Music and action in classical ballet performance?

[Geoff]

This exchange on another part of the Forum has made me think:

 

https://www.balletcoforum.com/topic/27055-pacific-northwest-ballets-historical-giselle-streaming/?do=findComment&comment=394596

 

Specifically I noticed this comment on how detailed the links between music and action were in the original performances of Giselle:

 

>>copious annotations...describe the mime scenes, showing specifically how the action matched up to the music...every note, every phrase, every shift from loud to soft or major to minor is designed to provide the dancers with a vital resource for communicating the drama, moment to moment—a resource that is not always recognized today as such.

 

This rings true. To take a simple example - also from Giselle - what does one feel when Albrecht knocks on Giselle's door in Act 1 but does not bother (or does not know to) match his actions with the clear door knocking in the orchestral score? Or when the Widow Simone - in Ashton's Fille - clog dances around but doesn't hit the beats of the music? Such clumsiness always grates, because there is so obviously a mismatch, like a film being out of sync. But, as this academic study of the 19th century shows, we are missing so much more of the original intentions throughout performances of classical ballet: when conceived and performed back then, the action and the music were allied, bar for bar.

 

This aspect of ballet performance is at risk of being more or less completely forgotten. One thinks of Prologues to the Sleeping Beauty which proceed as if the music is a generalised accompaniment to what is happening on stage, rather than the mime, the movement, the actions, being a detailed expression of the music: "every note, every phrase, every shift from loud to soft or major to minor...communicating the drama, moment to moment". 

 

We understand that more musical dancers show how they dance *to* to the music rather than merely at the same time as the music. By extension, it seems clear from the example of this Giselle text that everything, not only the dance steps, has been set to music and could (should?) be performed as such. 

 

How much are we missing in current ballet performances? Could they not be so much more detailed, so much richer, deeper, and therefore so much more exciting to watch? 

[Fonty]

49 minutes ago, Geoff said:

 

 

Or when the Widow Simone - in Ashton's Fille - clog dances around but doesn't hit the beats of the music? Such clumsiness always grates, because there is so obviously a mismatch, like a film being out of sync. 

 

Sometimes I am surprised at how out of time some of the Widow Simones are when they perform that routine.  It gives the impression they can't hear the music properly.

[alison]

What bugs me even more is when the "choreography" of the Giselle production doesn't actually allow Albrecht to do all the knocking that the music specifies.

 

You make some very good points, Geoff.  I do feel that some dancers are a bit "musically deaf".  Some just seem to "run through" the score and as long as both of them start and finish at the same time, that's all right, then.  No, it ain't, not necessarily.

[Geoff]

2 hours ago, alison said:

You make some very good points, Geoff.  I do feel that some dancers are a bit "musically deaf". 

Thanks Alison but, just to clarify, I am not really talking primarily about dancers. I am talking about who trains them,  who teaches the roles and who stages the works (after all one can’t make a mime gesture or action musical if one has not been taught it as part of the work in the first place).
 

Producers might find themselves responsible for more energetic, musical, exciting and entertaining ballet performances if they took such research discoveries into account. 

 

Instead the excitements embedded in the tradition are forgotten, gymnastics takes over, and the multivarious surprises and delights of a “through composed” ballet - music and action as one throughout - end up replaced by something which gets called boring. 
 

Edited February 24, 2023 by Geoff

[alison]

True, but I'd still be hoping the dancers would perceive something in the music that told them when to do what, even if they weren't taught that way.

[Pas de Quatre]

This truly surprises me, any mime or actions in classical ballet are set to the music in the same way that the steps are, and should be just as thoroughly rehearsed!

[Geoff]

45 minutes ago, Pas de Quatre said:

This truly surprises me, any mime or actions in classical ballet are set to the music in the same way that the steps are, and should be just as thoroughly rehearsed!

Exactly Pas de Quatre. The research shows that what you call “any” mime or actions are but a fraction of what people used to see (rather than, as we tend to get now, little sections of “mime” and then back to generalised filling in).
 

For example, and going back to my example of the Sleeping Beauty Prologue, try listening to the beginning of the ballet (assuming the curtain rises when the music and the notation have the curtain going up, this again often not being in the right musical place). Then compare what you have in your minds eye with what is going on in the music. Who is doing what during Tchaikovksy’s “demi-comique” march, say? Sitting with the score one can soon see just how much we may be missing in today’s productions. 

[Geoff]

To illustrate here is an example from the document at the centre of the research, for those who don't have access to Marian Smith's work ("The Earliest Giselle? A Preliminary Report on a St.Petersburg Manuscript", published in 2000 in Dance Chronicle). This is part of a page from an 1840s repetiteur - violin rehearsal score - showing Giselle Act I scene vii. This example is part of the scene where Hilarion finds the sword. 

 

Below is the French text written on the score (with a translation). Notice how much action is described for so few bars, and that this is not really what we think of today as a "mime scene" but more what I called “through composed” ballet.

 

 

[FLOSS]

Marian Smith the author of Opera and Ballet in the Age of Giselle says that if you follow the account of the mime for Giselle as recorded by Henri Justament the French words which he has written down are a perfect fit with Adam's music as recorded in the violin reduction of the score that was used for the first St Petersburg production of the ballet.We miss a great deal in modern productions of Giselle which only ever contain the edited highlights version of the dialogue; changing the characters of both Giselle and Bathilde by reducing Giselle to weak docility and making Bathilde an unpleasant class conscious aristo thus depriving both of something approaching their original characters and dialogue. Again if Ratmansky is to be  believed, the Hilarion we see today is not the man we were originally intended to see on stage. The argument in favour of the character transplants caused by cutting the mime is that audiences today are really only interested in the dancing ignoring the fact that choreography includes all the movement which the choreographer set to the score which means it includes the mime as well as dance.  

 

It is a great pity that Ratmansky is not keen to release recordings of his productions of the Petipa ballets because he regards his productions as work in progress rather than the finished product. The fact is that having had the good fortune to see his stagings of Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake and La Bayadere in which he persuaded  his dancers to adopt an historically informed performance style I encountered the extraordinary musicality of Petipa's choreography which transformed Beauty into a ballet of enchantment and charm. Performances in which the score is not distorted in order to accommodate the dancers' desire to display their modern technique has an extraordinary impact on the audience's experience of these works. It seems to me that it is the willingness of conductors, coaches and directors to distort the music to accommodate high extensions and other aspects of the"improvements in technique" of which we hear so much, which  goes a long way to explain why these ballets so often seem dull in performance.  A large part of the problem quite simply is that the display of technique approach to these works often shifts the emphasis away from those elements of the work which Petipa intended to be thehighlights of individual acts and the culmination  of the work as a whole. Modern aesthetics and performance practice has done great aesthetic damage to these works. Ratmansky's Beauty is cut but with greater sensitively to the effect the cuts will have on the narrative than the current RB production. In the Prologue Ratmandky's Catalabutte's has sections of mime which indicate the joy with which Aurora's birth is greeted rather than the choreographic equivalent of polyfilla  and the miss-timings we see at Covent Garden. It ends with a tableau in which the king forbids the presence of spindles and other sharp objects in his kingdom which makes his response to the knitting women in act one appear far less arbitrary than in the RB version of the ballet.

 

More modern works, or at least works created within living memory also suffer from coarsening, aesthetic indifference and  downright sloppiness on the part of stagers and coaches. As far as the Widow Simone is concerned if a dancer does not care enough about the choreography's relationship with the music to dance accurately then perhaps he should not be cast as the widow. If they really cared those responsible for coaching and staging the ballet should deal with a sloppy dancer by replacing him. Sadly I think that sloppy performances of Simone and interpretations of Alain which today often suggest that he has special needs is symptomatic of a  lack of respect for the company's founder choreohrapher, his repertory and the characters he created with his choreography. Osbert Lancaster's designs for Alain's costumes make it clear that  Alain's social awkwardness is a mixture of self-conscious gawky adolescence and being forced to wear ill fitting clothes. When Alexander Grant danced the role he made it clear that Ashton had created a character rather than a caricature  it was clear that Alain's physical ungainliness was caused by his failure to adjust to a recent growth spurt which was emphasised by a jacket which he could barely fasten across his chest with  arms that were far too short for him. In other words in Alain  Ashton had created the portrait of a socially awkward gawky adolescent while in Widow Simone he presented us with a tough peasant woman torn between her love of money and her love for her daughter. The fact that a masterpiece full of humanity has been reduced and to caricature and coarsened by sloppy performances and broad comedy reveals a want of taste  and aesthetic sensitivity and a lack of respect for the Ashton repertory and its musicality which is best evidenced by a lack of interest in getting ballets like Fille and Pigeons looking right in performance by beginning with casting these ballets with musically sensitive dancers who have the stage personalities appropriate for their allocated roles .

 

 

[LinMM]

It’s certainly true I’ve never ever seen the Character of Alain danced with the sensitivity of Alexander Grant who I loved in this role ….though he was also the first one I saw dance it!
After having a gap in going to ROH for a while I remember being rather disappointed in the Alain Character when I next saw Giselle as the role had definitely become caricatured at that time and I just didn’t feel the love for Alain that I had felt with Alexander Grants performance. 
Did this change after Ashtons death I wonder. Maybe the role is not so attractive to many of todays dancers as I suppose most train in the hope of becoming  a Principal dancer …. are Character dancers appreciated so much today? 

[Sim]

I think it's a moot point about Alain anyway....I have a feeling we won't be seeing Fille in the UK for a long time.  I do hope I'm wrong, though.

[Fiz]

15 minutes ago, LinMM said:

It’s certainly true I’ve never ever seen the Character of Alain danced with the sensitivity of Alexander Grant who I loved in this role ….though he was also the first one I saw dance it!
After having a gap in going to ROH for a while I remember being rather disappointed in the Alain Character when I next saw Giselle as the role had definitely become caricatured at that time and I just didn’t feel the love for Alain that I had felt with Alexander Grants performance. 
Did this change after Ashtons death I wonder. Maybe the role is not so attractive to many of todays dancers as I suppose most train in the hope of becoming  a Principal dancer …. are Character dancers appreciated so much today? 

I loved Paul Kay as Alain. He made me cry. 

[Fonty]

I must confess I never saw Alain as a gawky teenage boy wearing the wrong sized clothes.  I've always thought he was supposed to be a little bit simple, which is the way the dancers have portrayed him.  If it is a matter of public record that Ashton's intention was the former, why on earth was it allowed to slip so far down the caricature route?  Especially as this might lead to the ballet being banned or completely rewritten because it is now considered offensive?  I mean, we all know plenty of gangling teenage boys!

[Pas de Quatre]

If Alain is just an awkward gangly teenager, can someone explain the significance of the red umbrella? His fixation with it is not what one would expect from a boy who is merely shy and lacking social graces.

[Fonty]

A prop, perhaps, to conceal his shyness?  

[Pas de Quatre]

No it is a much stronger attachment than that!

[CHazell2]

2 hours ago, Sim said:

I think it's a moot point about Alain anyway....I have a feeling we won't be seeing Fille in the UK for a long time.  I do hope I'm wrong, though.

Why do you think that? I hope not too by the way

[James]

In no way do I endorse the terminology, but in a 2010 programme article on Fille, David Vaughan, author of Frederick Ashton and his Ballets, refers to Alain as “half-witted”.

[Sim]

7 minutes ago, CHazell2 said:

Why do you think that? I hope not too by the way

Because there’s a fear that the character of Alain will be offensive to some people. 

[Scheherezade]

6 hours ago, Sim said:

Because there’s a fear that the character of Alain will be offensive to some people. 

If you take this wrongheaded policy of “let’s not stage anything that might offend someone” to its natural conclusion, all narrative ballet would be cancelled because every ‘character’ must carry the risk of causing offence to someone, even if that someone is merely one of those people who make a point of taking offence on behalf of others who are not themselves offended. 

[Fonty]

14 hours ago, Sim said:

Because there’s a fear that the character of Alain will be offensive to some people. 

 

Who is fearful of this? How many complaints did they receive the last time the ballet was on?  Did any of those complaints arise from people who had actually been to the ballet and watched it, or were the complaints escalated by posts on social media and the newspapers grabbing hold of it? Are ballets now going to be subjected to the same "modernisation" as children's books?  

Those are the questions I would be asking Mr O'Hare, or whoever is responsible for these decisions.  And I believe publishers have backed down over the up dating of Roald Dahl's books following the uproar.  

Edited February 26, 2023 by Fonty
typo

[Pas de Quatre]

It would affect much in the performing arts, not just ballet! The comic unwanted suitor is a stock figure, Malevolio, Kate's suitors in Taming of the Shrew, Gamache in Don Q. Pierrot in Comedia del Arte is a more tragic traditional figure, memorably used by Glen Tetley in Pierrot Lunaire. In my mind Alain fits into this tradition blending the comic with pathos. Another example is Charlie Chaplin's character, The Tramp.

[Sebastian]

Ah, Alain. Readers with long memories will recall we have over the years discussed such aspects of Alain several times and most interestingly. I just did a search for him and his umbrella and learned a lot from what people have posted in the past.

 

Might it be ok if I now add a comment relating to the subject of this thread? There are some remarks in a 2015 Dance Tabs review of the then new production of Sleeping Beauty by Ratmansky which might be relevant:

 

https://dancetabs.com/2015/05/american-ballet-theatre-the-sleeping-beauty-new-york/

 

The review is by Marina Harrs, who is the author of the forthcoming book on Ratmansky and someone who has interviewed him at length. She opens her discussion of the production with these observations:

 

Perhaps the most striking element in Alexei Ratmansky’s new Sleeping Beauty for American Ballet Theatre is its musicality, the way the steps, peppered with accents and breaths, unspool within the music. In most productions of Beauty, the tempi are constantly being adjusted to accommodate the size or difficulty of the steps...Another striking quality is an overall danceiness that we don’t usually associate with the high classicism of Sleeping Beauty. Nothing is static or grandiloquent, and every instant is filled with movement...The choreography just bubbles along, more concerned with exemplifying an emotion or a thought – warmth, happiness, yearning – than with impressing upon the viewer the skill of the dancers.

 

 

[Emeralds]

On 24/02/2023 at 11:16, Geoff said:

This exchange on another part of the Forum has made me think:

 

https://www.balletcoforum.com/topic/27055-pacific-northwest-ballets-historical-giselle-streaming/?do=findComment&comment=394596

 

Specifically I noticed this comment on how detailed the links between music and action were in the original performances of Giselle:

 

>>copious annotations...describe the mime scenes, showing specifically how the action matched up to the music...every note, every phrase, every shift from loud to soft or major to minor is designed to provide the dancers with a vital resource for communicating the drama, moment to moment—a resource that is not always recognized today as such.

 

This rings true. To take a simple example - also from Giselle - what does one feel when Albrecht knocks on Giselle's door in Act 1 but does not bother (or does not know to) match his actions with the clear door knocking in the orchestral score? Or when the Widow Simone - in Ashton's Fille - clog dances around but doesn't hit the beats of the music? Such clumsiness always grates, because there is so obviously a mismatch, like a film being out of sync. But, as this academic study of the 19th century shows, we are missing so much more of the original intentions throughout performances of classical ballet: when conceived and performed back then, the action and the music were allied, bar for bar.

 

This aspect of ballet performance is at risk of being more or less completely forgotten. One thinks of Prologues to the Sleeping Beauty which proceed as if the music is a generalised accompaniment to what is happening on stage, rather than the mime, the movement, the actions, being a detailed expression of the music: "every note, every phrase, every shift from loud to soft or major to minor...communicating the drama, moment to moment". 

 

We understand that more musical dancers show how they dance *to* to the music rather than merely at the same time as the music. By extension, it seems clear from the example of this Giselle text that everything, not only the dance steps, has been set to music and could (should?) be performed as such. 

 

How much are we missing in current ballet performances? Could they not be so much more detailed, so much richer, deeper, and therefore so much more exciting to watch? 

I’m afraid a lot of the unmusicality (if we want to call it that) or being out of sync with the music that we see is often down to the repetiteur or director of the production rather than the dancer/s in the role.

 

The dancers count everything and obediently rehearse minute details that most audiences don’t notice. I too have noticed the changes (eg “missing” knocks by Albrecht are also a bugbear of mine as the music is still knocking but Albrecht has stopped!) but they are usually due to whoever mounts the revival or production insisting that the dancer stops prematurely.

 

If you only spot one dancer doing it while every other Albrecht is in sync, it may be due to nerves and forgetting the choreography on that particular occasion. But since this is a trend noticed by lots of us, you have to ask the coaches or choreographers in charge why they’ve altered the ballet.Unfortunately, some coaches/repetiteurs are also not very musical. 

[Geoff]

Thanks Emeralds, that is exactly my point. As I wrote on Friday:

 

>>I am not really talking primarily about dancers. I am talking about who trains them,  who teaches the roles and who stages the works (after all one can’t make a mime gesture or action musical if one has not been taught it as part of the work in the first place).

 

The Giselle research quoted above shows how detailed 19th century productions must have been, every single bar, so it seems sad that attempts are not made to honour this tradition. My hunch is that productions would be more energetic, more complex and therefore more interesting as a result.  

 

By way of illustration - and to provide a little more detail to my earlier comment about the Sleeping Beauty Prologue - I watched the performance at Covent Garden this Saturday evening. The curtain (or rather curtains, as there is also a scrim) went up at points bearing little resemblance to what the music suggests. More importantly, the opening section (I kept careful note of everything up to the arrival of the king and queen) has only a few beats of "mime" as understood by the Royal Ballet these days. But there is still a lot going on in the music, though there is now not so much happening on the stage and it is not really connected to the score. 

 

Much of what was going on seemed to be happening at the same time as the music rather than in time with the music.  It's only a guess (we don't have the missing violin score from the 1890s that Wiley examined forty years ago and which may have given detail of what's expected) but on the face of it there seems to be a lot of "text" missing now.

[Emeralds]

I notice that in the past all the Albrechts I saw used to do all the knocks in the music- from Nureyev, David Blair and Frank Augustyn on film (ie tv) to the Albrechts at SWRB, RB, Australian Ballet, and other visiting companies. Even in Prague (on holiday)! Not sure when some repetiteur decided it would be fun to get him to stop knocking halfway and to put his ear to the door instead. The problem is that it is not always easy for audiences in seats far away to spot that he is listening at the door (presumably for her footsteps) plus the music is telling us it’s two more knocks to go, so it’s not a change for the better.

 

I can’t recall any of the recent Widow Simones that I’ve seen being out of time with the music in the clog dance, but it’s been a long time since Fille was presented by RB or BRB (hint hint) so perhaps one of them should revive it and remind me. (They could do it at the Ashton Festival that has been proposed on this page. It’s his 120th birthday anniversary next year!) 

 

I’m due to see Sleeping Beauty only in May as my February booking was derailed by the rail strike (pun unintended) so will have a look at the Prologue then to see what’s happened with the response to the music too. I think Sleeping Beauty of all the three ballets really needs to be at one with the music as it’s the music that sets the tone and gives the ballet its grandeur  - if the staging ignores the music or is clearly out of sync, it looks like a very boring series of long walks and class exercises until Carabosse arrives.