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Apollos_Angels_A_History_of_Ballet

The document discusses the works of Jacques Roubaud and Georges Perec, highlighting the impact of Perec's experiences during the Nazi deportation of his parents on his writing. It also explores the complexities of ballet history as presented in Jennifer Homans' 'Apollo’s Angels,' particularly the challenges of preserving Nijinsky's choreography for 'Le Sacre du Printemps.' The text emphasizes the interplay of nationalism, religion, and the evolution of ballet, questioning the future of the art form without shared cultural beliefs.

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30 views

Apollos_Angels_A_History_of_Ballet

The document discusses the works of Jacques Roubaud and Georges Perec, highlighting the impact of Perec's experiences during the Nazi deportation of his parents on his writing. It also explores the complexities of ballet history as presented in Jennifer Homans' 'Apollo’s Angels,' particularly the challenges of preserving Nijinsky's choreography for 'Le Sacre du Printemps.' The text emphasizes the interplay of nationalism, religion, and the evolution of ballet, questioning the future of the art form without shared cultural beliefs.

Uploaded by

Facu Garcia
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
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of the living, especially the poems and fictions of its greatest living member, the

369
mathematician-novelist-poet-critic Jacques Roubaud. But the real center of this
book is the wonderfully various work of Perec, whose La Vie Mode d’Emploi (Life

Lit tle Rev iews


a User’s Manual ) has become a classic even for readers unaware of the elaborate
constraints used in its creation. Everything Perec wrote, Levin Becker posits, can
be traced back to a particular foundational experience: the Nazi deportation of
the poet’s parents when he was a very young child: “Perec wrote to make sense
of the world, and his insistent exploration of form and subject depended heavily
on the idea that there was something obscure but crucially important to be
found.” Indeed, most of the founding members of Oulipo, Levin Becker notes,
took an active part in the Resistance.
In tracing the source of Oulipo to the spirit of postwar Pataphysics, “with
its defensive glibness in the face of the world’s cruelty,” Many Subtle Channels
nicely puts to rest the assessment, still so common, at least in the United States,
that Oulipo was and is merely “playful”—clever gamesmanship rather than “real”
art. “Duchamp’s genius,” Levin Becker quips, vis-à-vis Adorno’s comment that
“to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” was to show that, even if “after
Auschwitz” could not be changed, “poetry” and the other arts could.
—Marjorie Perloff
doi 10.1215/0961754X-2423034

Jennifer Homans, Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet


(New York: Random House, 2010), 643 pp.

The centennial of the most notorious ballet premiere of the twentieth century
provided the occasion for the Joffrey Ballet to tour its 1987 reconstruction of
Nijinsky’s choreography for Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps and to remind us
of several aspects of the unique difficulties of the transmission of performance
arts. Ballet still does not have a universal system of notation and thus depends
primarily upon transmission by living performers to remain in the repertoire.
Nijinsky’s masterpiece did not give rise to a tradition by which it might continue
to live. The subtitle of the Sacre—Pictures of Pagan Russia in Two Acts—suggests
an explanation for its lack of longevity if viewed in the context of the history of
ballet as told by Jennifer Homans. Although religion and nationalism are ele-
ments of the cultural context in which any art develops, the kind and degree
of their prominence may be productive or destructive. Nijinsky’s choreography
failed to survive because it was too pagan and ultranationalist for the inherently
hierarchical and cosmopolitan art of ballet.
Homans’s history of ballet from its origins as a ritual performance of physical
and metaphysical order in the court of Louis XIV to the decades after the death of
370
George Balanchine in 1983 traces the complex interactions of religion and nation-
alism in Western Europe, Russia, the Soviet Union, and the United States. She
shows by her meticulous research how the developing discipline of classical bal-
COMMON KNOWLEDGE

let both draws on and distances itself from popular and local forms of entertain-
ment and recreation. Often it is by some personal serendipity or political cataclysm
that ballet has found its greatest opportunities to flourish: the Ballets Russes never
performed in Russia before or after the revolution, but Diaghilev gave Nijinsky,
Stravinsky, and Balanchine the occasion to work in Europe in ways that would
have been impossible in the Russian Imperial Theater at that time. A generation
earlier, however, Marius Petipa, foundering in the French ballet, had created the
signature dances of Romantic ballet, The Nutcracker, Sleeping Beauty, and Swan
Lake, for that very same Imperial Theater. In each case, and later when Balanchine
began his School of American Ballet, claims about the national character of the
art were—given its heterogeneous history—prospectively rather than retrospec-
tively correct. The attempt to create authentically national ballets, as in the case
of Nijinsky’s Sacre, ran contrary to the transnational and transcendent capacities
inherent in dance and music. Louis XIV, a nationalist par excellence, understood
the performance of ballet as affirming the sacred order of a hierarchical universe.
It was not accidental that Louis’s favorite role was that of Apollo, the Sun
King and divine warden of the arts, or that Balanchine recounts how he first
understood the artistic value of selection in choreography when he studied
Stravinsky’s score for his 1928 ballet Apollo, a piece that has retained its place in
the international repertoire. When Balanchine wanted conflict as his theme, he
did not choose the Dionysian blood sacrifice of the Sacre, a piece he had not been
allowed to choreograph in his youth in Russia and to which he never returned
when perfectly free to do so. Rather, he and Stravinsky collaborated on Agon
(1957) and synchronized the differences of music and movement in modern ver-
sions of seventeenth-century French court dances. The sarabande, galliard, and
bransle may have originated in pagan practices, but now they were set to both dia-
tonic and twelve-tone scales and made to demonstrate the value of complex orders
being regulated by human time, rather than by the primeval cycle of the seasons.
Homans makes clear in her paean to Balanchine that his desire to make
compositions for his dancers and his audiences came from his belief that art can
nourish the soul when it articulates the value of a metaphysical and sacred order.
As he said: “God creates, I assemble.” The elegiac ending of this history of ballet
mourns not so much the loss of a man but the loss of the shared cultural beliefs
in the values of discipline and decorum that are necessary for making and per-
forming ballet. Whether ballet can survive without those beliefs is a question to
which the fate of Nijinsky’s choreography for the Sacre gives an ominous answer.
—Beverly Haviland
doi 10.1215/0961754X-2423043
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