Contemporary Arts
The Ballerina and the Future
The latest study of her career (My Years with Pay/ova, by H. Algeranoff : Heinemann, 25s.) re- focuses interest on the questions without coming any nearer giving a definitive answer to any of them. It has the great virtue of showing her as an understandable and believable woman, and not the demi-goddess that we meet in almost all previous records of her life and work. This human presentation of her, on stage and off, on ships and trains, at parties and conferences, happy or ill, joyous or depressed, is the closest to a three- dimensionai view we are likely to get for some time. Mr. Algeranoff, an English dancer in her company for many years, writes sensitively, in- telligently and realistically about his .years in her company and, without labouring the point heavily, suggests many times that she was pro- gressive-minded, that she wished to create and perform new kinds of ballet, that she was eager to show her many publics as wide a variety of ideas as could be expressed through the formula of ballet. Whichever way we may be persuaded to believe, her reputation is untouchable—she did bring great pleasure and inspiration to multi- tudes; she treated her dancers with sympathy and intelligent consideration; she undoubtedly brought the idea of ballet into the consciousness of people of many races and cultures who other- wise might never have experienced it.
The more one ponders on the author's com- ments on her way of dancing, on her way of choosing dancers, on the repertoire she danced, the more it becomes clear that she was not so much a manifestation of a trend or a method or an ideal in ballet, .but an end-product, a final glorious realisation of something that—histori- cally considered—could happen once and once only. Pavlova's career and its valuable aftermath is really the climax happening in a series of events that began sixty years before her birth. She was the final, full, dazzling manifestation of the essence of ballerinadom; in her was totally realised all that any single human being could achieve—spiritually and physically—with both the idiom and the ideology of ballet, Bypassing (for the moment) all living ballerinas of true quality and without a single denigratory thought about any one of them—is this the time to ask whether the reign of the ballerina in ballet IS not near its end? No firm rules define when, Where, how and why women began (were per-
mitted?) to make careers as interpretative artists. When each European society finally admitted women into serious consideration as human beings it enabled them to push open the doors leading to any of the careers in which they could achieve success. When professionalism came to ballet, women were full-time and fully trained dancers as much as were men. It is too frequently overlooked that ballet has come to be an art seemingly built on and for women performers exclusively only since the day of the invention of the romantic ballet, about the period 1820-30. A longish period, true : but perhaps it is a legiti- mate criticism of the growth of the art of ballet since that period to point out the quite extra- ordinary limitations within which ballets are still imagined, created and performed.
A balletgoer of the 1820s, resurrected and treated to- a night out at his old pursuit, would find nine-tenths of any ballet programme any- where in the world today completely comprehen- sible. He would perhaps note a more involved and comparatively acrobatic vocabulary of steps used by the ballerinas; he might be pleased at seeing the male dancer actually dancing instead of mincing around or serving as a motionless piece of decor; he would scarcely 'notice that the scenery and costumes have usually a stylised rather than a naturalistic quality, for they do not 'blend into' the story any more effectively than the scenery of the ballets of his own day did. Almost nothing that mattered would have altered, for most of today's favourite successful ballets are on stories, and with dramatic situations, almost identical with the earliest works of the romantic ballet era.
Viewing the status of ballet today we can see that the work of even the best choreographers of this century almost without exception has been guided by the notion that the be-all-and-end-all of the art of ballet is the glorification and glamorisation of the female dancer. The opening of fresh fields of ideas for choreographic ex- pression has been carried out under the creators' subconscious burden of canalising all audience interest (or at least 95 per cent, of it) towards the mysterious, eternal She.
It is not beyond realisation that the next trend in ballet-making could be a first rediscovery— since the initial discovery by Italian ballet- inasters in the fifteenth century—of the emotional, dramatic, sensual, stimulative power of the male human animal in stylised,disciplined and harnessed motion. This aspect of ballet-making has, indeed, occurred fleetingly to one or two choreographers since 1900; I suggest that a concatenation of causes (State subsidy, the steady collapse of con- temporary homosexual dominance in the theatre arts, the unwillingness of women to embark on so chancy and unrewarding a career as ballet, the gradual emergence of a galaxy of splendid —and splendidly masculine—male dancers, etc. etc.) might well effect this shift of balance in the complete perspective of ballet within the next decade. There is no visible evidence that it could not happen—and, looking round the dance- theatres of today, what have we to lose?
A. V. COTON
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