Defying Gravity and Time

Been thinking you what to buy Nature Girl for Xmas. Her wish list has three items on it (Sims2, pretty wrist warmers, and earrings) and so there is a bit of room to buy one or two other things. When I was out buying Christmas music the other day, I bought her a DVD with the Paris National Ballet performing George Balanchine’s Jewels ballet.

When I was a ballet dancer, thirty years ago, Balanchine was more or less the god of (neo)-classical choreography. Nature Girl’s never seen any ballet before. I thought it would be a good introduction.

After taking a peek today, I am so surprised at how much my view of the Balanchine’s choreography has changed over time. Modern dance, movies, CGI, pop culture has changed how I see things. The music is so dramatic and I keep on expecting the dancers to soar across the stage ala Matrix, or to pirouette with such speed that the ballet dancer blurs with increasing velocity. And all they do is lift a leg, or extend their arms in beautiful aesthetic, but rather unspectacular ways.

The thing is, the art of ballet dancing, or maybe dancing in general, is attempting the impossible: making the complicated, difficult steps look effortless. Ideally there is almost a suspension of gravity and time. A good dancer can make the extraordinary unnatural poses, steps, jumps, and postures look natural. Much in the same way actors try to make William Shakespeare prose fluid and understandable to a modern day audience. Yet, seeing the ballet today was a bit like looking appreciatively at a Zen rock garden.

Then I remembered a story I heard many years ago from a fellow attending about attending his first (and only) ballet. He, a sign maker (i.e. store signs), had never seen a ballet before, but this “classy” woman he’d met invited him to the Kennedy Center in New York to see a ballet with Mikhail Baryshnikov. Baryshnikov entered the stage (I believe it was Giselle) by doing a series of leaps across the stage. This fellow was so astonished by the mastery of movement that he let out a loud and long “Wooowwww!” He said that a few of the nearby audience turned and looked at him with daggers in their eyes. But, the elderly woman sitting near him said, “Exactly!”

And that was the thing about Baryshnikov, as a young man, his leaps defied gravity and time: he would go up quicker and then slow down on the way down.