Notes on Dance Classicism
This essay was first published in 1987, in volume 5 no 2 of “Dance Theatre Journal”. It was an expanded version of the transcript of a lecture published in the conference proceedings of the 1986 University of Surrey conference “Choreography: Principles and Practice”. I have now (2026) made a few corrections, explanations, and emendations of facts, dates, and grammar, but am tempted to make far greater changes, since I no longer support some of the points I make here. This nonetheless seemed an important essay when it was young, causing further debate and research in dance circles. AM.
“We must make up our minds," said Diaghilev, “what is classicism.”
It seems that many of our choreographers today are anxious to be classicists, and that many of our audience are curious about definitions of dance classicism and anxious to applaud what they recognise as classical in dance. When I spoke on the subject at the 1986 University of Surrey Conference on Choreography, a triend said afterwards “Well, you've opened a real can of there.” But the can of worms has been there all along: and people have been opening and closing it all century - and earlier.
I: Diaghilev versus Classicism?
"Are you on my side or Diaghlev's?” Arnold Haskell described how Anna Pavlova greeted him. Ninette de Valois wrote of Pavlova in 1937: "She felt the call of the classical tradition as it affected her own bloodstream….That her medium was the classical ballet was due to the strategy of destiny rather than the conscious act of Anna Pavlova. She would talk of her efforts towards the safeguarding of the classical ballet, believe in her mission, regard the Diaghileff developments with real con-sternation, yet do things that many a rigid custodian of classicism found himself unable to accept.
“Working within the impregnable walls of classical ballet, she could not shake off its more positive shackles. It was too old, wily pound of flesh, shone through her and by her, and eventually gained a prestige that even her death could not remove…. Anna Pavlova was turned into the greatest ambassador the classical school has ever known.”
Pavlova was a star on the magnitude of Garbo, which is part of the reason she chose not to stay with Diaghilev, whose company emphasised ensemble and immersion in the image of each ballet. But the other side of the coin is that Diaghilev’s repertory could not provide sufficient vehicles for a dancer who was, as de Valois sayers, the greatest ambassador the classical school had ever known. She was, for example, five years ahead of Diaghilev in presenting “The Sleeping Beauty” in the West (albeit in a reduced version); she presented parts of “Paquita”, “Raymonda”, “The Nutcracker”, and other nineteenth-century ballets from the Maryinsky repertory which have become widely known today and which have become models of composition to many twentieth century choreographers.
De Valois notes that Pavlova “regarded the Diaghilev developments with real consternation." This prompts the question: was what Diaghilev was doing other than classical? Certainly Pavlova wasn't the only one who saw there being a conflict of aesthetics, of styles. The prima ballerina assoluta Mathilde Kschessinskaya had wanted to the take to the West in 1910 “a truly representative example of the Imperial ballet” as a reply to Diaghilev’s first season in Paris. The critic Andre Levinson always felt there were two aesthetics. He placed Fokine’s ballets with Isadora’s dancing on one side, and Pavlova's dancing and the old Petipa traditions on the other. Of Fokine and the new Diaghilev company, he wrote, around 1914 or so:
"It seems clear to me that despite all the new ballet’s pictorial and other beauties, despite all the splendour of its diverse impressions (both visual and musical) with which it showers us, despite all the ballet- master-innovator's energy, gifts and personal charm, the path he and his associatehave chosen for the Paris Festspiele is the path of ballet's suicide on the public stage. And were it not for that great conservative force, the classical pedagogy of our ballet school, there's no telling how far this new ballet would travel along the path of degeneracy.”
From all he says (he goes on to write that "the romantic sun" of classical ballet “has perhaps never shone so brightly". citing in particular the ballerinas Kschessinskaya, Pavlova, Preobrajhenskaya and Geltzer), as well as from the views of Pavlova and Kschessinskaya themselves, you receive the impression that back there in Mother Russia was a powerhouse of classicism. The names we attach to this older classicism are, in particular, those of Marius Petipa and the Maryinsky (the theatre in which the Imperial Ballet had performed since 1889 - today the Kirov).
II: Nineteenth Century Ballet Classicism
Classicism. The primary meanings of this word in the dictionary are to do with the culture and ideals of ancient Greece and Rome. (But, since the Renaissance at least. people have hastened to impose onto. or interpret from, those extinct cultures their own views and ideals.) The royal academies of Louis XIV made some invocation to "the ancients" in their constitutions: and it's important to remember that the study of classics was a vital part of formal education both then and up to the mid-twentieth century. In dramatic ballets. especially the ballets d'action of the eighteenth century, themes from Greek mythology and Roman history were employed.
Yet the word "classical" became much more intensely applied to ballet after the eighteenth century, after those Graeco-Roman subjects had been rejected and when the whole ethos of ballet was being changed as the original aristocratic model of courtly life lost its force. Of Marie Taglioni (not the most typical but the most influential of Romantic ballerinas, and to whom the French critics applied the word “Romantic” within a month of her debut in Paris in 1827), there is one occasion of particular interest when the word "classical" is applied in two senses by the critic Castil-Blaze. He wrote in 1827 that Marie Taglioni and Mile Saint-Romain were "eminently classical" because in their style the whole body moved. He opposed this to "our classical dance which leaves torso, arms and legs immobile, or at least in a state of rigidity and most displeasing inaction." But what he finds "classical" in Taglioni and Saint-Romain is the sculptural movement implicit in Graeco-Roman "classical" art. To him, Romantic and classical are reconcilable - a point also made a century later by Levinson in his 1929 biography of Taglioni. With her dancing, Levinson wrote,
“The technique of tradition becomes the language of the ineffable ... What, thanks to her, is achieved, is the interior illumination of a style. The traditional dance had been an exercise pleasant to witness: henceforth it expressed the things of the soul.… Writers ill-informed as regards the history of dancing endeavour to contrast the romantic with the classic dance."
Levinson's many discussions of classical dance in the early twentieth century and its history show a much more developed notion of dance classicism than earlier writers. Something had changed within the nineteenth century and earlier, so that ballet was no longer seen as imitating a Graeco-Roman classicism but as possessing its own. I would give three reasons for this change.
The first lies in the loss of the aristocracy as a stylistic model. As heads rolled with the guillotine, ballet had to find a new stylistic model. Ballet ceased to be related to the social dances of the ruling class, but it retained its nature as an art that proposed a physical and motional ideal. Prompted once more by classical art and sculpture, ballet ordered the dancer's body and language according to geometrical principles of alignment and proportion. These principles had already been implicit in ballet, but now they were developed to suit the more acrobatic and extended style of the nineteenth century. Blasis's writings are evidence of this teaching; and the new style was variously developed by the French, Italian, Danish and Russian schools of ballet throughout the nineteenth century. And in this bodily classicism we can see the old Graeco-Roman principles of expressive harmony, albeit hyperextended and acrobatised so that Greek and Roman ideals are largely forgotten and ballet's own formal rules take their place. Levinson once wrote "Classicism tends towards geometric formula. but at the supreme moment. breaks and avoids it." As a description of classicism, this is not all that precise or complete, but it's still interesting, because it draws attention to the ironic tension between the human body and pure geometry in classical dancing.
The second reason was that ballet developed a complex array of vocabulary. forms, devices, rhythms, and structures according to its new style. Complexity and virtuosity were, of course, also present in ballet before the French Revolution; but the language and structure of nineteenth-century ballet were developed in particular by Petipa in Russia so as to demonstrate "classicism" in a different sense. Petipa's ordering of dancers was classical not so much in the Graeco-Roman sense but rather in the sense that we use it of music - in particular the “classical style" of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. I don't mean that Petipa & Co. had developed the dance equivalents of sonata form, and I don't want to suggest that their ballets d'action are the precise equivalents of Mozartian opera seria or opera buffa. But ballet had achieved something parallel in terms of formal perfection. It's not irrelevant that Soviet critics have analysed Petipa's choreography in terms of its own musical values, using in particular the word "symphonisation". Perhaps ballet had once achieved a comparable structural perfection before, in the days of the baroque dance suite of Lully and Rameau; but Petipa's architectural classicism was new. Petipa certainly knew of the Golden Age of eighteenth century ballet and in several works, in particular “The Sleeping Beauty”, paid homage to it.
The last reason is that ballet choreographers had followed Taglioni in putting the danse d'école, the academic dance, at the heart of their works, rather than as incidental. This may have been true too of baroque ballet, but the Noverrean ballet d'action had not presented dance itself as the subject of choreography.
Early nineteenth century reviews, following the ballet d'action model. generally looked for narrative and mime above all, praising dance composition as one of the choreographer's secondary achievements. Thus one finds Parisian reviews of the ballets of Pierre Gardel and Filippo Taglioni questioning the choreographers' achievements, calling some of their ballets feeble but adding that dances, however. were excellent. Then a new generation of critics, led by Théophile Gautier, began to follow the principle of "art for art's sake" and thereby "dance for dance's sake", applauding the achievements of the Romantic ballerinas in emphasising dance values above all others. Yet divertissements of pure dance like the famous “Pas de Quatre” did not become established as a regular choreographic form: and nineteenth century choreographers continued to make ballets d'action. Problem: how do you make academic dancing the centre of a story ballet? For, as you know, much of the storytelling in nineteenth century ballet isn't done by ballet dancing, but by mime. Well, you can make dance the centre of the drama by making the protagonist dance-crazy (like Giselle) or a professional dancer (like Emeralda or Nikiya in “La Bayadère”). Thus dance becomes obviously the centre of the story. But Giselle and Nikiya die - and go to a classical afterlife, a realm of pure dance. The theatrical concept of supernatural worlds of pure dance, and of characters who danced by nature and without having to justify their dancing with dramatic motives, goes back to the Ballet of the Nuns in “Robert le Diable” and “La Sylphide”; and it was a Romantic concept. In telling the story of the Wilis which originally inspired “Giselle”. Heinrich Heine wrote, "Dancing is characteristic of aerial spirits: they are of too ethereal a nature to walk prosaically on earth, as we do." Consequently, many of the roles given to ballerinas in the mid-nineteenth century and later were supernatural. And this helped to develop the further concept that dance could be a life force, a natural condition on either side of the grave, for certain characters in a dramatic ballet. Thus Aurora, the fairytale but mortal heroine of “The Sleeping Beauty”, just dances. Dance is not her job, nor is it her passion: it is simply, profoundly. her nature. Her parents, suitors and courtiers are pedestrian; dance renders her ideal. And so dance is the subject of these ballets.
Thus bodily, structurally and dramatically the classical ballet of “The Sleeping Beauty” and other Petipa ballets has established a new dance classicism, one so refined and yet achievable that it still stands for many people today as the only true classicism in dance, or as dance classicism's highest point.
III: Music's Classicism and Ballet's Classicism
Stravinsky said “Music can express nothing but itself." Here surely is what Roger Copeland has called "the objective tem-perament". But because dance uses people, there's a difference between dance expression and musical expression. Note the difference between that line of Stravinsky's and the following one, when Frederick Ashton wrote that his concern as choreographer was “the purity of the dance expressing nothing but itself... and thereby expressing a thousand degrees and facets of emotion and the mystery of the poetry of movement." Yes, classical dance expresses. As several choreographers have observed, it cannot be an abstract art (in the sense that music and painting can be) because it presents human beings. But if in the first place you can't take dancing that is primarily about itself, its expression will elude you.
The strange connection between form and expression in art is nowhere stranger than in dance. In this art, we observe bodies, with all those natural and inevitable qualities that Delsarte, Laban and many others also the forms and designs into which dancing and choreography shape them, as if straining towards a more abstract condition. Walter Pater's dictum that "all art strives towards the condition of music" is surely not invariably true, nor is it invariably true of all dancing; but it is true, I suggest, of classical dance.
The classical ballet of the nineteenth century, achieving probably its most perfect masterpiece in “The Sleeping Beauty”, provides me with my first major example. But there remains that distinction between the classicism of dance and the classicism of music. The natural expressiveness of the body in movement is still present, as is the mimetic power of many basic movements both are metamorphosed by the world of forms and designs that is classicism.
Dancing that is about itself. Arnold Haskell made an interesting attempt to describe it, in the case of classical ballet, in the following :
"Classicism, very freely translated, means pure dancing that is based on the five positions, that produces long graceful lines, that is neither acrobatic, violent, nor lacking in dignity: the classical dancer, the dancer of perfect build and technique, who has sought no short cuts to proficiency. and who can hold her audience by her movements alone, with no extraneous literary conception to divert them; the classical ballet, ballet that is designed first and last for the maximum exploitation of the dancer's gifts, physical and artistic."
And he went on:
“The opponent of classicism, and therefore of ballet itself, invariably raises the point that steps such as the pirouette. fouetté, pas de bourrée are monotonous and meaningless, and that the intelligent public requires something more. Of course, they are monotonous and meaningless when performed by a nonentity, but. apart from the sheer beauty of line that fine movement gives, the classical dance, to be true. must be full of character. These much-maligned steps... are merely like the musical notes. limited in number, in themselves nothing. The effect depends upon how they are combined and executed. it is this classicism that is helping the dancer to express herself, that leaves her so gloriously free, if only she is big enough."
This is tricky terrain, but Haskell has touched on at least two important areas here: (a) no extraneous literary concepts (b) expressiveness of pure form in dance.
IV: Diaghilev, Balanchine, and Classicism's Evolution
Those sections from Haskell are from the chapter called “The Lessons of ‘The Sleeping Princess’". Chronologically speaking. I haven't advanced very far. And I have said little of Diaghilev, colossus and catalyst, and his treatment of classicism. It's always important to remember, in talking of this man, how conscious he was that the world was changing, that culture was undergoing a radical transformation. He honoured the old Imperial Russia that had produced “The Sleeping Beauty”, but he was among the first to recognise that that society was doomed, and that a new aesthetic was imminent. Late in his life, he said:
"Life doesn't stand still, it changes...
"I am accused of treating classicism with neglect and contempt. Rubbish! Classicism. like everything else, evolves. We must make up our minds what is classicism...
“The science of our theatrical dance is very young. While classical painting and sculpture were created centuries ago, ballet classicism was created in the eighteenth century and developed in the nineteenth with the ballet skirt, the dancer's uniform of the last century. Classicism is the university of the modern choreographer, but to develop theatrical creation we cannot remain academic. We have all learned algebra and Greek, but not to solve problems or to speak Greek. The dancer and ballet master of today must matriculate, just as Picasso must know anatomy and Stravinsky his scales.
“Skyscrapers have a classicism of their own, they are the palaces of our time. Classicism is a means - but not an end. When it becomes merely a restoration we must destroy the poison that affects the whole organ.”
A marvellous speech. Diaghilev there talks of classicism in two different senses. The first is when he says "Classicism is the university of the modern choreographer. but to develop theatrical creation we cannot remain academic... The dancer and ballet-master of today must matriculate." Here he suggests that classicism is simply the academic training of ballet.
This point of view is close to that of Fokine, who always held that this academic training was a strength lacked by Isadora, for all her other virtues that he admired. In the majority of his ballets Fokine rarely treated ballet as much more, or anything more, than the academic strength necessary to train the dancers. In a few ballets - in particular, “Les Syphides” and “The Dying Swan” - Fokine actually made academic ballet, more or less, his subject matter. (To be simplistic and to skate consciously over the Duncanist qualities that several have detected in them, I nonetheless call these works meditations on themes from, respectively, certain romantic ballets of the 1830s and ‘40s and the lakeside scenes from “Swan Lake”.) In those and all his works, Fokine (in Lincoln Kirstein's words) "freed ballet from sterile academicism". But ballet itself is not the subject of “Petrushka” or “Schéhérazade”. Nor, for that matter, is dancing. The second meaning of classicism used by Diaghilev occurs when he says "Classicism, like everything else, evolves." The significance of this line becomes more apparent when we consider the man's attention to certain works in his company's repertory.
It's relevant that he considered “Les Sylphides”, Fokine's one pure-dance work, to be his favourite. always casting it with care and maintaining it in repertory over twenty years. The particular passion with which he produced “The Sleeping Princess” in 1921, and his real sorrow when it was considered a failure, are also important, as is his remark "I am fifteen years too early with this production." The most interesting remark of all is one that he made when watching a rehearsal of Balanchine's “Apollon Muagète” (1928):
"What he is doing is magnificent. This is classicism, such as we have not seen since Petipa."
It's interesting that by contrast Fokine said in 1934:
"Frankly I find that recent choreography has all the faults of the pre-Fokine ballet, only with added pretensions Such Greek themes as 'Apollon Musagète'... should not be danced in ballet shoes, any more than a ballet on a purely Russian theme like LeS Noces'."
To Fokine, “Apollon Musagète” (henceforth “Apollo”) had to be a ballet about Ancient Greece, to Balanchine it was a ballet about classical dancing. To put it simply and crudely, what Balanchine was doing in Apollo was reinstating the academic dance, the danse d'école, at the centre of choreo-graphy. The ballet is about the creation of art, and its two leading characters are the god of music and the muse of dancing. It is therefore dramatically as well as actually about dancing to music.
Balanchine saw himself as part of a chain. As a young choreographer in Russia he had staged an evening called "From Petipa Through Fokine to Balanchinivadtze". Sooner or later, he omitted Fokine from the chain, retaining especial esteem only for “Les Sylphides”. But Petipa he always revered, and one of the reasons I talk about Petipa and the nineteenth century as much as I have is because I suggest that, if you don't "get" Petipa, you don't fully "get" Balanchine (though I hasten to add that Balanchine's work provides one of the best keys to appreciating Petipa).
The extent to which Balanchine's new (really new) works illumine the past never fails to impress. The great pas de deux in “Agon” is on the one hand radically new and on the other a clear development from Petipa: it even includes the little leg-beating walking steps Petipa used as an eighteenth-century touch in “The Sleeping Beauty”. It is capable of several different interpretations - as is all dance classicism. Talking of the general principle of supported adagio in classical ballet, Germaine Greer writes in “The Female Eunuch” that it makes the woman's role appear passive and weight-less. In response to this, Arlene Croce once wrote that it could be interpreted with equal validity as showing the man as slave to the woman. Her point is that this kind of classical dancing is double-edged and often ambiguous, and I mention it here because the double-edged nature of Petipa's choreography might well be less apparent in use today were it not for the intense variations and extensions of it that Balanchine has wrought in his own choreo-graphy. Just as the pas de deux in “Agon” shows that both the above interpretations of supported adagio are possible, it shows that they are also possible of Petipa's choreography, too.
V: Dance Classicism: New Definitions
This development of classicism has gone on throughout the twentieth century and has fully vindicated Diaghilev's point that "Classicism, like everything else. evolves."
But there has co-existed that other use of the word “classical", referring to the academic training of ballet in which, Diaghilev said, the choreographer should matriculate. It's a pity we still find "classical ballet" and “ballet" used as if absolutely synonymous, although it should be increasingly obvious that there is much ballet today that is very far from classical. It’s also a pity that for many people "classical ballet" is epitomised by the works of the late nineteenth century: Balanchine is still considered by some to be a neo-classicist. Neo, but not the genuine article. Ashton is more generally accepted as a classicist, at least here in the United Kingdom, just because he has been less radical.
One of the healthiest new developments - healthy for modern dance, healthy for ballet. healthy for semantics - came in 1944. In that year, Merce Cunningham began to appear in programmes of his own choreography for the first time. And also in that year John Cage wrote that important essay “Grace and Clarity”. He observes that, whereas the modern dance to date had been built on personalities:
“The ballet is in possession of a tradition of clarity of its rhythmic structure. These particular devices are not to be borrowed from the ballet: they are private to it. But the function they fulfill is not private - it is, on the contrary, universal...
"With clarity of rhythmic structure, grace forms a duality. Together they have a relation like those of body and soul. Clarity is cold, mathematical, inhuman, but basic and earthy. Grace is warm, incal to culable, human opposed to claritv, and like the air."
He goes on to suggest that the combination of grace and clarity are "what make hot jazz hot". They are also, I suggest, what make classical dancing classical. Grace and clarity: the ways in which Cage and Cunningham have developed their own theory and practice of this duality should be familiar to anyone acquainted with their approach to composition and their end-products.
VI: The Philosophy of Classicism
“The Sleeping Beauty”, “Les Syphides”, “Apollo”, “Agon”, “Summerspace”... As dance classicism has evolved, its great masterpieces have marked a steady progression away from literalism and representation. Because classicism keeps being re-defined, at no point can one say "That's it. That's classicism, defined and explained." But the continuing inquiry into what is classical dance is particularly relevant to the work of a dance critic, and it behoves him to be aware of the tradition of critical writing on the subject. After Levinson, the critics who have inquired most into the nature of dance classicism are Edwin Denby and Arlene Croce. The first major investigation Croce made into the area is perhaps her most important of all, an essay called “Ballets Without Choreography” (1967) in which she drops several depth-charges at sundry choreographers currently involved in the pure-dance vogue of ballet at that time (and since). She has been talking largely of ballet and some of its more misguided practitioners and then suddenly she says this:
"Much of what seems to have been derived from convention and expediency in the classical tradition is in fact a profound honouring of a certain philosophy of life, a way of looking at the world. So the difference isn't technical, it's philosophical - a question of attitude. And you can have the attitude without having the technique. Why should Merce Cunningham, for example, while venturing as far as anyone from the matrix of conventional ballet technique, still express (as clearly. sometimes, by negation and indirection as by affirmation) a sense of connectedness with classicism - while Gerald Arpino, who works from the conventional ballet syllabus, creates ballets which are philosophic ally deranged?”
A wonderful point - that classicism is more philosophical than technical. We have now the headache of trying to define what that philosophy is. I've used some unfashionable words like "grace" - and I'll now use some more. “Manners". And "morality".
Surely we begin to recognise a work as classical when we recognise that it expresses code of manners, a system of morality. We may not in our own lives conform to the code expressed in “The Sleeping Beauty”, but we can hardly fail to recognise it. I don't mean that classicism allows only the one code.
Here's another unfashionable word: "etiquette". Fashion notwithstanding, virtually all societies, small and large, have their own separate etiquettes, and so do all the various classical dance forms. By "etiquette", I don't mean just the precise code that governs every detail of behaviour at an old-fashioned dinner-party: I was brought up to find Victorian books of etiquette amusing. But many of us were brought up to believe, for example, that it is polite to ask someone "How are you?" but impolite to give that question an accurate reply and that’s what I mean by etiquette. Of course. there can be a lot of nonsense attached. It seems to me wonderfully absurd that in fact the proper English reply to "How do you do ?" is "How do you do?" Now. this kind of systematic courtesy, opposed to emotional revelations or self-indulgence or histrionics, can become pointless. Etiquette lived for its own sake is mere hollow facade. And that's why 1 used the word "morality" and the phrase "code of manners". It is not the code alone but the manners behind it that matter. We recognise the etiquette in “The Sleeping Beauty”, but what makes the ballet glorious is the relation between the containing etiquette of form and the underlying vitality of impulse. A former dancer of Merce Cunningham remarked recently that she considered Cunningham himself to be very emotional and that his way of choreographing was a way of coping with emotion.
Randall Jarrell once wrote: “The classicism of exclusion is academicism." Choreography that is all formula without connecting manners and underlying impulse, choreography that is code for code's sake, has Cage's "clarity" without Cage's "grace". It's "arid academicism" - a phrase I find I use precisely of those choreographies that are neatly and cleverly planned but that seem to propose neatness, tidiness. order and cleverness for their own sake. It's on this point that we may distinguish "classicism" from "formalism". It's sad that Merce Cunningham is often only considered as a formalist, as if he were moving body parts in space and time as if they were abstract tools. Much of what one reads about Cunningham encourages one to think just that, but from watching Cunningham's work one sees that rřmuch of its profound beauty lies in his sense that "Manners maketh man" - manners to other people. manners to one's own body, manners 10 space. ("Psychology doesn't interest him. Anthropology and zoology do." Carolyn Brown.) Cunningham's emphasis on dancers as soloists and his rejection of psychological expressionism - these aspects of his work are self-evident choices about the manners of his stage societies.
Indeed, it's from a standpoint as much moral as anything else that Cunningham chooses to dance independently of music Dance for him is a system or systems of behaviour: part of the system is his instinctive or deliberate choice to carry on acting without tagging along to the soundtrack (And it was from a no less committed and profound moral standpoint that Balanchine chose to choreograph to music: much of the beauty of a Balanchine ballet lies in the very complicated relation betwen sound and sight. just as the independence of sound and sight gives drama, dignity. even poignancy, to a Cunningham work.) All this is well known, or should be: I reiterate it here only to put it in context of classicism as morality.
And if the word "morality" bothers you, try just the word “behaviour". “Mores", in fact. Cunningham has one way of behaving to the music and Balanchine another, but they don't behave in those ways by accident; and they show that their systems of behaviour to music are profoundly committed and consistently worked out. And as you watch the choreography and the several aspects of behaviour it includes - dancers in relation to music, to other dancers, to their own bodies. to space - you find the choreography's philosophy or morality. I don't say that only for the classical choreographer is the stage a microcosm of the world or a particular way of life: but the classicist, in making it so, establishes a code of outward manners.
And I haven't quite done with pre-twentieth-century dance history either. I think that this dance classicism, this strange tradition of presenting dancers. stems back to the manners of early ballet. The ballet that developed in the Renaissance and Baroque periods was closely connected to courtly manners, as you can tell from Castiglione's “The Courtier”, written in the early sixteenth century. Read Saint-Simon in French on the life at Versailles over a century and a half later: you find that, when describing courtly behaviour. he uses such words as “révérence" and “pirouette" - words that, though quite differently applied. have become part of the ballet vocabulary today. People described life at Versailles as "un ballet perpetuel", a continuous ballet “whose choreography was etiquette". Ballet as it developed at this time was man's secular life made art, the code of courtly manners refined into dancing. This was the danse horizontale, the outward progress of the vertical dancer through space, in movemen governed by a system of behaviour. (Of course, that is not all the danse horizontale was.) And it established the tradition of values shown in those dances we today call classical.
Manners are to do with outward behaviour. Dance classicism is not an introspective or expressionistic presentation of people. It shows life as lived in present action. Often it gives an ideal or idealist view. The use of dance techniques, ballet or other, that demand clarity, precision, rigour. propose some kind of perfection. The truth of this in classical ballet should be immediately apparent. And although Merce Cunningham’s choreography has often included much so-called non-dance or non-technical material, and while his works are certainly not aristocratic in any sense of marked hierarchy or social consciousness, his extensive use of refined technique ensures that his works are not democratic in a plebeian sense. (“Plebeian” means of the general non-aristocratic population. Yvonne Rainer called her “Trio A” a "democratic dance" because it could be executed by anyone, trained or untrained.) Many ballets have depicted Utopian orders or formally intricate ceremonies. Few if any of Cunningham's works do. His compositional procedures militate against that kind of idealism or perfection. But refinement, clarification - these are prime Cunningham objectives.
If there is a sense in which Cunningham is not a classicist, it's not in his use of non-virtuosic or non-balletic material but in the various ways he has of structuring a work, which take us so far from traditional choreographic craftsmanship, so plainly in avoidance of any conventional look of beginning-middle-end or theme-and-variations or cumulative structure or development-and-resolution, that to call the structure of some Cunningham works "classical" would be to stretch the word out of sensible validity.
Obviously, the neat ordering of a work like Cunningham’s “Duets” (1980) - in which we see six male-female couples dance a series of six individual duets, each duet briefly becoming a quartet as another couple dances along the back of the stage, all the dancers returning, still in couples, for the finale - can be called classical. But it would be far harder to call the structure of such Cunningham works as “Walkaround Time” (1968) classical. Yet if Cunningham's structures are freer or odder than those of other works we call classical, we can see that, because he values precision and clarity, because he uses his compositional methods not only 1o invent but also to select, restrict and refine, his works often feature many classical virtues in their organisation. I'm particularly interested in the way he uses his methods to give each work a precise formal style of its own, to redefine grace as well as clarity in each piece he makes.
VIl: A Test Case
British wags used to talk of the Holy Trinity of choreographers - Petipa the Father, Balanchine the Son, Ashton the Holy Ghost. David Vaughan has written of another sacred trio - Ashton, Balanchine. Cunningham - whom he calls "the ABC of contemporary classicism." I've mentioned each of them. Ashton l've intentionally discussed least, because, of the three, he has done least to extend classicism into new forms. Nonetheless, he's the local master and fully deserves his rank among any list of classical apostles.
As everyone knows, God died in 1983. And it's interesting that some choreographers have seen this as a serious issue for them. As Karole Armitage said in 1985. "Balanchine's dead and where do we go from here?” Twyla Tharp has spoken in similar vein in interviews. Even after God, classicism must be moved on: these choreographers speak as if they owe it to him.
I don't plan to list all those choreographers who are today's classicists. But I want to take the discussion past Cunningham, and I will therefore advance deliberately into awkward terrain by talking a little of David Gordon. Gordon, like Twyla Tharp, Laura Dean and others, is a post-modernist who has choreographed on ballet companies. But I talk here simply of the three works his own company showed in London in the 1985 Dance Umbrella. (I have written of these elsewhere and am obliged to repeat some of my points.) In “Nine Lives” Gordon begins by dancing with a chair. You see not his feelings for the chair, but his manners towards it. It's the same charity - the same fantasy - that Astaire showed in dancing with a hatstand. Absurd, yes, but it makes us feel the absurd as reasonable and well-mannered and logical - and, of course, entertaining. The chair solo has a flow of ideas and is presented in an unbroken flow of motion. When it's over, he builds variations on that premise - men, women and chairs, in sequence upon sequence.
Theme and variations: we're back to the quasi-musical classicism of the organisation of a language I mentioned apropos of Petipa and which also characterises much of Balanchine's and Ashton's choreography. But it isn't the structure or the language by themselves that make this work classical, it's the fact that they advance, complicate and refine a system of manners.
In “My Folks” (a work to klezmer music about aspects of Gordon’s Jewish cultural inheritance), there is the sense of tradition l've mentioned in other classical choreographers, an honouring of traditions - in this case traditions ethnic and nostalgic but also, in Valda Setterfield's solo, the traditions of the ballet “Raymonda”. (Whose third act is a series of ballet variations on the theme of the czardas and mazurka. Gordon made Setterfield's solo on returning to New York after seeing Antoinette Sibley dance Raymonda with the Royal Ballet.) Elsewhere in this work there is, again, the extensive use of props - in this case stretches of fabric - and the sense of a system that takes the work beyond absurdity, that shows the method in Gordon’s manners. And the result of the method is that you can always follow the dancers as people. follow their actions as you follow human behaviour, consider their behaviour as an exemplification of some strange etiquette. This is true, too, in a work without any props, “Offenbach Suite”. This has as much structure and clarity as the other works: six dancers and Valda Setterfield in the first part. the same six and David Gordon in the second part, with a slow, odd duet for Gordon and Setterfield in between. Gordon said in interview that "There's only so long you can say 'l won't use the arabesque, the attitude, the double pirouette.'" and this work seems to be his formal notice that, even with his own company, he has started to use those steps. “Offenbach Suite” is really a meditation on supported adagio. We see dancers taking poses, staying immobile until other dancers promenade or otherwise shift them; and Gordon shows the irony in that. Are they just puppets? Are dancers now to be each others' props? Is one the puppet, or is the other the slave? Sometimes we see the women lifted and turned as if they were lifeless as the chairs in “Nine Lives” or the fabric in “My Folks”, yet sometimes we see the women move independently... In the Gordon-Setterfield duet, the irony remains, but, in the repeated lifts, the effect is above all just one of great beauty and poise. It's not a ballet about feeling, but it is about an ambiguous etiquette. As I've said, we will find these ironies and ambiguitiés in the most, traditionally classical works.
I don't want to push the idea of Gordon as classicist too far. The idea of classicism demands classical style of performance as well as classicism of choreography. Style in Gordon's work is absolutely clear with Gordon and Setterfield themselves, but that style is quite different from that of their supporting dancers - you couldn't quite call them, as they appeared here in 1985, the ballerinas of the company (as you could still call Merce Cunningham the ballerina of his). It is also very clear that some of their co-dancers have mastered the arabesque, the attitude, the double pirouette less well than others - less well than the steps themselves demand. Either the foot is pointed or it is not. The precision of classicism demands rigour. (This year, when Gordon re-used some of his “Offenbach Suite” material in his “Bach & Offenbach” for Extemporary Dance Theatre, one saw not only a dearth of precision and rigour from most dancers but also a complete lack of objectivity in performance - and instead audience-conscious manners tha drew attention not to the dance but to the feelings which the dancers wished the audience to suppose they had about the dance Jon Smart and Sharon Donaldson were honourable exceptions.)
VIII. The Classical Body
When Gordon and other former so-called post-modernists cease to say "I won't use the arabesque, the attitude, the double pirouette and start to take on ballet techni-que, they may or may not be tackling new aesthetics and ethics - Roger Copeland has argued in these pages that they are not, that these post-modernists have always had something in common with the objectives of ballet - but they are certainly taking on a completely new presentation of the body. (And surely that must involve completely new aesthetics and ethics.) Classicism perpetuates an idea of the body derived from classical art. The greatest Greek sculpture attends to the body and honours it as something glorious in motion and repose, capable of demonstrating ideal principles of geometrical proportion, and expressive not just for reasons of representation or gesture but as a vessel of perfect form.
This is why Adrian Stokes wrote that:
“The open, physical and graceful attitudes of the marble Greek gods in whom emotion is shown as an outward-turned body, was dramatised by the classical technique. One witnesses in ballet the release of power, not its integration, just as in the eighteenth century a man introduced himself, showed himself, by turning his feet outwards and by the wide sweep of his arm and by the slow inclination of the body."
André Levinson compared ballet to the oriental style of dance:
"The movement of the oriental dance is concentric. The knees almost instinctively come together and bend, the curved arms embrace the body. Everything is pulled together. Everything converges. The movement of the classic dance, on the other hand, is ex-centric - the arms and the legs stretch out, freeing themselves from the torso, expanding the chest. The whole region of the dancer's being, body and soul, is dilated."
Levinson laid great attention to the turn-out of the legs and feet. and to the gradual advance of classical ballet from the obtuse-angle turn-out recorded by Feuillet & Co in baroque ballet, to the maximum turn-out of Blasis, Taglioni and subsequent ballet.
Complete turn-out, he says, extends the dancer's range of motion, facilitates motions otherwise impossible and increases the dimensions of the invisible cylinder of air around the dancer in motion. He is right (although he is surely wrong to treat baroque ballet as if it were a more primitive form, merely a halfway house to the fully turned-out and extended ballet of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries).
What has been true of classical ballet from Versailles on is that it offers a centrifugal presentation of the body. This is a Renaissance legacy. Kenneth Clark in “The Nude” observes a distinction between the male nudes of the Greek and Renaissance periods:
"We may describe this by saying that the antique male nude is like a Greek temple, the flat frame of the chest being carried on the columns of the legs; whereas the renaissance nude is related to the architectural system which produced the central domed church; so that instead of the sculptural interest depending on a simple. frontal plane, a number of axes radiate from one centre."
In all the styles of classical ballet over the centuries, the centrifugal, radial presentation of the body is present. It is what gives lasting beauty and grace to pictures of dancers of Louis XIV's day, and gives radiance to Lancret's paintings of Marie Camargo. And in a completely different way this is what Isadora Duncan had. I find it interesting that when Levinson and Stokes denounce her "superficial hellenism", they don't discuss this most profound aspect of her art. By locating her centre as high as the solar plexus, she inclined more to the Greek architectural presentation of the body, with a gestural upper pediment carried by the abdomen and legs. But this was a serious, not superficial, aspect of classicism in her work; and it was surely what gave her dancing such phenomena! theatrical radiance and legibility. In turn, by influence, it revitalised the use of the body in this century's ballet.
In classical sculpture, the waist is a focal point, formalised and full of vitality, from Polyclitus through to Michelangelo. And it is so too in classical dancing. As Denby once wrote :
"If you want to see how good a dancer is, look at his stomach. If he is sure of himself there, if he is so strong there that he can present himself frankly, he (or she) can begin to dance expressively. - I say stomach because the stomach usually faces the audience; one might say waist, groin or pelvis region."
Almost as important are the thigh and foot - more so than in painting or sculpture, because of their role in the dancer's locomotion. And they give buoyancy and texture to dance. I'm not speaking just of ballet: the different but crucial attention to thigh and foot in Duncan's and Cunningham's dance styles comes to mind.
These are details, and crucial. To return to the whole body and to “The Nude”, Clark observes how much the men of the Renaissance made of Vitruvius's observation "that man's body is a model of proportion because with arms or legs extended it fits into those 'perfect geometrical forms, the square and the circle." (And so we see “man the measure of things".) What classical dancing achieves is to show that the human body in reality, not just in painting and sculpture, can demonstrate ideals of form in geometry, harmony, and rhythm - that man can be ideal.
IX. Final Observations
In his book “Prime Movers”, Joseph Mazo spoke of three concerns of dance classicism - time, space and sex. He mentioned this in particular of Twyla Tharp. Up to the year 1976, when he was writing, he said she'd shown interest in time and space but not so far in sex.
Well, that was eleven years ago and she's made up for it since. (But Tharp, when she heard of this view of his, said "Write your own dance history, make up your own lies.") The matter of gender and of relations between the two sexes has been important to classicists: naturally, differences of gender have been among the first things most etiquettes have observed. I think that if I list the names Petipa, Balanchine, Ashton, Cunningham, Tharp, Alston, you can see how variable the treatments of gender and male/female relations can be.
Cunningham's choreography doesn't always make gender an issue and never makes it a major one, but that becomes part of the Cunningham code of behaviour: the Cunningham etiquette takes that into account. in Petipa and Balanchine the ballerina can seem to be deified, something which might be offensive or trite in itself but which the choreography makes fascinating. One of the effects of art can be to reconcile you to an alien morality.
An emphasis on the dancer, not just as a moving object passive in the scheme of things. but as an active participant in the work's system of behaviour - this has also been a key characteristic of classicism. It's no surprise that balletomania has developed where classical choreography has reached a peak: it is one of the natural results of the emphasis on the dancer that the choreography makes.
Denby once observed, in his profound essay “Some Thoughts About Classicism and George Balanchine”, that with New York City Ballet dancers "the more correct their style the more their individual personality becomes distinct and attractive onstage," a point which Croce picked out as a theme for her own “Ballets Without Choreography” essay. At the point where dancers become most objective and impersonal and precise about their material, they become, paradoxically, most luminous. It is extremely hard to explain why, extremely easy to feel how, this is so. One of the new works that has fascinated and moved me most in recent years is Merce Cunningham's “Doubles” (1985): a work that is double-cast and which highlights the differences between members of either cast, purely by asking them to dance as strictly as possible.
How impersonal is classicism? Croce once wrote of Twyla Tharp in 1971 "Twyla Tharp's subject is not her life or yours, and in that sense she's a classical artist." Since then Tharp has made semi-autobiographical pieces like “When We Were Very Young” (1980) and “Fait Accompli” (1983) and works about the modern world like “The Catherine Wheel” (1981) and “Bad Smells” (1982) as well as formal pure-dance works. Yet I don't know that these works - just because they are about "her life or yours" - are therefore necessarily not classical. “When We Were Very Young” I never saw, “Bad Smells” and “Fait Accompli” (then “Untitled”) I only saw once. But “The Catherine Wheel” is well known in Britain thanks to its availability on video, and it strikes me as classical in some of the ways that “The Nutcracker” is. It's too complex a work for me to discuss here, but it is about the deployment of energy within social mores; and it uses narrative as a path to illustrate this issue until finally celebrating the liquefied, ideal deployment of energy in its Utopian, concluding Golden Section.
Balanchine wrote in one essay "The choreographer turns not away from life, but to its source." At first this sounds less like Balanchine than several other. very different, choreographers. (Doris Humphrey's phrase about modern dance "working from the inside out" comes to mind.) But Balanchine's is an important point in this discussion nonetheless. because it highlights the dance classicist's view of style - that it is based on impulse from a source, that it recognises this impulse as the motor of life force. The dance theréfore opens up the dancer's body, and to some degree alters. refines or transforms it. Internal impulse as fulfilled in outward code of behaviour. This is the grace of which Cage wrote, working to irradiate the frame of clarity.
This point about energy. its deployment and its context, was the stated subject matter of “The Catherine Wheel” and it is the implicit subject of all dance classicists. I have spoken, all too much now, of manners. Stephen Petronio asked me if I thought classicism could contain baD manners. “You mean Karole Armitage." I said, and he did. It seems to me that in “Drastic Classicism” and “The Watteau Duet” Armitage is deliberately dramatising the tension between aggressive impulse and ambiguously formal manners. You can see similar dramas in “The Catherine Wheel” and in some of Michael Clark's work, and you can see it in much of Balanchine's work (just look at the “Agon” pas de deux). But I think that, for all the violence in these 1980s works, they show that their so-called "bad manners" are only bad in one context and they can be liberated - liberating, in fact - in another.
The choreographer may look inwards, but the classical dancer in performance does not suggest introspection. There is a sense of progress, as there was in the dance horizontale and as there is in classical music. Doris Humphrey. often proposed as the classicist of modern dance, I don't consider classical in the works of hers I've seen because of the introspection, the lack of irony, and the one-facted sense of structure in her choreography. To me she's a very systematic formalist. In dance classicism the dancer's energy is shown channelled through systems of forms and designs that are as much moral as they are rhythmic or geometric. The idea of a system of forms and designs is important. This is why I think Yvonne Rainer's “Trio A”, fascinating though that is, is not classical whereas Twyla Tharp's “The Fugue”, which is not dissimilar in some aspects of bodily style, is.
Impulse, morality, forms. geometries and designs, language and virtuosity, grace and clarity... What else can we say? Perhaps just this: that in classical dancing we see a picture of life lived according to a system, not inhibited but refined by that system so that the realisation of impulse becomes the work's vital force and so that the body in action is transformed. Because it is not expressionist, it can seem escapist. But dancing is not apart from life, after all, it is life. And from Versailles on, classical dancing has demonstrated this fact. If we in looking at classical dancing realise that we are looking not at a a never-never land but at life, life refined and ordered, life where aggression and emotion and sensuality are not repressed but used within a code of manners or used to enlarge that code of manners. then we begin to understand its secrets
I have wound this up like the finale of a sermon, so I'll close by saying "And now to Petipa the Father, Balanchine the Son and Ashton the Holy Ghost..."
1987 biographical note: Alastair Macaulay teaches dance history at the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance, contributes dance criticism to “Dancing Times” and “The Guardian”. and is co-editor of “Dance Theatre Journal”. His thanks to Bonnie Bird, Katherine Lee, and Janet Adshead for having invited him to give lectures on the subject to Laban Centre M.A. and B.A. students and at the 1986 University of Surrey conference on “Choreography: Principles and Practice”. An earlier version of this piece will be published this vear. with texts of other conference lectures, seminars, and classes. in the University of Surrey 1986 Conference Report.