Gareth K Vile and Margaret Kirk get into a debate over dance and live art.
“Is there something wrong with you?”
“Well, yes, there is, but that’s a matter between me and my social worker. It’s got nothing to do with my desire to create clear definitions for ballet, contemporary dance and Live Art.”
“It’s more of a mania running through your articles. You spend more time explaining why Iona Kewney is Live Art or that Compagnie Didier Theron are ballet than you do actually reviewing. Your job, if you can remember it, is to tell people how many stars the show is worth, not come on like an undergraduate who has just read his first book on aesthetics.”
“Right. But most of my reviews are published after the run has ended. At best, they provide some fodder for a company’s next application for funding, or a sound bite for an advert. At worst, they mock the reader for missing my latest life-changing bout of existential trauma.”
“But what makes you think hearing your opinions on the necessary and sufficient conditions for dance is better? Who died and made you Pope?”
“Nietzsche can answer that better than I can. In the meantime, my definitions can help potential audiences make informed choices about what they might enjoy.”
“Okay, Aristotle. Take it away. I’ll be in the corner, checking my Facebook.”
“I’ll start off gently. Ballet.”
“That’s always been an obsession with you. What is it – the skimpy tutus or the dancers’ physiques?”
“The latter, obviously. But since I don’t like people to realise I hang around Tramway drooling at the corps de ballet, I am developing my understanding of the technique.”
“Like that time you did a ballet class and couldn’t walk for a week?”
“That’s part of it. But I also think that ballet has been given too rigid a definition, both by fans and detractors. It’s associated with an elegance, a costume, the pointe shoe and classical music that is really only the manifestation of its romantic form. Sure, you can’t beat a bit of Swan Lake or the end of Giselle, but if Scottish Ballet include Fearful Symmetries in their repertoire, it is obvious that ballet can be used to express more contemporary ideas.”
“In that particular case, the horrible greed of yuppies. And if Scottish Ballet perform it, I can’t really call it anything else.”
“Absolutely... in a post-modern sense, of course.”
“Scottish Ballet do plenty of stuff that doesn’t fit the romantic stereotype.”
“They have pieces by Trisha Brown – a post-modernism - and Forsyth. They did a Petruska by Ian Spink that featured pole dancing and hip-hop moves.”
“And that is why they get criticised for not being ballet.”
“But all of their dancers have classical training. And this foundation informs the way they dance. The possibilities come from the technique. “
“You hear contemporary dancers say that ballet is a good foundation all the time.”
“They aren’t acknowledging their heritage enough for my taste. If the very possibility of their movement vocabulary is based on their knowledge of ballet. They are performing contemporary ballet.”
“So – part of your definition is about reclaiming certain dances, certain choreographers, back into the ballet tradition?”
“Completely. It is a choice to use the ballet system. If someone has been trained in it, they might react to it, claim to reject it: yet without it, there would be nothing. Take a choreography created by a dancer who came through an Indian dance form: they would not instinctively react to ballet. Ballet is a possible foundation, and using it, rather than another form, locates the dancer in a specific tradition.”
“You remember all those PhDs you tried to read about the nature of dance? They often used ballet as a first step, before widening their scope. The problem they had was shaking off the ballet influence.”
“Admittedly, I rarely got beyond the introduction. But I saw how ballet was set up as a sort of gold standard, and other dances – ritual, social, whatever – got related back to ballet. It really screwed up their definitions.”
“So what makes your definition so much better?”
“I want to come clean about what is ballet. I want to emphasise that ballet is the dominant western theatrical dance form. And unless another art form is introduced as equally important in the foundations of a piece – say, in the way David Hughes made the Red Room with an Indian dancer and Al Seed doing his funky killer clown twitches - ballet is where the art come from.”
“So Didier Theron is a ballet choreographer now?”
“Exactly. You see how he uses mathematical formulations, has the dancers move in time, in unity, how they stretch and interact? It’s all ballet. It could be by Freddy Ashton.”
“You know this is going to annoy people?”
“I hope so. Ideas are just there to start a discussion.”
“And in your case, try and impress a woman.”
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