Ballet Austin

From 2006 to 2014, the professional US company Ballet Austin hosted an ambitious biennial competition, New American Talent/Dance, as an experimental platform to support “emerging” choreographers. However, after five seasons of this competition and despite self-reported success in meeting project goals to provide new learning experiences for participating choreographers, dancers, and audiences, Ballet Austin suspended the event. The reasons behind this decision, along with the insights gained through the process of producing these shows, reveal dimensions of US contemporary ballet in practice. This chapter illuminates how ballet pedagogy often fails the needs of contemporary ballet artists in the education of both future choreographers and the dancers who work with them, impacting not only the lives and careers of these artists but also, more generally, field aesthetics and development. The research further describes how audiences judged emerging choreographers, an analysis that may inform future lines of inquiry with regard to contemporary ballet and the sustainability of the field in the United States.

Copy Rites

This chapter considers two contemporary versions of The Rite of Spring: Xavier Le Roy’s Le Sacre du Printemps and Jérôme Bel’s self-titled production. Because there is relatively extensive documentation of Nijinsky’s original choreography for the Rite, so-called reconstructions are widely known and available. But Le Roy and Bel seek to reimagine the ballet completely. Le Roy loosely “conducts” the score as it is piped out of speakers placed among the audience, thus inverting the traditional spatial and artistic dimensions of theatrical space. Bel drastically denudes his Rite, with naked dancers, a nearly bare stage, and a flimsy monophonic rendition of the gargantuan score. He embarks on a subcutaneous exploration of a dance performance to discover its most basic constituent parts. In reworking the ballet’s “original” materials, these artists expose some basic assumptions about music and dance as media, both as performance acts and as objects of study.

John Cranko’s Stuttgart Ballet

The legacy of John Cranko’s Stuttgart Ballet includes his ballets and his underlying philosophy of “experiential intersubjectivity”—a collaborative creative process based on observation of individual experience. Working closely with his colleagues (dancers, composers, designers, etc.), Cranko sought their spontaneous expression to his cue or their solution to the challenges of creating. His choreographic philosophy led away from the traditionally exclusive, hierarchical work style of the ballet world and toward a work style producing individuality and originality. Successfully integrating the divergent ideas and instinctive expressivity of many separate individuals into his ballets, Cranko did more than enable an individualized viewer experience, accessible to a diversified audience. Importantly, Cranko also empowered his colleagues with his democratic and collaborative way of creating ballets in Stuttgart, ultimately forming such choreographers as Jiří Kylián, John Neumeier, and William Forsythe. This chapter looks at what shaped Cranko’s Stuttgart Ballet, the choreographic oeuvre, and the legacy today.

Christopher Wheeldon

In 2000, English-born Christopher Wheeldon became the first artist-in-residence at New York City Ballet (NYCB). The press compared his choreography to George Balanchine’s. This chapter discusses Wheeldon’s critically acclaimed NYCB ballet Polyphonia (2001) in relation to the “thick narrative” of the company’s history. It argues that Wheeldon’s collaborations with NYCB dancers Wendy Whelan and Jock Soto, in Polyphonia and other works, produced a unique aesthetic, one that transcended Balanchine’s neoclassical legacy. The chapter ends by considering how Wheeldon’s controversial decision to direct the Broadway musical about Michael Jackson is not out of character, but emblematic of his propensity to embrace the role of an outsider, who works to understand the unfamiliar and who surpasses what is expected of him.

Hans Van Manen

The Dutch avant-garde choreographer Hans van Manen (b. 1932) is frequently recognized as a game changer and pioneer for his fusion of ballet techniques with elements from dance theater, and for his scrutiny of ballet’s conventional use of authority, power, and patriarchy. Yet it still remains difficult to describe the “mysterious experience” one gains while watching his ballets, an experience characterized by an intriguing tension between formal austerity and dramatic expression—a type of “less is more.” In this chapter, Van Manen’s ballets are at once abstract and emotive; they are uncomplicated, tightly composed works of pure dance, and yet they are deeply social and political, with a clear emancipatory agenda. In short: Hans van Manen’s choreographies have an existential dimension, and can be described as abstract miniature dramas.

Akram Khan and English National Ballet

This chapter examines the development of Akram Khan’s choreographic pathway as an aggregate of diverse influences, primarily experienced through issues of identity, otherness, and interculturalism. Beginning with the early confusion of juxtaposing classical dance training in kathak and a fascination with Michael Jackson, Khan’s career has progressed, largely through an instinctive opportunism—absorbed from the “formless hunch” philosophy of early mentor, Peter Brook—and an ongoing fascination with the exploratory possibilities of collaboration through the hybrid mixing of dance disciplines to create his own style of mood movement. This process has taken Khan from the classical world of kathak, through contemporary dance, and back into another classical discipline, ballet, with detours along the way into flamenco, the Olympics, and text-based physical theater. The chapter describes the impact of all these experiences on Khan’s contribution to modern ballet, particularly in his association with English National Ballet.

Shapeshifters and Colombe’s Folds

The collaboration between William Forsythe and Issey Miyake in Ballett Frankfurt’s The Loss of Small Detail (1991) includes the Colombe dress, used in the finale of the first act, “the second detail.” If seen as a parallel choreographic object in Forsythe’s work, Miyake’s Colombe as “one piece of cloth” concept suggests the fold (Deleuze, 1993) as a potent epistemological principle that unites various versions of the work. Used in the solo dance that bridges two acts, the Colombe dress via the figure of fold visually hints at Forsythe’s choreographic gestures that open out balletic épaulement through “disfocus.” When Miyake’s and Forsythe’s topological gestures are juxtaposed, their discrete works reveal analogous shapeshifting that promotes multidirectional links between ballet and fashion as artistic forms that use historical and cultural frictions to fold into contemporaneity.

Mauro Bigonzetti

In 1990, Mauro Bigonzetti choreographed his first ballet, Sei in Movimento (Six in Motion), for Aterballetto, a pioneering ballet company set up in 1979 in the Emilia Romagna region of Italy. Over the course of the 1990s, an emergent, multifaceted choreographic identity began to evolve in his work, entwining the cultural and historical influences that inhabited the creative spaces of Aterballetto in Reggio Emilia. The chapter identifies the (dis)placed stylistic heritage that emerges from Bigonzetti’s choreography, including his reimagining of Bronislava Nijinska’s Les Noces (1923). This chapter articulates Bigonzetti’s artistic contributions throughout the end of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries within the context of Italian contemporary ballet.

“Ballet” is a Dirty Word

Professional dancing in São Paulo, Brazil, developed from the 1950s on, with a constant and strong influence from modern dance. As modernism looked disapprovingly at ballet, seeing it as something from the past, prejudice grew in the city toward the form. Directors and choreographers of dance companies currently speak about ballet and contemporary ballet as something that is done, but always by others, never themselves. Even the word “ballet” is avoided, since it seems to diminish the works being discussed, as it became something strictly associated with dance training, and not professional dance. This chapter investigates the roots of ballet in São Paulo, discussing both its origins and the origins of its rejection, while pointing to the recent indications of its newfound public interest.

Jean-Christophe Maillot

Jean-Christophe Maillot is one of the few French choreographers to have achieved international recognition in the field of contemporary ballet in recent years. This chapter explores his fraught early development as a classically trained artist in the midst of a contemporary dance boom in France and his subsequent career at the helm of Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo. There, he found the practical support and creative freedom to build a large repertoire, both narrative and abstract, from 1993 onward. Finally, Maillot’s process and style are explored through a case study: The Taming of the Shrew, a ballet he created for Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet in 2014. On the basis of studio-based sociological observations and interviews conducted during the rehearsals, this creation is envisioned as an example of the hybrid nature of new works in ballet today and the influence of the environment in which they are made.