Ballet as a Dance Form Some Just Love to Hate

Correction Appended Lewis Segal, a longtime sportswriter for The Los Angeles Times, has written a diatribe against professional football titled “Five Things I Hate About Football.” It deplores a “sport” in which steroid-driven behemoths bash one another about, with no apparent purpose, social relevance, aesthetic pleasure or moral uplift.

Just kidding. Actually, Lewis Segal, a longtime dance critic for The Los Angeles Times, published an article on Sunday titled “Five Things I Hate About Ballet.” Among its sins, he asserted, are that it commandeers a disproportionate amount of dance resources and respect, that it relies on mindless athleticism, that it has lost touch with “the realities of the moment” and wallows in “flatulent nostalgia,” and that it survives because it “has cultivated an intimidation factor that acts like a computer firewall.”

Ballet “ignores the present, but it also falsifies its past,” he went on, since it claims a venerable heritage, but opera is far older, and most ballet classics have been altered beyond recognition. Nineteenth-century story ballets are politically incorrect, he writes. Ballet infantilizes its dancers. Mere prettiness has replaced beauty as an ideal for ballerinas. Dance lovers should focus their psychic energies on the proscenium arch during ballet performances and pray, in the words of George Bernard Shaw, for it to “Fall. Fall and crush.”

Mr. Segal is the first to point out that his view of ballet is colored by its absence on any significant scale in the Los Angeles area. Hence my linkage of ballet with football, since Los Angeles is also without a National Football League team. Had he written 20 years ago, Lewis Segal, a noted music critic for The Los Angeles Times, might have made a similar diatribe about the irrelevance of opera, since Los Angeles did not have a major opera company then, either.

(For the record Mr. Segal succeeded me as Martin Bernheimer’s dance-oriented assistant at The Los Angeles Times when I decamped for New York in 1972, and I have barely seen him in the intervening years.)
Mr. Segal’s low regard for ballet is not new. He made many of the same points in a more closely argued, plausibly toned response to an invitation in 2002 from Ballet Magazine to discuss ballet in the 21st century. (He unleashed a few zingers there too, however, as in his crack about ballet’s being the purview of “dancing snowflakes and jumpers with padded crotches.”) So one explanation for his recent rant — that he was egged into it by a journalistic culture that prizes provocation over reasoned discussion — may not be entirely off the mark. He believes this stuff, but not necessarily always with the mocking, strident tone of the Los Angeles Times article.

Although I disagree with him on almost every count, there is something salutary about his position. There are so many ballet magazines and ballet Web sites out there now that simply assume the superiority of ballet to all other forms of dance that it is nice to have a corrective.

To take just one example, there was Jennifer Homans’s denunciation in The New Republic a few months ago of Downtown Manhattan dance as amateurish and childish, largely, it seemed, because it was not ballet. Ms. Homans might paraphrase her argument somewhat more subtly, and her own extremism could have been encouraged by the journalistic culture of The New Republic. But her disdain for those who profess to be dancers without having submitted themselves to ballet training was palpable.

Mr. Segal’s rant also has historical resonance. When George Balanchine was establishing himself in the United States in the 1930’s, he encountered resistance from those who felt that truly American dance was modern dance in the Fuller-Duncan-Denishawn-Graham tradition, and that ballet was an outmoded European import. Effete too, though the politically correct Mr. Segal does not go there. John Martins, chief dance critic of The New York Times in those years, was one who advanced that argument. Although he later modified his position to embrace Balanchine’s modernism, some balletomanes still disparage him for not immediately recognizing Balanchine’s genius.

Despite the absence of major ballet company in the Los Angeles basin, Mr. Segal has seen a lot of ballet over the decades. He surely knows that ballet is indeed trying to adjust to the modern world, to find new thematic and choreographic relevance without abandoning its technique and traditions, however shallow and distorted in Mr. Segal’s view. He could have made the same arguments about traditional ballet’s failings in a context supportive of contemporary ballet. Perhaps he has been soured by the hackneyed touring programs the big ballet companies take into Los Angeles.

“Does any star these days lobby artistic directors for better choreography or dare to say, ‘I just don’t want to be seen in that ‘Swan Lake’ ”? Well, yes. Carlos Acosta, the Royal Ballet and American Ballet Theater star, is only the latest to call for modernization and for a de-emphasis on 19th century story ballets. Sylvie Guillem has done the same.

Dancers in Europe (as with the Kirov Ballet’s William Forsythe program) and the United States yearn for exciting new choreography, and artistic directors do their best to provide it. Mikhail Baryshnikov stands as a one-man symbol of ballet’s (and dance’s) quest for renewal. When it comes to new work (as opposed to fancily modernized new productions of old work), ballet is far more contemporary than opera. Ballet masters and administrators spend half their time searching for the new. Which is not to say that all new ballet is good ballet, but they try.

Fanatic balletomanes resist such change on the very grounds Mr. Segal uses to chide all of ballet. For them anything but classroom ballet technique degrades the form, and a search for relevance is a descent into gimmickry and perversion.

One last thing Mr. Segal overlooks or denies is that ballet at its not infrequent best can still be beautiful and can still move the receptive soul as deeply as any other art. Even its hoariest traditions give pleasure, as in the delighted faces of audiences young and old at a good account of “The Nutcracker.” Ballet technique can speak to us today, and not just in Balanchine’s stripped-down modernist exercises, now themselves a half-century old.

Maybe if Mr. Segal weren’t the “sun-kissed Hollywood barbarian” that he self-mockingly called himself in 2002, if he had a homegrown ballet company he cared about with dancers whose progress he could trace, he might feel more sanguine about ballet as an art. With the N.F.L.’s blessings, he might even come to love professional football.