“Pas de Quatre”
by Amy Growcott
Lithograph of Jules Perrot and Cesare Pugni’s “Pas de Quatre” by Alfred Edward Chalon (1845). From left to right: Carlotta Grisi (left, kneeling), Marie Taglioni (centre), Lucile Grahn (right, back) and Fanny Cerrito (right, kneeling)
It was on this date, the 12th of July 1845, that Perrot and Pugni’s “Pas de Quatre” made its world première at Her Majesty’s Theatre, London. The “Pas de Quatre” is a ballet divertissement created by Perrot and Pugni for four of the greatest ballerinas of the 19th century. The Romantic Ballet was dominated by five ballerinas, who were deemed the epitome of the era – Marie Taglioni, Lucile Grahn, Fanny Elssler, Carlotta Grisi and Fanny Cerrito. On several occasions, there were attempts to bring these dancers together on stage, but not all were successful. In 1841, a new grand ballet entitled “Le Jugement de Pâris” in which Taglioni, Elssler and Cerrito would star was announced but never produced. Two years later in 1843, Benjamin Lumley succeeded in persuading Cerrito and Elssler to appear together at Her Majesty’s Theatre in a pas de deux that was very successful, but the fact that he was able to bring such a pas into fruition was considered something of a miracle. Nevertheless, the experience deepened Lumley’s ambitions to create a bigger work for all the three aforementioned dancers to appear in. In 1845, Lucile Grahn made her début in London, and there was further excitement when it was realized that Taglioni, Cerrito and Carlotta Grisi would all be in the English capital at the same time. Elssler was engaged elsewhere. Lumley jumped at the chance to engage the three ballerinas for a new ballet in which they would appear together and in February, The Times announced that they might ‘appear in one single ballet – a collision that the most carelessly managed railroad could hardly hope to equal.’ Following the success of her London début, Grahn was also invited to be part of the new work, and it was decided that it would be a pas de quatre with no introductory narrative. Lumley, however, was aware of the risks behind such an ambitious project, not in the least due to the rivalries between the dancers, so persuading them to appear together required a good bit of coaxing, flattery, and supplication. Lumley clearly succeeded in gaining the ballerinas’ cooperation, but this was only the first step as the most challenging of tasks lay in devising the choreography, which he entrusted to Perrot with the following instructions: “Every twinkle of each foot in every pas had to be nicely weighed in the balance, so as to give no preponderance. Each danseuse was to shine in her peculiar style and grace to the last stretch of perfection; but no one is to outshine the others – unless in their own individual belief.” Pugni, who was commissioned as composer, was no doubt given the same instructions for the music. The key was for the Pas de Quatre to showcase each ballerina’s skills and levels of greatness as equals and individuals, not as a competition to determine who was the greatest. *Perrot’s choreography Perrot’s choreography has not survived, but Ivor Guest offers a good description and insight of the ballet’s structure and choreography in several of his books, including Jules Perrot: Master of the Romantic Ballet, bringing together descriptions from different eyewitness accounts. “The ballet began with an introduction of elegant, picturesque groups. Taglioni was always in the centre of these groups with the others positioned around and above her, their arms outstretched as if in homage. These groups were succeeded by a ‘quick transverse movement,’ followed by a brilliant solo for Grahn and then, a pas de deux for Cerrito and Grisi that was succeeded by Taglioni performing a series of jétés across the stage. The first variation was an allegro variation for Grahn, revolving with ‘dainty semi-circular hops’ en pointe as light as ‘a feather in a current of wind’ yet vigorous, and in her poses, astonishingly firm. The second variation was an andante movement for Grisi, performing ‘tip-toe flights’ and ‘lightning gyrations’ of ‘equal dexterity and number, mingled, however, with a world of little sprightly steps, which multiplied her feet into thousands – a piquant, coquettish variation in which she brought her youthful grace and fascination into full play. A romantic note was now struck, as the tempo changed to slow, expressive andantino movement danced by Taglioni and Grahn. But this mood was only momentary. Cerrito, who had been calmly contemplating her rivals from the back of the stage, burst into action with a rapid sequence of turns, taken diagonally across the stage, followed by some jétés so buoyant that, the words of one spectator, ‘you could see she would have striven to “put a girdle around the earth in forty minutes”’… It was now the turn of the supreme ballerina, herself, and it was a tribute to her artistry that, in spite of the triumphs that had gone before, she could raise the enthusiasm to new heights. Hers was an allegro variation, gentle and languid in mood, in which she ‘displayed all her commanding manner, relying much on that advancing step of which, we believe, she was the inventress, and astonishing by some of her bounds.’ In it she introduced ‘steps with the knee bent forward’ which were so completely her own that no other dancer had succeeded in imitating them, and it was observed that her ‘line of dancing was always maintained nearer the perpendicular’ than that of her companions. Then came the coda, in which all four vied with one another in performing ‘steps of various and dazzling complexity,’ ‘flying with a rapidity the eye could scarcely follow, mingled in beautiful evolutions and presenting a moving picture of which no description can give any idea,’ and finally coming together with precision to form a ‘sculpturesque’ group.” *World première "The most famous cast of Dolin’s “Pas de Quatre” (1943) Alicia Markova (Taglioni), Alexandra Danilova (Cerrito), Nathalie Krassovska (Grahn) and Mia Slavenska (Grisi) Preparations for the historic performance that was scheduled for the 12th of July were soon underway and everything was going to plan, until the morning of the première when an incident occurred that almost threatened the whole event. An argument broke out between Cerrito and Grisi over precedence. While neither ballerina questioned Taglioni’s right to dance the final variation, they both claimed precedence over the over for second place. According to Taglioni, it was Cerrito who started the quarrel and that Grisi flew into a great rage, stamping about the stage and called her colleague “a little chit.” In despair, Perrot rushed to Lumley’s office, reported the incident and Lumley’s solution was, in Guest’s words, ‘worthy of Solomon.’ He said, “The question of talent must be decided by the public, but in this dilemma, there is one point on which I am sure the ladies will be frank. Let the oldest take her unquestionable right to the envied position.” The effect miraculously worked, and the incident was settled, about which Lumley wrote in his memoirs: “The ballet-master smote his forehead, smiled assent, and bounded from the room upon the stage. The judgement of the manager was announced. The ladies tittered, laughed, drew back, and were now as much disinclined to accept the right of position as they had been before eager to claim it. The ruse succeeded. The management of affairs was left in Monsieur Perrot’s hands. The order of the ladies being settled, the grand pas de quatre was finally performed on the same night before a delighted audience, who little knew how nearly they had been deprived of their expected treat.” However, when evening came and the performance was to begin, there were some in the audience who doubted that the mission to bring the four great ballerinas together had been fulfilled, but when the lights darkened and the orchestra began to play, all doubts vanished when the curtain rose to reveal Taglioni, Cerrito, Grisi and Grahn, all clad in pink and adorned by roses in their hair. The auditorium erupted in thunderous applause. The ballet and the event were an outstanding success: Lumley had achieved what many had believed to be impossible, and Perrot’s choreography showcased the four great ballerinas of the Romantic Era in all their glory. The critics were enchanted to the bone as proven by the reviews. The Vicomtesse de Malleville wrote in the Le Courrier de l’Europe wrote, “There are more than ten ballets of the calibre of ‘La Esmeralda’ in this new effort of Perrot.” The critic of The Times wrote, “Never was such a pas before, it was the greatest Terpsichorean exhibition that ever was known in Europe.” According to the Era, “[The Pas de Quatre] shook one’s soul to the very centre” and the Morning Herald concluded thatitmarked “an era in the records of the ballet-master’s art, and those who saw it chuckle to this day with satisfaction, and talk boastingly to those who did not.” The “Pas de Quatre” was performed only three times more in July on the 15th, the 17th, and the 19th before Grisi left London. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert attended the performance on the 17th of July. The ballet was revived two years later in 1847 for two performances on the 17th and 20th July, with Carolina Rosati dancing Lucile Grahn’s role. *Sir Anton Dolin's “Pas de Quatre” "The original cast of Anton Dolin’s Pas de Quatre (1941) Nana Gollner (Taglioni), Alicia Alonso (Grisi), Nina Stroganova (Grahn) and Katherine Sergava (Cerrito) In 1941, the British dancer and choreographer Sir Anton Dolin staged a new version of the Pas de Quatre. Dolin owned a copy of Chalon’s lithograph of Perrot’s Pas de Quatre and the music score was found by historian Cyril Beaumont in the London archives in the 1930s. Dolin revived the ballet with new choreography that was based on the descriptions of the critics and eyewitnesses of the original 1845 performance and the music score was arranged and orchestrated by Leighton Lucas. According to American Ballet Theatre’s website, the world première of Dolin’s “Pas de Quatre” was danced by Ballet Theatre and took place on the 16th of July 1941 at the Majestic Theatre in New York City. The original dancers were Nana Gollner (Taglioni), Alicia Alonso (Grisi), Nina Stroganova (Grahn) and Katherine Sergava (Cerrito). However, the most famous cast of Dolin’s “Pas de Quatre” seems to be Alicia Markova (Taglioni), Alexandra Danilova (Cerrito), Nathalie Krassovska (Grahn) and Mia Slavenska (Grisi), who seem to have debuted in the ballet ca. 1942/43. Since its première, Dolin’s “Pas de Quatre” and by some of the most celebrated ballerinas of the 20th century.
"The most famous cast of Dolin’s “Pas de Quatre” (1943) Alicia Markova (Taglioni), Alexandra Danilova (Cerrito), Nathalie Krassovska (Grahn) and Mia Slavenska (Grisi)
"The original cast of Anton Dolin’s Pas de Quatre (1941) Nana Gollner (Taglioni), Alicia Alonso (Grisi), Nina Stroganova (Grahn) and Katherine Sergava (Cerrito)
The Dante Project at the Paris Opera Ballet: Moving across Media
MARCH 25, 2024 - BY TATIANA SENKEVITCH
More than a century ago, in his essay “On the Anniversary Celebration of Dante,” the legendary literary critic Erich Auerbach, observed that, “Dante is far from having achieved his maximum impact even now.” [1]The Dante Project—a recent collaboration between choreographer Wayne McGregor, composer Thomas Adès, visual artist Tacita Dean, and dramaturg Uzma Hameed— demonstrates that Auerbach is still right. Until this ballet, the world of dance referred to or evoked Dante’s poetry with its rich visual imagery only tangentially, as for example in several choreographic interpretations based on the music of Francesca da Rimini: Symphonic Fantasy after Dante by Tchaikovsky. [2] The Dante Project, commissioned by the Royal Opera House, is the first attempt in current performative arts to reimagine Dante’s epic poem as a full-evening ballet. It takes the public along with the poet through Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. The Project stages an artistic quest for the Dante of today, mediated by means of dance and presented as a condensed theatrical action. McGregor asked Adès, one of the leading classical composers in Britain today, to write a full-length score to be produced at the Royal Ballet. A prodigy of collaborative projects, McGregor did not specify the subject or theme for this commission. Adès had been fascinated by Dante’s epic poem since his teenage years and suggested a score based on The Divine Comedy. The first act of the ballet, “Inferno: Pilgrim,” exceeded almost twice the suggested duration of thirty minutes. And yet, for Adès, the fourteen musical episodes still seemed barely sufficient to submerge the listeners in the deepest circles of punishment, with all their physical and moral torments. “Inferno” was premiered by the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra in May 2019 in concert form, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel. Two months later, it was performed again in Los Angeles; this time with the addition of McGregor’s choreography performed by dancers from the Royal Ballet.
Next, McGregor and Adès’s project moved to the Royal Opera House in London, where its scheduled opening in May 2020 was stalled for a long eighteen months. It was only in October of 2021, coinciding with the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death, that the Dante Project was finally produced, in its full three acts, before the public. Then in May of 2023, it was staged by the Paris Opera Ballet, where McGregor had been working since 2007. The Paris production serves as the basis for this review. Staging a full-length ballet based on a historical literary source, particularly an epic poem, is a worthy undertaking for contemporary ballet theater. However, while narrative ballet often meets with public appreciation, it also frequently bears the stigma of bygone cultural models, evoking the allegorical performances of the Baroque, the exotic glamor of the French belle epoch, or even the heroic ballets of the Soviet era. With the rise of neoclassical ballet, choreographers often preferred allusions rather than plots, associative atmosphere rather than verisimilitude, and the freedom of reference found in the absence of a libretto. Clearly, contemporary ballet theater cannot resist the enticing possibilities of transforming the most complex and grand literary works into balletic form, seeking to remake literature’s logocentrism through the poetics of corporeal narrative based on sensations. Given recent history, no one should doubt that the great works of literature, from Shakespeare to Tolstoy and Thomas Mann, could be choreographed into ballets. Though, of course, one might still ask, is this desirable? Dante, however, never seemed high on the list of literary sources for ballet theater. Something in the poetic structure and cosmological grandness of this literary monument likely discouraged conversions from the poetic text even into a closer medium, that of theater plays. The Dante Project, therefore, offers an opportunity to think critically about contemporary ballet as a vehicle for Dante’s theological epic; it also allows an opportunity to contemplate the ends of the balletic medium in relation to the other non-verbal media—music and visual arts—that collaborate with choreography when channeling poetry into the theatrical mode. The presence of Wayne McGregor, one of the most acclaimed innovators in contemporary dance today and an attractive, inviting figure for the newer and younger public in dance, makes The Dante Project fertile ground for an examination of the encounter between a Renaissance literary masterpiece and contemporary theater dance. The word “project” in the title of this ballet is an apt choice for this multimedia figuration of Dante’s verbal imagery: it suggests an ongoing, continuous character for this daring artistic enterprise. To condense Dante’s epic poem into a three-act ballet while simultaneously creating a palatable, visually engaging, and illuminating experience for the public would be a daunting task for any single artist. Yet Adès’s score, Dean’s stage sets, and Hameed’s dramaturgy furnish three structural pillars that support the contribution of dance itself. McGregor’s prior collaborations with Hameed had already proved efficient in pouring—one might say even channelling—the choreographer’s fount of plastic ideas into the flow of a narrative structure. Hameed has divided the libretto into three acts that correspond logically to the Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise, thus mirroring the tripartite structure of the poem. Still, transforming The Divine Comedy into a ballet libretto was a task of a high order of difficulty for Hameed. The poem narrates the ultramundane journey of the poet, the literary avatar of the author, through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise in search of his true self. These three strati that once organized the social and religious world of the Renaissance man persist in various understandings of human destiny. In his journey to Hell, Dante encounters the souls of the damned, many of them his contemporaries or familiar historical characters. These eternally tormented creatures retain their corporeal essence and convey to the poet anguish, misjudgements, and ethical or criminal misdeeds that continue to plague humanity, some seven hundred years after Dante’s death. McGregor’s road to Dante was long and almost literally induced a change from sneakers to pointe shoes. His manner of movement originated in modern urban rhythms, asphalt surfaces, visceral bodily pulsations, bulging contortions, extreme extensions, and jagged lines. Already in his non- narrative creations, particularly in Chroma (2006) and Infra (2008), two ballets that became iconic for contemporary ballet canons, McGregor expanded balletic language through his non- hierarchical approach to pre-existing codes. Creating persuasive characters through dance and conveying their motivations came next. The shift towards building characters as in theater dance occurred in McGregor’s choreography because of his search beyond the categories of contemporary ballet, and his incorporation of elements of techno and street dance. The invitations to stage ballets such as Chroma, for the companies as diverse as San Francisco Ballet, Bolshoi Ballet, or the National Ballet of Canada, among others, allowed the choreographer to estimate the potential of different interpretations, infusing his choreography with layers of meaning. Revealing a limitless plasticity and pliability in dancers, his choreographic imagination enabled dancers to search for a new level of emotional exploration on stage. Even his apparently abstract Infra McGregor claimed, was simply about people. McGregor’s current style emerged consistently during his almost two decades of work with a single classical company, the Royal Ballet, for which he became the resident choreographer in 2006. [4] Despite his status as a widely sought-after choreographer for full evening “traditional” ballets, McGregor keeps one foot in “pure” contemporary dance, never deserting his first company: Random Dance (now Company Wayne McGregor). He also eagerly ventures in the areas of popular cultures. His choreographies for the blockbuster Harry Potter or the Goblet of Fire, for the 2022 ABBA Voyage concert, as well as his staging of dances for the advertising campaign everyBODY of Selfridge in London occupy places of significance within his oeuvre of the last decade. It seemed logical, then, that the same choreographer who had established his name in contemporary dance and became engaged with the leading repertory companies throughout the world would venture into full-length narrative ballet, and, more specifically, use literary sources as an inspiration for his work. Raven Girl (2013), his first ballet grounded in a literary work, was followed by Woolf Works (2015), Tree of Codes (2015), The Dante Project (2021), and MADDADDAM, (2022), among others.[5] In The Dante Project, the narrative thread and subsequent stage action follows the journey of three leading characters—the poet, Virgil, and Beatrice. In Dante’s poetic world, inspired by achievements of antiquity in the sciences and the arts, and by the mathematical thought of the Renaissance in particular, the way down is a descent into a geometrically structured series of concentric circles, and. Virgil, the leading poet of ancient Rome whom Dante revered as his mentor, becomes the poet’s guide on the journey to Inferno and Purgatory. And yet, as a pagan, Virgil cannot follow his ambulatory student to Paradise. Instead, at the gates of Paradise, Virgil entrusts Dante to Beatrice, the third principal character of The Divine Comedy. Beatrice is both a real woman, someone whom Dante might have encountered in his youth, and a symbol of divine love and the eternal beauty— the inspiration that led Dante’s soul and imagination to soar above the mundane world. Even this short sketch will suggest the high order of complexity that any “translator” of Dante’s monumental oeuvre into a theatrical format encounters. Dance, perhaps, has a certain advantage over other forms of art, given its potential for evoking the communication of emotions and ideas by means of nonverbal figurations. Concerns persist, however. How can Dante’s and Virgil’s long voyage to the bottom of the underworld, their cumulative vision of both sinners and the righteous, as well as the transformation of Dante’s love for Beatrice be condensed into a ballet plot without losing its complexity and completeness? What balletic code would befit the re-enactment of the hellish torments, Purgatory’s self-revelations, and the further ascension to the angelic order? Perhaps the phantasmatic rites of Romantic ballets? Or the psychological density of neoclassical tradition, such as in John Cranko’s or John Neumeier’s works? Or the ritualistic rhythms of Maurice Béjart (his Ninth Symphony in particular)? Or something completely different and yet unseen? Although The Dante Project is premised on collaborative work, McGregor faced a challenge—or perhaps a joy, or both—of devising Dante’s world on stage through the singular method of corporeal figuration that is the choreographer’s alone. By reputation an emotionally withdrawn artist, in The Dante Project, McGregor here attempted to conceive movements expressing a range of emotional states, including horror, fear, disgust, despair, pain, regret, repentance, remorse, and each had to become legible to the public. On the one hand, that Dante’s characters underwent extreme physical suffering seemed fitting to McGregor’s physical approach to dance; on the other, the subtle concreteness and poetic transparency of Dante’s figuration might be expected to clash with the supranatural, almost technological logic of movement preferred by the British choreographer. Erich Auerbach was also one of Dante’s most perspicacious scholars. He argues for example, that “though Dante’s language is marked by supreme artifice, it is uncomplicated in its effect: it does not deal in riddles. The profound wisdom of his words can thus be understood as fully by the simple and childlike mind as by the reader who contemplates them in pursuit of their deeper meanings.”[6] It seems, then, that the simultaneous transparency and depth of Dante’s poetry can serve as a genuine source for dance, an art that old and recent thinkers have claimed to be akin to a universal language. For this to happen, that magic switch mentioned by Auerbach, which we call artifice, must be uncovered in the work’s new artistic medium. Artifice, morphologically coming from art (ars), refers to an artistic technique, one that is not available in nature, hence the contrast between the “natural” and “artificial,” articulated already in Aristotle’s Poetics. Art imitates nature, but each art imitates it differently, finding its own tactics and keys. The artifice that produces a transparency of meanings, as noted by Auerbach, is a particularly sensitive device for transitioning from verbal imagery to dance. The Dante Project’s multimedia dazzle kept the public busy, at times oversaturated with the intensity of scenic action, but a clear eloquence of gesture, which ought to emerge at the passage of idea into movement, was often missing. For those who were not closely familiar with Dante’s text, the balletic image of Dante along with the quest of his journey remained vaguely defined. No specific choreographic steps marked the transformation of the poet’s attitude towards Virgil, towards his beloved Beatrice, or towards his own revelation of human destiny. In many ways, Dante lingered on the stage as simply an observer to constantly evolving moving tableaux, masterfully contrived for the corps de ballet, as if trapped in a beguiling high-tech fantasy, one in which no character would truly suffer or desire to change their destinies. Dean’s sets and Adès’s music played crucial roles in supporting the choreography’s progression through the three acts of the ballet. In the opening scene, the public sees dancers clad in grayish, ashen bodices, inside a circle drawn upon the stage, while the two characters representing Dante and Virgil, dressed in bright, blue-and-yellow costumes, walk at the edge of the circle. A circle, an indexical sign of Dante’s representation of Hell, marks the limit of the figurative action that develops against the backdrop of a gigantic chalk drawing of an inverted mountain formation, falling into a vortex at the universe’s center. Dean’s ingenious choice of chalk for the set in Act One is a strong emotional gesture. This fragile, natural substance that crumbles into particles after a trace is applied underscores the improbable reality of the negative world, where the sins and errors of the positive world are disrobed. The crumbled chalk, like ashes, covers the bodices of dancers who appear androgynous, interchangeable, and deprived of identity. Dante’s journey into the underworld breaks down into fourteen episodes as charted by Adès. The poet encounters fallen people, including the selfish, the ferryman Charon of Hades, and the poets (among them the great classical poets of Antiquity, consigned to Limbo like other non-Christians); he recognizes Ulysses, observes Francesca and Paolo, walks through the Forest of Suicides, with Dido and Aeneas among them, and discerns soothsayers, thieves, the wrathful, and the false pope; the poet witnesses the Road to Calvary, and, finally, he meets Satan. With this dense number of episodes, McGregor had to be precise in choosing movements, stances, and gestures that would distinguish the different types of the damned. While some groups of sinners were sharply characterized, the function of others was not immediately legible. For example, the pairing of female dancers as conjoined twins to represent soothsayers, or the frenetic fouettés performed by the all-male group in the episode of the thieves made a solid balletic iconography. At the same time, two duets of unfortunate lovers—Francesca and Paolo, and Dido and Aeneas—were visually coherent but they left the viewer with no sense of empathy; nor could the public understand what tormented these couples, or why encountering them were important for Dante’s journey. In his recent choreography, McGregor clearly feels more and more at ease with academic movement vocabulary. Even the characteristic jaggedness of his lines created by movement patterns has become smoother and coherent, especially in the duets. Being at ease with classical vocabulary, however, does not necessarily lead to mastering its rhetoric. McGregor’s lexicon of movements is diverse. Yet in The Dante Project, he distinctly privileges academic movements and forms, including those generated by the pointe shoes technique. This choice secured visual consistency throughout three acts of the ballet. Classical vocabulary, in this case, became something akin to the high style of poetry, associated with the epic genre, that Dante learned from Virgil. Yet in his Divine Comedy, Dante transgressed the limits of Virgil’s style by mixing different genres and shifting narrative modes. In breaking the boundaries of genres, and even in naming his work a comedy, Dante freely revised what was felt to be appropriate for his period in the relations between form and content as well as thought and expression. As such, visualizing in choreography Dante’s narrative and, a fortiori, expressing the passions that lead Dante’s characters to the abyss might well be a task of inventing a figurative poesis that surpasses the limits of a single style. One of the most striking episodes in “Inferno” was the appearance of Satan in androgynous guise. In the Paris production, both Valentine Colasante and Roxane Stojanov performed this role with confidence and individual touches, but Stojanov’s Satan seemed particularly gutsy and monumental. On this point, McGregor seemed to be fully in touch with the existing iconography; he delineated an image pulsating with meaning and echoing, yet not repeating, familiar visual sources. One might think here of the timeless sway of Michelangelo’s monumental fresco of the Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel and its stunning inventory of suspended movements, which could themselves unfold into the energy of dance. Theater dance, as Jean-Georges Noverre argued two and a half centuries ago, continuously benefits from resourcing the iconography established in the visual arts, as both painting and dance deal with imaginary figurations. Throughout his career, McGregor has collaborated with the visual artists of today, enriching his choreographic ideas by novel, technologically inspired means of contemporary art. The older repository of images, however, might be a platform of resonance and consideration as well. A choreographically bland dialogue between Dante and Virgil was something of a missed opportunity, whereas in the source poem it is a highly charged interaction between a student and his chosen mentor from the past. Virgil not only accompanies Dante on his voyage, he warns, protects, and conveys moral judgments to his Renaissance peer. The Paris cast of The Dante Project featured Irek Mukhamedov, the legendary Tatar dancer, whose career unfolded in the Bolshoi and Royal Opera House, as Virgil. Though in his mid-sixties, the dancer retained his powerful plasticity and dramatic presence on stage, but this was not sufficiently explored by McGregor’s choreography. For Mukhamedov, now working as a ballet master in the Paris Opera Ballet, the role of Virgil had a deeper symbolic meaning, as both dancers performing Dante— Germain Louvet and Paul Marque—work in the company with this Soviet-trained teacher almost daily. The significance of this casting choice for the Virgil-Dante tandem might well have resulted in a greater dramatic impact, if the choreography had been available to accommodate it. Both Louvet and Marque performed Dante’s part dutifully and with technical ease; however, neither emotional depth nor intellectual investment informed their respective interpretations of the role. The most convincing attempt to re-enact Dante’s poem as dance was found in Act Two. Musically, “Purgatorio: Love” expressed the process of contemplative prayers and introspection. Adès, by condensing thirty-three canti of Dante’s “Purgatorio” into seven musical movements, structured as an unfolding meditation that served to pacify McGregor’s thirst for revolving movements. Importantly, the music suggested a new poetic mode, different from that of the “Inferno.” As a theme, the purifying power of love, a mystery equal to the revelation of faith, was developed in Adès’s music with charged intensity. Based on the ancient Jewish chants still preserved in Jerusalem’s Ades Synagogue, which were established by the composer’s Sephardic ancestors, the music called for ritual introspection in this balletic Dante. Tacita Dean’s set for Purgatory was equally commanding. She divided the stage into two parts: a bare monastic dwelling with simple taborets to the left and a series of large, superimposed photographs of a street corner in Los Angeles to the right. To underscore the meaning of Purgatory as the middle ground between Hell and Paradise, Dean used a sequence of photographic negatives of a real tree on the street in Los Angeles in order to show its transformation from violet into a blooming, intense green, with the coloring added by hand. The series of photos serves as a fold in Dante’s memories of his encounters with Beatrice: first as a girl, and later as a teenager (both flashbacks were short duets danced by students from the School of Paris Opera). McGregor responded to the serene atmosphere created by the music and the set with graceful attention. The narrative created by Dante’s memory became graspable and captivating, particularly when Beatrice appeared on stage. Hannah O’Neil’s appearance in the role of Beatrice came across as a great revelation of the growing artistic potential of this recently recognized étoile of the Paris Opera Ballet. Act Three brought Dante to Paradise, the logical ending to his journey. In the poem, Paradiso represents the ascension of the poet’s soul to the highest, celestial order of things. The transformation occurred over twenty-four hours, during Easter Sunday, when the bright light of life takes over death. In Hameed’s ballet dramaturgy, Paradise ought to render a finale, an apotheosis, as it did in the bygone classical formula. In Act Three, “Paradiso: Poema Sacro,” McGregor’s choreography thrived in the atmosphere afforded by the music and sets, but it did not command the ensemble. Searching the means for transformation of Dante’s argument on divine cosmology and angelic order within some thirty minutes of theatrical action—a daunting task in many ways—the creators of The Dante Project chose different paths and relied on their corresponding media. Finding a visual abstraction of levitating happiness as the pinnacle of Dante’s journey turned out to be more challenging than creating the vision of the lower world.
Photo: The Dante Project, Act Three. The Royal Ballet ©2021 ROH. Photograph by Andrej Uspenski. Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris Dean’s digital projection serves as a background to the balletic action. The film, titled Paradise centers on the aperture’s contrivance that allows different visual sequences to co-exist within a single-film frame. Dean found her inspiration for this pulsating, plasmatic eyeball in William Blake’s vision of Paradise for the British artist’s watercolor illustrations of The Divine Comedy, produced in 1824.[7] Developing Blake’s sensuous palette rather than his mode of figuration, as a point of departure, Dean intelligently brought an art-historical reference to her abstracted representation of Paradise in the film. Looking back at Blake, and perhaps also to John Flaxman, another great nineteenth-century artist working on Dante’s iconography, pointed to abstraction, not only as a property of contemporaneous visual languages, but as mode of representing Dante that emerges through a longer historical projection. For Act Three, from the scene depicting the departure of Virgil from Purgatory, Adès took the theme “Sweetest Father” as the opening passage to Paradise. Expanding on this theme from Purgatory, Adès linked the theme of the poet’s purification to his ensuing journey to a higher stratum. Musically, the earthly Dante who bade farewell to his beloved teacher gave way to the Dante released from his previous bonds. Furthermore, the concept of spiral ascension of the celestial spheres found support in his construction of musical tones as gravitational rotations, mirroring the magnetic forces of the universe. The music conjured for listeners something of the abstraction of radiating, glowing celestial bodies that Dante observes in Paradise. A vocal theme, a divinely pure yet human voice that emerged in the final duet of Beatrice and Dante, seemed organically built into the theme of the transformation of bodies. How, then, did choreography fill the space between the spiraling movement suggested by Adès’s music and the anamorphic projection by Dean? McGregor expressed his vision of the celestial spheres through the revolving, circular movements of several couples of dancers dressed in diaphanous, illuminated bodices. His aptitude in creating light, weightless transfers between positions and in distributing the grouping on the stage was particularly effective throughout Act Three. His choreography devised scintillating, visually absorbing concentric movements of couples and floating lifts. Yet the meaning of Dante’s wandering among these luminous bodies, and, moreover, the poet’s reconnection with Beatrice, however wonderous they may have appeared to the viewer, seemed too gleeful and affected for the celestial, unreachable order of things. The lack of delineation of the main characters Dante and Beatrice, through purely figurative, choreographic means became evident here again, echoing their insufficient development through the ballet. Instead, they turned into beautiful bodies, like those swirling around them. As they were from the outset, they remained abstractions. Academic ballet of the nineteenth century had certain recipes for tying up the concrete and the abstract on stage: either a “white act” or a marriage divertissement, depending on the plot of the ballet. To take the most obvious example, Giselle in the eponymous ballet appears as a modest, peasant girl in the first act, with its “concrete,” life-like details. She goes through the discovery of betrayal and insanity only to reveal the transforming power of forgiveness in the second act, a category as abstract as divine wisdom in Dante’s work in many ways. No “happy ending” to the story of Giselle was possible within the limits of the romantic ballet. The abstraction of the Wilis— bodies and spirits at once—becomes an aspect of the genre’s codified poetics. The Dante Project particularly in its choreographic aspects, offered a handsome, uplifting ending, with many beautiful lifts and precise, mechanically executed movements. But the composer, the artist-designer, and the choreographer seem to lose sight of each other in their respective pursuit of abstraction, each seeking the empyrean in Dante on their own terms. Still, The Dante Project does leave the public with a sense of accomplishment. The road through the three strata of Dante’s universe that the team elaborated was instructive, despite certain discrepancies between the visual and choreographic components of this ballet. None of the four main contributors to the Project—Adès, Dean, Hameed, and McGregor—were vanquished by the monumental status of Dante’s literary work. They endeavored to capture its wholeness through their respective artistic means, revealing the possibilities and appeals of multimedia approaches. In the voluminous critical literature on Dante, thinkers of different schools agree on the poet’s gift for creating a sublime simplicity in his universal quest, one that Dante learned in part from Virgil; they also emphasize his ability to channel doctrinal and esoteric knowledge by means of human encounters and specific events. Taking a human measure of the universal order and charting individuality on the divine scale were key engines in the Renaissance project that Dante inaugurated. The production in question was in many ways too mediated and thus busy to focus on the individuality of the main characters, who were not given the chance to pose their simple, essential questions on life, the afterlife, and art. The multimedia approach launched in the project, however, might be also a way to reciprocate the sensory fullness of Dante’s images by several artistic means. Among many literary scholars studying Dante’s poetic style, Auerbach pointed to the poet’s mingling of genres with no respect to the earlier boundaries established in classical literature. Auerbach identified Dante’s style as mixed and figural, taking figural as a mode of reading and interpreting the world.[8] Osip Mandelštam , the great Russian poet of the last century and a contemporary of the Russian formalist tradition in literary studies, sought in Dante a model for the autonomy of poetic language. Mandelštam ardently disputed the widespread opinion of his time that Dante’s poetry was sculptural. In his powerful essay “On Dante,” Mandelštam insisted that “Dante’s poetry possesses all the kinds of energy known to modern sciences. The unity of light, sound, and matter make her inner nature.”[9] Auerbach’s notion of the figural interpretation of Dante along with Mandelštam’s keen sensitivity to the rhythm of Dante’s poetry predicted in some ways the possibility of transferring Dante’s imagery into dance, giving it some sort of kinetic representation. One might consider here the Russian poet’s observation that “philosophy and poetry are always on the move, on the legs, in Dante. Even a stop [in Dante’s verses] is a form of an accumulated movement, a plateau for a conversation […]. A quatrain is breathing in and out, and then—a step.”[10] As a theatrical production, The Dante Project should be justly credited with forecasting the ways by which Dante’s universe might reach today’s public, might touch and perhaps transform it. That dance should be able to convey the most complex stories and forge characters equal to those created in the greatest works of world literature was an idea advanced already in the Age of Enlightenment, at the time when the modern system of the arts began taking its shape. The Dante Project’s search for converting one of the most revered literary monuments into a theatrical and balletic form suggests that academic dance still actively reflects on its role in the current system of the arts and, consequently, remains an audacious platform for experimentation with traditions and limits of the arts.
Photo: The Dante Project, Opera National de Paris, Germain Louvet (Dante) and Hanna O'Neill (Beatrice). Act Two. (© Ann Ray/OnP). Courtesy of Opera National de Paris.
[1] Auerbach, Erich, and Jane O. Newman. “On the Anniversary Celebration of Dante (1921)” in Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach, ed. James I. Porter (Princeton University Press, 2014), 121. [2] Tchaikovsky’s music was used for at least two eponymous ballets, including those choreographed by Serge Lifar for Ballets de France of Janine Charrat in 1958 and by Yurii Possokhov for San Francisco Ballet in 2012. [3] The attempt to capture Dante’s imagery in dance, which requires a transition from the verbal to the visual figuration, inevitably recalls the rich tradition of Dante’s reception in the visual arts, running from the Renaissance masters, such as Botticelli, to the Romantic rebellion of Eugène Delacroix, John Flaxman, or the late nineteenth-century printmaker Gustave Doré, whose images inspired Adès in composing his music. [4] It is important to mention here that he was the first resident choreographer of this leading academic company who trained neither in classical dance nor at the Royal Ballet. [5] For Woolf Works, a commission from the Royal Ballet, McGregor obtained an original score by Max Richter and engaged Hameed’s expertise for the dramaturgy. Hameed devised the three-act structure of the ballet inspired by Woolf’s novels—Mrs. Dalloway Orlando, and The Waves—leaving to choreography the task of conveying characters’ psychological depth along with some historical ambience. Woolf Works, which premiered in May 2015 on the stage of the Royal Opera House, earned recognition and high praise among critics, winning the Lawrence Olivier award in 2016 as the Best Dance Production; Alessandra Ferri also received the Outstanding Achievement in Dance award the same year based on her interpretation of the central role. [6] Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach, 129-30. [7] https://www.mariangoodman.com/exhibitions/tacita-dean-paris-2022 [8] Erich Auerbach, “Farinata and Cavalcante” in Mimesis, The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968), 198. [9] Osip Mandelštam, Razgovor o Dante [A Conversation about Dante], (Moskva: Iskusstvo, 1967), 9-10. Translation is mine. [10] Ibid, 10. TATIANA SENKEVITCH, historian of art and dance, received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, USA. She has published on early modern artistic theories, French academic paintings, and dance. She was a recipient of Getty Research Institute and Chateaubriand Fellowships, and of the CNRS, Centre Jean Pepin, Paris.
This essay first appeared in THE MASSACHUSETTS REVIEW
Apollo muses
by Alastair Macaulay
Two questions I raised in interviewing the Balanchine Foundation’s three “Apollo” muses are these: What does the ballet’s most famous image - the sunburst triple arabesque - express? And where does Terpsichore’s head face? Remember that between 1928 (the ballet’s premiere) and 1978 the sunburst arabesque was brilliant but a momentary transition, whereas in 1979 Balanchine, removing the last residues of decor from the ballet, turned this triple arabesque into rhe ballet’s final resolution. But Balanchine tended not to speak of meaning when coaching muses. (He made an exception when coaching Suki Schorer in Calliope’s variation.) By contrast, Apollo was the one role where he spoke of intention, drama, imagery, in coaching successive male dancers. As Jacques d’Amboise in particular stressed (relating his understanding of what Balanchine had told him over the years, and remembering how little Balanchine ever spoke of story or motive or imagery or meaning in any other ballet), the finale of the uncut “Apollo,” after the young god has heard the call from his father Zeus, is elegiac. Apollo is taking his leave from the muses, his playmates on the slopes of Parnassus, before taking the winged chariot to Olympus sent by his father. The muses hang onto Apollo (1 - see the photo of the Diaghilev production) because they don’t want him to leave them. That makes sense of why Terpsichore, usually if not always, looks downward and away in the sunburst arabesque. When Balanchine changed the ballet’s ending in 1979, he may have changed the meaning of the triple arabesque. It’s noteworthy that Suzanne Farrell, whom he had first cast as Terpsichore in the 1960s (2) and who returned to it for him in 1980, looked down and away in the earlier version of the ballet but then looked upwards in ecstasy in the later version (4). But the 1979 version shocked many: it was the most traumatizing of the many changes he made over the decades to his ballets. To Barbara Horgan, Balanchine’s assistant of twenty-six years, he merely said “I was bored with it.” To Farrell, the most renowned of his muse ballerinas, he never answered her question about his change; and in her final staging of “Apollo” she reverted to the earlier version with a staircase designating the mountain. This “final” 1979 version of “Apollo” made it another of his pure-dance ballets. But it omitted the recessional mood and poignancy of Stravinsky’s ending. Thursday 13 July
How does Giselle end her Act One variation?
The Theatre of Giselle’s Mind, as Shown in a Single Phrase. by Alastair Macaulay
Cynthia Harvey as Giselle with Robert La Fosse as Albrecht
How does Giselle end her Act One variation? At the start of July 2023, I watched four American Ballet Theatre Giselles at the New York Metropolitan Opera House, just as in autumn 2021 I watched five Royal Ballet Giselles at Covent Garden. After the hops on point, all nine of them did the same manège of piqué turns en dedans, circling the stage. Unfortunately, this was never part of traditional “Giselle” choreography. It’s just a showy cliché effect that makes Giselle seem unoriginal, just another ballerina doing a routine wow ending. This bothers me most with the Royal Ballet. The Royal was founded - and achieved worldwide renown - on the principle of being as true as possible to the texts of the nineteenth-century ballets. Although both Ninette de Valois and Frederick Ashton tampered with details of those texts from the 1940s onward, their tinkerings were small and few. In general, the Royal stayed fastidiously true to the traditional texts until the 1980s; its “Coppélia” and “Sleeping Beauty” still show an overall respect for older versions, whereas the incurably and insufferably anti-historical Peter Wright has approved successive changes to “Giselle” and “The Nutcracker” that give one cause for despair, while Kevin O’Hare’s decision to commission the late Liam Scarlett to overhaul “Swan Lake” was a destructive major nail in the coffin of Royal Ballet tradition. (The New York Public Library has complete silent footage of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet - as the Royal used to be - in all four acts of “Swan Lake” between 1949 and 1956, as filmed on its tours of North America.) During the 1980s and 1990s, more and more Royal Ballet Giselles gave up ending the variation with the diagonal “whirlwind” of turns, even though (or just because) that occurs in no other ballet. In the twentyfirst century, all Royal Giselles, and all American Ballet Theatre Giselles, have performed the cliché manège of piqué turns en dedans, making Giselle look like umpteen other ballerinas. YouTube helps here to some degree. In 2016, Navarre Brixen posted a useful video “Giselle - 5 Spessivtseva variations, 1930-1960s”: Giselle - 5 Spessivtseva variations 1930-1960s - Spessivtseva, Markova, Alonso, Nerina, Fracci - video This title, admittedly, perpetuates the old mistake that this variation was added for Olga Spessivtseva, whom we can see on a fragmentary 1932 silent film of “Giselle” Act One. It wasn’t (though her partner Anton Dolin was given that wrong impression). Actually, this variation was recorded in the 1903 Stepanov notation for Act One, as danced by Anna Pavlova. Probably the choreography (including the famous diagonal of hops on point) was made by Petipa in the 1880s; he may have modified it for Pavlova, whom he greatly admired. There are three versions of the ending, one only subtly different from another, but none of them give Giselle a manège circuiting the stage. Instead, they give a diagonal of faster and more intricate turns, often ending in a pas de chat, sometimes arriving in fourth position, sometimes in a kneeling position. Navarre Brixen’s compilation showed Olga Spessivtseva, Alicia Markova, Alicia Alonso, Nadia Nerina, and Carla Fracci. Brixen also observed “All dancers do the diagonal instead of the manège. (In the 70s the diagonal was replaced by the manège in most Western productions; BNC still do the diagonal.) Also, a reminder that dancers from more than half a century ago didn't have such poor technique as some YTbers like to believe... All Giselles here are in their 30s or 40s.” Six years ago, again on YouTube, “Amy” posted “Giselle - Pas seul ending (Manège or Diagonal?)”, showing Alina Cojocaru, Alicia Markova, Natalia Makarova, Alicia Alonso, Alessandra Ferri, Carla Fraccii: Giselle - five Spessivtseva variations 1930-1960s - video. “Amy” amiably writes: “So which ending is better? Personally, I prefer the diagonal ending; I think it goes better with the music and it's nice to see something different from the common manège of turns that we get in many female variations today. What do you all think?” My own views are already evident. I wanted, however, to consult someone who knew both versions from experience. I knew that Cynthia Harvey had studied Giselle with Margot Fonteyn, who danced the role from 1936 to 1970. Harvey danced it with both American Ballet Theatre (where her partners were Kevin McKenzie, Robert LaFosse, Guillaume Griffin, Ricardo Bustamante, Julio Bocca, and Wes Chapman) and with the Royal Ballet (partnered by Mark Silver). This week, I wrote to her to ask whether the diagonal was harder and whether she had preferred it. The wording of her reply has greatly impressed me: “Yes, the diagonal IS harder, especially because it shouldn’t be slowed down getting into the start of it. That first downbeat for orchestra and dancer is a challenge, but a well worth one. “Once I understood the idea of what Giselle says and thinks there (in the theatre of her mind), I could not go back to a simple manège.” Harvey is a friend who has consulted my questionnaire “Giselle: Ninety-Four Questions and Ninety-Four Answers” on my www.alastairmacaulay.com website. I’ve now added her words to the answer to question 43. And I also wrote to her to enlarge on “the theatre of Giselle’s mind” with relation to this diagonal. In particular, I asked “Does the whirlwind diagonal of tight turns suggest that the initial exhilaration of that variation has built into something nearer the edge?” Harvey replied “You’re right- it makes sense to create the momentum that will take the story to its conclusion. Some might argue that piqué turns could have a similar effect, I suppose, by the sheer repetition of them, and I get why people might think that that also could represent a whirlpool (circling the stage) of emotion. But I think a whirlWIND of emotion and the staging going towards her mother who allowed her to dance in the first place, is also significant. “Here are some thoughts which I hope make some sense. “Giselle is not just in love. She’s deeply, madly, and blindly in love. To make sense of the mad scene that comes after her solo, there has to be a build up or culmination of emotions as well as events. We know that on that day, she has what one could describe as all her Christmases at once! She comes out of her home, all aflutter, to find this man whom she has met, this man of her dreams. He tells her that he loves her. She, being a superstitious and naive young thing, says, No - we must find out if you REALLY love me with the marguerite. (He loves me, loves me not.) Owing to Albrecht’s deception of pulling out a petal, it seems to Giselle that he really does love her! IT WORKED. She totally believes in this love. It’s verifiable! “That day she also meets the beautiful aristocratic lady from the castle over yonder, who gives her a stunning piece of jewellery when she hears the great news that she is in love. Later the same day, she is crowned Queen of the harvest - wow! Life is unimaginably good for this peasant girl! “Giselle is captivated by all the wonderful things happening to her. AND, to top it off, her mother allows her to dance. She loves to dance so much, and she loves Albrecht. She dances for love. What could be more appropriate than her dizzying turns of ecstasy to represent those feelings of love? Anyone who has felt those emotions, or who can imagine them, can understand how one could become all wrapped up in the whirlwind of those feelings. (Think Diana, Princess of Wales). “Simple piqué turns, in a way, to me, I’d describe as cute - maybe even coy. They’re not difficult. THIS is not a moment to make something look easy. The diagonal of en dedans/en dehors turns is hard. ( I might have done a double en dedans to begin, then the two single dehor piqués and repeated the sequence three times before the ending. I don’t mention that as a way to blow my own horn, but to say that rhythmically, down up, up-down up, down up - requires a good start and it is very active with the feet. The busy nature of the footwork represents the tingling of excitement to me. That diagonal has something on each beat of the music. Like when one is nervous, the energy can make one tremble. Giselle’s heart is beating so fast at this point, she’s all nerves and energy. She is thinking that she is the luckiest girl in the world. I feel, at this moment, there are overwhelming feelings of euphoria. If Giselle does not allow herself to be totally enraptured as it builds to the end of the solo, the madness that follows is diminished in terms of story line. “I’ve gone on way too long. And I’m not sure if I’ve even answered your question of what is in the theatre of her mind, but probably it would be more appropriate to suggest that it’s what is in her heart that is important. That is what affects her mind.” I treasure this missive from Harvey. It’s she, by the way, who passed on to me, some years ago, the phrase “a whirlwind of turns” to describe the diagonal. And the phrase was coined by Margot Fonteyn, who danced the role for over thirty years (1936-1970). Of course, it was the Soviet Russians, with their routine scorn for nineteenth-century choreography and their indulgence of balletomania, who first changed the ending from the diagonal to the manège. Today, if you want to see Giselle dancing the diagonal “whirlwind”, you must watch either the United Ukrainian Ballet (in Alexei Ratmansky’s 2022 production) or Pacific Northwest Ballet (where Peter Boal’s 2011 production has been informed by research from Marian Smith and Doug Fullington). Why do the foremost ballet companies of today have so little interest in preserving the old choreography? Alastair Macaulay is a critic and historian of the performing arts. In 1994-2007, he was chief theatre critic to the “Financial Times” in London. In 2007-2018, he was chief dance critic to the “New York Times” in New York. He still contributes to both newspapers.