Darcey Bussell was Cool Britannia personified (albeit that she disdained the political project and refused to have her portrait hung at No.10). Her departure marks another loss of connection to Kenneth MacMillan and to the epoch of ‘big creativity’ in ballet. Bussell, along with Mukhamedov, was the last of MacMillan’s muses. None of the dancers in today’s Royal Ballet have known the experience of having masterworks created on them. This matters. It is arguably the fusion of creativity with charisma that allows dance to make its mark on popular culture (Guillem and Nureyev are exceptions: in most other cases, new work was integral to the projection of a particular dancer's identity). Until the Royal Ballet finds a strong new choreographic voice, I doubt we will see many dancers making an impact beyond the regular dance audience.
Bussell's leaving has led to further talk about the internationalisation of the Royal Ballet. Does it matter that there are so few English dancers in the front ranks? I think so. If this company is to merit continued public funding, it needs to produce forms of theatre that are rooted here, as were the three pieces in last week's programme Checkmate, Symphonic Variations and Song of the Earth.
The Royal Ballet must not become a company whose identity is 'airside'; beyond passport control and duty-free, with no instinct for English life beyond Floral St. English dancers and choreographers are essential - people who have a passion for this place and its joys and frustrations. Major talents, from wheresoever, should always be welcome - but this company needs a 'point of view' on the culture for which it exists, and it seems to me that it does not have one anymore. De Valois, Ashton and MacMillan were not choreographers merely; they each had political instincts, establishment and radical, they loved/were angered by England and were hard-wired to wider social realities. The RB should, to my mind, be the dance equivalent of the NT across Waterloo Bridge - England's national dance theatre. It scarcely makes a case for itself with a failure to commission a full-evening work since 1995 (Mr Worldly Wise); a full-length score since 1991 (Cyrano de Bergerac) and a one-act score, also since 1991 (The Judas Tree)
Checkmate, Symphonic Variations and Song of the Earth also had strong ritual content -and I'll try to return to this. Today's choreographers are losing the instinct for ritual. Instead they mostly produce 'play' (often 'play' at the level of music analysis). The most marked fault-line for me during the year was the 'play' of Wayne McGregor's Chroma in John Pawson's heavily ritual setting. There's a sociological question here: is society losing its instinct for/appreciation of ritual? Ritual expresses the instinct for social integration. In an anomic fractured world, is ritual becoming harder? There aren't many sociologists of dance (I can only think of Helen Thomas) - sociologists aren't that interested in the area, while dance academics are, mostly, insufficiently hardwired to the social sciences to have a stab at the questions as they relate to the world beyond dance. The questions are worth exploring because dance's creativity issues can't be addressed in terms of dance alone; the form's cardiac arrest may be suggestive of a failure in society itself (Maybe McGregor expresses what this society has become? Dreadful thought.....).
A few quick thoughts about Symphonic Variations. I much preferred the first cast this time around to that which danced it two seasons ago (several of the same people in both). Steven McRae has learnt restraint - it made a huge difference. In the second cast, only Sarah Lamb had the right instinct for the piece's poetics, and she deserved better company. Otherwise, it was pretty lamentable and I even heard someone describe the allegro as 'a bit Vegas'.
2 comments:
I've found much to think about over the last few days in this post, Brendan. (Incidentally, I saw in a link to yesterday's Telegraph that Carlos Acosta regrets that there has been no great choreographer around to make a masterpiece on him, nicely reinforcing your first point.)
Being still something of a newcomer to ballet, with so much of the RB's heritage work still to see, I do sometimes feel that the company suffers from the weight of differing expectations - to preserve and show its history, to encourage new work, to share the Opera House, and to secure the employment of its people. But the need for "a strong new choreographic voice" is surely true, and it's noteworthy, perhaps, that after several years now of new pieces in the Linbury and Clore studios, nobody has been asked to attempt a full-evening piece for the main stage. (I still have hopes that Cathy Marston might one day succeed at that level, so it will be instructive to see how her proposed "Tale of Two Cities" for NBT goes next year.) When you point out how long it is since the last major commission, I wonder if that very distance does not add to the weight and worry of Monica and the ROH Board attempting another now? One can imagine the reactions if it went badly wrong but, still, I'd agree that they need to take a chance on someone before too much longer.
On your "English" point, where do you see ENB, BRB, NBT, even SB, as having any shared responsibility for the maintenance of a national style? And, as a Scot addressing an Irishman, I'm conscious that you used "English" rather than "British" throughout - any particular reason, what with De Valois being Irish by birth, and Ken MacMillan a (unrelated) Scot? In dance terms, do you see some difference here?
Enough for now - but I'll be interested to see how you develop the question of "ritual" in the dance context. (This week's first Tablet leader on the possible restitution of the Tridentine Rite mentioned "choreography" in a way that rather implied to me that the editor might not see choreography as any part of our current rite. So, in anything but the strict context of dance, has the word gained a connotation for ritual arcana and complexity, things we'd rather do without?)
Ian Macmillan
Thanks for your comment Ian. In the rush to get ready for our holidays, I need to crack on with 800 words on a similar topic for Dancing Times.
I think there are layers of explanations for ballet's creative arrest; some of them are to do with the institutions of the form itself - companies and training. In my post I was wondering out loud about the possibility of a wider sociological explanation - perhaps the present zeitgeist may not be susceptible of expression in durable forms of dance theatre. I don't know.
As to the present state of the RB's creativity, just as the best predictor of future creativity is past creativity, so also is the converse true. You can lose your appetite for risk.
On the 'English' question, this is just a piece of playfulness. I don't really believe in the notion of 'Britishness'. de Valois and MacMillan came to London at a young age. London formed them - not Blessington, not Dunfermline. I favour a referendum in England on leaving the UK.
Re The Tablet, have a look at the two letters on the Tridentine Mass, especially John H Lamb's, which recounted a celebration at Downside. "I came away disappointed. To me Mass had not been celebrated so much as acted; the angle of arms and hands was precise to a degree; movements across the sanctuary were obviously at predetermined pace."
That letter intrigued me: at one level, postures of reverence beget inner reverence. At another, it raised a question that dance must also answer - about the viability of a particular bodily symbolic language across generations.
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