wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

Rockwell Matters

March 03, 2008

Visit John Rockwell’s blog at artsjournal.com
Subscribe to Rockwell Matters at I-Tunes

Spring, fast upon us, has become the height of the ballet season in New York. Eager audiences fill City Center and the New York State Theater and the Metropolitan Opera and the critics fall all over themselves to immerse themselves in balletic minutiae.

We had already had the just-concluded New York City Ballet winter season and Diana Vishneva’s striking if erratic “Beauty in Motion” program at City Center. Still to come are the Kirov Ballet for three weeks at the City Center in April, the City Ballet spring season, with a big 100th-birthday Jerome Robbins tribute, and American Ballet theater’s eight-week stand at the Met.

I myself happily take part in the spectator sport aspect of ballet’s appreciation. And yet ballet is not all there is to dance, and in recent years it has seized a disproportionate amount of the attention paid to the art.

There is a long history to this tension between ballet and other kinds of dance. From the earliest years of the last century, dancers rebelled against what they saw as the strictures and artificialities of ballet, and struck out in often bold, sometimes silly new directions.

Ballet reasserted itself through George Balanchine starting in the 1950’s. He had the proper St. Petersburg lineage, but he made ballet an equal partner with modernist achievements in the other arts, and he won loyal, not to say fanatic, critical champions. His legacy can still give revelatory pleasure, but it also serves as a damper to the open appreciation of the new.

Modern dance, beyond the big companies like Ailey, Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor, persists in generally impoverished form in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn and in the dance departments of liberal arts colleges around the country. But the mainstream critics tend to ignore such sometimes amateurish friskiness, despite their occasional dainty forays downtown.

Me, when I began my two-year stint as chief dance critic of the New York Times in January 2005, I led off with a manifesto happily hailing what seemed to me the self-evident fusion of ballet and modern – how dance audiences could enjoy both, and how innovative choreographers from modern dance were enlivening the ballet repertory. This triggered a storm of protest on the ballet web sites. For them, modern-dance choreographers simply degraded the purity of ballet; ballet was of the air; modern dance was of the earth, or worse.

Three years later, I still think dance is best perceived whole, that ballet’s past is wonderful but its future is bright, too, and that that future will probably be infused with ideas from the modern side of the divide.

— John Rockwell

Posted in Rockwell Matters | Leave a Comment