Balletic Prowess

Balletic Prowess

There are some sports in which any participant (under certain fairly wide parameters) can achieve sublimity, if only once, and that fleetingly. 

Take a middle-aged, fundamentally unfit, park footballer, who, by happy coincidence of many factors of time and physics, and none to do with his skill, apart from an ability to swing a leg, hits a dipping 30-yard volley into the goal. A feat he’ll never repeat, but always remember. Or a weekend tennis player, whose flailing and hopeless lunge at the ball somehow produces the perfect fizzing topspin lob, landing on the baseline with utter untrievability behind her opponent.

Both kick and stroke would be the envy of a top professional – the difference being (among many others) the true ability to repeat.

Other sports, at the highest level, require sustained levels of fitness and skill that cannot be matched at all by the casual amateur. Luck cannot get them there. How can any aspect of the speed and physicality (and possibly brutality) of professional rugby or American Football be emulated by the amateur player (except possibly the brutality)? And of course the highest levels of track and field athletics, or swimming, are utterly unobtainable. (I suppose it’s just possible for someone to close their eyes, throw a desperate and lucky punch, and knock out a champion boxer.)

But even in the case of sports demanding the utmost of speed and strength (and ability) it’s usually possible to imagine being at the top, or how to get there. Basically there’s a continuum between where you are, the unproficient amateur, and the point, far, far along the line where the top people are. All you have to do is progress along the line… in your imagination. And if you manage to hit the wonderful volley or lob, so much the better food for your imagination.

There are some physical achievements that are not susceptible either to lucky emulation or imaginative extrapolation. For me, gymnastics and ballet are in this category. I can see (obviously) that things of great beauty and agility are done. But in no way can I relate them to anything I can actually do, or have done (in a more energetic and flexible past), or can imagine doing or having done.  

The philosopher Thomas Nagel once famously asked, rhetorically, and unanswerably, What is it like to be a bat?.I could ask a similar question about ballet.

These thoughts are prompted by three recent encounters with ballet.

First, the film The White Crow. It’s about Rudolf Nureyev. There are two interweaved story lines – the residence of the Kirov Ballet in Paris in 1961, which eventually ends with Nureyev’s dramatic defection to the West, minutes before boarding a Soviet plane; and the history of his childhood, and the successes and failures, and tantrums, of his very early career.

Nureyev is played by an actual modern Russian dancer, Oleg Ivenko, so no body, or ballet, double is required for the scenes of dance school or performances. Indeed, I’m told that for technique and training, top modern dancers (Ivenko is one) surpass Nureyev (whether for charisma is another matter).

We see Nureyev/Ivenko in class and on stage, leaping and in cinematic close up. Impossible suppleness, balance and energy.

But in this film dance scenes punctuate the drama of Nureyev’s life – including the fact that he was from a peasant Muslim  family, and  that his father was a political commissar in the Red Army in WW2.

Most dramatic are the events in Paris, where Nureyev is seduced by the cheerful vulgarity and freedom of Paris nightlife and, encouraged and sustained by a new friendship with an enigmatic and wealthy young woman (Nureyev was gay), he defects.

Next on my balletic trajectory (hmmm..) was Romeo and Juliet, at the Royal Opera House, choreographed by Kenneth McMillan. He originally arranged the ballet with a certain two principals in mind; but commercial pressures saw to it that it was first performed by, of course, Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn.

The ballet’s music (Prokoviev) is gorgeous, the dancing mesmerising: how can someone float softly through the air (so it appears) to land in her partner’s unflinching arms? How can so many twirl and swoop, strut and lunge, in a vast brawling swordfight? How can lovers die with such liquid languor?

(The shadow on the evening: the ROH’s hugely overpriced mediocre food. But then one expects a bit of commercial cynicism at the ROH, as McMillan found when this ballet was first cast.)

Finally, to the summer show of the wonderful Danceworks ballet school, which runs classes at levels from near tots to near professionals. Its children, supported by a few adults, put on several performances during the year. 

This month of June, it was a series of dances to the music of Saint Saens, Carnival of the Animals.

The little children were excellently drilled, beautifully expressive, bouncy but controlled. The older, stronger teenagers were graceful and powerful. There was that suppleness, strength and fluidity of movement that marks the disconnect between me and these avenues of physical accomplishment.

I write as one that, at no age, has been able to touch my toes with legs straight…

June 2019