Eschewing Stories, Ballet Often Struggles for Purpose

Reading the New York Times today (March 12, 2020), I glanced through a review of a performance by Scottish Ballet at the Joyce theater in Manhattan, a mecca of dance.

The program, entitled "This Is My Body …" and consisting of two contemporary pieces, was labeled "unispiring" by Siobhan Burke, an NYT dance critic. The first of the two pieces, she said, showed off the dancers' "stunning technique and muscular physiques, but little else."




"It's a complication of cool moves to music -- the athletic partnering is the coolest -- without any sense of purpose," she said.

Anyone who has attended much in the way of contemporary performance at major ballet companies for quite some years now can be forgiven for thinking much the same about most of what they have seen. Such pieces are often impressively energetic, aesthetically edgy and totally forgettable.

Ever since the ballet dumped the idea of using dance to illuminate stories, companies have strugged for a sense of purpose. It's about time someone like Ms Burke has the courage to say the king has no clothes.

Out here in Seattle, as a long-time ballet fan, I frequently attend performances by the Pacific Northwest Ballet, an excellent company able to employ an orchestra so that most of its dances can be peformed to live music.

The company recently put on a classic version of "Cinderella" choreographed some years ago by PNB's former co-director Kent Stowell. Like "Swan Lake," "The Nutcracker," "Sleeping Beauty," "Giselle" and other classics, it's an audience favorite.  Performing such ballets on a regular basis is essential to the financial health of PNB, which dances many contemporary pieces as well.

Attending the performance, I was highly bemused by the program notes of current PNB artistic director Peter Boal, a former principal dancer with the New York City Ballet.

He went to great lengths arguing that "Cinderella" is as much a contemporary story as a piece of historial mythology.  The story can easily be viewed as paralleling present-day situations, Boal claimed.

For instance, he wrote, imagine a contemporary situation were someone (presumably a woman) is denied access to a desirable event. Such things as poverty, birth and profession may come into play, but also prejudice, discrimination and lack of basic decency could be present, Boal pointed out.

"Yes, I'm taking about "Cinderella," but you have to admit it sounds like so many of the issues we face today," he said.

I agree, so why hasn't anyone created a contemporary ballet that explores, through the expressive qualities of dance, such issues?

Oh, such notions are out of fashion and quickly dismissed when one suggests them (as I have). That's just not where ballet is today -- increasingly uninspiring and purposeless for a wider public, one might argue.

I wish to emphasize, however, that I am not opposed to non-story ballets. I just think the pendulum has swung much too far in that direction.