Apollo's Angels

This year I again embark on reading each of the books the New York Times has selected as the ten best of the year, and I start with Apollo's Angels, by Jennifer Homans. One of the reasons I like to do this is because I end up reading about things I otherwise never would have. This book, for example, is on a subject I knew hardly anything about: the history of ballet.

It is a coincidence that I was reading this book when I saw the wonderful film Black Swan, giving me a double-dunking in the waters of ballet. I'm still pretty obtuse about it, but I feel like I know a lot more after reading Homans' thorough history, which is most fascinating when discussing how the spirit of ballet moved from nation to nation: from France to Denmark to Russia to England to the United States. There is a lot of political history mixed in as well, and it's not gratuitous; Homans makes the point that ballet succeeded most in countries with stable government systems.

The art began in France, and flourished during the reign of Louis XIV. It had elements of Italian pantomime, but in that country opera became the dominant art form, while France created what we know today as classic ballet. Homans traces the lives of many key choreographers and dancers, such as Maria Taglioni, who was really the first to typify what we now think of as a ballerina, wearing tulle and hair pulled tight in a bun. The first well-known ballets, La Sylphide and Gisele, were created during this time.

French dancers ended up working in St. Petersburg, where they imported the art to a welcoming culture. Russian ballet at the time was very much influenced by the West; Tchaikovsky's enduring ballets, Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker, and Swan Lake (which still dominate ballet companies today) were distinctly romantic and Western in style.

But then Russians took the art form as their own, and went back to Europe with it. Homans calls Ballet Russes, which was put together by impresario Sergei Diaghiliev and featuring Vaslav Nijinsky, one of the great companies of all time, yet they never performed in Russia. They were distinctly Russian, though, especially when using the music of Igor Stravinsky in the ballets The Firebird and the controversial The Rite of Spring, which caused riots and was only performed eight times.

Following the Russian revolution the Soviets made ballet a national obsession--if Stalin didn't approve, your life may be in danger. Homas writes, "Why ballet? Why did this elegant nineteent-century court art become the cultural centerpiece of a twentieth-century totalitarian state? The answer is complicated, but it had to do above all with ideology. The consequences of the shift from aristocracy and the tsar to revolutionary "workers" and "the people" were deep and lasting. Under Communist rule, the whole purpose of ballet changed. It was no longer enough to entertain or to mirror court hierarchies and styles; ballet had to educate and express "the people"--and it rose to prominence in part because it was thought ideally suited to the tast. Unlike theater, opera, or film, ballet had the virtue of being a Russian performing art that did not require Russian in order to be understood or appreciated. No matter its Imperial roots, it was a universal language accessible to anyone, from barely literate workers to sophisticated foreign ambassadors--and especially (during the Cold War) the Americans.

During the 1950s there was a flowering of British ballet, personified by the superstar Dame Margot Fonteyn, who became famously teamed with the Russian defector Rudolf Nureyev. But Homans titles her last section "The American Century," as two men, both of Russian origin, dominated the scene: George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins.

Homas writes, "Classical ballet was everything America was against. It was a lavish, aristocratic court art, a high--and hierarchical--elite art with no pretense to egalitarianism. It had grown up in societies that believed in nobility, not only of birth but of carriage and character; societies in which artifice and fine manners--so different from America's plainspoken directness--were essential and admired attributes. Worse still, ballet was Catholic in origin and Orthodox in spirit: its magnificence and luxe seemed sharply opposed to America's simpler and sterner Puritan ethic." Yet ballet exploded in popularity during the years after World War II. Homans notes that almost all of the teachers were exiled Russians, but I think even more basic is that it was a period of a boom in the birth-rate and parents needed pastimes for the children. Boys played sports, girls went to dance class. The image of a young girl in tights and ballet slippers seemed American as a boy in a baseball uniform.

Balanchine was the great figure of American ballet, while Robbins flirted with Broadway (he created West Side Story and Fiddler on the Roof, not too shabby) before returning and staying with ballet. Homans writes at length about their genius, but of course writing can't replace seeing it. Amazingly, Balanchine choreographed 400 ballets, but most of them are "lost"--even a generation ago, there wasn't a good enough system of notation to commit them to posterity.

Homans' most controversial chapter is her last, in which she declares: "I grew up with ballet and have devoted my life to studying, dancing, seeing, and understanding it. I have always loved watching it. When I first began work on this book, I imagined it would end on a positive note. But in recent years I have found going to the ballet increasingly dispiriting. With depressingly few exceptions, performances are dull and lack vitality; theaters feel haunted and audiences seem blase. After years of trying to convince myself otherwise, I now feel that ballet is dying." Those are strong words, and Homans has taken some heat for them. I have no idea if she's right or not, but things can change quickly. Will the popularity of Black Swan turn things around? Maybe, maybe not, but I will say that I'm actually interested in attending a performance soon. Hope springs eternal.