Ballet: European by Birth: (The Conclusion of an Unpublished Essay)

Author(s): Gedeon P. Dienes

Source: Dance Chronicle, Vol. 18, No. 2, Aspects of Dance: Essays in Honor of Selma Jeanne
Cohen (1995), pp. 171-177
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1567870
Accessed: 08-08-2017 02:10 UTC

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 Ballet: European by Birth
(The Conclusion of an
Unpublished Essay)

Gedeon P. Dienes

Around the beginning of the twentieth century came the third gr

milestone in the development of ballet, when the human bod
again discovered, now in terms of its expressive, rhythmic, an
namic powers. Europe was no longer "alone." European culture
spread-mainly over the Atlantic-and thanks to the innume
"feedbacks" had become Euro-American. Time had acquired a n
value in terms of speed, acceleration, displacement over untold
tances. This could not fail to create a new mentality, a new app
to reality penetrating all walks of life. Pedestrians turned cyc
cyclists turned drivers, engines replaced horses, liners linked co
ents, airplanes became means of public transport, the futurists pai
speed and movement, and the motion pictures learned to master ti
in slow-motion sequences.
The moving human body came into the focus of attention
into the center of activities: Olympic Games, physical training, bo
exercises for health or aesthetics or for sports, and movement ana
were new trends marking the advent of a new assessment of all ki
of human movements, including dancing. Ballet came to be att

? 1995 by Gedeon P. Dienes

171

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172 DANCE CHRONICLE

from without and from within for its conventionalism,

and lack of semantic message (i.e., expression) by "rivals" such as
Rudolf von Laban and Mary Wigman and by reformers such as Michel
Fokine, Serge Diaghilev, and Vaslav Nijinsky, not to mention such
"impacts" coming from the new continents as Loie Fuller and Isadora
Duncan. This was where the European internationalism of ballet ended
and its intercontinentalization began-as with Anna Pavlova.
In the first third of our century, ballet was dominated partly
by the values that had accumulated in St. Petersburg and partly by
the new values advocated by the Ballets Russes, and it had to weather
the storms produced on the new continents in the shape of what today
we call modern dance.
Thanks to the specific social and economic conditions and cir-
cumstances under which ballet was born and developed, it has alway
reflected the typical features of European cultural evolution or,
might say, it has always been a socioartistic manifestation of Eu
peanness, sometimes lagging behind other intuitive and intellect
trends, sometimes heralding the advent of something: think only o
the roi soleil and of Noverre.

When penetrating the princely and royal courts as part of celebrations

and festivities at the end of the Middle Ages and into the sixteenth
century, ballet detached itself from dance as public entertainment
and thus, separated from the "uneducated," became the property o
the "happy few." It turned into a characteristic social activity of th
thinner, higher layers of European society, first in the southwest (Italy
and Spain), then in the west (France and England), and later made
its appearance in what was then called the "near east" (i.e., the Ger
man- and Slavic-speaking areas).
While in Europe the movements today called ballet were "ex-
propriated" by the worldly ruling classes and practiced only by its
members, other classical dance forms, for instance in Asia, evolved
in another direction, namely toward religion, becoming part and par-
cel of ecclesiastic practices, as in India. While certain forms of dancing
were raised to religious heights on other continents, in Europe the
church waged battles for centuries against all forms of dance mani-
festations. In fact, dance also tended to penetrate religious activities

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 BALLET: EUROPEAN BY BIRTH 173

on this continent, but this was blocked by a series of proh

sued by the church for some ten centuries. This is one of t
why classical forms of dance evolved comparatively late
At any rate, the expansive power of dancing could not b
Dance first survived among the lower classes and later i
the middle classes, eventually making its way into the h
layers of civil society, as far as princes and kings.
As rationalism arose in the seventeenth and eighte
turies, ballet, too, made an important step: it took leave of
and took possession of the stage, and thereby amateurs
field to professionals, as of 1672. This may be attributed to
of replacing instinctive, improvisational and personal ma
with well-established order in all such social phenomena
behaviors, including artistic activities. Geometry began
the structure of dance performances as well as the position
ments of the human body. Symmetry, as the "ideal ord
ated the pageants, a strict succession of appearance on the s
dictated by the socioartistic rank of the performers. (Even
principal dancer comes out last and disappears first at cu
As to ballet technique, the European method of the
(which began with Beauchamps' five basic positions of t
culminated in ballerinas rising to the pointes) relied on
anatomical considerations with a view to defeating gravity
ing ilevation. This was a male technique in the "classical
century and a female technique in the romantic nineteen
represented by the high jumps and leaps of Vestris, "dieu d
and the floating figure of transcendentally winged Taglion
or the livelier art of Elssler. This led to the probably highe
development of the lower limbs, leaving trunk and arms su
At variance with this, the classical dances of the East h
a technique focused rather on the torso in the Arabic st
head, on the hands and arms, in the various Indian styles f
sion and the Japanese styles for martial purposes, and o
body verging on acrobatics in China. These forms of cla
have achieved a diversity of movements of parts of the bod
in and alien to European ballet.
As to the message of the dance-often called plot o
first stressed by Noverre and Angiolini, it was initially my

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174 DANCE CHRONICLE

and allegorical and always at the service of the ruling class

to turn toward the daily life of "the people" in the late eig
tury and it did not come "down to earth" prior to the twent
When analyzed today, ballet can be said to cover man
trends of theatre dance in this century. These can be group
headings: classical ballet and modern ballet. The former
various schools-Italian, French, Russian, English, an
firmly based on classical technique, whereas the other grou
ballet, encompasses a much greater diversity of "schools
trends, chiefly earmarked by individuals such as the F
Maurice Bejart, the Hungarian-born Aurel von Milloss,
Yuri Grigorovich, the Polish Conrad Dziewiecki, and th
land Petit, among many others, not to speak of the Am
where another variety of styles evolved, but not witho
roots, initiative, and impacts; let it be sufficient to mention
Balanchine, a direct link with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes,
Robbins, perhaps the highest peak in American modern ba
not deal here with what is usually referred to as moder
porary dance because I do not think of it as a European
the contrary, it is more of an American product in the fo
sponse to balletic development in Europe.)
In non-European dance cultures, classical dances
mythical, legendary, and historical memories have rem
more alive in the minds of the spectators than in Europ
familiar with the "plot," these spectators understand th
the performers who present and dance the stories that
parcel of the spectators' upbringing. Another reason for u
ing - and I think this applies chiefly to India-is a lang
hands, arms, head, and eyes (i.e., facial expression), which
for many a century with well-defined semantic content, a
tomime idiom somewhere between the imitative and the co
and which has always contributed to understanding the
the Far East, recitations also help.
On comparing ballet creations as a classical featur
peanness with the character of non-European classical d
we cannot avoid noticing that most outstanding ballet
to a very great extent, come from individual inventive
productions in other classical dance idioms, which are
tradition-bound in both form and content.

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 BALLET: EUROPEAN BY BIRTH 175

In addition to the wide span of tradition-based e

have to realize that an innovative component has invaria
ent in balletic evolution. Ballet, unlike extra-Europea
has always been more flexible, open, and admissive t
new movements, in order to reflect and respond to the
ideals of the times. The best creators of ballets were at the same time
innovators of the morphological tissue of the dance and "spokesmen"
for the cultural trends of any given epoch.
Hence we may say that, as characteristics of European develop-
ment, receptiveness and individuality, both symptoms and typical fea-
tures of Europeanness, distinguish ballet from other dance idioms.
These features are also responsible for the powerful global diffusion
of this art as part of expanding Euro-American culture.
The twentieth century has witnessed an explosion of European
culture all over the world and this explosion, a characteristic of Euro-
peanness, is also valid for ballet. In its classical and modern forms,
ballet has spread to practically all continents, but - unlike other arts - it
has not been detrimental to the local arts of dancing in the sense of
oppressing, suppressing, or distorting them. Ballet has never been
destructive or aggressive, but was accepted on other continents in its
Euro-American form, letting domestic, ethnic styles of dance survive.
Anna Pavlova's impact on the world of dance resulted in the expan-
sion and appreciation of ballet all over the world, but it did not affect
any "subcultural" dance forms in a negative way. In the wake of the
expansion of ballet in the first half of our century, there came a post-
war response from all over the world, mainly from the three or four
classical cultures of Asia, from the native cultures of Africa, and from
the most up-to-date trends in America; their enumeration would fill
pages. Ballet is something Europe could offer and has offered to the
world, and in return this has been rewarded by a number of dance
styles.
There are now schools of classical ballet in Japan and in China
where first-class ballet dancers are trained-and who win prizes in
world ballet competitions-yet the original Japanese and Chinese
dance forms have not disappeared. We can say, for instance, that
Anna Pavlova "conquered" Indian audiences for ballet, but she did
it without "attacking" Bharata Natyam, Kathakali, Kathak, or other
regional forms. On the contrary, the spreading of ballet has awakened
interest in local dances on other continents, making experts and per-

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176 DANCE CHRONICLE

formers conscious of the value of the indigenous dances

need to preserve and develop them. Ballet-and perhaps
tury we may even go so far as to say dance as a whole- h
a cultural interaction between Europe and the other con
that has proved fruitful and fertile, and in no way detrimen
of the artistic factors involved in it.
One of the reasons for this, I venture to say, is that human
movements are governed by entirely different physical and psycho-
logical motives than other arts. Take, for instance, music, where there
are such regularities as the octave with a doubling of the number of
resonances, or the relationship between the tonic, the dominant, and
the subdominant, underlying and governing the development of musical
hearing in Europe. Or, for instance, painting, where the relationship
between different colors can also be explained by measurable physical
components. Underlying ballet is human movement, which can only
vaguely be measured by relating it to a system of coordinates (in space),
to regularly recurring emphases in duration (time; i.e., rhythm), to
the input-and-output relation of energies (force; i.e., dynamics) and,
of course, to an expression of its own kind. European theatre dance,
called classical ballet, has arbitrarily chosen a few hundred from the
infinite quantity of movements according to "local" tastes, that is, to
the evolution of Euro-American aesthetics, and thus evolved a specific
style and form of dance characteristic of the cultural development of
Europe. Other styles and forms have chosen other sets from this in-
finite stock according to principles characteristic of their own develop-
ment. It should, however, be stressed that the visuality of lines, forms,
and groups has not yet been studied as deeply as the background of
color visuality and of musical auditivity, although great thinkers of
dance philosophy have made important contributions to our under-
standing of human movements in the various styles.
The infinitude of possible movements of the human body is
one of the reasons for the compatibility of different dance styles, in
the sense that these styles do not necessarily clash, but can be com-
plementary and may even fertilize one another, spreading ballet styles
across the continents without destroying the ethnic identities of the
local dance styles.

These considerations may raise the question whether ballet is indeed

anything purely European, whether it is a form of dance that can be

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 BALLET: EUROPEAN BY BIRTH 177

looked upon as a characteristic feature of Europeannes

two answers to this question: a firm "yes" and a faint "
As far as "yes" is concerned, ballet is definitely an
tionably a product of European culture, born from and fed
of European ethnicity, an art form that has assimilated
ber of movements and patterns from social and folk dan
"choreo-capillarity" and others through individual chore
ventiveness. It rose to the highest peaks of European societ
down to the middle classes as a form of both profession
and amateur social pursuit. It has never been "readopted
lore in its original function, but has engendered what m
stage folklore.
As far as "no" is concerned, ballet-in its current s
velopment-has spread all over the world; it is practiced in
country as a global form of theatre art. It has become an i
language of the human body, including dialects within
Europe, fertilized-in its modern form-by extra-Europea
On examining ballet merely in its actual stage, we may lose
historical backbone and it may seem a rootless, neutral,
ental esperanto of artistic manifestation. This is why ballet
correctly judged without a thorough historical analysis.
Hence the firm "yes" for its Europeanness.

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