I first fell in love with dance, watching it on television at Christmas. We lived in a small town outside Dublin - with almost no opportunities to see live theatre dance(I was in my late teens before I saw a dance performance at the Abbey Theatre - it was Tanz Forum from Cologne, which doesn't exist anymore). But RTE did broadcast some dance on its single channel. I remember watching a programme of diverts recorded during a Bolshoi visit to Ireland, and David Lichine's Graduation Ball on New Year's Eve. And RTE also bought some studio ballets made by Danish TV (I remember Flemming Flindt's The Miraculous Mandarin).
Today we'll watch Giselle and Lucy Blackstad's The Royal Ballet - dreams to reality (I've seen it in preview - it's excellent, really getting under the skin of the world it depicts). Christmas, dance and faith have been fused in my mind over the years - and the connections are especially vivid today.
A book has been sitting on my bookshelves unread for years (it's in my eyeline even as I type this). It's called "Blessed Rage for Order" and the author is David Tracy of the University of Chicago's Divinity School. Philip Endean SJ suggested I read it, when I was contemplating a theology PhD at Heythrop. The title has always intrigued. I can never watch anything by Balanchine without thinking of his 'blessed rage for order'. This week it was the Film 4 broadcast of his Nutcracker and the ordered and marshalled domesticity of his Stahlbaum household. This from a man whose ordered world was torn apart several times in his lifetime; when he was effectively abandoned by his family, when the way of life he embraced was shattered after the 1917 revolution, when he attempted to reinvent himself in North America.
Dance is, in part, about our complementary needs for ritual, playfulness and social cohesion. I've been thinking about Martin Kettle's Guardian piece and what needs to happen to bring dance into the wider intellectual currents of our time. I'd love to see writers with the playfulness and sensitivity of Jeanette Winterson or Michael Symmons Roberts given the opportunity to spend time with a dance company. Nothing might result. But lots might.
I feel keenly the hope to see dance and theology, secular and sacred rituals brought into dialogue (and at a better level than Chroma, a clash of high aspiration and low style). The awareness of both realms of reality nourished Balanchine, Stravinsky and Ashton, as it does choreographers like John Neumeier and David Bintley today.
This week I've exchanged emails with the Austrian Jesuit priest, Volkmar Premstaller, who is in the throes of a book about spirituality and classical ballet. It's due to be published in German, but I hope it might be translated into English. A high-level dialogue of this kind might do something to nudge dance into the mainstream intellectual currents of our age. In mentioning Volkmar, it's appropriate to remember those other Jesuits who were instrumental in theatre dance history; the Jesuits who created ballets at St Louis-le-grand in Paris, and Claude Menestrier SJ, who, as early as 1682, argued in his Des Ballets Ancient et Modernes, that the human body itself is the only appropriate vehicle for the expression of certain inner emotions.
And speaking of Volkmar, I remember with gratitude his Jesuit confrere Karl Rahner (who died in Innsbruck, where Volkmar lives, over twenty years ago). Philip Endean did me a great service at Heythrop in introducing me to Rahner, the towering figure of the twentieth century in Catholic theology, and someone whose ideas have been decisive for me at the level of lived experience.
A very happy Christmas!
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