MODERN DANCE AND BALLET: UNEASY TRUCE

When the Joffrey Ballet introduces its production of Pilobolus’ popular “Untitled” on Sept. 26 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the performance will mark a new chapter in the stormy, improbable relationship between ballet and modern dance in America.

Up to now, the pre-existing modern dance works acquired by ballet companies have at least shared with ballet a dependence on steps. No longer: Pilobolus’ style is based on physical images derived from non-choreographic systems of motion such as gymnastics and other athletic disciplines. It is a style of metaphorical movement theater unrelated to the techniques of classical ballet or previous modern dance. There has even been debate about whether it is dance at all.

Today, of course, when only the disciples of the late George Balanchine seem to stay faithful to the pure classical muse, most balletomanes concede that modern dance adds spice to their repertory diet of 19th-Century revivals and increasingly predictable neoclassic music visualizations. Thus even the most iconoclastic modern dance choreographers frequently move from their own companies to guest affiliations with major ballet troupes.

Twyla Tharp, for instance, has worked with the Joffrey Ballet, American Ballet Theatre and New York City Ballet while maintaining the ensemble that bears her name. Laura Dean, David Gordon and Pilobolus co-founder Moses Pendleton have also fashioned pieces for the capabilities of ballet dancers while moonlighting away from the world of modern dance.

However, a few decades ago it would have been inconceivable for modern dance innovators to have ventured into what was generally perceived as enemy territory. Ballet and modern dance were then considered opposites, at the conservative and radical extremes, respectively, of the dance world.

Ballet had the glamour and grandeur of a 350-year-old imperial tradition, while modern dance had a depth and daring born of rugged individualism. The former idiom denied weight; its technique exalted the floating woman, the leaping man. The latter glorified weight; it found primal drama in human resistance to gravitational force. Between these conflicting dance disciplines and philosophies there could be no rapprochement .

Possibly the most dramatic confrontation between the hostile factions of ballet and modern dance took place on Feb. 20, 1931, at the New School for Social Research in New York. Martha Graham and her company were giving a lecture/demonstration moderated by New York Times dance critic John Martin, and in the audience was the great Ballets Russes choreographer Mikhail Fokine. At 36, Graham had just created “Primitive Mysteries” but had yet to produce most of the works now recognized as her masterpieces. At 50, Fokine had done his most celebrated work--”Les Sylphides,” “The Firebird” and “Petrushka”--fully two decades earlier.

According to the account in his “Memoirs of a Ballet Master,” Fokine thought “Miss Graham looked like a fanatical prophetess. It seemed that her whole appearance rejected as a matter of principle any sign of femininity and beauty. . . .”

He found her dances “ugly in form and hateful in spirit,” slow in tempo, sad in expression “and nearly all the time angry. The fists were clenched. The head and body made the kind of movements that dogs make when barking.

“I thought: ‘Barking girls . . . this is not only a cult of grief but a cult of hatred as well.’ ”

Vexed to the utmost, Fokine was able to keep his opinions to himself--until Graham made what he regarded as a sarcastic remark about Anna Pavlova and also proclaimed that “When ballet performs a Grecian dance it becomes horrible.”

That did it: The choreographer of those explicitly Grecian ballets “Narcisse” and “Daphnis et Chloe” started to ask questions--leading questions, nasty questions--though he never got around to identifying himself.

Attempting to prove modern dance “contrary to nature,” Fokine parodied Graham’s use of the arms and shoulders. Graham didn’t recognize Fokine and told him: “You don’t know anything about body movements.” Later on, she stood derisively in fifth position to demonstrate balletic artificiality. He then told her she knew nothing about ballet.

Eventually Martin intervened. “Mr. Fokine,” he began, “we cannot continue this argument. Ballet has had its chance of saying what it had to say during three centuries, so the modern dance has a right to talk for three weeks.”

At the mention of Fokine’s name, Graham flushed. But she immediately recovered and, looking straight at him, made a statement that confirmed the prevailing view of the distance between her art and his: “We shall never understand each other,” she said.

So it seemed for much of the next quarter-century, for when ballet and modern dance did occasionally come together--as in Merce Cunningham’s “The Seasons” for Ballet Society in 1947--the latter inevitably compromised its identity in service to the former.

By 1959, however, Graham had become an icon of American culture--so much so that the next wave of modern dancers would soon rebel against her in their search for new modes of expression--and it was time for a proclamation of equality between the two forms. It came in “Episodes,” a joint effort by Graham and Balanchine to choreograph the entire symphonic output of Anton von Webern.

On a single program, Graham’s company presented a dance drama about Mary Stuart (“Episodes I,” with New York City Ballet dancer Sallie Wilson cast as Queen Elizabeth) and Balanchine’s company danced a plotless ballet suite (“Episodes II,” with Graham dancer Paul Taylor given a special solo).

As ballet historian Nancy Reynolds notes, “There were some wry observations at the time to the effect that it was the moderns who used the ‘traditional’ elements of story line and descriptive costumes, while the ballet dancers were stripped to their leotards, devoid of emotion, and sometime pointed their heels or danced upside down, even though they never took their toe-shoes off.”

If “Episodes” represented a truce between ballet and modern dance--plus the closest thing to a media event serious dance had yet had in America--some of the old snobbery still lingered.

Writing about Graham and Taylor, New York City Ballet General Director Lincoln Kirstein has praised “their individual qualities of personal intensity and integrity” but admitted that “In attempting to work with them we were prompted by their value as novelty for a ballet-oriented audience, rather than by any charitable broad-mindedness or genuine preference.”

Nevertheless, after “Episodes” came the deluge. Out of the rootlessness and eclecticism of the next decade emerged choreographers working in hybrid (ballet/modern) styles--among them Glen Tetley and Alvin Ailey. Pariahs to both the modern dance establishment and the avant-garde, they often found respect only in Europe, but their popularity and influence helped expand dance technique everywhere.

Finally, in 1967, came the breakthrough. After, in his words, “going tambourine in hand” to private donors without success, Robert Joffrey convinced the New York State Council on the Arts to fund a revival of Kurt Jooss’ 1932 German antiwar dance of death, “The Green Table.” It made history.

For the first time a classical company performed a pre-existing modern dance work with no balletic modifications whatsoever. “The Green Table” has been a staple of the Joffrey repertory ever since.

Soon every ballet company seemed to be staging either Jose Limon’s “The Moor’s Pavane” or Paul Taylor’s “Aureole” more or less intact. Indeed, Rudolf Nureyev danced them both, plus the Graham repertory too.

For certain ballet-oriented audiences and critics, this situation seemed something like nirvana. In the mid-’70s, Clive Barnes of the New York Times even called Nureyev the essential Graham dancer and soon other ballet stars--especially aging ballet stars--began distorting modern dance works to death.

Remember Erik Bruhn, Carla Fracci, Natalia Makarova, Kevin McKenzie and others in various stellar American Ballet Theatre casts of “The Moor’s Pavane” during the last ten years? They all sank without a trace, emoting up a storm but missing the proper weight, intimacy and positional sharpness of the work--everything that gives it its distinction.

Even those ballet dancers with an affinity for modern dance sometimes think of it in Kirstein’s terms as a mere repertory novelty. For example, American Ballet Theatre principal Martine van Hamel recently described the new David Gordon ballet (“Field, Chair and Mountain”) created for her last season as “fun to do, but I don’t know how long it would last, stay a challenge, if I did it a lot.”

“It’s odd,” she continued. “I’ve found that a work by Twyla (Tharp) is like an American car: It’s good for a year, but then you want another one.”

In turn, some modern dance choreographers look on ballet productions of their work as no more than diverting career perks. For instance, Paul Taylor enjoys the increased exposure for his creations--and the additional income: “I really make more from that (ballet royalties) than from my own company.” But he doesn’t become actively involved in restaging his work. “I save my energy and try to put it in my own company,” he comments.

Taylor insists that it takes years to learn his work properly and that when he sees it done by ballet dancers, “there is a difference--and I expect there to be. But I’m not sure that it’s always bad. Sometimes there’s not enough time to teach them the details of the style and they’ll do things on their own that I like better.”

But he’s contemptuous of “ballet dancers who think they can do anything just because they can do ballet,” and scornful about the current detente between ballet and modern dance. “I’m all for the old resentments, the old dance wars,” he declares. “It fires you up. I like the things that make modern modern and ballet ballet.”

“After ‘Episodes,’ Balanchine invited me to join his company. It was a hard decision, but I didn’t want to do it--not even with Balanchine. I’m a modern: That’s my heritage. And to hell with the ballet!”

To Joffrey, however, “movement is movement; it doesn’t matter if it’s ballet or modern as long as it’s creative. American modern dance is a strong, vital force. Why shouldn’t we use it? Choreographers who are important, innovative, individual should be included in our repertory.”

Joffrey has commissioned more new works and revivals from modern dance choreographers than anyone else in ballet. He knows exactly how difficult it is for ballet dancers working under repertory conditions to catch the essence of this eloquent, unorthodox, demanding body of work.

“You must maintain the (choreographer’s) style,” he says, “so we always try to get people who originally danced a work to help us. They remember things, images that the choreographer told them that give us the quality we want.”

“Of course, it’s a challenge to the dancers to be secure enough in a new way of moving. But dancers now have more training in all fields--ballet and modern. I think if the mind is stretched, then the body will be stretched.”