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1HERSA1 F037
The Sydney Morning Herald JANUARY 29-30, 2011 SPECTRUM 37
Review by Valerie Lawson
DanceAPOLLO’S ANGELS: AHISTORY OF BALLETJennifer HomansAllen & Unwin, 608pp,$59.99
Elevating ... the choreographer George Balanchine working with his dancers; the Russian ballerina Tatiana Riabouchinska in Le Coq D’Or; the Australian Ballet’s Mr B! A Tribute to George Balanchine.
The evolution of ballet from etiquette to art took place against a background of political, social and economic upheaval.
Bound for heaven, step by step
J ennifer Homans sees the artform of ballet with the cool eyeof an academic but under-
stands it with the muscle memoryof a former professional dancer.With this rare combination of skills,she has written a landmark historyof ballet covering 400 years, fromthe French court of Henry II andCatherine de Medici in the 16thcentury to the death of GeorgeBalanchine in 1983.
Homans illuminates, analyses,contextualises and always asks why– why did this kind of danceremerge at this time or that ballet atthat time and why should we care?Unlike so many histories of dance,the book sets its subject within itsera, not in a vacuum pack in whichnothing else exists.
Free of jargon and postmodernistreferences, Apollo’s Angels is not justfor the cognoscenti who write forthemselves and their close circles.That’s not to deny its intellectualrigour (Homans holds a PhD inmodern European history from NewYork University), and those whohave a firm grasp of performing artshistory will find many new insights.
The scope of her book is the wayin which ballet evolved within theEuropean political, social andeconomic landscapes of the West,from the beginning in Italy, thenFrance, when ballet was a formof etiquette rather than art, tocertain key moments in history,among them the production ofThe Sleeping Beauty that reopenedthe Royal Opera House in CoventGarden after World War II. Thisevent, said the economist andballetomane John Maynard Keynes,was a way of “declaring peace, so tospeak, by restoring again this frag-ment of civilisation”.
Throughout her book, Homans
weaves her themes of ballet as acivilising force and of the way dancewas considered to elevate its parti-cipants. Angels enter the picture inthe mid-16th century when the sonof Catherine de Medici, Charles IX,established the Academie de Poesieet de Musique, whose membersthought humankind could movecloser to the angels – to celestialharmonies – by dancing.
But then, as now, there were darkangels hovering around ballet.Catherine de Medici was one. Thegrace and elegance of the extravag-ant spectacle Ballet Comique de laReine came at the same time assavage civil and religious conflicts,such as the murder of Huguenots inthe St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre,in which de Medici played a majorrole. Even today in popular culture,ballet is imbued with the idea ofwhite and black, innocents and darkangels. This summer’s cult movie is
Black Swan, in which Natalie Port-man stars as a ballerina whose vir-ginal innocence is pitted against ablack-hearted rival.
In Apollo’s Angels, the narrativesprings most vividly to life in Russia,when Peter the Great came to powerin 1689. Transforming himself into aEuropean, he dispensed with ritualsof Russian life, took fencing anddancing lessons, wore Westernclothes, shaved his beard, encour-aged his courtiers to speak Frenchand imagined himself as a latterdayLouis XIV, the king who had dancedin the role of Apollo.
This led, in turn, to the promin-ence of ballet in St Petersburg andthe creation of the twin pillars mark-ing ballet’s place as an imperial Rus-sian art, Swan Lake and The SleepingBeauty. Homans writes with theinsight of a performer about the wayin which the corps de ballet in SwanLake is an ensemble created byTchaikovsky’s music and how thechoreography of his collaborator,Marius Petipa, made dancers “movelike courtiers with chest open and alight, high centre of gravity” in TheSleeping Beauty.
Homans’s analyses of key danceworks of the past two centuries areprofound, among them La Sylphide,Giselle, Balanchine’s Apollo andAgon and Jerome Robbins’s WestSide Story. She cruelly dismisses theBritish choreographer KennethMacMillan and idealises Balan-chine, the choreographer whosework she knows best as a studentand a former dancer in both the SanFrancisco Ballet and Pacific NorthWest Ballet.
Her book concludes with an elegyto the end of ballet, to a time when,the author believes, we no longerbelieve in ballet’s ideals, when weare sceptical of elitism and skill,when ballet audiences wallow innostalgia and when today’s artists
are “unable to rise to the challengeof their legacy”. All highly debatableand, no doubt, grist for the advancepublicity mill.
Ballet has always been about todie but there is always someone whomanipulates it back to life.
Homans’s description of the dan-cers in Frederick Ashton’s Les Ren-dezvous, choreographed in 1933,reminds me of the work of today’sresident choreographer at the RoyalBallet, Wayne McGregor.
“They break the rules as fast asthey make them . . . at times the stepsdouble back on themselves with
tricky changes of direction punctu-ated by generous bends through thetorso, leaving the impression ofpressing urgency and languidsuspension at the same time.”McGregor exactly.
Today’s choreographers areabsent in Apollo’s Angels. It will takea new Homans in 40 years to deliverthe verdict on both them and theelevating art of ballet.
Valerie Lawson is the NancyKeesing Fellow at the State Libraryof NSW and is writing a history ofballet in Australia.
Equinox tides, Orion’s beach,Jervis BayWalking the beach, the first time for a year,there’s evidence of storms, of bladderwrack and kelp.The year’s been hard — not much achieved,new grip of age, slow ache of bone — now seaweed,algae, turtleweed, some littoral, impedesmy feet; augophylum delicatum, sealettuce, as we used to say, fading, cured under salt.Seagrass, funnelweed, burnt sticks, here dumped aloftlike fallen flags, marking last night’s wetadvance; each buffet from the pulsing tideheaped neptune’s necklace, coralline, allramparts in a chain of marks, new-floated flotsamhigher still, these creeks excited, stirred withsalt, the ocean’s fingers snaking onto land.
But samphire holds the higher ground,despite the roar, the dunes endure, and eachand every sweeping wave, starts me dancing,on the strand: the next one won’t be quiteas high, the water will retreat, it must; recallthe day, the night, the moon, repeat each stepto equinox: the promise brought by tides.
Margaret Barbalet
Poem
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