic-period works created for it by August Bournonville, balletic tradition around the world celebrates the glory days of late-nineteenth-century Russia. What, then, does tradition mean for the New York City Ballet? Coming to America in 1933, George Balanchine envisioned a world-class company that drew just enough on the imperial Russian tradition to transform it into something new. He had begun making ballet modern in the 1920s, demonstrating his knack for paring narrative to a minimum and creating movement that could plumb a story's psychological and emotional depths without a cumbersome libretto ("There are no mothers-in-law in ballet," he liked to say). Balanchine reinvented classicism by tweaking it, twisting it, contorting it, and stretching it. His dancers bent knees or flexed feet, walked, squatted, knelt, crawled, shuffled, scuttled, and swam, in addition to launching jetés, pirouetting, and bourréeing. He enlarged ballet's vocabulary beyond the strictly classical precision of Petipa's lexicon into a patois savvy and rangy enough to encompass the breadth and complexity of feeling the modern world had made necessary, cannily borrowing from modern dance and jazz. Both the severity of his modernism and those borrowings from high and low modern art served him well in sleek, mongrel America, where he established the School of American Ballet, devised his own brand of training in speed, precision, and efficient expressiveness that grew into Balanchine Technique, and headed a series of companies that eventually, in 1948, became the New York City Ballet. Even when his ballets appeared as resolutely Romantic as Serenade (1934), to Tschaikovsky, or as crisply classical as Symphony in C (1948), to Bizet, they fulfilled his neoclassical vision. In Serenade the swirling motion of the corps took center stage—for his first American work, a democratic ballet—and Symphony in C used no plot at all, the music providing shifting expressions of youthful energy, romantic daring, and athletic exuberance, capped, in the finale, by a pure dance apotheosis, not a vision of death or love, but of a heaven peopled by breathing bodies perfectly enacting an effervescent score. [End Page 432] If even classical Balanchine bucked the nineteenth-century tradition, his more overtly modernist works, especially the many to music by Igor Stravinsky, turned ballet upside down. The question of tradition for the New York City Ballet, therefore, differs from that for any other company: how do you maintain a tradition when that tradition itself is the avantgarde, the twentieth century's most radical choreographic achievement? What kind of future can NYCB shape for itself when that future has little chance of looking as radical and new as its avant-garde past? Peter Martins, who inherited Balanchine's position as Ballet Master in Chief, has the company's Balanchine repertory in sparkling condition, performed by a brilliant assortment of dancers. How to keep alive the company's reputation for daring novelty, however, has proved more challenging; genius like Balanchine's, after all, comes once in a lifetime. One of Martins's strategies has taken the company into the past: new productions of The Sleeping Beauty (1991), Swan Lake (1996; staged for NYCB 1999), and Romeo and Juliet (2007), all with his original choreography, and in spring 2015, his adaptation of La Sylphide, inspired by his own Bournonville training and early...