Dance Chronicle: Significance and Insignificance of Technique

It is unfortunately true that the increased interest in dance of recent years has had little to do with a mature and responsible art form. Although technique becomes more and more impressive, the attitude toward material remains depressingly casual. A dance audience demands a performance, no matter of what. But the technical skills of performance are not everything. There comes a point where mere technique seems insignificant; at this point, dance reaches out to audiences beyond the Dance Audience, and the Dance Audience itself has a sudden revelation of what technique is for. There have been few revelations of this kind recently.

The New York City Ballet Company continues its successful career as the American heir of a European ballet tradition. All the enthusiasm about this company sometimes makes us forget that its particular conglomeration of talents has limitations. First and foremost, the company is a projection of the interests of one man, George Balanchine. Mr. Balanchine has an ideal set-up: he takes most of his dancers from a training school under his supervision, and he is free to arrange the kind of repertoire he wants. Both as teacher and choreographer, his work is based on an unquestioning acceptance of the vocabulary of classical ballet. He is showman enough to vary the vocabulary frequently, but for the sake of variety merely, not exploration; it is the norm to which he always returns. The constructive, healthy side of this is precisely that a norm exists. With it young dancers can be efficiently brought to a certain competence and tested by specific objective criteria. Hence the beauty of Balanchine’s corps de ballet; there are no second-rate dancers in it. As for the leading dancers, one is constantly impressed by the brilliance and dexterity of Maria Tallchief, Tanaquil LeClercq, Melissa Hayden, Patricia Wilde, and Yvonne Mounsey. On the other hand, though we grant Balanchine’s versatility and craftsmanship, we need not grant he has everything. For all its loveliness, the ballet vocabulary is a severely restricting one. In its purest form—and Balanchine is the exponent of pure ballet technique—it takes no cognizance of physicality, of such alienating factors as sweat, weight, noise, and shortness of breath. Hence, like the “pure” poetry which Robert Penn Warren spoke about, it is fair game for the mocking Mercutios of this world. If dance really is only a matter of technique, so that what counts for the expert is the solving of technical problems, and what counts for the layman is a certain surface brilliance, Balanchine is perfect, and if you ask for more you are unreasonably “literary.” But why not take the reasonable attitude that dance is no more pure formal exercise than any other art? Balanchine is delightful with something like Bourrée Fantasque or Symphony in C, both great and gorgeous displays. He has a certain astringent modernity in Orpheus and The Prodigal Son. He can turn out Divertimento, a wonderfully simple formal exercise in syncopation, and Firebird, a dignified little fairy tale. Yet these ballets are fundamentally about music, or costumes, or the five ballet positions——never about people.