Archangel of the arts?

Many ballet dancers, writes Jennifer Homans, 'are suspicious of words, and understandably so: they spend their lives working with their bodies and with music, and words are simply not their trade'. All the more impressive, then, that two former dancers write so beautifully about their art. The first lady remains Royal Ballet trained Julie Kavanagh, with her compelling and superbly researched biographies of Ashton and Nureyev. Now Homans, who started out at the School of American Ballet, ticks many of the literary boxes with an ambitious popular history of the art, Apollo's Angels.

She has enlightened me about so many aspects of ballet that I'd barely given a thought: the intellectual rigour with its roots in the classical belief of human perfectability through the body's geometric proportions, the striving to reach the heavens and 'the great Ballet-master' (as the Abbé Mersenne called 'the author of the universe' in 1636). Later the Jesuits taught the 'mute rhetoric' of dance, gesture and declamation. But it was at the court of Louis XIV, of course, that ballet reached its first, painstakingly stratified plateau. Like his predecessor but with far greater discipline and devotion, the future roi soleil devoted himself to the art and appeared in some 40 ballets. There's no escaping the celebrated image of Louis as Apollo in Le Ballet de la Nuit, with suns great and small all over his costume (I fear this image is back to front, but as it's wikifree, it'll have to do).

Just how lively the court ballets could be we heard on Friday night in an orchestrally and chorally superb performance of Phaëton, Lully's 1684 tragédie lyrique, zestily conducted and played at the harpsichord by that great animateur Christophe Rousset: there's a chaconne to conclude the second act which you feel could go on for ever. Homans tells us how the gravitas of Louis's beloved Courante gave way to the toujours gai Minuet preferred by Lully. Around 1800 we get the waltz, but that's to jump over the Enlightenment development of story-ballets and the French Revolution.

Homans is brilliant, at first anyway, in connecting the art to the times. There's a chapter on the democratisation of dance with the advent of the Revolution. Its later artistic celebrations with women in white as paragons of reason and virtue were a far cry from the scabrous Carmagnole caricatured here in Fred Barnard's Victorian illustration for Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities.

There are portraits where Homans goes straight to the anecdotal heart of the matter: of Marie Sallé hitting London in the 1730s, according to one witness 'without hoopskirts , or corps, dishevelled and with no ornaments in her hair...just draped in chiffons on the model of a Greek statue'; and of Marie Taglioni, no beauty, using rigorous self-discipline to steer the dance away from male domination in the 1800s with her embodiment of sylphdom and Gautier's romantic maxim that 'ballets are the dreams of poets taken seriously'. Here's her Sylphide appearing to Scots dreamer James in the French ballet that Bournonville was to immortalise in Denmark with his own special style (it still has a conservative hold, in the best sense, on ballet in that country today).

Diligent in her coverage of how ballet advanced, or not, in other countries through the 19th century, Homans gives us fascinating insight into the proto-Fascist pageants of Luigi Manzotti in Italy: the hugely popular Excelsior (1881), an allegory of Progress, 'boasted a cast of more than five hundred, including twelve horses, two cows and an elephant'.

In Homans's Russian chapters, we are back on the serious tack. The imperial bolstering wasn't news to me, but I hadn't appreciated quite how much Tchaikovsky's later scores 'brought out a whole new range and tone-colour in the human body, a nuance and subtlety that Minkus and Pugni could never inspire'. All this, in The Sleeping Beauty, in spite of the essentially court-dictated spectacle of it all (photo from original 1890 production).

As Homans moves into the 20th Century, she is less ready to take the rough with the smooth, the earthy with the idealistic. On the plus side, there's a pitch-perfect journey through the highs and lows of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, with a special pleading for Nijinsky both as dancer, bringing a 'fragrant androgyny' to redefine male dancing 'and put the danseur back at the centre of ballet' (below, in Le Dieu Bleu)

and as choreographer; Le Sacre du Printemps was 'a bleak and intense celebration of the collective will...a coldly rational depiction of a primitive and irrationally charged world...the first truly modern ballet' (Roerich's costume design for the Chosen One below).

Can you believe Le Sacre only had eight performances before being lost to the world? In her epilogue, Homans excoriates Millicent Hodson's 'reconstruction' as 'a travesty' rendering 'a radical and shocking dance...tame and kitschy'. How she could be so sure about the original I don't know, but 'kitschy' was certainly my experience of a recent Maryinsky performance.

Also on the plus side is Homans's delightful potted history of Ashton's progress, growing out of the surprising intellectual beginnings of British ballet proper in the 1920s - Ninette de Valois's Rout, for instance, kicked off with a dancer reciting a poem by German political activist Ernst Toller - and experiencing a miraculous sweet renaissance against the spirit of angrier times with  La Fille mal gardée in 1960. On the minus side is her disapproval of Kenneth MacMillan's later plunge 'into the depths of his own damaged personality and dark obsessions'. Shattering Mayerling, for instance, is dismissed with implied disapproval in a sentence (pictured, Johan Persson's image of Mara Galeazzi with the astounding Edward Watson in a recent Royal Ballet revival) .

The same problem arises with the chapter on Soviet ballet from Stalin to Brezhnev. Homans is excellent on the communist reinvention of the classics, but when she comes to the 1960s, she is more concerned to be down on the 'tasteless and bombastic' aspects of Grigorovitch's Spartacus than to give credit to its colossal energy, still wowing us in the latest personification of Russian masculinity, Ivan Vasiliev (photo by Damir Yusupov for the Bolshoi Ballet, originally included in the Arts Desk review to which I've linked).

Homans rises to the challenge of surveying three great American-based careers: those of the violence-prone Anthony Tudor, of whom I knew little, of Jerome Robbins and above all of the great archangel George Balanchine: such a career that was, from his first great choreography of Stravinsky's music, Apollo, in 1927 - you might see why he changed the look of it in later years -

 to the dying man's 1981 vision of the Adagio lamentoso in Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony.  Detailed reflection on Agon (1957), with Stravinsky's musical time-machine whizzing us from the court dances of Louis XIV through to the dodecaphonic era, returns us full circle to the intellectual beginnings of ballet.

Then the epilogue has to go and spoil it all. Sure, there have been no giants like Balanchine since his death. But nor has ballet itself snuffed it, as Homans implies. What, not a word of today's choreographers, like Ratmansky revitalising the Russian tradition or our British-based live wires, like the pair who have so enchanted my hard-to-please colleague Ismene Brown in her review yesterday of the Ballet Boyz? Homans also has not a word to say about recent hybrids which, it's true, have an eye on the market (why shouldn't they?) but keep their integrity, like the companies of Alvin Ailey (his troupe's phenomenal Samuel Lee Roberts pictured by Paul Kolnik) and Matthew Bourne?

It seems to me that Homans's anxiety to keep her ballet chronicle tied to a cultural history, which is frequently a strength, leads her to see black and white patterns where the truth is somewhere in the middle. Still, hers is a gripping, readable study, which everyone with the slightest interest in ballet should read.

I've been slow to catch up on writing about other reading here. January and February saw a pleasurable return to Iceland. First was Halldór Laxness's typically skewed wit and (I suspect very native) sense of fantasy in The Fish Can Sing, a tale of growing up and falling under the spell of a 'world singer' - or not - in the developing days of Reykjavík's history. Who could fail to be enchanted by this?

It's neither as long nor as sombre as Independent People, which is of course a more epic kind of masterpiece, and infinitely more readable than World Light, which I had to give up on. No readability problems, though, with the thrillers of Yrsa Sigurðardóttir. Since being engrossed by My Soul to Take - covered in that same blog entry where I referenced Laxness for the first time - after falling under the spell of the Snæfellsnes peninsula, I'd been longing to catch up on her three others to date. I began this time with Ashes to Dust, a magnificent - and educational - mix of the gruesomely personal with the volcanic eruption on Heimaey, the largest of the Westmann Islands, back in 1973 (slightly grainy picture from that time below).

The result of which is, of course, I'm itching to visit the island. Just as evocative in its sense of place is the latest thriller, The Day is Dark, with its baleful evocation of an isolated part of Greenland and its people.  Then I went back to the first of Sigurðardóttir's books, Last Rituals, set mostly in the capital but with a creepy investigation into witchcraft on Iceland.

Indeed, you learn a lot about the country. But the best thing about these books is the disparity between the utterly down to earth, likeable and only mildly dysfunctional protagonist, attorney Thóra Gudmundsdóttir, and the bizarre and often stomach-churning cases with which she's involved. There's plenty of mileage in the character yet, so I look forward to more.

Learning the steps

Take Frederick Ashton’s 1937 skating divertissement Les Patineurs: a trifle light as air, but oh, the complex demands that went into making it seem so. Balletic art, like any other, should conceal its difficulties, but I do find myself becoming ever more reverent in my attitude to the discipline of dance. And I wish I knew more about its steps and positions. So far my knowledge is as tentative as my gardening – I know the species I admire, in this case stunners like the multiple fouettés, the fabulous fish and fan dives, but not much in between. 2012 would be a good year for learning the vocabulary: but how – in classes, or just passively, online? At any rate I did feel last year that I shouldn’t sound off about ballet performances until I’d got more detailed knowledge about the moves under my belt.

Which is why the little extras served up on the new Ashton triple bill DVD are so meaningful. Actually it’s not exactly new, putting together a fair conspectus of Royal Ballet stars from 2004 – including Bussell and Samodurov – alongside those still very much active in 2010 (which is when Les Patineurs was filmed).


As I only have 30 words on it in a BBC Music Magazine roundup, it must be OK to rhapsodise about the bonuses to Les Patineurs, all three of which cast a richer light on Ashton's choreography to Meyerbeer's music (the Constant Lambert arrangements start so well, with extreme registers in the galumphing waltz, but don't go on to shine a la Lanchbery).

You’d probably guess that the insouciant role of the Blue Boy is a toughie, but how much more respect I had for spunky Steven McRae (pictured up top by Bill Cooper) after I’d watched the rehearsal sequence in which he’s put through Ashton’s paces by self-styled caretaker of a tradition Christopher Carr. I wasn't expecting it to appear on YouTube, and it wasn't there when I started writing, but now it is. [UPDATE: And now it isn't, since the Royal Ballet has reasserted copyright.]

Which makes some of my precis redundant, so I've hastily trimmed; but watch it through [clearly this no longer pertains, but it's a bit late to go back and reinstate all the original text I'd cut away] for wisdoms on the fresh up-to-dateness of the ballet, the difficulty for 1937, the breathtaking rehearsal work on the butterfly jumps which have defeated some male dancers - Baryshnikov included - though clearly not the original performer, Harold Turner. 'Head lower into the centre of the circle', urges Carr, 'legs flying round the outside...The hard bit is after you've done one set to get ready to go again.' And of course the sequence has to finish with the 'iconic' ending, 'hops in second and continuously turning until the curtain comes down'.

Well, that was clear, at least in the demonstration. And here's the Blue Boy's first solo - sadly not the number featuring the butterfly leaps - between the witty entry of the Blue Girls (Samantha Raine and Akane Takada) and the Pas de deux of the Couple in White (Sarah Lamb and Rupert Pennefather).



What's not to 'get' in that? Whereas you’d have to be a real ballet expert to understand the subtleties of Ashton’s Scènes de Ballet, third on the DVD bill – for some insiders, his finest achievement. I can sense the finer geometric points, but not as acutely as I do Balanchine’s extraordinary rendition of another Stravinsky score which dances even though it was never intended for choreography, the delectable Capriccio for piano and orchestra in its places as the second, ‘Rubies', ballet of the diverse Jewels.


Whatever the chic New York gimmick that prompted this troika of Balanchine-filtered French (to Fauré), American (to the Stravinsky) and Russian (four movements of Tchaikovsky's Third Symphony) styles, it makes a satisfying whole. There are two magical short Pas de Deux in 'Emeralds', and inevitably the prima ballerina assoluta Ulyana Lopatkina glitters aristocratically in 'Diamonds', but my heart truly leaped at the centrepiece of 'Rubies', where Irina Golub's extensions and her playful mirror-work with Andrian Fadeyev make the most immediate impression.


Technically, it's superb, but Balanchine proves once again that no choreography is worth its salt if it doesn't provide a perfect reflection of music that, in this case, is chameleonic and elusive. Which I suppose brings me back to first the notes, then the steps.