When I hear conversations (usually in lobbies of theaters after performances or granting panels) about whether choreographic work is good or bad based solely on the work’s vocabulary, I cringe. Often I will hear comments like, “the vocabulary was not new” or “the vocabulary was not innovative” as a way of assessing (usually minimizing) the artist’s work. When I hear those kinds of statements I always want to scream. While I admit that an interesting vocabulary keeps the eye engaged and that movement invention plays a key role in the success of a work, however, there are other elements that ought to be brought into play for assessing a work’s success, for example concept or idea, vision, theatricality, or structure.

This obsession with new, fresh and innovative vocabulary seems to be a particular American fixation (Europeans seem less concerned with it). The American-ness of it, I believe, is linked to the ascent of abstract expressionism in post WWII America. Just as social realism in the 1930’s with its social and political protest themes had been a major influence on early American modern dance, abstraction and abstract expressionism was the perfect art for a time of increased censorship of the arts and artists in America. With abstract expressionism’s image as pure, highly idiosyncratic and apolitical it was a perfect movement for McCarthy era art where the political climate did not tolerate social protests. Its rightness lay in the non-specificity of abstraction – if the subject matter were totally abstract then it would be seen as apolitical, and therefore safe; or if the art was political, the message was obscure, oblique or for a small group of insiders. And just as this very American movement and New York became the center of the western visual art world it also became a significant influence on American modern dance makers and the move towards an American dance focused on pure movement.

In Europe it was a different story, I think. The memory of the horrors and atrocities of The Second World War were always present to European artists and the post-war bifurcated divide of Europe into East-West made politics and its ramifications ever-present. In addition, expressionism still seemed to hold interest to European dance artists, especially Germans. Expressionism and its newer post-war manifestation, neo-expressionism, with an emphasis on rendering the world and human behavior in rough and violent ways, hyper-subjective perspectives, and radically distorting reality for emotional effect and to evoke moods or ideas seemed a perfect artistic strategy for Europe’s traumatized cultures.

Pina Bausch, who was trained at the Folkwangschule which was founded by Kurt Jooss, one of the founders of German expressionist dance (she later assisted him) was an innovator whose innovation I would never say lay in her vocabulary – it lay elsewhere, the transformation of the tactics and strategies of expressionism into Tanztheater. One might say similarly of Jiri Kylians (exploration of the expression of human relationships) and Mats Ek (social engagement of psychological dilemmas) and even recent William Forsythe, especially since his abandonment of post-modern irony (investigation of choreography as a fundamental principle of organization) that vocabulary is not the main point. These artists’ work is not just about movement but also about ideas, the dynamics of relationships, and representation (presenting and structuring). Movement vocabulary is just one of many tools used to create their worldviews.

On the other hand, an artist such as Ohad Naharin’s, who, not so incidentally, spent the early days of his choreographic career in the United States and now runs a state supported company in a country, Israel, that appears to have little patience or taste for overtly politicized work, is a brilliant abstractionist. His work is vocabulary-centric and one could argue that he is probably the most gifted in terms of innovations in movement language of any contemporary mainstream choreographer working today. His movement choices do exactly what interesting and original movement language should do – intrigues, delights, and fascinates. While I love his work and the way that he engages the body I often find something missing – my humanity is not engaged. I am neither moved by sentiment, anger, compassion, nor do I have insights into my humanity. I am thrilled and exhilarated by the sheer physicality of the experience, which I am grateful for, but I end up feeling not quite fulfilled.

I am not suggesting that there is only one kind of good dance (the kind I like), rather the opposite. There should be room for the many ways that artists chose to express how they see the world, not just one or a few. It is through our access as audiences and society to these varied perspectives, a full menu one might say, that our aesthetic appetites (and other needs met by art) are filled. I may prefer one dish over another or one different than what you might prefer but my preference does not negate the artistic deliciousness or nutrition of the other dishes on the menu.

All work is not equal (I know) but neither is all work trying to accomplish the same thing. For example to say that George Balanchine’s Agon fails because it lacks story or narrative is ridiculous -that’s not what he was trying to do! So perhaps the underlying criteria for assessing work should be, intent (if we can discern it) – did the artist accomplish what they set out to do? If that is the case, one can still like it or not (which is taste) but the viewer is now liberated to appreciate the artist’s work for what it is as oppose to not appreciating it for what it is not. Perhaps what I am thrashing about trying to say is that I would like to see a more aesthetically and technically egalitarian approach to appreciating and assessing work. Meaning that work is assessed from various perspectives or combinations of criteria, using varied modalities where vocabulary is just one of many; that a single technical or aesthetic aspect is not favored over the other unless it is recognized that the “author’s” intent is to make that one particular element the lens through which to view the work.

I want to acknowledge what seems like a contradiction: I have often said publicly that I don’t care what the artist intends me to experience but only what I experienced from the performance. I will try to explain what I mean. I believe that spectators/audiences are selfish. In many ways the average viewer is not interested in the high-minded, philosophical, technical or theoretical aspects of performance. Their concerns are basic – did I have a good time. Now ‘good time’ can be defined in many way, meaning a visceral and sensually satisfying experience, an intellectually gratifying one or some combination of both. In other words did it make me feel good, ‘think good’ or both? That is to say, the work and the experience of the work are two different things. I can recognize the value or success of a work, without, liking the experience of it. In other words, the criteria used to assess the work has nothing to do with whether or not I liked or did not like my experience of it in performance.

In 1993 while my company Donald Byrd/The Group was performing in Frankfurt, on our off night I went to see Ballett Frankfurt. On the program was the premiere of a new Forsythe work, Quintett. Watching that piece was probably the most excruciatingly painful experience I have ever had in the theater, I hated my experience. Why? 1) I felt that he, Forsythe, was struggling with what he wanted the piece to be – was it a pure movement investigation or was it about something else more personal (his wife dying); 2) these two conflicting impulses pulled and fought with at each other for most of the piece (and I had to sit and watch) until the latter won out; and 3) what appeared to be his indecisiveness annoyed me. The response from the audience was divided, half cheered and the other half booed. My theater partner for the evening sat sobbing while I could hardly wait to get out of the theater. However, I could not stop thinking about the piece. Over the course of the next year I thought of it daily and finally concluded that it was a great work but the theatrical experience was not one that I wanted to repeat. It didn’t matter what Forsythe intended (perhaps he knew or perhaps not; or even that his intentions had changed over the course of creating the piece) but what I knew was I did not like my experience. But that did not stop me from recognizing that the work on its own terms was magnificent.

I believe that dance conversations that focus primarily on vocabulary are important but also that they are basic and entry level conversations, the first step in beginning to articulate what the eye and the mind recognizes and understands as the various building blocks that make a dance. But perhaps a more meaningful conversation would not be so singularly focused.

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Over the past couple of years I have found myself dissatisfied with many of the ways in which I work. After the creation of the Man/Pet program (The Miraculous Mandarin/Petrushka), it occurred to me that the formality and tidiness of those pieces robbed them of their vitality and the structures were inadequate to support the theatrical experiences I wished the audience to have or ideas I wanted them to grapple with. For years my work had very much been grounded in a proscenium aesthetic (a framed picture through which the audience peered to observe what was on the other side). I had relished exploring the possibilities of proscenium theatrical devices as well as the visceral thrill and dynamic energy generated when the conventions were broken. But what had once seemed exciting now started to seem like mindless habit – irrelevant, artificial, un-thoughtful, automatic and gratuitous. These explorations had grown tiresome. This became clear to me during Man/Pet.

The PAMU projects (Beyond Dance: Promoting Awareness and Mutual Understanding), with their focus on complex geo-political issues, seemed to demand that I explore other ways of working and structuring. I saw these projects as a possible way, an opportunity, to break the old habits and begin to explore other kinds of structures and organizing principles, something more ‘authentic’- structures that mimic or attempt to replicate the complexity and the unknowable(ness) of the subject of the pieces or even of life itself. I was weary of the neat and tidy on stage, viewing things from only one vantage point, everything organized so that the eye could easily take it all in. I wanted something that was closer to how the contemporary world appeared to me – so unknowable and complex that order as it had been known seemed to disappear and become unpredictable, even chaotic.

But what of the dozens (or tens of dozens) of pieces I had created over the past decades before my current explorations into ‘authentic structure’? I cannot ignore the fact that the old works are in many ways neat and tidy (while the content might not be), are designed to be viewed frontally, and for the most part, they conform to and exploit traditional proscenium stage picture theory (even when breaking the rules they are the old rules being broken in old ways, they ask the same old questions). With those works I had set out to gain mastery in an old system with values grounded in the 19th Century and perfected in the 20th Century – the old pieces reflect those concerns. Then how should these old works be presented now? What is the best way for them to be viewed today in order for them to be, if not relevant, at least vital and engaging?

Perhaps one way to begin to answer some of these questions is to draw attention to what is most obvious about theses works: they are meant to be seen from a front/ there is one ideal vantage point, the images fit within conventional stage pictures, the viewer’s attention is clearly focused (with the things that are most important taking place center-center), and there are no decisions to be made about what is to be watched. One might say that their technical concerns are ‘nostalgic’ – a world as viewed with hindsight or as we remember it being, ordered and knowable, not how it is, unpredictable and unknowable.

With these questions and concerns in mind, I decided to begin our 2010-11 Season with “Peering Into The Ballroom”, three of my ‘ballroom’ ballets, La Valse, Act 2 from Bristle (1993), Longing (2005), and Le Bal Noir (2006) all new to Spectrum. My decision is partially driven by a desire to continue investigating the implied questions raised last season with the Byrd Retrospective Festival: 1) how do my older works and/or those not made for Spectrum create context for the current Spectrum creations and 2) how do they fit into a continuum of my artistic concerns, fascinations, and development?  They were chosen also because, 1) the relationship they bear to ‘le bal noir’ ballets of Balanchine (a strong an ongoing fascination); 2) my hope, desire, and need to keep these works relevant to my recent artistic explorations; and 3) to use them as a starting point to begin to self-interrogate my past work.

This has led me to wonder how to highlight, push or force the viewer to confront that which is most unnatural and ‘inauthentic’ about then – a carefully ordered and single perspective reality – in order that their vitality can reveal itself. I am proposing to make more visible the major conceit of these works – the proscenium or the notion that the viewer peers through a 4th wall to witness real life on the other side. We, the objective and omniscient viewer, like Superman with his x-ray vision (or God), watches as the performers engage in their ‘living’- we assess their actions as well as their skills as performers. And within this closed, self-contained, artificial system, this tautology, in which our perspective, unlike real life, is incontrovertible, we feel omnipotent. We are above the chaos and the unpredictability of life and therefore, we feel safe and secure. This sense of feeling safe, secure, and God-like is why I believe remnants of 19th Century Europeans aesthetic and sensibilities persists in our artistic cultures – That false sense of order and balance, of power, makes us believe we are above the fray, that we are in control and life is not dangerous and chaotic and we are not powerless over the unpredictability of existence.

For “Peering Into The Ballroom” we will divide out Studio Theater in two. On one side will be the audience/viewer (A/V), on the other the dancers/performers (D/P). Between them will be a frame – like a picture frame or a window frame – that would demarcate the two spaces. On the ‘D/P’ side a beautiful, velvet draped, chandeliered room suggesting a late 19th Century ballroom or salon will be installed and in which the performance of the three works will take place; on the ‘A/V’ side, chairs rowed for the patrons to sit and view the illusion on the other side. The effect will be very much like a 19th Century diorama. While dioramas were typically landscapes this analogy is to show the connection and similarities of the artificial and illusionary aspects of our room and the theatrical convention of proscenium framing. And like the audiences of the 19th Century that would peer through proscenium arches and the frame of the diorama to see an image that suggests a real life setting or even the modern dioramas that one encounters in museums of natural history, our patrons will do the same, all the while recognizing the falseness of it all. This recognition of falseness elevates the work from the realm of the inauthentic or deceptive to the domain of the metaphoric or poetic.

I think the point I am trying to make here is that unlike the ‘authentic structures’ that I am seeking to create for my newer work this hyper-artificial ‘framing’ of older works draws even more attention to the ‘inauthenticity’ of their structures and nature; thereby, making them poetic and ‘honest’. They are honest because we are conscious that the structures are false and simplistic fabrications and are not attempting to signify the world or life in its complexities but rather represent a narrow, simple, and easily perceivable world.  This contextualizing of the older pieces validates them inside the framework of my current aesthetic explorations. Suggesting that the ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ are both compelling ways to represent the complex and unknowable world in which we live, have lived, or wished we lived.

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I have long been fascinated by the ballroom ballets of George Balanchine. Le Bal, a work from 1929, was his first attempt in this genre that he continued to explore through out his long career. These ballets, including La Sonnambula, La Valse and Davidsbündlertänze, seem to be dance as envisioned by a surrealist or romantic poet and in this sense they are radically different from the cool and austere masterworks like Agon and The Four Temperaments that we usually think of when we think of Balanchine. Sometimes referred to as ‘Le Bal Noir’ ballet or The Black Ball ballets the above works which form the core of the corpus of the genre share some distinctive traits beyond their ballroom setting: undercurrents of something tragically wrong, bereavement and loss, ill-fated relationships, and destiny as indifferent and fickle.

In many ways, Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty anticipate the genre of ‘le bal noir’ – with Rothbart and Carabosse as agents of fate who make the party go terribly wrong. Yet, in these ballets as in all things 19th Century, conflicts are resolved, in one way or another, by the end. Many believe that Balanchine, whether consciously or not, modernized the genre by letting narrative points remain uncertain and leaving plot questions unanswered. To him, these works were not about happy endings or even tragic ones, but rather suggesting philosophical and human complexities through irresolution.

Many of the characteristics we associate with ‘le bal noir’ is present in other Balanchine works that do not fall obviously into this category – most notably in the first three movements of his 1966 work Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet (I first saw it in the mid 1990’s). [The first movement of this work also reminds me of the lavish finale of the 1937 Fred Astaire/ Ginger Roger musical, Shall We Dance, where Fred dances with dozens of masked Gingers before the real one reveals herself. How intriguing it is to think about the influence that Astaire and Hermes Pan had on Mr. B and his exploration of the genre.]

In fact, watching numerous performances of Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet at New York City Ballet over the years led me to obsess on Brahms’ Piano Quartet No.1 in G Minor, Op. 25 to which the ballet is danced. However, Balanchine chose to use Arnold Schoenberg’s 1937 transcription for orchestra for his choreography as oppose to Brahms’ 1861 original scoring. I remember wondering – why on earth would Balanchine not use the original score and why would Schoenberg choose to transcribe and orchestrate Brahms? Schoenberg gave the following reasons for his decision: “1. I like this piece. 2. It is seldom played. 3. It is always very badly played, because the better the pianist, the louder he plays and you hear nothing from the strings. I wanted [for] once to hear everything, and this I achieved.”

The sheer beauty and sonic colorations of the opulent Schoenberg orchestration might be one of the elements that attracted Balanchine. The other might be that the work was to be his first new abstract ballet at City Ballet’s large new home at Lincoln Center since it’s move from the much smaller City Center. And because Balanchine often said that chamber music was not suitable for large ballets,  “too long, with too many repeats, and are meant for small rooms”, Schoenberg’s large scale arrangement was perfect for Balanchine’s 55 dancers ballet and the big stage of The New York State Theater.

Although the Balanchine ‘le bal noir’ ballets were created in the 20th Century, the setting always referenced a late 19th Century European ballroom or salon. These are elegant sophisticated rooms, manifestations of the maturation and loosening of the strict mores governing social interaction between men and women at the end of the 19th Century. The introduction of the waltz earlier in the century had changed everything. Social dances done by couples before this time were danced with almost no physical contact, hands barely touching. The waltz by contrast was done with a couple in a close embrace, the man with his hand around the woman’s waist, continually spinning around the room. To a society where close physical contact in public with a member of the opposite sex was objectionable, this intimate, suggestive ‘waltz position’ shocked and was considered scandalous. By the end of the century while the sight of men and women dancing in a locked embrace was no longer shocking, the atmosphere of the room was probably still titillating and charged with undercurrents of sexual energy and desire.

Think of these late 19th Century ballrooms as a kind of social platform where complex personal dramas, charged relationships, distortions of memory and time, societal anxieties, anticipative excitement about, or despair facing impending change might play themselves out. These rooms were a place where the two previous centuries of European culture and its societies converged and were distilled into a single iconic image – elegant embracing couples spinning gracefully in a beautifully chandeliered room. It is in this setting, with all of its suggestive history and psychological implication, that Balanchine places his players/dancers for his ‘le bal noir’ dances.

For Balanchine perhaps it was also a nostalgic location – a place he yearned to return to, somewhere that had faded away and was gone. Like Europe, that soon was to be enveloped and engulfed in the chaos of the onslaught of World War I, this ordered, constrained and highly charged place was about to explode and disappear forever. And by the time the Roaring Twenties rolled in, these places robbed of their mystique, existed only as memory, as longing. The element of persistent and strong desire for a return to a place that exists only as memory is what gives the Balanchine ballroom ballets their fragrance. The faint smell of perfume from beautiful women lingers in the air, enshrouding the space with a desire to return not only to their arms but also to the past in which those arms belonged.

In 1991 with the creation of my ballet Dance at the Gym for The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater I too began to explore this same territory but in an American context. In many ways the mid-20th Century Friday night dance in the high school gymnasium had become an Americanized and democratized everyman or ‘everyteen’s’ version of the European ballroom. If nobody realized it before, certainly by the time Jerome Robbins created his “Dance At The Gym” sequence from West Side Story the gym dance or sock-hop had achieved iconic stature and was indelibly inscribed in the public’s imagination as the place where the period’s stories, relationships, and social challenges were being acted and danced out. Following Dance At the Gym, over the next 15 years, I made five pieces that explored the unique power generated by intimate interactions in public spaces where social dancing occurs such as ballrooms and high school gymnasiums. In 1993 saw the creation of my La Valse, Act 2 from Bristle which is set in a European style ballroom as was the 1997 Fin de Siecle (for The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater), the 2005 Longing (Cincinnati Ballet), 2006’s Le Bal Noir (Koresh Dance Company) and my second gym dance, Motown Suite (2006) for The Joffrey Ballet. All sought to capture the mystery, drama, and theater of this unique social ritual of public social dancing – couples dancing together publicly while simultaneously creating a quite, private, personal, and imagined place to connect.

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