Queering Ballet

 #QueertheBallet
Adriana Pierce, choreographer
Bridge Street Theatre, Catskill, New York
February 25, 2021
Streaming on Youtube, February 25-March 11

-- By Tom Phillips 

The art form of ballet is overdue for a queering – i.e. expanding its repertoire of meaning beyond the traditional binary codes of gender and sex.  Adriana Pierce, an alumna of George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet and Miami City Ballet, went into a recent residency with a clear goal in mind: “to create a duet for two women which honors their movement styles, physique, emotionality, and connection in a way that is not harnessed by ballet’s traditional technical ideals.  I also feel it’s imperative that audiences get to see genuine and thoughtful queer stories and relationships.”  By the end of the residency she was well begun, maybe halfway done.  But next comes the hard part. 

 L. to R. Sierra Armstrong, Remy Young 

 

Dirty Dancing

"One. One & One"
Vertigo Dance Company 
Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York
March 6, 2019
-- By Tom Phillips 

Except for a neat row of dirt at the front of the stage, the opening section of “One. One & One” by Israel’s Vertigo Dance Company looks much like the closing elegy of George Balanchine’s “Serenade.” It’s a solemn communal idyll, to sonorous cellos in a minor key, with a motif of dancers leaning on each other for balance and support. They seem to be a close-knit group, working out complex tasks together –- as when three men braid the hair of a woman while she uses her long tresses to pull them across the stage.

The communal spirit stays as more dirt is spread in the rectangular, closed space. But the mood changes suddenly with the sound of a cannonade -- big guns, firing in the distance. After that, the dirt and the dancers start to fly, and the communal idyll is transformed into what looks like an army boot camp, whipping troops into combat readiness. The motif here is “bring it on,” with dancers lining up on each side of the stage and charging at their opposite numbers, trying to breach their defenses. Every charge is repelled!

So much for “Serenade.”  This looks more like socialist realism, the kind of state-sponsored art that Balanchine came to America  to get away from. And if it reminds you of the modern history of Israel, as seen by the State of Israel, that’s just what it looked like to me.

Serenade at Eighty

-- By Tom Phillips

Eighty years ago this week, a new art form was brought forth on this continent.   On June 10, 1934, George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein’s fledgling School of American Ballet performed the first ballet choreographed on and for American dancers – Balanchine’s Serenade.  It was the beginning of a revolution, but not the kind that anyone expected.  

  

When Balanchine arrived in America in 1933, a refugee from imperial Russia, no one was clamoring for a new classical ballet with music by Tchaikovsky.  These were the depths of the Great Depression, the heyday of John Steinbeck in America, and Socialist Realism in Russia.  The arts were expected to reflect the social and political struggles of humanity.  Modern dance seemed much closer to the spirit of the time.  And the main figure in modern dance was Martha Graham, whose whole career had been a revolt against the ballet tradition.

Serenade starts with a tableau that could have been created by Graham.  Seventeen girls stand in blue light, their feet straight ahead.  One arm is raised, the hand flexed toward the vertical. Balanchine reportedly told them they were “blocking the moonlight.” The position is un-balletic, the expression anti-romantic; but suddenly it begins to transform.  The wrist curves and circles overhead, then diagonally across the center line of the body, followed by the gaze; the arms form a ballet position at the hips. Then, without warning or preparation, seventeen pairs of feet suddenly turn out from parallel to first position. The floor squeaks in protest. The movement is abrupt, almost violent -- not an impulse from within, but a discipline imposed from outside. Graham herself said the first time she saw it, tears sprang to her eyes. “It was simplicity itself,” she said, “but the simplicity of a very great master.”

Next the heads lift, the arms rise and spread out, and the torso lifts as the right foot points to the side.  The dancers breathe and expand, no longer blocking the moonlight, but open to the world in front of them.  The sequence could end here, but it doesn’t. Balanchine – who talked of “forcing” beauty out of human material — closes the feet, crossing the ankles to the fifth position. The arms again rise and spread, but this time the bodies reach beyond the vertical, looking to the sky. “Blocking the moonlight” has been transformed, step by step, into ballet, into an opening toward the heavens.  Balanchine’s young ballerinas have yet to move from their places, or even bend their knees, but they have already foreshadowed the drama to come: the transcendence of modernism by classicism.

The David H. Koch Nutcracker

-- by Tom Phillips



Battle scene from Balanchine's Nutcracker

When New York City Ballet and New York City Opera announced in 2008 that David H. Koch would donate 100 million dollars to renovate the New York State Theater, the opera called it a “transformative gift.” The ballet said it would “ensure the integrity of George Balanchine’s vision for the theater ..for decades to come.”  Three years later the renovation is complete.  But the opera company has left the building, now called the David H. Koch Theater, and Balanchine’s vision is in the dumpster.  Lincoln Center, conceived as a place where high culture would be available to the masses, is becoming just another exclusive haunt for the One Percent.