THE PAST IS PROLOGUE What makes a ballet traditional? The answer is more elusive than we may think, as Valerie Lawson explains. © Valerie Lawson Artists of The Australian Ballet in Anne Woolliams’ Swan Lake, c.1977 Photography Branco Gaica The most precious records of a nation’s history are Today’s choreographers, when they revive and restage with contemporary elements; or a total spring clean wrapped in archival paper and stored in a building that the classics, must find a balance between audience – beginning again with nothing but the score and a often resembles a Grecian temple. But the archives expectations, honouring the past masters, and finding rough cut of the narrative. of ballet – its traditions – cannot be found in any one the essence and relevance of the work for today. For place, but in scattered fragments: old scores, diaries, them, the classical canon can become a yoke to bear A notable scholarly reconstruction premiered in costume illustrations, photographs and ancient or a springboard for experimentation. St Petersburg in 1999. The Russian choreographer notations. Classical ballets from the 19th and Sergei Vikharev produced an ornate, four-hour version of early 20th centuries are reinvented on the basis In the 20th century, George Balanchine kept the The Sleeping Beauty, based on Marius Petipa’s original of such ephemera. tradition of 19th-century classical ballet alive his Beauty, performed at the Mariinsky Theatre in 1890. own way, “not through idolatry and archaeology,” But while the past is elusive and fractured, the wrote his biographer, Bernard Taper, “but through Vikharev’s reconstruction began with manuscript slippery notion of ballet “tradition” is always present, constant innovation, experiment, and discovery. pages of notation and marked-up piano scores of especially in the minds of the audience, who cling to Always Balanchine thought of ballet as a living the ballet. Now in the theatre collection of Harvard their memories and their mental images of how the art, not as a relic of the past to be worshipped University, they had been smuggled out of Russia in classics should be told. or academically preserved.” 1918 by Nicholas Sergeyev, the Mariinsky Theatre’s ballet master and chief notator. They might recall the first time they saw the Prince’s In 1951 Balanchine choreographed his own Swan melancholy solo before he encounters the Swan Lake, compressing the themes of the ballet into just True to the 1890 premiere, the Lilac Fairy’s variation Queen; Princess Aurora’s exhilaration as she runs one act. Over the following decades, he tinkered with in the Prologue of Vikharev’s production was little on stage for her 16th birthday celebrations; a ghostly the production, adding and subtracting dances, and more than a series of simple posé arabesques, corps of winged sylphides; the Three Ivans leaping; at one time, eliminating the Dance of the Cygnets. danced en pointe and in a tutu (the variation now Odile spinning into her 32 fouettes; or the four little considered the traditional version was choreographed swans, arms crossed, heads moving in mesmeric In the 21st century, attempts to revive landmark in 1914). For the remainder of the ballet, the Lilac Marilyn Jones backstage during the premiere unison. And for each person, according to their tastes, classical ballets can take one of three paths: a Fairy changed into court shoes with little heels and season of Peggy van Praagh’s Swan Lake, 1962 tradition has, or has not, been served when they see painstaking piece-by-piece reconstruction from a calf-length dress, and carried a staff decorated Photography Darryl Smyth those ballets once more. various relics; a patchwork of the past, intertwined with lilac feathers. FROM TOP: Anna Sobechshanskaya as Odette in Julius Reisinger’s original production of Swan Lake, Moscow 1877 Lev Ivanov, St. Petersburg circa 1885 Marius Ivanovich Petipa, 1898 Michael Curry and David McAllister in Anne Woolliams’ Swan Lake, 1983. Photography Branco Gaica Robert Helpmann and Pearl Argyle of the Vic-Wells ballet company perform a pas de deux from Swan Lake, 1937 © BBC/Corbis OPPOSITE: Erik Bruhn and Sonia Arova in Peggy van Praagh’s Swan Lake, 1962. Photography Darryl Smythe Although much admired in the West, the production Of all the 19th-century classics, Swan Lake carries that Odette and Siegfried could live happily ever after was scorned by many in Russia. Vikharev lamented the highest burden of expectations that tradition will on earth – not in an afterlife. One version in the 1930s that Russian balletomanes, accustomed to the be honoured. Most versions descend from the four- portrayed the evil von Rothbart as a scheming member durable 1952 Beauty, cried when they saw his act 1895 production choreographed by Petipa and of the aristocracy. new-old version. Lev Ivanov in St Petersburg, but they adhere to only a few of its staple ingredients: the dance of the four Post-World War II productions in the West delved into Those who saw the premiere of that 1952 version cygnets, Odette’s variation and her pas de deux with Siegfried’s psyche, possibly reflecting the popularity might well have shed a tear in memory of the Prince Siegfried in Act II, and Odile’s fouettes. Almost of psychoanalysis in the 1960s and 1970s: in this “traditional” 1930s productions, just as London everything else is up for reinterpretation. genre belong Erik Bruhn’s troubled Siegfried, and the audiences of 1921 were shaken by Diaghilev’s “Siegfried’s dream” interpretations of Peter Darrell, radically overhauled The Sleeping Princess, filled with Swan Lake’s history even began with a rehash, when Rudolf Nureyev and John Neumeier. additions by the choreographer Bronislava Nijinska, Petipa and Ivanov remade the first production (which who updated the Russian productions of her youth. premiered in 1877, in Moscow). Tchaikovsky’s brother, Each generation will interpret tradition according Modest, rewrote the libretto and Riccardo Drigo to the spirit of the time, but of course the spirit is Nijinska removed much of the mime, added new rearranged Tchaikovsky’s original score, a task Drigo constantly changing. Some ballets of the past may variations for Bluebeard, Schéhérazade, and the compared with an arduous surgical procedure. remain interesting, but “their aesthetic is dead”, wrote leapfrogging Three Ivans, and created the impressive the critic, Arlene Croce, “and often the sentiment is fish dives for Aurora and her prince in the grand pas Over the decades many surgeons have been at work dead too”. The most we can ask of any revival, she de deux. The Three Ivans and the fish dives are now on Swan Lake, and many Petipa-Ivanov elements have suggests, is “that it not embarrass history too much”. considered traditional elements. been eliminated, among them the swan corps’ knee- The choreographer Frederick Ashton deplored the length dresses and the ballet’s apotheosis, which has archaeological search for authenticity, insisting that So, too, are Aurora’s long balances as she takes the Odette and Siegfried flying in the clouds, perched what matters is the way in which each generation hand of each suitor in the Rose Adagio. But, as the on oversized swans. extracts the essence of a work and conveys its poetry. critic Alistair Macaulay points out, this exercise in unsupported balances only became a canonical part of Like shadowy figures in a landscape, the Jester While choreographers, researchers, and audiences the role in the West in the 1940s, when Margot Fonteyn that appears in the Act I and Act III court scenes alike continue the search for the elusive beast of attempted to trump the Rose Adagio performance of and Siegfried’s friend, Benno, have appeared and tradition, they might also contemplate the inscription another English ballerina, Alicia Markova. disappeared. Benno vanished in 1901, then returned written on a statue outside the building in Washington in post-Revolutionary revivals in the West. DC that holds the United States’ archives. As for Petipa’s La Bayadère, present-day productions have strayed far from the 1877 premiere, no longer In the Soviet era, restagings followed the political Quoting a line from The Tempest, it reads: incorporating its long mime passages, but showcasing dictates of the day. In line with the concept of a “The past is prologue”. the virtuosic solo for the Golden Idol, a variation added socialist paradise, the tale acquired a happy ending, Valerie Lawson is an author and dance historian for the first time in 1948. Audiences love the Idol. and was approved by Stalin’s censors. In the secular Without him, many feel, the Bayadère tradition is lost. Soviet Union, von Rothbart, the villain, had to die so .