This month, the London public will have an enticing meeting with a modern master whose impact on contemporary art was enormous. But the place is not modern. It is the Royal Ballet and Opera, who hosts Three signature worksA trio of pieces by George Balanochine, sublime choreographer of the modern era: Lavish sonplayed for the first time in 1929, Serenade (1935) and Symphony in C (1947).
Balanochine was the pioneer of “neoclassical” ballet, supposedly because he uses traditional techniques for a new radical choreography. Her career is surprising in the eras that she is overlapping, the modernities he has seen and shaped, and the avant-garde protagonists who have populated her.
Born Georgi Melitonovitch Balanchivadze in Saint Petersburg in 1904 (he died in 1983), by 21, he worked with the ballets of Serge Diailev, revising the choreography of Léonide Massine in 1920 of Stravinsky'sky's The Rossignol songWith the original costumes and sets of Henri Matisse. He never looked back.
Historical Trio
The three works carried out in London are all monuments. In 1929, The prodigal son First like the Russian Ballet final ballets, as Diaghilev died later that year. The sets and costumes were designed by the French painter Georges Rouault, a sometimes obsessed with religious iconography. The artist and choreographer found a particular symbiosis in their fascination for the clarity and simplicity of a historical form: “by conceiving the choreography”, Balanochine said: “I had in mind the Byzantine icons which are so familiar to all the Russians.” Rouault's conceptions will be relaunched for the performance of the Royal Ballet.
Serenade was the first Balanchine ballet choreographed in the United States. Created on the students of the American ballet school (and, radically, including errors and fortuitous moments), it is at the heart of the repertoire of the New York City Ballet (NYCB), which Balanochine co-founded in 1948. Its artistic history, with creations by minor artist Gaston Longchamp, is perhaps less distant. But Symphony in COriginal production (then called Cristal Palace) involved a major artist from the start, with conceptions of the surrealist Leonor Fin. His costumes, on the theme of the colors of the precious stones, finally informed the new choreography of Balanochine; A 1967 play, Jewelry.
Generations of influence
In the United States, Balanochine influenced and caused a more irreverent reaction among the successive generations of choreographers, like Yvonne Rainer and Merce Cunningham, and their wider artistic environment. That he incorporated Summer spaceThe great collaboration of Cunningham of 1958 with Robert Rauschenberg, in the NYCB repertoire, recounts his appreciation of his disciples.
But the relevance of Balanochine for visual art is not only direct collaborations and affiliations with artists during his lifetime. His formal gestures and models make him crucial for certain strains of the art of contemporary performance. The key to the choreographic terrain he inaugurated was his shower. “A ballet can contain a story, but the visual show, not the story, is the essential element,” he said, adding: “The choreographer and the dancer must remember that they reach the public through the eye-and the public, in turn, must train to see what is done on the stage.”
He insisted on an abstract visual emergency while empowering his audience
He therefore both insisted on an abstract visual emergency while empowering his audience – a deeply contemporary ideal. And art has moved regularly to the discipline of Balanochine in recent decades, dissolving the boundaries between performance and sculpture, gallery and scene. Tino Sehgal and Pablo Bronstein artists, for example, used Balanchine movements in performative collages in the gallery settings. Sehgal incorporated the steps of Balanchine in his first works 20 minutes for the 20th century (1999), a “dance museum”, as he described. Bronstein incorporated the Balanochine movements into pieces for the Biennale High in 2007 and the Duveen commission of Tate Britain in 2016, in which he wrinkled on the relationship of dance with architecture.
These reflect a concern with museums as spaces activated by bodies, more than simply as display of objects. In 2015, the art historian Dorothea von Hantelmann argued that “in the 21st century canon” – a “history of body postures and forms of incarnation” – the Calanque will be “as important as Malevich”. While the artists are struggling with this idea and challenge and reinvent the museum, the balance of grace and the economy of the choreography of Balanochine and its own commitment with cultural traditions, offers an irresistible eloquence.
• The Royal Ballet presents Balanchine: three signature works as part of Van Cleef & Arpels dance reflections, March 12-April 8, www.dancerefections-vancleefarpels.com
