RENAISSANCE INSTITUTE: WINTER/SPRING, 2027 Thursdays at 9:15

ARTIST BIOS      SYLLABUS      CLASSES:  [1]  [2]  [3]  [4]  [5]  [6]  [7]  [8]  [9]  [10]  [11]  [12]

ABOUT THE COURSE

I am an opera director, so what am I doing talking about dance? Well, I have been hovering on the fringes of dance for most of my life. I was going to the ballet long before I became interested in opera. For several years, I wrote dance reviews for major newspapers in Scotland. I have designed stage lighting for dance programs. I have pioneered the use of dance concepts in my training of opera singers. And many of my most fruitful collaborations, whether professional or personal, have been with choreographers. Even today, lecturing about opera and musical theater, I find myself especially excited by those moments where movement is an essential part of the mix. So while this is not an academic survey, still less a technical one, I did think it might be interesting to examine what choreographed movement can deliver to a stage performance, whether at the Met or on Broadway, or as a medium on its own, in classical ballet or modern dance.

The course is not historical, but a list of some of the ingredients of dance-on-the-stage that continue to excite me, regardless of period. But I needed some form of organization, so the listing below is largely chronological, in the order in which each concept first came to the fore (such as pointwork in the earlier 19th century or abstract dance in the 20th); most of these things continue to be found right up to the present. Also note that the descriptions often mention many more works than can be covered in a single class. As I develop each one, I shall choose where to place my focus, and the fact that a work is mentioned, or even illustrated, does not guarantee its eventual inclusion.

This is the preview of a proposed course. As I prepare each session, the RESOURCES tab under each image will turn blue, giving links to a printable Handout and other preparatory materials before class, and the full script, video links, and slides after it. Until then, everything is subject to change. rb.

CLASS 1	February 11
Maenads (Greek relief, 5th century BCE)	RESOURCES

1. The Soul of Dance

Movement and rhythm are as basic as walking and breathing. People have always used measured gesture in religious ritual, or to access spiritual states too deep or complex to be confined by words. Seen against this background, ballet-as-entertainment is a mere niche medium peculiar to a few sophisticated cultures—yet it works, in part, because of this connection to basic human functions. Casting as wide a net as possible, this introductory class will move rapidly from dance in the ancient world, through the development of ballet in the court of Louis XIV, to end with some of those works of modern dance that have attempted a return to these primitive roots.

CLASS 2	February 18
Bournonville's version of Taglioni's La Sylphide	RESOURCES

2. On Point

On point—or rather en pointe, for the style of women dancing on their toes, togther with ballet itself and the whole vocabulary that surrounds it, is of course French. The style was first seen in opera, with ballerina Marie Taglioni dancing the role of a dead nun in Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable (1831). Seeing its effectiveness in portraying ghostly spirits who seemingly floated across the ground, her choreographer father Filippo Taglioni soon followed with La Sylphide in 1832, and the style was taken up by others in Giselle in 1841 and the famous tournament of ballerinas Pas de Quatre in 1845. Their legacy, and the teaching methods that codified and perpetuated it, still forms the basis of ballet training today.

CLASS 3	February 25
Triumphal scene in Verdi's Aïda at the Met	RESOURCES

3. The "Grand" in Grand Opera

Ballet has always been an essential component of French grand opera, whether in founding classics such as Guillaume Tell (1829) and Robert le Diable (1831), home-grown masterpieces from La Juive (1835) to Faust (1859), and works by other composers written to French specifications, such as Donizetti's La favorite (1840) and Verdi's Aïda (1871). Wagner added a ballet to his Tannhäuser for its Paris premiere in 1861, but it failed in part because he had placed it in Act One, before the wealthy male patrons of the ballerinas had typically arrived! All the same, opera and ballet have long enjoyed a fruitful and colorful symbiosis.

CLASS 4	March 4
The Tchaikovsky/Petipa Sleeping Beauty, a Romantic classic	RESOURCES

4. Fairytale Fantasy

Following the discovery of a love affair with the wife of a Spanish Marquis, French dancer Marius Petipa was forced to flee to Russia, where he was soon appointed chief choreographer of the Imperial Ballet in Saint Petersburg. But Petipa's shame became the world's gain, for the works he created there from Don Quixote (1869) to Le Corsaire (1899), and especially his three full-length works to scores by Tchaikovsky—The Sleeping Beauty (1890), The Nutcracker (1892), and Swan Lake (1895)—would be hailed as the apotheosis of classical ballet, and establish Russia as its epicenter. This class will focus especially on the first of these, The Sleeping Beauty.

CLASS 5	March 11
Designs for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes by Leon Bakst	RESOURCES

5. The Exotic

When impresario Sergei Diaghilev arrived in Paris with his Ballets Russes in 1909, the epicenter of ballet shifted back to its home base. What Diaghilev wanted was to astonish, and to do so he chose colorful and exotic subjects, engaged charismatic dancers such as Pavlova and Nijinsky, encouraged innovative choreographers such as Fokine, Massine, and Balanchine, commissioned scores from Stravinsky, Satie, and Ravel, and encouraged artists such as Leon Bakst and Pablo Picasso to reimagine stage design as a force in its own right. Although his company dissolved in 1929, Diaghilev detonated a bomb whose shock waves would ricochet for the rest of the century.

CLASS 6	March 18
Laurent Pelly's production of Ravel's L'enfant et les sortilèges at Glyndebourne	RESOURCES

6. Song and Dance

One of the results of the Ballets Russes sensation was its inspiration to composers to create operas which either made unusual use of dance or proceded as a series of fleeting sensations rather than through narrative logic. The most obvious example is Ravel's L'enfant et les sortilèges (The Child and the Enchantments, 1925), which works almost as much through dance as in song. But Stravinsky's Nightingale (1914) and Soldier's Tale (1918) might also qualify, as would Prokofiev's Love for Three Oranges (1921), Janácek's Cunning Little Vixen (1923), and Benjamin Britten's swan-song Death in Venice (1973).

CLASS 7	April 1
The dream ballet from Ohahoma!	RESOURCES

7. Americana

George Balanchine's arrival in New York in 1933 created a direct link with French innovation and Russian tradition; his School of American Ballet was to become the foundation of classical dance in this country. Meanwhile, however, American choreographers such as Martha Graham had been inspired to take the Ballets Russes experiment still farther, and develop an approach—now called "modern dance"—which would acknowledge the body's weight rather than denying it. But the most significant American innovation may have been the development of dance in the Broadway musical, such as Balanchine's On Your Toes (1936), the unique contributions of Agnes de Mille to the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals Oklahoma! (1943) and Carousel (1945), and the standalone ballets in a similar vein with scores by Aaron Copland, Rodeo (1942) and Appalachian Spring (1944).

CLASS 8	April 8
Frederick Ashton's Variations Symphoniques at the Royal Ballet	RESOURCES

8. Music in Motion

All the ballets mentioned so far have used dance to develop a story, but there is a parallel development in the 20th century where dance is simply the abstract expression of the score to which it is set. Probably the earliest example was Fokine's Les Sylphides (1909) in the first season of the Ballets Russes, to the music of Chopin. Balanchine's first ballet for his American students, Serenade (1934), explored a single work by Tchaikovsky; his numerous later abstract works illuminate scores from Bach to Stravinsky. Other notable examples have included Ashton's Variations Symphoniques (1946, César Franck) or MacMillan's Concerto (1966, Shostakovich). And some abstract dances have been made to commissioned scores, such as Merce Cunningham's Summerspace (1958, Morton Feldman) or Twyla Tharp's Golden Section, (1981, to a rock score by David Byrne).

CLASS 9	April 15
Steven Spielberg's West Side Story, 2021	RESOURCES

9. Exuberance

Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story (1957) may be a tragedy, but when the dancers launch into Jerome Robbins' choreography for "America" (or Justin Peck's in the 2021 Spielberg film above), it is impossible for audiences not to get swept up in the sheer energy. Or looking at opening numbers alone, how about "Another op'ning, another show" from Kiss Me, Kate (1948), "I hope I get it" from A Chorus Line (1975), or "Circle of Life" from Julie Taymor's staging of The Lion King (1997) as ways of pulling us into the excitement? Or, on a slightly different note, "Tradition" from Fiddler on the Roof (1964) or "Alexander Hamilton" from Hamilton (2015) as the high-energy matrix for a quieter introduction of the main characters.

CLASS 10	April 22
Closing pas-de-deux from Le parc by Angelin Preljocaj	RESOURCES

10. Sex

Most dances involve the interaction of men and women, so sensuality is always in the air somewhere. Yet because almost any ballet pas-de-deux requires intimate physical contact as the norm, we tend to discount this, and most come across as romantic rather than physical. To make a dance specifically about sex requires a special language. It first came (in coded form) in Nijinsky's L'après-midi d'un faune for the Ballets Russes in 1912, and more explicitly in Kenneth MacMillan's Manon (1974) and Mayerling (1978). Interestingly, two more recent works use the slow movements of Mozart piano concertos as the background for intimate erotic exploration: Jiri Kilian's Petite Mort (1991) and Angelin Preljocaj's masterpiece Le Parc (1994).

CLASS 11	April 29
Shuffle Along on Broadway, 2016	RESOURCES

11. To a Black Beat

Dance and music are among the most unfiltered expressions of cultural identity, and the most direct way to share it with others. This class will be divided between two works in very different media. First the all-Black musical Shuffle Along (1921) by Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, one of the landmark works of the Harlem Renaissance, running for 504 performances. In 2016, George C. Wolfe produced a revival on Broadway that not only reproduced the original but made it a kind of history of Black culture over the intervening century. The second piece is a ballet, Alvin Ailey's Revelations (1960), made when he was only 26, and calling upon his boyhood in Texas and experiences in the Baptist Church. Set entirely to spirituals, it is one of those works seen once and never forgotten.

CLASS 12	May 6
Crystal Pite's Flight Pattern at the Royal Ballet	RESOURCES

12. Challenge

There are a few ballets that bypass mere entertainment to challenge us to think about contemporary issues. Pictured above is Flight Pattern (2017), by Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite, exploring the refugee crisis. Grim and even tragic at first, it achieves a miraculous transcendence in its final pages, with the dancers becoming birds and literally taking flight. We will also look at precedents from 20th-century Europe, such as Shostakovich's Soviet-era satire The Golden Age (1930) or German choreographer Kurt Joos's 1932 anti-war diatribe, The Green Table. David Bintley managed to address serious ecological themes in upbeat comic style in Still Life at the Penguin Café (1988). And the decision by director Clément Cogitore to incorporate Black street dancers from Paris housing projects into his Opéra production of Rameau's Les Indes galantes is another kind of political statement.

 
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