Reworking the Ballet

Counter Narratives and Alternative Bodies

Vida L. Midgelow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415976022
• eBook ISBN: 9781135922405
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Challenging and unsettling their predecessors, modern choreographers such as Matthew Bourne, Mark Morris and Masaki Iwana have courted controversy and notoriety by reimagining the most canonical of Classical and Romantic ballets.

In this book, Vida L. Midgelow illustrates the ways in which these contemporary reworkings destroy and recreate their source material, turning ballet from a classical performance to a vital exploration of gender, sexuality and cultural difference.

Reworking the Ballet: Counter Narratives and Alternative Bodies articulates the ways that audiences and critics can experience these new versions, viewing them from both practical and theoretical perspectives, including:

• eroticism and the politics of touch
• performing gender
• cross-casting and cross-dressing
• reworkings and intertextuality
• cultural exchange and hybridity.

Part I
Approaching reworkings of the ballet in theory and practice

Chapter 1
Reworking the ballet

(En)countering the canon

No text is ever completely imagined in any one production. It can continue to be dreamed in different ways, with different people, at different times. This can be regarded as one of the central truisms of theatre. And yet, what remains enigmatic is not the multiple lives of a text, but the unknown lives that are concealed within it.

(Bharucha 2000:85)

Reworking the ballet

What cultural and artistic period reworks The Nutcracker as a 1960s comic book, characterises Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty as a drug addict, and replays Swan Lake as a homoerotic love story?¹ Choreographers have increasingly presented cherished ballets from the past in maverick and radical ways, challenging the edifice of received meanings. In this chapter I outline choreographic reworkings of canonical ballets, considering how they might be accounted for within the context of the current milieu, and establish the critical frame within which reworkings exist and can be discussed, for I am interested to know how we experience reworkings and how we come to ‘understand,’ or ‘make sense of’, reworkings when they are discussed as reworkings.

I start, in ‘Defining the terms of the discourse’, by providing an overview of terminology. I outline particular classification systems proposed within the fields of dance, theatre, film and literary studies for use in the analysis of differing versions of a source text. The section that follows, ‘Reviewing five Giselles’, compares reworkings of Giselle. These dances exemplify typical practices associated with reworking, and the brief analysis offered here begins to illuminate the choreographic strategies and recurring themes within these dances. The following section, ‘Counter-discourses and the canon’, outlines the tenacious web within which these dances operate. This web is woven with threads that emanate from, among others, poststructuralist, postcolonialist, feminist and queer discourse – forming counter-canonical positions. These bodies of knowledge, as they intersect with postmodernism, have provided the critical climate of the current era. Strands of these discourses are unravelled in the two following sections in order to give rise to a critical language and analytical method with which reworkings, analysed in detail in subsequent chapters, can be discussed. Particularly influential threads evident in the acts of reworking discussed in this book are the challenges to the discursive production of power and knowledge, especially as exemplified by reformations of the artistic canon. This, together with challenges to notions of authorial authority, authenticity and truth, and the corresponding awareness of the historical and social construction of identities, forms the critical basis from which these works can be considered. The final section, ‘Towards a definition of reworkings’, begins to delineate the common features of reworkings.

Reworkings can usefully be considered as hybrid, ‘palimpsestuous’ texts that evoke a particularly bidirectional gaze, as they exist within a double frame, simultaneously evoking and questioning their sources. While, as shall become evident, it is difficult to suggest ‘newness’ in reworkings, for they are always at some level ‘re-presentations’, I nevertheless note the ways in which many of the dance works discussed throughout this book embody alternative or subversive agendas such that many (although not all) of them play a part in counter-canonical discourse. The choreographers discussed produce transformed visions of the ballet and its narratives to create new texts that can help us to recognise our assumptions and shift our perceptions about both the past and the present.

Defining the terms of the discourse

The term ‘reworking’ is not a standardised or commonly understood term, and the dances I here term ‘reworkings’ do not demonstrate a single set of easily definable features. There are almost as many approaches and terms as there are dances and writers. The following proliferation of terms – revivals, remakes, reconstructions, re-creations, restorations, reworkings and revisions – among others, represents a contradictory mix of approaches. While definitions of these terms are somewhat illusive, it is nevertheless useful to attempt to delineate approaches and define features in order that effective analysis may be undertaken. What is similar in the dances that are here called reworkings, and what is reflected in this set of terms, is the prefix ‘re’. These terms all describe dances that have a pre-existing dance text, or pre-text(s), as a source that they ‘re’-visit in a variety of ways. They all describe dances that have a source text that is variously altered, revised or turned over – a source text that is at the very least a significant reference point for the new work.

The relationship between the source text(s) (or sometimes it might be more appropriate to describe it as a target text(s)) and the newly constructed text is an important one which distinguishes one mode of ‘re’-visiting from another. The emphasis here is upon dances that substantially alter the ballet in order create a new work that has a significantly different resonance. Reworking, as I use the term, needs to be differentiated from other essentially more restorative trends, for revivals and reconstructions in ballet have tended towards a securing of tradition, while reworkings, in contrast, are engaged in a dialogue with tradition, often challenging established premises.

In truth, reworkings cannot be totally dissociated from processes of restoration and reconstruction; rather, they operate at opposite ends of a continuum, as both restorations and reworkings are on a scale of ‘authenticity and interpretivity’ (Thomas 2003:144) – with reconstructions emphasising the aura of ‘authenticity’ and reworkings stressing ‘interpretivity’. However, as Helen Thomas argues, even though reconstructors tend to highlight notions of ‘repeatability’ in their search for the ‘original’, the processes of reconstruction and the ephemeral nature of dance means that ‘interpretivity’ plays a part.

Indeed, taking this one step further, Mark Franko argues against the embedded notions of replication in reconstructions, stating that reconstruction’s ‘master conceit is to evoke what no longer is, with the means that are present’ (1993:135). Franko suggests that constructing through deconstruction lets loose new forms of reconstruction. ‘It consists’, he writes, ‘of inscribing the plurality of visions[,] restoring, conceptualising and/or inventing the act’ (ibid.: 152). The result of this process, he maintains, is to reinvent, rather than reconstruct, the work – in what might be considered a manner analogous to the process of reworking. However, reworkings, as distinct from reconstructions, explicitly and demonstratively break the chain of ‘repeatability’. Reworkings, using a viewer’s knowledge and arguably, in some instances, the canonical and commercial success of a source, also enter into a conscious and overt dialogue of change and difference. For, unlike reconstructions, they make no pretence to authenticity – indeed they deliberately mark themselves as other than the authentic in order to emphasise their difference. Bypassing the obsessive yet unattainable search for an authentic version, reworkings deconstruct the past, engaging with it only to enter into an interpretive discourse – often wilfully reinterpreting or misinterpreting their sources.

Various authors have attempted to clarify these different trends and have sought to establish frames of reference for discussing the relationships between a source text and the newly produced text. Interestingly, most of the authors cited in the following overview discuss theatre, literature or film rather than dance. They also tend to discuss shifts across art forms rather than reworkings within an art form, but across styles/genres – it is the latter of these approaches that is my focus. Either way there has been little attention paid to this enterprise in dance. However, a few dance scholars have entered this thorny territory, and Smith (1992) suggests that the terms reconstruction, recreation, resetting and revival could be described in the following ways.

Reconstruction suggests intensive labor, research, piecework, maybe educated guesswork about some details, and generally implies a date of performance distant from that when the work was first produced. Recreation implies that the spirit of a dance is captured [even] though the details may be totally wrong, and the term is often used, for example, when discussing a modern performance of medieval entertainment in which descriptions from the period are scarce. If a dance with costumes and sets from one production is being set on another cast within a relatively short interval of time, the term resetting is often used. The term revival is often used when a dance is produced, usually under the direction of the choreographer, after not being performed for several years.

(Smith 1992:248–9)

Ann Hutchinson Guest follows a similar vein of thought when she suggests that reconstruction implies ‘constructing a work anew from all available sources of information aiming for the result to be as close as possible to the original’ (2000:65). In this category she offers the work of Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer as an example.² Revival, she suggests, is a term that describes the bringing to life of choreographic work from notation. Of a reworked dance she has little more to say than that, if the choreography is reworked, it should be indicated clearly whether it is by the original choreographer or by some other person (ibid.: 65–6).

These dance writers essentially focus on recuperative approaches. Theatre analysts have emphasised works that are more distant from their source texts. Amy Green, in The Revisionist Stage (1994), cites Robert Brustein’s formulation, which categorises two approaches to the conceptual rewritings of classic plays. These are simile productions, in which plays are recontextualised wholesale into different historical contexts, and productions which are conceptualised on the basis of poetic metaphor. Such productions are ‘suggestive of the play rather than specific, reverberant rather than concrete’ (Brustein, in Green 1994:13). Geoffrey Wagner (1975) and Darko Suvin (1988) similarly identify and categorise productions as they become progressively distant from the source text. Wagner, discussing adaptations from novels to films, uses the terms transposition, commentary and analogy. Of these, transposition has the minimum of apparent interference, whereas the commentary re-emphasises or restructures the work in some way. These changes might include modifying characters, dealing with inner stories, or altering the context or surrounding imagery. The final term, analogy, represents a parallel argument to Brustein’s poetic metaphor in that this approach may only hint at the source text.

The set of terms established by Suvin provides perhaps the most concrete model of categorisation, but, in attempting to be definitive, it is problematic. Suvin formulates what he calls ‘interpretative pragmatics’ (1988:395) in order to discuss directorial interpretations. He argues that any signifying situation in printed or performed dramas induces a ‘Possible World’ in the reader or spectator (ibid.). Therefore, he goes on, each world will unavoidably have some limits and central features. While acknowledging that diverse readings of these possible worlds are probable, he argues that ‘they will have to have what Wittgenstein called a family likeness, that is some parameters in common: negatively, limits; positively, features’ (ibid.: 376). He labels these central features invariants. Suvin develops a system of identifying these invariants and attempts to distinguish between different stagings of plays based on their preservation, or not, of significant invariants. He calls these variants, adaptations and rewrites.

A variant observes the central structural features of the text being interpreted. In this formulation any staging is a variant. An adaptation uses only some of the central invariants, but these ‘are sufficient to establish its “family likeness” to other members of that family’ (Suvin 1988:410). His final term, rewrite, indicates a work that ‘is no longer, strictly speaking, an interpretation but a use of some elements from the anterior structure as a semi-finished product’; in such works only a few invariants may be evident (although at least one must be evident), although they may be ‘used for a radically differing purpose’ (ibid.).

Dance reworkings, as I use the term, are found across what Suvin categorises as adaptations and rewrites. For the term reworking, in that it is an active term, implies a process, a rethinking, a reconceptualising, and a revising of the source text in order to bring about some new resonance. For one of the purposes of reworkings is to alter the convention, and, while not all revised texts are progressive, the basic premise evident in these dances is that the source needs to be gone over or re-examined. The creators of reworkings can be seen to map out an alternative aesthetic terrain, which, to varying extents, diverges from the perspectives evident in the dances that they rework.

However, Suvin’s formulation is not easily adapted for dance for, while possible worlds are inevitably evoked in the viewer in dance texts and play texts, he relies heavily on the written play text as a fixed anterior source to establish his invariants or central features. Without this anterior source, as is mainly the case for dance, the invariants are harder to establish, for in live performance there are an infinitely greater number of features to consider. The closest that it may be possible to approach the identification of invariants in dance is the discernment of form and the relationships between typical components in a particular work.³

More recently, continuing this plurality of terms and definitions, Julie...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Plates
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Approaching reworkings of the ballet in theory and practice
• Part II Refiguring the body and the politics of identity
• Notes
• References and bibliography
• Index