Dear Michael,
You're a terrific writer, a good friend, and at peril of your never again buying me a drink, I do have to take issue with a few of the things you wrote in your recent blog post about City Ballet's current winter season. You're not the only critic I've read decrying City Ballet's decision to program long runs of five full-length (I'd rather say "evening-length," but hardly anyone else does) ballets. This is more than City Ballet's ever done in a single season; no more than one or two full-lengths has been the norm. With so many evenings devoted to these biggies this season, there's been a drastic reduction in the number of evenings devoted to City Ballet's traditional programs of three one-act ballets. You're not the only writer to imply that this new look is the mess of pottage for which City Ballet's traded its heritage, and a sign of the End of Days, when the repertory of every ballet company in the world will be reduced to cookies pressed from the same few cutters, or, as you put it, "the same dozen ballets being programmed by every single company."
These statements are fine examples of the "thin-entering-wedge" argument, an assumption that a current trend must continue, and can have only one possible outcome. City Ballet's programmed a lot of full-length ballets this season. Does that mean that EVERY company in the world is doing (or has done) the same? Or most, or even many? A lot? Just which companies, besides NYCB, are we talking about here, anyway? Some nameless companies that might be putting on Balanchine's Coppelia? Well, why wouldn't they? It's a gorgeous ballet. I think it's a mistake to assume that if a company puts on a full-length ballet, it has a choice between that and a mixed bill. Given the state of the economy, and that full-lengths tend to be more popular than mixed bills, it's more likely to be a choice between a full-length ballet or no ballet at all. Or no company at all.
Letting the rest of the world fend for itself, and returning to City Ballet, I can't see how this season's five full-length ballets represent some sort of wholesale abandonment of the Balanchine heritage. Don't forget, in addition to Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty and Romeo + Juliet, they're doing Balanchine's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Jewels.
Getting back to the "thin entering wedge," it's fallacious to look at this season and assume that from now on, EVERY season will have a preponderance of full-length ballets. The Spring season has a grand total of zero full-length ballets. It does, however, have twenty-two ballets by Balanchine, seven by Robbins, four by Martins, two by Wheeldon and one each by The Usual Suspects: Barak, Bigonzetti, Miroshnichenko, McGregor, Millepied and Ratmansky. Of these, seven are premieres. Is there another company in the world that can offer such an embarrassment of riches (granted, some are more former than latter)? It's quite likely that over the years the number of Balanchine and Robbins ballets performed each year has declined slightly. That's unfortunate, but inevitable. Unless the company entirely stops creating new ballets, some new works will enter the "permanent" repertory (some might even deserve it), and these will either crowd out "lesser" works of the masters, or, more likely, keep them "offline" longer than the A-list ballets.
Of course this isn't ideal. What's ideal would be for Balanchine and Robbins never to have died, and for me to remain forever thirty, rich, and less incompetent in the ballet studio. It ain't gonna happen. Given this sad state of affairs, Peter Martins has done tolerably well at preserving the repertory. He hasn't done as well as we all would've liked, and he's hardly been above reproach, but I'd give his curatorship a solid B-plus. Sometimes "it could've been worse" isn't such a bad legacy. While stylistically the Balanchine ballets (and their dancers) aren't what they were, or what we might ideally wish them to be, they're still pretty damn good, and the company's been dancing them sensationally. Who Cares? was a revelation, as was Midsummer. I can't remember a season in recent decades when I've so often left the theater as thrilled and babbling with enthusiasm as I have this winter. The days when the Balanchine repertory looked shabby and underrehearsed are gone, gone, gone (let's hope that trend will continue in the spring). Did the few Balanchine ballets look so great this season in spite of, or because of, the full-lengthers?
Anyway, I don't think you can say that City Ballet's "neglecting," "rejecting," or "retreating from" Balanchine's paradigm, on the basis of one season, especially given what's on deck for the spring. Also, about that paradigm, just because Balanchine was good at making virtues of necessity doesn't mean that was what he'd do if he had his druthers. The spare "practice clothes" look of his black-and-white ballets didn't come about because he up one day and said, "let's not use costumes!" For much of City Ballet's early years, there wasn't much money for costumes, so Balanchine, to borrow a phrase, made it work. If it weren't for budget shortfalls, would we have ever seen this severe, black-and-white world?
Similarly, Balanchine never "rejected" full-length ballets; necessity rejected them for him. At City Center he had neither the money nor the resources to do full-length ballets (with the exception of the Nutcracker, but that's different). Balanchine wasn't above pandering to the masses to build an audience at City Center, but he did it with one-act works like Stars and Stripes and Western Symphony. Morton Baum's implied that Balanchine considered these crowd pleasers to be distractions from what he really wanted to create (or at least Baum considered them such), yet he made them anyway, and they turned out okay. When Balanchine panders, we get masterpieces; when Martins panders, we, sigh, don't. But both get people into the theater.
Balanchine wasn't opposed to full-length ballets. Once he had the resources of the New York State Theater, he made A Midsummer Night's Dream and proved a genius at storytelling, and, with a new muse, his Don Quixote, which seems like about five full-length ballets in one. True, he had no interest in a full-length Swan Lake or Romeo and Juliet, but he famously wanted to do a Sleeping Beauty, but only in a theater with a turntable, so he could properly stage the long-lost Panorama. Clearly, full-length ballets were not Balanchine's primary interest, but wasn't trying to consign them to the dustbin of history, either.
Perhaps you're right in saying that "every other company does these ballets and most do them better," but not in New York. City Ballet's regular "competition" is American Ballet Theatre. ABT does Kenneth MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet, which is far, far better than Martins' Romeo + Juliet. McKenzie's and Martins' Swan Lakes are both dreadful in their own ways, so I'd rank that as a tie. McKenzie's truly awful Sleeping Beauty makes Martins' lovely one look even better. So it's a tie: City Ballet, 1.5; ABT, 1.5. And if most other companies do these ballets better than City Ballet, why were there so many full and near-full houses?
Your citation of "doing what they want," they being dancers and audiences, apparently, as an argument against doing these full-length ballets reminds me of an unintentionally droll scene in Frederick Wiseman's recent documentary about the Paris Opera Ballet, La Danse, in which Brigitte Lefevre chides and cajoles her ballet masters and mistresses to encourage their dancers to take modern classes. Lefevre suggests that if they do, they might dislike performing in modern works less. She also observes that the POB's evenings of these modern works aren't very popular with audiences, either. Perhaps French irony is drier than I can tell, but Lefevre seems entirely bereft of any in her promotion of works that dancers hate performing and audiences hate watching. I suppose in Lefevre's Bizarro world, art is like castor oil: it tastes awful going down, but it's good for you and you'll swallow it and you'll like it, or else.
So, in Lefevre's Paris, the show must go on even though nobody wants to dance in or watch it; in Popkin's New York, the show should not go on, even though people DO want to dance and watch it. I'm stretching a point here, but for crying out loud, while popularity shouldn't be the only criteria for performing something, it shouldn't be a reason NOT to. I'm sure you didn't mean for this, or your jab at "infantile" audiences, to sound so condescending and snobbish; at least I hope you didn't.
Let's face it. Much of the problem is that of this season's three "classics," Peter Martins' Swan Lake sucks, and his Romeo + Juliet sucks even more. I am in the camp that thinks his Sleeping Beauty is wonderful, however. Martins' creepy R+J makes MacMillan's look like a work of staggering genius, although at ABT, Kevin McKenzie's Swan Lake tied Martins' in the race to the bottom: they're both dreadful. If Martins' full-lengths were better, we probably wouldn't be having this argument. Let's not forget, though, that Balanchine's contribution to the full-length set, Midsummer and Jewels, is quite wonderful. I don't hear anyone railing against them!
Those arguments you dismiss so out-of-hand are actually quite compelling, and in dismissing them, you seem to confirm their validity, or, somehow, use their validity as a reason to discredit them. Given the state of the economy, and the fact that City Ballet's chewing though its once-massive endowment at a frightening pace (yes, we both know where a lot of it goes, but that's another story), that the classics sell well is a huge plus. City Ballet needs to sell tickets, and it needs to make money. Actually, it's kind of brilliant marketing to generate such a buzz about full-length ballets by clustering them together, leveraging existing, and expensive, assets without the expense and risk of a new full-length production. Circuses? Yeah, you'd never catch Balanchine working for the circus ... nevermind. Giving the audience what it wants (casting popular dancers in famous roles) is a bad thing? Giving the dancers what they want (a chance to do those roles) is a bad thing? Bringing a new audience to the ballet is a bad thing?
Dear God! I remember back in 98 (I feel so old), City Ballet was celebrating the 50th anniversary of its founding in 1948. As I looked at the silver-haired audience, I had the depressing realization that most of them could've been at that first performance, and where was the audience of the future? It looked like City Ballet didn't have much time to find, or manufacture, one.
Although there were a lot of kiddies at the full-lengthers, I wouldn't call the new audiences "infantile," unless you consider everyone under forty to be such (given the noisy chatter, bag-tearing, munching and texting I saw, you might be right), it wasn't so. I was thrilled to see not just kiddies, but college-aged kids and even prime-of-lifers at these shows who'd clearly never been to the ballet before. Of course they're stupit. They applaud and even laugh and cheer in all the wrong places, and they reward truly stupendous performances with mild applause. (Two curtain calls for La Bouder's Aurora? Shame!)
Yep, they're newbies. Can't even tell a soubresaut from a sisonne, I'll bet. They don't even know what they're looking at, and I'm awfully glad they're there. Some of them will stick around, see other works, and perhaps start working their way through the repertory, learning and seeing, as Balanchine's repertory can teach them to see. People have to start somewhere. I know I did.
Finally, if City Ballet does full-length ballets, or even just the "classics," poorly, that's not a reason not to do them, it's a reason to do them better.
I won't go into your description of Bouder (you're entitled to your opinion), but you might consider that by now the "cheerleader-from-Carlisle" thing might filter more than illuminate her for you.
Now I need a nap.
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