Here’s Hoping That History Repeats Itself

The ends of centuries are reliably bad periods for Western theater dance: periods in which the great creators of the age decline or die, when the life of the art form seems to ooze away, when empty mannerism and spectacle infect the stage and nothing compelling looms on the horizon. If, in the midst of relentless “Riverdance” tours complete with prerecorded taps, increasingly uncomprehending productions of the standard ballet repertory and modern dance companies intent on talking audiences to death, we seem to be enduring such a period right now, it may be comforting to note that the malaise has always been temporary.

Consider the transition from the 18th century to the 19th. Decrepit, aging dance forms fit for either mindless nostalgia or outright ridicule fill the one ballet that survived that epoch with its original choreography: Vincenzo Galeotti’s delightful “Whims of Cupid and the Ballet Master,” a one-act comic divertissement that has been in the repertory of the Royal Danish Ballet since its premiere in 1786.

Here Galeotti shows a feeble old couple barely making it through one last minuet--the social dance that came to symbolize the courtly elegance of the Age of Reason--and a parade of this and other typical modes of the 18th century (Grecian classicism, national folk-dancing styles, character portraits) ends in a wild melee.

Who would have guessed from this parodistic cavalcade that just 20-some years after the century finally turned, a technical innovation would utterly change the power structure and help renew the creative vision of classical ballet?

Males ruled theater dance in the 18th century, but as women began experimenting with stiffened slippers and the idea of dancing on the tips of their toes in the first decade of the 19th, their capacity for sustained balances not only enriched the language of ballet, but became the means through which they would replace men as the major stars of the age.

More significantly, pointe dancing created the central theatrical symbol of the Romantic era: the irresistible, elusive winged woman hovering above the Earth and bringing disaster to any man foolish enough to try to possess her. From “La Sylphide” in 1832 up through such modernized treatments as Frederick Ashton’s “Ondine” in 1958, the image of the untouchable, lighter-than-air ballerina captured the imagination of audiences and still influences the art in every way, from notions of classical style to the ideal body type.

Today, however, our late-20th century obsession with technical prowess reduces all the toe-dancing sylphides, wilis, dryads, peris and swan-maidens of Romantic ballet to mere showcases or vehicles for women who look good in tutus. We don’t remember that their original audiences saw them as either nature symbols or embodiments of the paranormal: bait for the destruction of a mortal male’s body and soul.

But if the Romantic vision of dangerous intersections between parallel realities seems to contemporary audiences as aged and decrepit as the dancers in Galeotti’s minuet, it might be wise to recall that the emptying out of content in dance is just another part of a recurring historical cycle.

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Certainly no period in the history of ballet proved more empty of content than the end of the 19th century in Paris, the capital of Western culture. Save for a few imported Italian virtuosi such as Carlotta Zambelli, technical standards had radically declined at the Paris Opera (the epicenter of dance at the time) and a disreputable kind of celebrity-ballerina reigned. As a result, you might justly call the fin de siecle ballet stage a fancy-dress meat market.

Rather like contemporary rock stars of both genders who display their current squeezes in their latest music videos, the rich dandies who served as the patrons of Parisian dance liked to have their trophy ballerinas wear onstage the jewels they gave them. These patrons also liked to dine late, so they preferred that the ballet sequences in grand opera occur no earlier than Act 2--a condition that composers ignored at their peril.

Men had long since been relegated to mere lifting duties, so many of the major classical roles for men in Parisian ballets of the last third of the century were originally danced by women: Franz in “Coppelia,” for instance.

As Parisian ballet became increasingly tainted, the greatest choreographers of the Romantic age mostly worked elsewhere--notably Jules Perrot (“Giselle”), who freelanced throughout Europe before his early retirement, and Marius Petipa, who took French classicism to Russia and created the style and repertory for the Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg. Best known for “The Sleeping Beauty” (1890), he turned out masterworks up through “Raymonda” in 1898 and remained active until 1903.

Ultimately, it was Petipa’s artistic heirs who redeemed European ballet from its corruption, just a few years into the following century. Invited to present a season of Russian opera and ballet in Paris in 1909, impresario and former arts journalist Sergei Diaghilev assembled leading dancers from Petersburg and Moscow in a company that would become the groundbreaking and still influential Ballets Russes.

Besides establishing the choreographer-as-star and the one-act ballet as a serious--indeed, dominant--creative matrix for the new century, Diaghilev’s 1909 season restored the male dancer to primacy with such startling displays as Mikhail Fokine’s “Polovtsian Dances” from “Prince Igor.”

More remarkably, he also restored the female dancer to spirituality with such lyrical abstractions as Fokine’s “Chopiniana,” which was retitled “Les Sylphides” in Paris, making its link to the glory of Romantic ballet unmistakable.

Just as Diaghilev brought the purity of Romanticism back to Western Europe 92 years ago, you might argue that St. Petersburg alumnus Mikhail Baryshnikov sought to bring the purity of postmodernism back to America on the recent “PASTForward” tour by his White Oak Dance Project. Both reaffirmed an artistic legacy at a time of drastically slipping values and both found the future of the art in the past. The question is one of timing: Did Baryshnikov do it a decade too soon?

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In the Bible, the children of Israel wandered in the wilderness for 40 years, forbidden to enter the promised land until the generation of the unworthy was consumed. In dance history, the timetable for change usually beats Bible schedules, but the concept holds: A new vision of dance has always required a new dance public.

I’m not suggesting that dance in the 21st century has to languish until all those who worshiped “Riverdance” go to that great Glocca Morra in the sky--they might actually be useful in dramatizing the advent of the Next Big Thing, like the crowd that rioted at the 1913 premiere of the epochal Nijinsky/Stravinsky “Rite of Spring.”

No, the question for all of us at this juncture in history is whether we’ll be willing and able to recognize the century’s new vision once it arrives. And we may not have a lot of time to formulate an answer: Right now the next Diaghilev could well be finishing an MBA somewhere in Boston or New York City while freelancing for some high-minded dance quarterly--and, boy, do we need him or her at the impresario-challenged Los Angeles Music Center.

Similarly, the new Stravinsky could be at CalArts or Juilliard, bedeviling every composition teacher, and the new Fokine could be practicing tendus or contractions in dance class somewhere while thinking about how best to break all the rules.

Although 21st century dance might well start on the street a la tap, in a sleazy dive a la tango or even on MTV, up to now the key innovators in every dance epoch have always come from the academy--rebelling against it, perhaps, but always trained by it to state-of-the-art proficiency. And that training enabled them to evolve beyond the display of physical skills to new ways of conceptualizing the art, whether they studied at the Imperial Ballet of St. Petersburg, as did Nijinsky and Fokine, or at Denishawn here in Los Angeles, as did modern dance icons Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey.

So it can’t hurt to start pumping up alumni endowment funds, artists-on-campus programs and fellowships for rebellious virtuosi--all to subsidize someone indispensable, whose name we’ll learn eight or nine years from now--if history is a precedent and our luck holds.

Until then, we can keep our dancers profitably and divertingly minueting, river-dancing or wearing onstage the jewels we’ve given them, as long as we--and they--don’t get over-invested in the old realities.

After all, very, very soon the nastiest put-down for any artists, critics or audience members will be to say that they’re stuck in a hopelessly passe 20th century mind-set.