TERRY TEACHOUT
637
The near-total inability of modern choreographers to make successful
multi-act ballets suggests that the problem may be one of form as much as
substance. Virtually all new full-evening ballets are modeled more or less
directly on the nineteenth-century classics, often quite slavishly so. They
are three-act period pieces in which the story is periodically interrupted
by non-narrative divertissements that give the princi pal dancers and soloists
ample opportunity
to
show off; the music consists of short, self-contained
numbers colorfully orchestrated in the manner of Tchaikovsky.
The assumption seems to be that what was good enough for Petipa and
Tchaikovsky ought to be good enough for us. But was it good enough for
Petipa and Tchaikovsky themselves? One of the biggest problems facing
classical ballet companies is that there are
only
seven full-evening ballets
from the nineteenth century,
La Bayadere, Coppelia, Don Quixote, Giselle,
The Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake
and
La Sylphide,
that continue to be staged
regularly in anything remotely resembling their original form.
(The
Nutcracker
is almost always seen in modern restagings.) That is a slender
legacy on which to build a theatrical tradition--slender enough to leave
one wondering whether the tradition was all that impressive in the first
place.
George Balanchine certainly had grave doubts about the formal via–
bility of the nineteenth-century story ballet. His purpose in making such
one-act dances as "Serenade" and "Ballet Imperial" (both of which, sig–
nificantly, are set to the music of Tchaikovsky) was to create a new formal
context for the movement vocabulary of classical ballet, one that would
make possible a more purely poetic mode of expression divorced from the
rigid specifics of mime-based narrative. Most of the major choreographers
of the past half-century have followed his lead; even Frederick Ashton,
though he favored the story ballet, acknowledged the unique power of
plotless dances to "leave an audience suspended in a trance-like response
(that a story ballet can never achieve) because of their very directness and
delicacy of poetic potency that needle-like reaches the heart."
Could it be, then, that modern attempts to make traditional story bal–
lets are doomed to failure because of the intrinsic limitations of the form
itself? The Kirov Ballet recently put this question to the test with its new
staging of
The Sleeping Beauty,
performed in July at New York's
Metropolitan Opera House, in which the company has sought to repro–
duce as exactly as possible the Mariinsky Theatre's 1890 production. Not
only
are the sets and costumes based on surviving designs, but Petipa's
choreography has been reconstructed according to the notation of
Nicholas Sergeyev, the company's regisseur-general, who fled Russia in
1917. Sergeyev's notes have been used on several previous occasions (most
notably when Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes danced
The Sleeping Beauty
