Ballet in the Long 20th Century

Dance theorists have long sought to record their art form, and the systems they develop must define and clarify the relationship between time, space, and the body. This paper examines a treatise on dance notation, Vladimir Ivanovich Stepanov's _Alphabet des mouvements du corps humain_ (1892), as a musicological, aesthetic, and medical text as well as a dancerly one. Stepanov notation looks like music notation, and has recently been employed in the creation of new productions of ballets from the Russian Imperial Theatre such as _The Sleeping Beauty_ and _Harlequinade_. While its value as a reconstructive tool has been explored by scholars and practitioners including Alexei Ratmansky and Doug Fullington, the system's conceptual framework has gone largely unexamined in secondary literature. Notation can only ever record an art form incompletely, and strategies of notation reveal the ideological agendas of their creators. In the treatise that describes his system, Stepanov shows a desire for a new, objective dance theory, modeled on music theory, that could be both generated and documented by notation.


The _Alphabet_ draws on a vibrant cosmopolitan discourse centered not in Saint Petersburg, where Stepanov trained and worked, but in Paris, the city of the document's publication. Stepanov makes little mention of Russian ballet, but instead justifies his notational system through reference to the ideas, words, and inventions of two French scientists, Étienne-Jules Marey and Jean-Martin Charcot. The scientists that Stepanov admired rejected language as an accurate means of communication. They inspired him to break from earlier dance notators, whose interest lay in creating a linguistic framework for dance. Instead, these scientists preferred graphs, which Marey called a form of "natural writing," to describe physical phenomena. Not content to simply notate dance, Stepanov proposes his system as a way to record all human movement, from gymnastics to the convulsions of choreic patients. He posits a theorization of the body modeled on kinematic principles, and his work flirts with objective and physiological aesthetics. Following Marey, Stepanov also indicates that musical rhythm can express the temporal organization of bodily motion, and that music and anatomy interact in ways of which we are only dimly aware.

In Act II of _The Limpid Stream_, the male dancer emerges on stage in long white tutu and tiny wings. He is the image, in parody, of the Romantic sylph. This moment, evoking ballet's Wilis and sylphs, signaled a new experiment in Soviet dance. Commissioned in 1935 as _The Two Sylphs_ for the Malïy Theatre in Leningrad, _The Limpid Stream_, as the ballet came to be called, was a collaboration of Dmitri Shostakovich and Fyodor Lopukhov. The work was set on a collective farm in the North Caucasus, where farmers and artists came together in a quixotic comedy of switched identities and romantic upsets. The ballet was hugely popular, and in a move that seemed to seal the work's fortunes, the Bolshoi Theatre commissioned a Moscow production within months. But in 1936, _Pravda_ published a devastating review accusing _The Limpid Stream_ of disregard for "verisimilitude" to Soviet life. The work was withdrawn from the repertoire. Lopukhov lost his position at the Malïy Theatre, and Shostakovich never again composed for ballet.


_Pravda_'s accusations reflected the increasing political constraints and impossible demands that ideology placed on music and dance (Scholl 2007; Iakubov 2008; Ilichova 2008; Ross 2015; Morrison 2016). Yet _The Limpid Stream_ is not just another example of artistic repression. It also illuminates the competing creative impulses that shaped Soviet ballet in this period. Based on archival sources in St. Petersburg and Moscow-scores, photographs, libretti, sketches,musical ephemera-my paper explores the new questions that _The Limpid Stream_ took up, prompted by emerging Soviet ideology, and perennial questions of realism and narrative to which this ballet returned. I suggest that _The Limpid Stream_ was Shostakovich and Lopukhov's attempt to reimagine Romantic ballet as Soviet modernism. In doing so, they responded to the pressures of a genre whose legacy extended deep into the Imperial period, and beyond, yet whose essentials had been fundamentally challenged by developments at home and abroad. In subverting balletic tropes, _The Limpid Stream_ offered a model for negotiating the transnational nature of ballet during a moment in which the genre's national identity was truly in crisis.

Revivals of Gluck's operas ­­__Orphée__, __Iphigénie en Tauride__, __Alceste__, and __Iphigénie en Aulide__ at the Opéra-Comique in the 1890s and 1900s marked an important moment in the history of French music. As William Gibbons has shown, these Gluck productions were integral to nationalist debates about the past and future of French opera and central to the creation of a museum of French masterworks. They were also key works in director Albert Carré's mandate for the Opéra-Comique, which in 1898 had become the focus of debates about what role the city's second national lyric theater should play in French culture.


Now long forgotten, the Gluck revivals included new divertissements by the eminent choreographer Madame Mariquita. These ballets were not eighteenth-century dances, as audiences would have expected, but free-form choreographies that recalled Ancient Greek statuary. Created shortly before Isadora Duncan arrived in Paris with her Greek dances, and a full decade before Nijinsky created __L'Après-midi d'un faune__ with the Ballets Russes, Mariquita's Gluck divertissements were the first modern ballets seen in Paris. 


This paper situates Mariquita's Grecian ballet modernism within the context of fin-de-siècle Paris's vogue for all things Greek, and discusses what role her ballets played both in the reception of the Gluck operas and in furthering Carré's vision for the Opéra-Comique. If Greek dances in Gluck operas now seem odd, at the time they were a perfect fit. Greek dances could be appropriated as French (the French considered themselves the inheritors of Ancient Greek culture), they evoked a glorious past, and they were modern –– an important positioning when casting Gluck as one of the founders of modern French opera and the Opéra-Comique as a museum and a modern theater. They could also be framed as serious art while appealing to a public primed on erotic exoticism.


Mariquita's Greek divertissements proved extremely popular and whetted audiences' appetites for novel forms of ballet. In drawing attention to these forgotten modernist ballets, this paper sheds light on a repertoire central to the history of French opera and dance.

In 1983, George Balanchine's death plunged his company, New York City Ballet (NYCB), into crisis. Weeks after his passing, the troupe premiered Glass Pieces, a new work by Jerome Robbins to the music of Philip Glass. Robbins's ballet successfully convinced critics and audiences alike that NYCB could move past Balanchine's legacy and into the modern era. Glass Pieces set a new model for the company and for American ballet more broadly; in the decades since, almost a quarter of new works premiered at NYCB have been choreographed to minimalist music. Yet neither musicologists nor dance scholars have addressed the growing relationship between minimalism and dance in this period.


In this paper, I show how Robbins used minimalist music in order to remake NYCB's image for the 1980s. The choreography took advantage of minimalism's dual time structures. Over the rapid pulse, Robbins encouraged the corps to act like rushing crowds or cogs in a machine. At the same time, to the music's glacially slow rate of change, Robbins staged achingly expansive dances for his soloists. Glass Pieces is thus both a celebration and criticism of the 1980s, a paean to the brutal exhilaration of Wall Street set over a lyrical dirge for neglected workers. As such, Robbins's work provides a way of understanding the relationship between an embodied experience of minimalist music and twentieth-century city life. 


I argue that Robbins's continual juxtaposition of faceless masses with calm, powerful soloists evoked the audience's feelings of subjectivity while living in a dense, mechanized city. The ballet thus addressed similar themes to Godfrey Reggio's film Koyaanisqatsi, released in the previous year and also featuring music by Glass. But unlike Reggio, Robbins consistently pulled away from the dehumanizing elements of minimalism and moved towards a subjective, even Romantic, interpretation of the score. Drawing on archival sources at the New York Public Library, including Robbins's extensive diagrams of Glass's music, correspondence with the composer and his agents, and rehearsal footage from the ballet's creation, I show how Robbins used Glass's music to stage what it felt like to be a New Yorker in the 1980s.