No more sophisticated art form than ballet?

I intend to kickstart this blog. Although I've been dancing and seeing lots of dance, dance has given me little to say. I've seen too much that has left me absolutely cold (most recently an indifferent week at the Mariinsky when we were in Petersburg, and again the thoroughly regrettable Shostakovich season at the Coliseum). On the other hand, I've been very aware recently of how many layers there are to unpack from a good opera production. In contrast, much dance is slight and encodes , well, not a lot. There is a section of the dance audience that values the art for reasons more ritualistic than aesthetic - like "liturgy queens", who fetishise details of the celebration of Mass. Sometimes reading the various dance websites,I feel I've tumbled on something akin to the Latin Mass Society

I've had a generous note from Jeremiah McNichols, who's author of the weblog, Thinking in Pictures: adventures in visual education. In a recent - and persuasive - entry, he takes issue with Lewis Segal's philippic in the Los Angeles Times about ballet and its future, notably with the charge that it has an ethos that is uniquely intimidatory, and that its particular issues with authenticity render it in large measure 'fake'.

However I think Segal has a point about dancer formation. He writes: " This system produces something well worth hating: dancers forever young (because there's always someone new to replace them when they age) who don't really know themselves but have learned how to move skillfully and energetically while thinking critically about how they're doing — not what. It may be a minority opinion, but a life lived by someone else's counts is the ultimate unexamined existence, and it gives an audience nothing when set to music.Because this system works like an assembly line, automatic and unyielding, it also breeds choreographers skating over the contours of major scores as if only half-listening, along with ridiculously expensive high-culture events that speak more about the burnout of an art than anything else."

I'm hoping to work up an entry about this, but I believe less and less that dance can cut it on its own. It's an artform that functions only in active dialogue with others - design, music, theatre. Many of ballet's greatest triumphs have been synthetic - and masterminded by non-dancers (the Tchaikovsky ballets, the Diaghilev rep: the dance per se is contributory). The advent of gramphone records and the symphonic ballet gave rise to a dangerous illusion - that the choreographer could somehow function without dialogue. The result? That ballet, in Giannandrea Poesio's words, became an ‘art of form’, lacking in theatrical and performance qualities, and merely a matter of ‘putting steps together’. (Balanchine is an exception: Stravinsky was a constant interlocutor. Ashton and MacMillan also had interlocutors - De Valois' Royal Ballet is a particular exception to my general argument; she, in her way, carried on the Ballets Russes tradition. . “Ashton was kept rigorous by De Valois", one member of the Royal Ballet told me. "Also she was a real cow and would stop people from doing things that she did not think would be right”)

The reality is that ballet training socialises dancers into high conformity - it does not encourage creativity. If ballet is to have a future, it will be because practitioners from other disciplines see its possibilities and summon it into wakefulness. In the meantime, reserve some scepticism for the opening line of a recent Guardian editorial, "There is no more sophisticated art form than ballet."

Let me finish with some comments from a senior figure in British dance, who agrees with the proposition that the tendency not to question the choreographer’s ‘ultimate authority’ is at the roots of ballet’s present creativity problem. He particularly instanced Ashley Page's work. “He would go in the studio and lock the door. Four weeks later they would open the door with a new piece. No one would have come in and looked at it and said ‘this doesn’t work’ or whatever. In any case Ashley was very bad at taking advice. It was like Martin Amis not wanting to change a semi-colon. It is not in the culture of choreographers. They don’t want it to happen”

The person I'm quoting was particularly scathing of how the Royal Ballet is overly respectful of the sacrosanctness of created work. “They wouldn’t dream of pulling Fred’s or Kenneth’s work apart. Nobody thinks they have authority.” This, according to my source, is where the director has a key role. But, he told me, even when the Royal Ballet was led by a director/choreographer, this role was unfilled. “They might have a few of their friends come in and say ‘it’s wonderful darling’, as Deborah did with Kenneth (MacMillan) and told him that everything was magnificent, even when it was not. Ashley – especially Ashley – was just left to get on with it. That’s when it is wrong.”