Lyrical lack

Royal Ballet Triple Bill
Royal Opera House

There was a time when dancers were very often given the means to gain a deep understanding of what they were supposed to be interpreting on stage — the well-known story of Ninette de Valois taking her artists to see William Hogarth’s paintings while creating The Rake’s Progress is but one of many examples. There was also a time — long before ballet-training turned into a money-churning business of marketable diplomas — when the rudiments of artistic interpretation were embedded in the blossoming dancers’ daily routine. Today, little or no significance seems to be bestowed upon the artistic side. Ballet teachers have little or no knowledge of the repertoire and/or its stylistic nuances, while many ‘reconstructors’ and dance ‘notators’ focus more on second-hand step-mongering than on an all-encompassing approach to theatre dance. Choreographic ideas have always been created with specific meanings, if not specific narratives, attached to them. To execute them without any evident understanding of those artistic nuances reduces dance performances to mere gymnastic displays. Which, let’s face it, is what most ballet performances are these days.

Take, for instance, the Royal Ballet’s new triple bill. It opens with Serenade, one of Balanchine’s most renowned signature pieces. Created in 1934, the work epitomises that neoclassical abstract dance-making that Balanchine is mostly associated with. Still, the plotless ballet has intrigued generations of dance scholars, writers, interpreters and viewers with its layers of visual metaphors, prompting a wealth of possible readings, which cannot be easily overlooked, for they have contributed to the work’s performance tradition. What I saw, alas, was competently danced but lacked the aura of unsettling lyricism that should always shroud Serenade. The enigmatic stretched-arm salute performed by the corps de ballet at the very beginning of the work had none of its poignant magic; likewise, the so-called ‘angel of death’ final section, in which a male dancer crosses the stage while being blindfolded by a female dancer behind him, failed to give me — and other Balanchine-fond friends — the shivers it has been giving me since I first saw Serenade more than 35 years ago.