My Old Friend Ballet
By Emmaly Wiederholt
In my heart of hearts I am a ballet dancer. Since I was five years old I have not gone longer than a month without finding myself in ballet class. It is my first and deepest love in the realm of dance, and its physical and psychological demands excite me in a way I’ve never experienced otherwise.
That said, I’m hardly the ballerina I dreamed of becoming. In the past five years, I have moved further and further away from ballet in the performance opportunities and choreography I have sought out. Butoh, improvisation, modern dance, theater, site-specific work, performance art: the people I choose to work with and the choreography I am most excited about today are a far cry from the lithe lines and architecture of the dance form I started with.
I still take ballet class regularly. Though it has boiled down to once or twice a week, I can never seem to get farther than a stone’s throw away from ballet. I often ask myself why I’m in ballet class. I’m not trying to perfect my pirouettes, or get my leg higher. I’m not even trying to get “better,” that naughty word that has plagued me all my dance life (“Am I good enough?”). So what am I there for? Exercise? Because I don’t know when to throw in the towel? Are these good enough reasons to continue?
Local dancer/choreographer/performer Monique Jenkinson is premiering her newest piece, “Instrument,” at CounterPULSE later this month. Jenkinson, currently in residence at the de Young Museum, delves into her personal relationship with dance, and in particular ballet, after being inspired by the current exhibit featuring costumes from Rudolf Nureyev’s career. At a work-in-progress showing of “Instrument” a few weeks back, Jenkinson talked about how Nureyev defected from his country, and how she similarly felt she had defected from the territory of ballet. This resonated deeply with me. I wanted to be a ballet dancer more than I’d ever wanted anything. But at a certain point I realized that I would need to defect from the land of ballet, both because it was increasingly apparent I would not find myself in a ballet company and because I felt the pull to explore other styles and approaches. In hindsight my mind has repeatedly exploded open in my quest to find dance beyond ballet.
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Tony Rizzi, a former Forsythe dancer who now creates his own work. Dancer, visual artist, and actor, Rizzi is an artistic-polymath, running the gamut of combining mediums and genres. I asked him if he still took ballet class, and he responded he had taken it that day in fact (though he apparently didn’t like the teacher). We talked a bit about ballet, and he felt that ballet was best used as a training tool. He hit the nail on the head for me when he said, “Often my problem with dance is how to get the thought across with only movement.” His work, like more and more choreography coming out today, blends theater, various dance genres, and even film or visual art.
But where does that leave my old love of ballet? I worry about ballet. I worry about its relevance in a dynamic changing world. Is it best used as a training tool, as Rizzi suggested? Is it a springboard for new movement syllabi? Ballet often feels a bit like Latin. Latin, the root of romantic languages, is a dead language. It is not growing or colloquially used, though an understanding of Latin can be invaluable in translation, etymology, and language construction. Ballet feels a bit like that to me: an old language at the root of newly developing languages.
I hope that some people will read this and will vehemently disagree with me. I hope they will assert that ballet isn’t akin to a dead language. Perhaps they will point to ballet choreographers such as Wayne McGregor or Christopher Wheeldon, though I maintain that their steps and phrases might be new but the concepts and themes motivating them are not. This is not to say that I don’t enjoy going to the ballet, or that I think ballet shouldn’t be performed anymore. I don’t have any answers here; I’m simply narrating my own grapples.
Is ballet still evolving? And is that evolution on the same trajectory as other forms of performance dance? What is ballet’s relevance today? When ballet was being created, it was an expression of royalty. As it evolved through Petipa, Diaghilev’s crew, and Balanchine (to name some big ones), it changed and evolved in accordance with the times. I worry that evolution has slowed or even stopped. I worry that ballet’s greatest feats lie in replication (how many versions of the Nutcracker and Swan Lake are there?), that it has, in effect, become a museum piece.
From a practitioner’s point of view, I don’t expect to stop taking ballet class anytime soon. My old love of ballet might find itself increasingly obsolete in many respects, but as a means of understanding and challenging my body, nothing else can parallel. To the dance world at large: bring on the new age of avant-garde choreography. I’m excited about it! But for better or worse I’ll be tagging my old friend ballet along for the ride.
2 Responses to “My Old Friend Ballet”
The picture shows a very much alive little girl who loves ballet. Ballet may be lacking the vitality of youth but it certainly can never die as long as little girls (and a few little boys) imagine, pretend and dance for the sheer joy. Let’s say perhaps the dancer matures. But as you say Emmaly, ballet is an old and treasured friend that you have moved beyond.
Very good article and espeically from a personal view, on whether Ballet is dead Ms Emmaly!!
More than a few times, over the past years, I’ve had people say to me, “Ballet is dead.” And there’s probably some degree of truth to that – at the very least. But, I think “contemporary ballet” is alive and well and sometimes, producing works that are as gorgeous as anything we see in performance. After moving dance out of my life, for a number of years, it’s actually contemporary ballet that brought dance back in. Now I realize, I left dance as a viewer & supporter, for a long period, not so much because I didn’t like or grew tired of classical ballet, but because I adored contemlporary ballet and didn’t even realize it.
And isn’t it wonderful, that on local dance scene, women are the majority of contemporary ballet choreographers, leaders and dancers. That is worth celebrating.
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