Passage III

HUMANITIES: This passage is from the book Apollo's Angels A History of Ballet by Jennifer Homans.

I never thought of ballet as anything but contemporary, a here-and-now art. Even the oldest of ballets are of necessity performed by young people and take on the look of their generation. Besides, unlike theater or music, ballet has no texts and no standardized notation, no scripts or scores, and only the most scattered written records; it is unconstrained by tradition and the past. Choreographer George Balanchine encouraged this idea. In countless interviews he explained that ballets are here and gone, like flowers or butterflies, and that dance is an ephemeral art of the present; carpe diem. The point, he seemed to be saying, was not to bring back old musty dances such as Swan Lake: it was to "make it new." For the dancers, however this was a paradoxical injunction: history was all around us—in our teachers and the dances, but also in Balanchine's own ballets, many of which were suffused with memories and a Romantic ethos. But we nonetheless made a cult of never looking back, of setting our sights resolutely on the present.

And yet it is because ballet has no fixed texts, because it is an oral and physical tradition, a story telling art passed on, like Homer's epics, from person to person, that it is more and not less rooted in the past. For it does have texts, even if these are not written down: dancers are required to master steps and variations, rituals and practices. These may change or shift over time, but the process of learning, performing, and passing them on remains deeply conservative. When an older dancer shows a step or a variation to a younger dancer, the ethics of the profession mandate strict obedience and respect: both parties rightly believe that a form of superior knowledge is passing between them. I never for a moment, for example, questioned the steps or style Alexandra Danilova conveyed when she taught us variations from The Sleeping Beauty: we clung to her every movement. The teachings of the master are revered for their beauty and logic, but also because they are the only connection the younger dancer has to the past—and she knows it. It is these relationships, the bonds between master and student, that bridge the centuries and give ballet its foothold in the past.

Ballet, then, is an art of memory, not history. No wonder dancers obsessively memorize everything: steps, gestures, combinations, variations, whole ballets. It is difficult to overstate this. Memory is central to the art, and dancers are trained, as the ballerina Natalia Makarova once put it, to"eat" dances—to ingest them and make them part of who they are. These are physical memories; when dancers know a dance, they know it in their muscles and bones. Recall is sensual and brings back not just the steps but also the gestures and feel of the movement, the "perfume," as Danilova said, of the dance—and the older dancer. Thus ballet repertory is not recorded in books or libraries: it is held instead in the bodies of dancers. Most ballet companies even appoint special "memorizers" dancers whose prodigious recall sets them apart from their peers—to store its works: they are ballet's scribes (and pedants) and they keep whole oeuvres in their limbs, synchronized (usually) to music that triggers the muscles and helps to bring back the dance. But even dancers with superlative memories are mortal, and with each passing generation, ballet loses a piece of its past.

As a result, the ballet repertory is notoriously thin. The "classics" are few and the canon is small. We have only a handful of past ballets, most of which originated in nineteenth-century France or late Imperial Russia. The rest are relatively new: twentieth-and twenty-first century works. There is some record of seventeenth-century court dances, but the notation system recording these dances died out in the eighteenth century and has never been fully replaced. These court dances are thus an isolated snapshot; the before and after are missing. The rest is spotty and full of holes. One might suppose that French ballet would be well preserved: the fundamental precepts of classical ballet were codified in seventeenth-century France and the art form has enjoyed an unbroken tradition there to the present day. But we have almost nothing. La Sylphide premiered in Paris in 1832, but that version was soon forgotten: the version we know today originated in Denmark in 1836. Coppelia, from 1870, is in fact the only nineteenth century French ballet still widely performed in its (more or less ) original form.

Introduction: Masters and Traditions from APOLLO'S ANGELS: A HISTORY OF BALLET by Jennifer Homans, copyright @2010 by Jennifer Homans. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.