Reconstructing Ballet

“GESTURES DANCE, AND DANCES TELL STORIES”

by Marina Harss

[This article first appeared in the “Arts” section of the New York Times of 30 May 2018.  I saved it because it speaks of reconstructing a historic ballet with the aid of dance notation—in this case, a system invented in 1892 by Vladimir Ivanovich Stepanov (1866-96), a Russian dancer.  I’ll follow this article with a review of an earlier performance that included a dance reconstructed with Labanotation, another system.]

We think of ballet as a nonverbal art, but for the last few months, the words “tell” and “say” have echoed in the studios of American Ballet Theater. The dancers aren’t using their voices; it is their bodies that are doing the talking.

“Harlequinade,” which has its premiere at Ballet Theater on June 4 in a staging by Alexei Ratmansky, is a highly conversational ballet, inspired by the popular 18th-century theatrical form known as commedia dell’arte. Between the dances, the characters “speak” to one another in broad, legible gestures and glances that fit into the musical phrases like words in a song. The dancing, too, is full of details that add to the character of each scene. The gestures dance; the dances tell stories.

“The characters are almost putting on a show, talking to the audience as they go,” said Cassandra Trenary, who alternates in the role of Columbine, Harlequin’s sweetheart. “We’re breaking that fourth wall.” When Harlequin, the young hero — a trickster in brightly colored tights — offers a serenade to his beloved, he strums a mandolin, moving his lips as if really singing a tune.

This ballet isn’t Mr. Ratmansky’s invention, but rather a restaging of a comedy by Marius Petipa, originally called “Les Millions d’Arlequin,” or “Harlequin’s Millions.” It was first performed in 1900 in St. Petersburg, where it remained in the repertory for almost three decades.

Petipa, the principal choreographer at the Imperial Theaters in the second half of the 19th century, put on dozens of ballets, including many that are still repertory fixtures: “The Sleeping Beauty,” “Don Quixote,” “La Bayadère.” These were passed down mainly through oral tradition, as in a game of telephone, from teacher to student, with tweaks and additions compounding over time. Written notations for many ballets do exist, at least in partial form, but mostly they are ignored, on the theory that dance is a living, breathing art form, always changing.

This stylistic drift doesn’t sit well with Mr. Ratmansky, he explained over coffee near Lincoln Center. Until recently, he said: “I had lost my interest in these classical ballets. I didn’t want to see them.” Something, for him, was missing — but he wasn’t sure what.

There were later versions of “Harlequinade” in Russia by Fyodor Lopukhov (in the 1930s) and Pyotr Gusev (in the ’70s); and, at New York City Ballet, by George Balanchine (1965, with additions in 1973). As with most later stagings of Petipa, they were loosely based on the original — Balanchine made up his own steps, “in the style of” Petipa — but none made any claim of authenticity.

So, rather than patch together a “Harlequinade” based on the versions he knew or dream up his own, like Balanchine, Mr. Ratmansky went back to a trove of dance notations kept at Harvard: detailed scores written out in a system of lines, dots, arrows, X’s and O’s. Stepanov Notation, as the system is called, was developed by the dancer Vladimir Ivanovich Stepanov in Russia in the 1890s. Note-takers sat in studios, scribbling in real time as the dancers rehearsed.

This labor-intensive system fell out of use after the Russian Revolution, when people had more important things on their minds. In the decades since, few people have bothered to learn how to decode the notes. (One of the few was Sergei Vikharev, who remounted several ballets using notes in Russia.)

Why bother with them at all? For Mr. Ratmansky, Petipa’s choreography mattered. “It’s about the steps,” he said. “Choreography is a text, and this is the text we have. You wouldn’t change Balanchine or Fokine, so why Petipa?”

Five years ago, Mr. Ratmansky and his wife, Tatiana, a former dancer who assists him in his reconstructions, sat down to figure out what the notes actually contained. What they found has surprised and delighted him. “The key is the simplicity of the phrases,” he said. “Petipa’s choreography is so simple, and so wise. Everything feels inevitable.”

The style has inspired him in his own work, he added. “You can see it in my ballet ‘Whipped Cream’ — it’s really structured after a Petipa ballet, with all the changes of mood, the stage pictures, the diversity of approaches to each scene.”

“Harlequinade” is Mr. Ratmansky’s fourth deep dive into the historical record, after “The Sleeping Beauty” (for Ballet Theater, in 2015), “Swan Lake” (for Zurich Ballet, in 2016), and “Paquita” (for Bayerisches Staatsballett, in 2014). In the fall, he’ll take on “La Bayadère,” for Staatsballett Berlin.

As he has become more conversant in Petipa’s style, his freedom within it has increased. In “The Sleeping Beauty,” he was adamant that the women should raise their legs up only 90 degrees and not point their feet when they stood at rest, but rather hold them in a semirelaxed position. Many of the women’s turns were executed with the foot on half tiptoe rather than fully on the tips of the toes.

These period details were difficult to maintain — the dancers kept going back to their old habits, he said — so he hasn’t insisted on them in “Harlequinade.” “It requires too much time to make it work, and there are never enough rehearsals,” he said.

What he hasn’t dropped is his focus on the specificity of Petipa’s style. “Even the arabesques and the arms and the angles of the body tell us something about the character or the situation,” Mr. Ratmansky said. Many of those details had been smoothed out over time. In a pose from the final pas de deux, for example, he asked the dancer to twist her shoulders slightly so that she could peer back at her partner: “There’s a lot of story here; you’re telling us about your fear.” The pose wasn’t just pretty; it carried meaning.

How much of this comes from Petipa and how much from Ratmansky? The line can be blurry. Some sections of the notes are fairly sparse, with only indications for the legs and feet, or a simple floor plan. Even when there is more detail, it requires interpretation.

“There is this section where Harlequin does a diagonal of batterie” — jumps in which the legs beat together in the air — “and each time you jump, there’s a turn,” Daniil Simkin, one of the dancers alternating as Harlequin, said during a rehearsal break. “Exactly when that turn happens is up to discussion.” (The other Harlequins are Gabe Stone Shayer, James Whiteside and Jeffrey Cirio.)

Mr. Ratmansky described the process of reconstruction as “finding the little bits in the dust, and then placing them together to create a picture.” It is not a science, after all, but an act of the imagination.

[Harlequinade ran from 30 May through 9 June 2018 at the Metropolitan Opera House in Manhattan.

[Marina Harss is a freelance dance writer and translator in New York.  Her dance writing has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, The Nation, The Guardian, Playbill, Dance Magazine, DanceTabs, and elsewhere.  Translations include Irène Némirovsky’s The Mirador, Dino Buzzati’s Poem Strip and Pier Paolo  Pasolini’s Stories from the City of God.]

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“A TWO-FOLD HISTORY LESSON, COURTESY OF FOUR MIDCENTURY MASTERS”

by Alastair Macaulay

[This review was first published in “The Arts” section of the New York Times on 26 April 2010.  The reviewer, Alastair Macauley, the New York Times’ principal dance writer,  doesn’t say so in his notice, but all the dances in this program were reconstructed one way or another from historic productions.]

In reviving little-known little gems by four leading mid-20th-century choreographers, as it did in the “Signatures 10” program on Saturday at Gould Hall, New York Theater Ballet confirms its status as an invaluable company. Very few in the audience can have seen all these gems before; fewer can feel that they know even one well.

The program — an entirely happy one, with music played live on piano — teaches us plenty about dance history. Not only are these unusual views of how dances were made over 50 years ago, but in each case the choreographer was also thinking about the historic past.

Antony Tudor’s "Soirée Musicale," one of his few pure dance and plotless works, recaptures engaging aspects of early-19th-century ballet style in response to the Rossini items that Benjamin Britten had arranged in this score. Frederick Ashton’s “Capriol Suite” follows Peter Warlock’s score in reimagining aspects of the Renaissance. Agnes de Mille’s “Three Virgins and a Devil” is a comedy in medieval manner. And in “Suite From Mazurkas” José Limón addresses the Polish heritage of the mazurka as presented in Chopin’s music.

These ballets look forward as well as back. No lover of Ashton’s choreography can miss the “Capriol” moments that suggest ballets to come, like his 1960 staging of “La Fille Mal Gardée.” And, as one of the “Suite From Mazurkas” male dancers takes time to place the palm of his hand on the ground, anyone who knows “Dances at a Gathering,” the 1969 Jerome Robbins work that also makes use of Chopin mazurkas, must wonder if Robbins had seen Limón’s work. This year is Chopin’s bicentennial: too few dance companies are commemorating it, but in this Limón revival Theater Ballet does the composer honor.

All four works place their faith in lively through-the-body dancing. Feet, hands, torso, neck, pelvis, shoulders, eyes: all make memorable contributions here, and in striking coordination. The dancers of New York Theater Ballet look extremely but endearingly young. Above all they look happily fulfilled. In each of these pieces I felt I was seeing the choreography true and understood, as if the performers had found themselves.

This achievement proved most remarkable in “Capriol Suite.” Like all of Ashton’s choreography this needs dancers as vivid in their torsos as in their feet and a group sense that each dancer may be continuing a neighbor’s line. The Theater Ballet performers bend from the waist, exhibit vivacious insteps and elegantly catch one another’s eyes in best Ashton style. The blend of formal grace and comedy in one pas de trois for a woman and her two suitors is extraordinary. The placing of the heel of a flexed foot on the floor and the change of the body’s angle from addressing one diagonal to another become as expressive as the fleeting dance suggestions of each lover’s frustration.

Tudor was known as a great ballet teacher, and many of his alumni regretted that he seldom applied the inventiveness he showed in the classroom to dance-for-dance’s-sake choreography. “Soirée” is surely the best view we now have of that side of him.

His historical sense is, like Ashton’s, uncanny: at times he seems attuned to Romantic-style ballets by Bournonville that he was unlikely to have seen. His three couples evoke the worlds of “La Sylphide,” “Giselle” and “Napoli” ; jumps, lifts, traveling hops interconnect in seamless phrases. Three other women dance trios with marvelous effects of arm-and-foot coordination. And Tudor brings all nine dancers together in harmonies that, like everything about this work, extend our idea of this great choreographer.

I’d like to see de Mille’s “Three Virgins and a Devil” again: its droll absurdity is fun. Still, it was the slightest and least subtle work of the evening. By contrast, “Suite From Mazurkas” emerged as one of Limón’s finest. You feel the layers of his thought — Poland as home, the mazurka as tradition, Chopin as Romantic — but principally he’s immersed in dance itself rather than communication. This aspect of his inventiveness has the upper hand here, and it shows him to be, as seldom in other works, a true poet.

[New York Theatre Ballet’s Signatures 10 ran at Florence Gould Hall at 55 E. 59th Street in New York City on 23 and 24 April 2010.  I saw the performance on Saturday, 24 April.  The co-stager of Antony Tudor’s Soirée Musicale was Oona Haaranen, a dancer, choreographer, dance teacher, and dance notator who was a writing student of mine for a while when she was working on a graduate degree.  Oona and her co-stager, Ray Cook (the “choreographer” was Tudor), wrote in the program:

Soiree Musicale dates from the same period as Tudor’s Jardin aux Lilas and Dark Elegies.  It was first performed in 1938 at London’s Palladium Theatre.

Staged by Oona Haaranen and Ray Cook from the Labanotation score prepared in 1962 by Ann Hutchinson Guest by arrangement with the Dance Notation Bureau which has preserved, enhanced, and furthered the art of dance for 70 years, 1940-2010.

The cast learned to read Labanotation as part of this project.

[Labanotation, invented in 1928 by Rudolf Laban (1879-1958), an Austro-Hungarian dance artist and theorist, is another form of dance notation like Stepanov Notation, used in reconstructing the ballet in the first article, above.  (Ann Hutchinson Guest [b. 1918] is an American movement and dance researcher and an authority on dance notation.)]

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“ARCHIVING DANCE: THE NECESSITY OF COLLABORATION”

by Heather Desaulniers

[Most people, even inveterate balletomanes, don’t know anything about dance notation.  I’m presenting two articles that focus one way or another on that technique for preserving and restaging historic dances.  To help make it a little easier to understand the subject, I’m adding an article discussing dance notation to this post.  There is, of course, lots of material on dance notation and the many specific techniques like Stepanov Notation and Labanotation, the two types mentioned above (including Wikipedia entries on “Dance Notation,” “Vladimir Stepanov,” and “Labanotation”) and interested readers can look further if they wish to pursue the topic.  This article was taken from the website of Burgeon, an arts magazine written by artists, produced by the non-profit Day Eight, posted on 23 January 2010 (http://bourgeononline.com/2010/01/archiving-dance-the-necessity-of-collaboration-by-heather-desaulniers/).]

The re-staging of work establishes a genealogy in dance. Many companies reproduce historical compositions, and as new pieces are created these works enter into the collective ouevre of the field. Technology, notation and personal recollection can all help in re-staging dances, but no one means of archiving can capture the totality of a choreography. Past analysis has tended to evaluate the use of archival methods separately. Only a collaborative archival network combining technology, notation and personal knowledge can ensure the future of repertory.

Technology has provided indispensable archival opportunities in the field of dance. In particular, video has transformed the creative, marketing, and archival process. Live performance is fleeting and impermanent by nature, and the power to film these transient moments creates an un-paralleled resource. With good reason, video is usually the first step in re-creating an earlier work, but it is imperative to acknowledge its limitations. First, traditional video obtains only a two-dimensional image. This provides a good first glimpse of the movement, but not enough detail to re-stage with any precision or rigor. It is impossible to remain true to the nuances and intricacies of complex movement styles – such as the choreography of Twyla Tharp, Bill T. Jones or Trisha Brown – with a two-dimensional view. Second, when looking at video, there is a limited perspective. You are at the mercy of who took the video and who was dancing the work when it was taped. Even professional videographers can miss things, and what if they miss something that is a crucial part of the piece? Dance is changeable. No one piece is ever performed the same way twice. There are always slight, or sometimes not so slight, adjustments for different spaces and different dancers. The expectation is that video captures the most accurate depiction of the work, but this is more a hope than a certainty.

Three dimensional image capture is an exciting technological alternative to conventional video because it can convey a more complete representation of movement. This relatively new technology requires multiple cameras positioned at different angles and heights so as to record a three dimensional figure. The archival applications for this technology are incredibly exciting, but sadly, untapped. This type of filming can be very expensive and thus, not an option for many dance companies. In point of fact, a minority of companies dedicate resources toward preparation of archival material. In addition, 3-D technology has become stalled and somewhat stuck in the performance arena. Choreographers today seem to have an obsession with how ‘mixed media’ and ‘corporeal presence’ (the new go-to buzz phrases in dance) can transform a work within active performance. For all of these reasons, 3-D imagery has not penetrated into the field of archiving.

The most under utilized archival method is dance notation. Labanotation and Benesh Movement Notation are the two primary systems that can provide a written record of choreography. Both employ a specific system of markings that indicate which body part is moving, the impetus for the motion, the direction, speed and duration of the choreography. Both Laban and Benesh are like hieroglyphics: they are an entire language, very detailed, extensive, and providing a directional map to unlock the minutiae of movement. In theory, dance notation is a great idea, but because the number of people fluent in dance notation is small, and the time/expense of notating a dance significant, written notation exists for a fraction of the important ouvre of modern dance work, and is accessible to an even smaller number of practitioners.

The importance of personal coaching and personal experience cannot be overlooked when staging previous works. Having individuals with experience of the staged work (whether the choreographer, one of the original dancers, or a dance historian) present during re-creation significantly informs the reconstruction process. These individuals may not be able to ensure an exact replication of the steps, but many essences and ‘isms’ are beyond the capabilities of technology and notation. Admittedly, as with technology and notation, individual memory/personal coaching does have its limitations. One challenge is that this type of knowledge cannot be institutionalized, and so is uncertain from generation to generation.

Every archival process can make a positive contribution, yet on their own, each system is insufficient. To preserve our important cultural heritage, what is needed is the application of a thoughtful, reliable, and collaborative archival practice integrating technology, notation and personal resources to the fullest extent possible. Dance companies generally lack the funds to utilize all available archival systems when re-staging choreography. And, the limited funds that exist to create or stage work tend not to include the funds necessary for integration of archival concerns (money to access the newest technology, arrange for a notation, etc.) Archival policies for the field need to be developed, both to ensure preservation and performance of important works, and to encourage the funding mechanisms necessary to institutionalize appropriate archival/reconstruction policies.

[Heather Desaulniers is a freelance dance writer and critic, based in Washington, D.C.  She contributes regularly to criticaldance.com, and is currently pursuing historical research on choreographers Sophie Maslow and Pola Nirenska.  She is also an associate editor of Bourgeon.]