Apollinaire: chorus, corps, reality TV, and the forgotten modernist project. With response from Paul Parish.

[This is the final post in a discussion of "Serenade," "Liebeslieder," and the corps that began here with me solo, continued here with Brian Seibert and me, and then, moved to regular Foot contributor Paul Parish magnificently here. For more on Balanchine's "Serenade" (and who can get too much of "Serenade"?) here's my response to Pennsylvania Ballet's interpretation at City Center in November 2007.]

Paul,

About the corps as Greek chorus: the corps in theater certainly stands in for us. In ballet, though, it seems to me less an Everyman than no man at all. It lends the ballet an impersonality that makes it extend beyond its players, encompass a different world from the one in which we live.

I know I've been saying and saying this--being a real bore--but I think it's a big deal in this age of reality TV and memoir craziness, with the prevalent notion that the closer one gets to the personal, the closer one gets to epiphany, the truth, yadda yadda.

Basically, we're living in a neo-Romantic age dusted with postmodern cynicism about the difference between art and life. That is, while the Romantics felt that art should imitate life, we now don't believe in life--only "life." Forget reality TV, reality life is just around the corner. Still, art's in the same position: ersatz. Art and reality--or "reality"--are yoked. And the problem with the corps is it has no objective correlative.

Which means today it's seen as a bit frou-frou, I suspect. Contemporary choreographers often opt for the chamber-sized when they could afford to do otherwise.

Balanchine understood the corps not as 19th century decoration but in modernist terms--as an alchemical principle--or in Emersonian terms of nature, the force of nature. Terry, in his "All in the Dances," powerfully makes the point that Balanchine was a modernist in his means, whatever the emotional tenure of the individual work. He quotes Balanchine saying, "Romanticism you have to get from God. My business is to show you form." Of course, the modernist cheerleader T.S. Eliot--whom Balanchine would have admired for his insistence that artistry wasn't about personality--probably would have said God was form--or, better, the metabolism of its creation. But I stray....

[Paul wrote about an earlier, less on-a-rampage version of this post:
I DO agree with you about the corps -- they're like barely embodied emotions, the feelings that run in the group are made visible in them, but it's not personal. It's like mob energy, or what happens at the end of football games when the crowd storms the field and swarms up the goalposts and shake them till they fall over. Nobody's in his right mind when they do that, and nobody is "himself" -- the ego is dissolved away. Probably the same thing happens in lynch mobs.]

In any case, yes to big ballets, to corps galore! To Balanchine's "Symphony in C," to Forsythe's "Artifact."

February 6, 2007 6:26 PM | | Comments (0)

Categories:

Leave a comment

Topics on Tap

Apollinaire, Sunday August 24, UPDATED Saturday August 30:  ballet summer roundup and a cat among the books and flowers. Updated 8/30: more on Forsythe and the Romantic ballet 
Daniel Madoff, Wednesday August 27: a nifty new website for touring dancers and their fans
Apollinaire, Thursday August 7:  love of a kitty
Theresa Ruth Howard, Monday, July 28: A glimpse of Alvin Ailey's fifty years, from the inside
Apollinaire, Saturday July 5: Neil Greenberg's surface unconscious
Apollinaire, Wednesday June 11: Premieres by the Bolshoi's Alexei Ratmansky, Twyla Tharp, and Michael Clark--lot o' thoughts
previous

Contributors

Eva Yaa Asantewaa 

has written dance journalism and criticism since 1976, published most notably in Dance Magazine, Soho News, The Village Voice, The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Gay City News, and on her own blog, InfiniteBody.

Paul Parish 

is a regular contributor to Danceviewtimes and San Francisco magazine, and has contributed to many other publications. He was a Rhodes Scholar same time as Bill Clinton. He lives and dances in Berkeley.

Me Elsewhere

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by foot in mouth published on February 6, 2007 6:26 PM.

Paul Parish: more on the lost worlds of "Liebeslieder" and "Serenade"--of Germany and Shakespearean Tempest-tossed lands was the previous entry in this blog.

We interrupt this program.... is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

AJ Ads

Introducing
AJ Arts Blog Ads

Now you can reach the most discerning arts blog readers on the internet. Target individual blogs or topics in the ArtsJournal ad network.

Advertise Here

AJ Blogs

AJBlogCentral | rss

culture
About Last Night
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Artful Manager
Andrew Taylor on the business of arts & culture
blog riley
rock culture approximately
CultureGulf
Rebuilding Gulf Culture after Katrina
Dewey21C
Richard Kessler on arts education
diacritical
Douglas McLennan's blog
Flyover
Art from the American Outback
Life's a Pitch
For immediate release: the arts are marketable
Mind the Gap
No genre is the new genre
Rockwell Matters
John Rockwell on the arts
Straight Up |
Jan Herman - arts, media & culture with 'tude

dance
Foot in Mouth
Apollinaire Scherr talks about dance
Seeing Things
Tobi Tobias on dance et al...

jazz
Jazz Beyond Jazz
Howard Mandel's freelance Urban Improvisation
ListenGood
Focus on New Orleans. Jazz and Other Sounds
Rifftides
Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

media
Out There
Jeff Weinstein's Cultural Mixology
Serious Popcorn
Martha Bayles on Film...

classical music
The Future of Classical Music?
Greg Sandow performs a book-in-progress
On the Record
Exploring Orchestras w/ Henry Fogel
Overflow
Harvey Sachs on music, and various digressions
PostClassic
Kyle Gann on music after the fact
Sandow
Greg Sandow on the future of Classical Music
Slipped Disc
Norman Lebrecht on Shifting Sound Worlds

publishing
book/daddy
Jerome Weeks on Books
Quick Study
Scott McLemee on books, ideas & trash-culture ephemera

theatre
Drama Queen
Wendy Rosenfield: covering drama, onstage and off
lies like truth
Chloe Veltman on how culture will save the world
Stage Write
Elizabeth Zimmer on time-based art forms

visual
Aesthetic Grounds
Public Art, Public Space
Artopia
John Perreault's art diary
CultureGrrl
Lee Rosenbaum's Cultural Commentary
Modern Art Notes
Tyler Green's modern & contemporary art blog
Creative Commons License
This weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons License.