by

Ntongela Masilela

In as much as Edwin Denby critically observed that the work of his friend Willem de Kooning, whom he had known from the early 1930s inNew York City, had been to establish a new painting style in opposition to the then diminant Surrealist mode of painting, likewise the choreographic work of George Balanchine, from the masterpieces of the early 1940s, had been to establish a new classicism in ballet. This re-instituting of classicism was historically necessary, Denby thought, because the 'mannered' Modesrnist ballets of Michel Fokine and Leonid Massine had fractured the structural harmony of ballet form. This fracturing, or more appropriately, this altering of the organic principles of ballet form by Fokine had began in 1904, a year before the his historic meeting with Isadora Duncan. Whilst Duncan continued on her innovative path to found a new dance form, modern dance, Fokine overthrow the dominance of Marius Petipa's classicism in ballet. For Edwin Denby, the importance of Balanchine was in displacing modernism through classicism in ballet, and also in creating superlative ballet masterpieces. Informed by historical constructs and critical principles, the dance criticism of Edwin Denby sought always to mark periodizations and establish analytical categories within the complex form of ballet. Hence, to grasp the significance of Edwin Denby's understanding of Balanchine's historic importance in re-constituting classicism as the fundamental stylistic mode of ballet, and his insightful feel for Balanchine's regulative principles which transformed and re-shaped the form of ballet, it is necessary to take an encapsulated glance at the history of ballet. Inevitably, it will be in the form of stenographic notations.

If the self-reflexiveness and self-consciousness of an artistic form is usually an indication of its maturity and consciousness of its self as a historical phenomenon, then the publication of Jean Georges Noverre's Letters on Dancing and Ballets , was such an event in the history of ballet. In these letters, which were published in Stuttgart in 1760, Noverre formulated five propositions which he felt should be constitutive of ballet structure: first, a ballet should possess good and understandable plots; second, excellent music and commissioned scores should form an integral part of ballet; third, movement in dancing must express or assist in the development of the theme; fourth, given the historical moment in which he was writing, Noverre demanded reform of stage custom and the abolition of the use of masks in ballet; fifth, the art of mime, which had fassllen into disuse, should be restored, redeveloped and restructured. THese principles which govern ballet to the present day, were to be fully realized after the French Revolution in Romantic choreography. Marius Petipa, the great French choreographer, in colloboration with Tchaikovsky, effected a reordering and transformation of these propositions to institute a classical style in ballet. Perhaps this was made possible by his move from the late ninenteenth-century Paris to the Czarist court of the then St. Petersburg. There he disengaged the structure and stylistics of ballet from the practice of the Romantic choreographers. Petipa acgieved this modal change in the following manner: first, he was able effectively to achieve a harmonious unity between the forms of his great ballets, whether The Sleeping Beauty or Swan Lake among others, with the music of Tchaikovsky whose musical structure was mainly dominated by melody and harmony; second, he de-emphasised content in ballet as it had dominated Romantic ballets, and developed digressive plots with no linear projection, technical brilliance was brought to prominence; third, virtuosity was elevated to an end in itself with the aim of displaying the ballerina; fourth, he thought stories and themes as of little consequence in ballet, and therefore, he compensated for this by bringing the classical pas de deux to supreme perfection. Petipa thus had brought such great innovation in the structure of the ballet, that within them two contrastive national consciousness were held in dialectical poise. Therefore today it is said that though the choreographic works are French in structuration, they can only be performed in the Russian manner in order to realize and reveal their full complexity.

Perhaps the Russian Revolution of 1905 had the effect on intellectuals of such a nature that it compelled them to question and interrogate all principles and philosophies of life, even those governing artistic creativity. Anyway, it was in such a climate that Fokine redirected ballet towards the forms of Romantic choreography in opposition to the classicism of Petipa. Fokine founded the style of neo-romanticism in the early part of the twentieth-century. In a letter of July 6th, 1914 to The Times of London, he retrospectively tabulated what he felt he had achieved against the Petipian principles of choreography: first, he reinstituted the Noverrian formulation that music express the story of ballet, primarily its emotional content; secondly, that dancing and mime in ballet have meaning only if they serve the expressiveness of dramatic action; thirdly, that though ballet should colloborate with the other arts, it should never be in a state of dependency; fourthly, that each ballet should be staged in conformity with the epoch represented. Through ballets like Petrouchka , The Firebird, Prince Igor and others, Fokine effected a profound change in the direction of ballet. It should be emphasised that the music of Stravinsky was instrumental in effecting this change, as much as it was to be central in the choreographic works of Balanchine, who strove to reimpose the Petipian classicism in ballet against the achievements of Fokine. Balanchine was very conscious of the historical legacy of Petipa, which he transplanted in America in the form of neo-classicism. Balanchine made movement the end of choreography itself, without relating it necessarily to narration, plot or story-line. Some of the ballets of Balanchine are nothing but pure structures of music, like for instance, Concerto Barocco . THe symbiotic relationship between ballet and music was seen in the following terms by Balanchine: "It woulb be wrong to say that all music should be danced, but I think the greatest music is never for dancing. I agree with the poet who said that music rots when it is too far removed from the dance, just as poetry rots when it departs too far from music." 2 With Balanchine ballet reaches pure formalism. In his book, Balanchine's Festival of Ballet , from which we have just quoted, Balanchine defines formalism in this manner: "Choreographic movement is used to produce visual sensations. It is quite different from the practical movement of everyday life, when we walk, lift things, stand up, and sit down. Movement in choreography is an end in itself: its only purpose is to create the impression of intensity and beauty." 3 For Balanchine, only the purism of formalism is the relevant mode of dance creation.

This background of historical complications and transformations of ballet structure and texture in the development of ballet is essential to an understanding of Edwin Denby's appreciation of the neo-classicism of Balanchine. From his earliest reviews in the early 1940s of Balanchine's masterpieces like, Concerto Barocco , The Four Temperaments , Danses Concertantes and others, Denby sought to deconstruct and reveal the nature of Balanchian classicism. Though Balanchine has created a wide variety of ballets, from dance ballet, through drama of atmosphere and divertissement, to grand pas de deux, it is the 'abstract' ballet which is felt to contain the pure classicism of Balanchine. Denby names these so-called abstract ballets simply dance ballets. The texture of the dance ballet is self-referential without reference to any metaphysical speculations, historical dialectics or cultural processes of any kind. Marcia B. Siegel writes the following stating her preferance for Balanchine above Massine: "I find Balanchine's approach more modern - he relates to music as sound, texture, rhythm, phrasing, the way many visual artists use paint, canvas, metal, plastics. In each case the artist tries to express the properties of his medium directly, not to give his interpretation of the medium." 4 The characteristics of the Balanchian dance ballet are: not only non-narrative, but aggressively anti-narrative, persistently plotless, and an intense virtuosity.

For Edwin Denby, the question of the classicism in Balanchine's worksis interrelated to other topics such as, the nature of tradition, the depth of the purity of style and the future of classicism in ballet. In a conversation he had with Balanchine, Denby reports that according to Balanchine there were several styles of classical dancing, and the one of interest to him was that which fused together classic mime and academic style in the manner of the tradition of St. Petersburg. Balanchine thought that this was an energetic style in contrast to the mannered classicism of the Paris Opera. By tradition Balanchine meant not so much the question of steps in movement as much as a treasured experience of style. In short, for Balanchine style is constituted by details which are evident in movement when that movement is informed by the purity of the vocabulary and the cleannes of accent. But style for Balanchine does not necessarily constitute the central construct of ballet. What he sought to achieve was what he called an inner creative force of self-expression. Edwin Denby thought this to be the subjective meaning which expresses itself in Balanchine's abstract dance ballets through the cumulative effect of dramatic, lyrical and choral images. It these images, Denby theorized, which constitute the formal structure of Balanchinian ballet. The combination of these images in a synthetic form of movement within the architecture of music in patterns of time, Denby felt, reveal the classicism of Balanchine's abstract dance ballets. Hence it is not accidental that the structural quality of Balanchine's ballets is governed by rhythmic patterns of music, especially the music of Stravinsky. Balanchine's extension of the range and depth of classicism in the twentieth -century was not limited only to the purification of the three-act classic ballet, which incorporates mime, character and academic dancing, but also included, according to Denby, the classsicizing of the movement of African-Americans, in tap dancing and in modern recital dancing. Balanchine sought to make classicism the dominant and universal stylistic construct of ballet in the twentieth-century. How successful this undertaking has been, can be judged and evaluated in relation to the ballet works of Hans van Manen.

Having established the principles that informed the classicism of Balanchine's ballets, Edwin Denby then sought to cartograph its realization in the work within the New York City's Ballet. The handsomeness of the dancing, the absence of glamorization and extravagance, the vituosity in precision, stamina and rapidity, the rhythmic power of the dancing style, and the brilliance of the step movements, these were the characteristics which for Denby expressed the classicism of Balanchine's New York City's Ballet. In this essay of 1952, "New York City's Ballet", Denby compared this ballet company to the Paris Opera which he found stilted and mannered. These characteristics, Edwin Denby thought, formed the connective logic of classicism. These made possible the impact, truth and grand style of Balanchine's ballets. This grand style of Balanchine's classicism was evident in the ballet masterpieces of the early and middle 1940s, which Denby reviewed as they were appearing. In one of his earliest pieces on the work of Balanchine, a short 1944 review of Balanchine's Serenade called "Balanchine's Classicism", it was already evident to Edwin Denby that Balanchine's choreographic power found consummate expression in non-narrative, storyless and non-linear ballet. Without hesitation he called Balanchine the greatest choreographer of the period, and this was while Massine was still at the height of his creative powers, and Fokine had only been dead for two years.

Probably this judgement is understandable given the fact that that Serenade seems to have had a tremendous impact on Denby. He wrote of it that in it the dance forms and the dancers are luminous in their spacing and their impetus is of a miraculous musicality. Going further, he found in it a formal structure informed of wit, fancy, senriment, which were all fresh, warm and innocent. These poetical and lyrical terms of evaluation and judgement are what constitute the greatness of Edwin Denby as a dance critic. In this review, the classicism of Petipa's heir, was displayed for Denby in the grandness of Serenade, which does not seek to overwhelm and impress. In Danses Concertantes , which is a suite of dances without a plot, appearing in the same year as Serenade , Denby found other powerful poetic terms to give it meaning: he found it to be characterized by effervescence and grace of dance invention, it was sumptuous yet delicate, and there was fluttering and twittering in it. And then Denby adds; "Astonishing is the ease with which Balanchine understands the flow of the unsymmetrical periods of the music and gives them a visual grace and a logic that illuminates the musician's musical intentions. The music is delicious instrumentally, but it is very firm in its melodic and rhythmic logic, and the absence of any rhetoric gives it a gentle serenity that is strangely bewitching. It is that rarity, a modest materpiece." Naturally only the music of Igor Stravinsky could be so 'balletic' and bewitching. 5 A ballet of 1945, The Four Temperments , according to Denby, is brilliant because of the denseness and power of the dance images that characterize the movement from moment to moment. It is a fantastic prism of extreme contastive sequences and motions: composed of toe lunges, sharp stabbing steps, turns in plie, and reverences and strange reverses. It is a dazzle of movements.

In an essay of 1960, "Balanchine Choreographing", Denby attempted to convey how Balanchine minutely constructed a classical ballet. This was the ballet Variants . Though one could feel descriptively the complications, difficulties and repetitions involved in such an endeacour, Denby did not achieve his aim of making us perceive and see classicism coming into being in an abstract Balanchinian dance. Inspiration is beyond the realm of criticism.

If the choreographic works of Balanchine presented themselves to Edwin Denby in the form of the historical question as to the nature of classicism, though he never examined the historicalness of this question, the works of Martha Graham, on the other hand, were apprehended as presenting themselves in the form of the cultural question as to the textual quality of modernism in dance. The very concept of Modernism is constantly subject to too many determinations, hence its indeterminateness: its historical dates and boundaries are incessantly giving rise to dispute; whether the concept defines a style or a particular artistic sensibility; tha nature of the map of its geographical distribution; and whether perhaps it should only be limited to certain artistic fields, for instance, literature and music. Nevertheless, within its parameters, one would have to agree with Marcia B. Siegel perceptive observation that Graham's dance works revolve around two thematic structures: while on the one hand they are expressive of national identity and personal constructs through prototypes, on the other hand, they abstract this expressiveness through symbolization and mythologization into the cosmic realm. 6 This totalization of allusion and reference in dance form tends to make the choreographic work of Graham encroach onto other artistic fields, whether American poetry of the nineteenth-century or the mythological world of Greek antiquity. Therefore it is not surprising that her dance vision has been dominant and imposing in modern dance. One strain of American dance descends from her. 7

In one of his early articles as a dance critic, Edwin Denby expressed serious reservations about the technique and sensibility of modern dance. In this essay of 1939, "Looking Human", Denby voiced certain objections: that modern dancers in performance smoehow disappear function only as instruments; that in modern dance joyfulness is missing; that choreographers in this mode wanted to be expressive without also being aware of the dialectics of presentation; and that there is an absence of projection. These criticisms were intended to assist in facilitating the reception of modern dance on the part of the audience. It was through an encounter with the works of Martha Graham that the defining terms of Edwin Denby took on a more appreciative, analytic and poised tone. in her work, especially the Chronicle , which was then being reviewed, he finds an extraordinary sense of movement, a deep emotional steadiness in projection and an intellectual tension. Though music and dance are inseperable from each other, each, according to Denby, has its own rhythmic structure. Therefore it is important not to confuse the parallelism between them for their possible inter-changeability.

The work of modern dance which was to have a tremendous impact on Edwin Denby, in the sense of revolutionizing his sense of perception, was Martha Graham's Letter to the World . Probably the impact of this work was not accidental in that it has since its appearance in 1941 been judged to be one of the three greatest works of modern dance. In this dance work, Graham examines the life and poetical works of the ninenteenth-century great American poet Emily Dickinson. It may paradoxically be the stoicism of the poetess that attracted the exuberance of the choreographer. The marked contrasts between their life-styles could not be more greater. It could possibly be the affinity of the contrasts between them that propels the explosiveness of the Letter to the World . Marcia B. Siegel has written brilliantly on the structure of this dance piece: "The dance is built on a brilliant device, a double main character, One Who Dances and One Who Speaks. . . The speaker invokes selected lines from Dickinson and the dancer interprets them with action. Their characters frequently merge in mirroring movements or in related dynamic qualities, but they are basically two different personae. The One Who Speaks is mature, sedate, has her emotions well in hand. She is an observer; she distills what is happening to the other woman into controlled images, a narrative that has power but that can be told. The One Who Dances is young, unrestrained, vulnerable. She is all action and feeling, and she has no words." 8 This characterization reflects in many ways the relationship between Martha Graham and Emily Dickinson.

Edwin Denby, in a review of 1941, found Letter to the World to be a truly outstanding masterpiece. He found in Graham's choreographic composition contrast of dynamics and continuity of lyrical line. Again, Denby's dance criticism reverts to poetical description rather than for example to metaphysical or philosophical speculation. In later appreciations of Martha Graham's work, for instance Appalachian Song and Herodiade , Denby characterizes it as possessing unsurpassed intellectual seriousness and constituting theatrical brilliancy which define the moral fabric of its style. Then Denby adds, employing analytical contrasts and poetic terms: "Ballet began, one might say, on the basis of lightness, elevation and ease; it could add modernism (which was an increased heaviness and an oddity of gesture) for its value as contrast. Miss Gaham, beginning with modernism, made of heaviness and oddity a complete system of her own. Brilliancy in heaviness and oddity became her expressive idiom. This is one way of explaining why much of her style looks like ballet intentionally done against the grain; or why she has used lightness and ease not as fundamental elements but for their value as contrast. But Miss Graham's system keeps expanding, and this season her entire company now and again seemed to be using non-modernist dance qualities not merely for contrast but directly." 9 These terms of judgement, in their analytical brilliance, have not been questioned by the passage of time in the half a century since they were written. It is this which makes Edwin Denby the great dance critic of our time.

1 Lecture II presented at the "First International Summer Dance Festival ", Arezzo, Italy, August, 1986.

2 George Balanchine and Francis Mason, Balanchine's Festival of Ballet , W.H. Allen, London, 1978, p.779.

3 ibid., p.781.

4 Marcia B. Siegel, The Shapes of Change , Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1979, p.100.

5 Edwin Denby , Looking at the Dance , Horizon Press, New York, 1949,p.79.

6 Marcia Siegel, op. cit., p.175-176.

7 Deborah Jowitt, "Mistrust of Academies: Training to be a Modern dancer in the USA", in Ballet and the Arts/Das Ballett und die Kunste , (eds.) Horts Korgler, Jens Wendland, Jochen Schmidt et. al., Ballett-Buhnen-Verlag, Koln, 1981, p.131.

8 Marcia B. Siegel, op. cit., p.177-178.

9 Edwin Denby, Looking at the Dance , p.316.