"Ballet has given us visions of limitless human potential and a sense of grace as profound as anything we have ever thought, felt or believed. But all too often, it now commandeers a disproportionate amount of money and attention in the dance world and returns only an increasingly self-satisfied triviality."
"When other forms of concert dance — not to mention movies, TV or the theater — are this empty and useless, it's easy to openly dislike or even despise them. But ballet has cultivated an intimidation factor that acts like a computer firewall. If people hate ballet, they frequently feel guilty and assume that it's got to be their own fault, that they're not educated or sensitive enough. If only they went more often, read more essays and program notes, joined a company support group …"
"For beginners, the easiest thing to hate about ballet may be the way so many 19th century story ballets depict non-Christian, non-European, nonwhite people. Happy slaves, lustful Muslims, murderous Hindus: They sure don't make 'em like that anymore. But why are we watching this stuff — surely not out of nostalgia for the racism and xenophobia on view?...Classical music still shakes us to the core. Classical theater speaks of the eternal issues that define our lives. But too much antique Western classical dance... simply buttresses a sense of white Euro-privilege by dramatizing how colorfully nasty things are elsewhere."
"Thinking of dancers as beautiful children might seem harmless enough, but in ballet it's part of a system that denies young people any real choices in their lives... Ours, however, too often turn out obedient classical athletes by imposing rules about where to be, what to do, how much to eat, whom to believe in and when self-esteem is deserved or not. It's even worse for the ballet women who starve themselves to match a skeletal ideal and then stop menstruating for the length of their careers. Talk about arrested development."
"Does any star these days lobby artistic directors for better choreography or dare to say, "I just don't want to be seen in that 'Swan Lake' "? Does responsibility to the art and audience extend beyond dancing well?"
and Segal ends his piece with:
"Non-Christians and those moved to anger rather than despair by wretched ballet choreography or dancing should try staring at the top of the proscenium arch and repeating words written by George Bernard Shaw: Fall. Fall and crush."
Balletomane that I am, I am probably expected to be outraged at the article and the writer. But as I read it, I found myself only faintly annoyed and mostly amused at the diatribe. Granted, Segal does come up with some some sad truths of the art in question but the delivery is of shock-and-awe irrationality and not thoughtful insight and concern. As Kristin Sloan of The Winger puts it, "It's too bad that the shock value of these statements is more likely to get the article attention than a concerned, caring, fully realized criticism of the art and it's current place in the world."
John Rockwell of the New York Times delivers a calm and rational defense to Segal's piece in "Ballet as a Dance Form Some Just Love to Hate"
"Mr. Segal is the first to point out that his view of ballet is colored by its absence on any significant scale in the Los Angeles area... Had he written 20 years ago, Lewis Segal, a noted music critic for The Los Angeles Times, might have made a similar diatribe about the irrelevance of opera, since Los Angeles did not have a major opera company then, either."
"Mr. Segal’s low regard for ballet is not new... one explanation for his recent rant — that he was egged into it by a journalistic culture that prizes provocation over reasoned discussion — may not be entirely off the mark. He believes this stuff, but not necessarily always with the mocking, strident tone of the Los Angeles Times article."
Rockwell admits to the uncomfortable truths of the art:
"...there is something salutary about his (Segal's) position. There are so many ballet magazines and ballet Web sites out there now that simply assume the superiority of ballet to all other forms of dance that it is nice to have a corrective... To take just one example, there was Jennifer Homans’s denunciation in The New Republic a few months ago of Downtown Manhattan dance as amateurish and childish, largely, it seemed, because it was not ballet... her disdain for those who profess to be dancers without having submitted themselves to ballet training was palpable."
"Mr. Segal’s rant also has historical resonance. When George Balanchine was establishing himself in the United States in the 1930’s, he encountered resistance from those who felt that truly American dance was modern dance in the Fuller-Duncan-Denishawn-Graham tradition, and that ballet was an outmoded European import. Effete too, though the politically correct Mr. Segal does not go there. John Martins, chief dance critic of The New York Times in those years, was one who advanced that argument. Although he later modified his position to embrace Balanchine’s modernism, some balletomanes still disparage him for not immediately recognizing Balanchine’s genius."
and then addresses the reasons why ballet is to be hated:
"Does any star these days lobby artistic directors for better choreography or dare to say, ‘I just don’t want to be seen in that ‘Swan Lake’ ”? Well, yes. Carlos Acosta, the Royal Ballet and American Ballet Theater star, is only the latest to call for modernization and for a de-emphasis on 19th century story ballets. Sylvie Guillem has done the same. Dancers in Europe and the United States yearn for exciting new choreography, and artistic directors do their best to provide it. Mikhail Baryshnikov stands as a one-man symbol of ballet’s (and dance’s) quest for renewal. When it comes to new work (as opposed to fancily modernized new productions of old work), ballet is far more contemporary than opera. Ballet masters and administrators spend half their time searching for the new. Which is not to say that all new ballet is good ballet, but they try."
"Fanatic balletomanes resist such change on the very grounds Mr. Segal uses to chide all of ballet. For them anything but classroom ballet technique degrades the form, and a search for relevance is a descent into gimmickry and perversion."
"...ballet at its not infrequent best can still be beautiful and can still move the receptive soul as deeply as any other art. Even its hoariest traditions give pleasure, as in the delighted faces of audiences young and old at a good account of “The Nutcracker.” Ballet technique can speak to us today, and not just in Balanchine’s stripped-down modernist exercises, now themselves a half-century old."
Rockwell actually writes a very short response, and I can't help but feel good that he did not allow Segal's article anymore limelight (or space) in the NY Times. Haha.
My thoughts on the matter? Coming up shortly. For now, I just want to point out that Segal does not point my beloved art in any concrete direction for improvement. He just rants.
Postscript:
Halili-Cruz School of Ballet, named the best academy in Asia, just did the Philippines proud again in the recently concluded 8th CSTD Asia-Pacific Dance Competition. The 72-strong delegation of dancers brought home five of seven available Perpetual trophies. They also brought home 19 gold trophies, eight silver trophies, seven bronze trophies and 13 gold medals (honorable mention).
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