Dance of the Sun King

Pulcinella

Pillar of Fire

The opening of the ballet by Antony Tudor

Three posts on love – II

Act I – A rustic village

Giselle, a weak-hearted young girl who is adored by her native villagers, lives with her watchful mother, Berthe. Hilarion, the village gamekeeper, is desperately in love with Giselle. Prince Albrecht, a nobleman who is already engaged to a noblewoman named Bathilde, is bored and lonely with his everyday existence. Captivated by Giselle’s frail beauty and innocence, Albrecht disguises himself as a peasant named Loys. After purchasing the cottage adjacent to Berthe’s, he proceeds to shower Giselle with his affections.

Hilarion, filled with suspicion and jealousy, becomes enraged when Giselle falls madly in love with Albrecht and believes that they are engaged.

Berthe has a vision that her daughter will one day become a Wili, a jilted maiden who dies before her wedding night. The Wilis emerge between midnight and dawn to vengefully trap any man who enters their domain by forcing him to dance to his death.

Hilarion exposes Albrecht’s disguise and proclaims that he is already betrothed to Bathilde. Overwhelmingly distraught and horrified, Giselle dies of a broken heart.

Act II – A forest clearing

Hilarion is discovered just before midnight keeping vigil by Giselle’s tomb. As midnight approaches, the Wilis appear with their leader, Queen Myrta. This is the night Giselle is to be initiated as a Wili.

Albrecht, laden with feelings of guilt and remorse, visits Giselle’s grave. He sees a vision of Giselle and follows it into the forest. At this point, Myrta discovers Hilarion in the forest and orders the Wilis to dance around him until he dies from exhaustion. She then discovers Albrecht and demands that he share the same fate as Hilarion but is unable to permeate the invisible bond of love that Giselle has for him.

At dawn, when the Wilis lose their power and must retreat to their dwelling place, Albrecht is saved and Giselle forgives him. Giselle returns with the Wilis and recognizes that now she will be one of them for the rest of time.

(Synopsis taken from this site.)

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Feminists would no doubt cringe at this story, and they would have good reason to do so. After all, a woman dying for love of a man, and then forgiving him to the point of saving his life from the souls of other broken-hearted women who would unleash their just wrath against him… no wonder they call Giselle one of the greatest of the romantic ballets (as opposed to the “classic” ones). Under of all of this emotional kitsch, however, there is a lost grammar buried, one where love counts not the cost of its own sacrifices, even if it leads to death or eternal damnation, as in the case of our own Giselle. Buried outside of God’s forgiveness, on unconsecrated ground, to haunt the night with all of the other souls in the outer darkness, she still finds it in herself to show love to the man who betrayed her. Melodrama? Yes. But can there be something more profound there? Absolutely.

This all didn’t sit well with part of me. Part of me is like all of you: it asks first of love: what’s in it for me? But there is still that childish voice of a St. Therese and others who would say: I would like to be in Hell so there would be someone even there who loves God. Love speaks like that, amour fou, love that loses itself in the other. It transcends ideology, and it transcends common sense, and part of me feels that we are less and less capable of even admiring such displays. Giselle, for all of its emotional cheesiness, at least gets that much across.

Wonderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.
It doesn’t matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vow
a thousand times
Come, yet again, come, come.

-Rumi

La fille mal gardée

From a delightful ballet by Frederick Ashton that AG and I watched recently.

I commented to AG how I felt that this is the type of ballet you would bring children to. I also commented that as I posted earlier, the narrative skill and cleverness of this type of theatre are difficult to find these days not because of lack of technique, but because of a change of attitude. As AG put it, people have a hard time accepting that dance movements can contain any real meaning, probably because they have a hard time believing anything contains transcendent meaning. The best example of this, that I have also written of in the past, can be seen in the choreography of Mark Morris. Compared to Ashton, what we see in Morris is a resort to vulgar tricks and jokes in order to seem clever, intelligent, and “relevant”. But it is one thing to have a bunch of people dressed as barnyard chickens dancing on stage, but it is another to mimic sex acts in a public performance or have two men do a pas de deux in order to “deconstruct” male/female relationships. It seems we have lost a lot even in the comedic realm.

Here is another excerpt:

La Danse…c’est une question morale

AG pointed out to me Sarah Kaufman’s article for the Washington Times criticizing the hegemony of George Balanchine’s aesthetic in modern ballet. While Kaufman does not have too many negative things to say about Balanchine’s choreography (other than the initial criticism of decades ago that his ballets are “too abstract”), she basically posits that the dominance of the Russian émigré is too much of a good thing. At least in this country, many of the ballet companies are run by former Balanchine dancers who were at the New York City Ballet. While they tend to do many Balanchine works, AG also pointed out that Balanchine is nowhere nearly as ubiquitous as Kaufman portrays.

Requite Me Not

Marguerite and Armand

Choreography by Sir Frederick Ashton

The Very Eye of Night

Film by Maya Deren

Music by Teiji Ito

Choreography by Antony Tudor

Moreover, we think that from the swift and orderly revolution of the heavens originates musical harmony; that eight tones are produced by the motions of the eight spheres, and a ninth, a kind of harmony, is produced from all of them. And so we call the nine sounds of the heavens, from their musical harmony, the nine Muses. Our soul was endowed from the beginning with the Reason of this music, for the celestial harmony is rightly called innate in anything whose origin is celestial. Which it later imitates on various instruments and in songs.

-Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love

The Dying Swan