On Dance
DISCH, THOMAS M.
On Dance BUT IS IT ART? By Thomas M. Disch Arts That Cater to the pleasure principle are often given short shrift by critics. Carpets, floral arrangements and Liberty print fabrics may demand...
...Borromeo tells Palestrina he must write the greatest Mass of all time to prevent the Council of Trent from reinstating the Gregorian chant as the only music in Christendom...
...An infectious rhythm can set any foot tapping, and which of us, once in motion, doesn't believe him- or herself to be the active agent rather than the passive reflex...
...The sets and music are usually created by well-credentialed professionals...
...We become like conductors at the podium, convinced the music comes from our batons...
...A pair of giant angels flank the composer's studio, unseen by him but testimony to the audience that God's own wind is filling his sails...
...Why was he tortured when he fulfilled his commission...
...Still, it has long stretches of pure glory, especially the two grotesque parodies of the Rose Adagio from Tchaikovsky's The Sleeping Beauty, where the ballerina tests four claimants to her hand...
...The Royal Opera accompanied the Royal Ballet to the Lincoln Center Festival, and I can't resist commenting on its performance of Hans Pfitzner's "musical legend in three acts," Palestrina...
...In MacMillan's version that sequence resembled an alien abduction...
...No explanation is offered...
...Had he forgotten he'd written the Mass, wiped out by the sheer rapture...
...May it also find choreographers on a par with MacMillan and even (grudgingly) Ashton...
...Not really...
...Ballet is, of course, dance at its most authenticated...
...3) They maintain a double standard, politely applauding the fairy tales and froufrou when they are on offer, and reserving felt praise for the more demonstrably ambitious choreographers— George Balanchine,TwylaTharp, Jerome Robbins, Kenneth MacMillan—whose ballets engage the mind...
...Palestrina, amid funereal candles, has a last ironic grumble and the curtain falls...
...His is a new era that will give birth to Pfitzner's own tradition, now waning itself, and it is clear that the opera is as muchaboutPfitzner as its namesake...
...The sermons, delivered either by orto the composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, concern his sense of belatedness as a composer in the waning polyphonic tradition...
...Aficionados deal with this problem in three ways...
...Prince is a fairy tale after the manner of Tchaikovsky's Big Three...
...Not surprisingly, the muse does descend, first as a convocation of "nine dead masters of the art of music," then as Palestrina's deceased wife Lucrezia, who is represented in the Royal's production by a kind of naked Eve as she might appear in a natural history museum diorama...
...All's well...
...He succeeds in the first ambition many times over...
...Among contemporary choreographers the late MacMillan has always seemed to me the most committed to full-scale narrative ballet...
...Beyond that, MacMillan's recension of Benjamin Britten's one major ballet score, The Prince of the Pagodas (first staged by John Cranko in 1957), isamajor accomplishment, on a par with his more naturalistic Romeo and Juliet, Manon and Meyerling...
...Rarely seen outside Germany, the opera offers a pair of lengthy, solemn sermons that sandwich a verismo recreation of ecclesiastical politics at the Council of Trent in 1563, with only the most exiguous plot connection between them...
...Nevertheless, those who had applauded his achievements in his heyday—Mann, Bruno Walter and many others—remained loyal to him after World War II, and to his accomplishment in Palestiina in particular, accounting it the last and noblest gasp of German Classicism...
...in the second he is thwarted by an ill-conceived scenario, a combination of King Lear and Swan Lake that never quite achieves mythopoeic lift-off...
...Like Pound he was a master of the art he practiced, as well as a mad self-mythologizer...
...2) They adopt a formalist esthetic that considers only the dancers' technical skills, an attitude that diminishes the achievement of all except those abstract works without an "argument" that can be set down in program notes...
...Any nine-year-old mature enough to sit still for an hour at a stretch might feel as full an appreciation of Coppélla or Prokofiev's Cinderella (performed in the season j ust past by both the Royal Ballet and ABT) as most adults in the audience...
...The woman is a fair depiction of what I usually feel at the ballet, a benign euphoria based on kinesthetic identification with the ideal bodies in motion before me...
...1) They ignore it, or don't perceive it to be a problem...
...A case in point is the American Ballet Theater's recentproduction of Léo Delibes' Coppèlla...
...Indeed, theirs may be a keener pleasure, for those grown-ups who can't regress easily to a suitably simple frame of mind are missing half the fun...
...But Parsifal it's not...
...No, he agreed to be tortured, because Pfitzner believes in the myth of tormented and ill-used genius—his own in particular...
...Then there are Coppella's traditional glories, the formal pas de deux in Acts I and III, and, in Act II, the show-stopping impersonation by the ballerina, here Paloma Herrera, of the title-role mechanical doll...
...This purpose is twofold: to do the traditional thing as it should be done, with grand marmer pas de deux and pas de however many, and to create a memorable drama...
...The object of their dismay is a matronly woman sitting between them in the front row of the theater who has closed her eyes and lifted her arms in rapturous emulation of the foregrounded ballerina...
...In the '20s and '30s, though he did his damnedest to toady up to the Nazis, denouncing his most ardent advocate, Thomas Mann, and precipitating Mann's flight from Germany, Pfitzner was rejected (Hitler thought him a Jew...
...Of the four offerings on the Royal Ballet's "Ravel Mixed Program," MacMillan's La Fin du Jour, a stylish evocation of Le Jazz Anglais using Ravel's Piano Concert in G, clearly outclassed Frederick Ashton's fusty Daphnis and Chloe and fustier La Valse...
...Not that his more abstract efforts are less than ravishing...
...If it is art, it is surely the most democratic of all forms...
...William Trevitt, as the King of Vanity, came across as a rather cruel caricature of Ashton's most fluttering style, while the Fool, danced by Tetsuya Kumakawa, was a Nijinski of athleticism...
...Borromeo returns to apologize and abase himself at Palestrina's feet...
...Palestrina declares he would obey, but his muse can't be coerced...
...Such pleasure notwithstanding, the classic repertory often comes across as, well, innocuous...
...Along with this authenticity comes much humdrum and frequently inexplicable mime, long stretches of balleticized folk dancing, and a recital number performed by children from the School of American Ballet and Stamford City Ballet (a tradition blessedly unique to dance...
...Back to Palestrina, who, bleeding and bandaged after his torture, is waiting for the reviews to come in on his Mass...
...The story opens as Palestrina, sung in good voice albeit without dramatic flair by the American tenor Thomas Moser, is called upon by Cardinal Carlo Borromeo, the Pope's nephew and a future saint (another American, bass-baritone Alan Held, whose forceful performance lacks nuance...
...We all will dance, with proper musical encouragement...
...The Mass gets written in one sitting...
...Deborah Bull as Epine, the Goneril/Regan daughter, was a black swan to remember, and Darcey Bussell as Rose, the Cordelia daughter, proved her claim to be the Fonteyn of a new era...
...The solos of the suitors, each with characteristic body language, showed the choreographer and dancers at their best...
...The same question can respectfully be asked of the dance...
...The Council conducts its other business after the tableau vivant fashion of a Wagner-era Meistersinger von Nürnburg, with some splendid vocal cameos: Anthony Rolfe Johnson as the dotty Patriarch of Assyria, Robert Tear as the simpleton Bishop of Budoja, and Thomas Allen as a magisterially oleaginous Papal Legate...
...At the center of the work is a black hole of egomania, self-pity and festering resentments...
...FranzJosef Selig, as Pope Pius IV, enters on a red carpet to announce that it is perfection, and to declare Palestrina an immortal who will henceforth lead the choir at the Sistine Chapel...
...Its performers are highly trained...
...But the experience of attending is so sheerly agreeable that those of puritan temperament often react to it like the pair of shocked spectators on the cover of a recent New Yorker...
...May it survive its enforced exile during Covent Garden's restoration and flourish for centuries...
...The Council meeting ends with the calculated slaughter of the servants employed by the faction opposing the Pope...
...Palestrina demurs, the Cardinal commands...
...Otherwise it will become England's ABT, another repertory company with dazzling performers but no guiding vision...
...At the Council of Trent, though, we learn almost in passing that Borromeo has ordered Palestrina tortured until he fulfills his commission...
...Dating from 1870, it is one of the older storybook works and it has now been staged for ABT by Frederic Franklin, based on his memory of the Ninette de Valois version that he danced in 1933...
...The fact is, he was the kind of paranoid sourpuss that gives High Seriousness a bad name, Germany's own Ezra Pound...
...The music may not commend itself as well to easylistening pleasure, but MacMillan apparently believes the work serves his purpose admirably...
...Palestrina would become a selffulfilling prophecy...
...Carpets, floral arrangements and Liberty print fabrics may demand huge prices—but are they Art...
...I am grateful to the Royal Opera for mounting it so well and for bringing it to America, but I can't imagine I will ever see it again, or that I would want to...
...But even this turn, Coppélìa's chief claim to fame, raises the question again: Is it Art...
...The Cardinal exits in a huff...
...Sometimes there is an overlay of thought, but the basic pleasure can be had just as well at the circus or a sporting event: giddy, unthinking delight...
...In ballet years that is equivalent to seeing Medea performed by Euripedes' grand-nephew —it is as authentic as you're going to get...
...More than a few productions of the past ABT season were pitched at the intellectual level of circus slapstick or a Disney cartoon...
...So God bless the Royal Ballet, probably the best dance company in the world today...
...Unless you become as a little child, you cannot enter the kingdom of ballet heaven...
...The tickets are pricey...
Vol. 80 • August 1997 • No. 13
