When I was small I was enchanted by ballet. But then my father took me to see Swan Lake. It was kind of him, he wanted to do something nice for me. Unfortunately, he loathed ballet - he thought it was silly. We sat in the dark together at the Festival Hall in London and gradually I was distracted from the exquisite scenes unfolding on the stage by the fact that, beside me, my father was shaking with stifled laughter.
Sadly, his laughter was infectious and soon his sense of the absurdity of what we were seeing onstage overcame me, (as Havel said in the letter I quoted in my last post: "The moment one first thinks of asking "so what?" of an event once felt to be supremely meaningful, an exceedingly important experience, one proper only to man, is germinated, though we may scarcely notice it: the experience of absurdity. This "so what?" question has a special infectiousness or power to expand.")
Ballet was spoiled for me ever after. And yet, while for me personally it has been tainted, I still recognise it is a form of human striving toward beauty that is admirable and, within its form, occasionally its practitioners can achieve something that is sublime.
It seemed to me that it was a form that required enormous discipline: as such, it would be much harder to dumb down than other spheres of artistic endeavour. However, I had a suspicion that Matthew Osborne - famed first and foremost for his all-male Swan Lake - might be going to give the task of dumbing it down a very good try. Today I read a review of something by him that suggested my suspicion was right - he has been steadily "democratising" (or should that be "degrading") ballet, with ever greater success, since the first appearance of his version of Swan Lake way back in 1995. The review I read contained this phrase, which struck me forcefully:
"The absence of nuance, of stillness, of quietness, or restraint soon becomes very wearing."
It seemed to me that this judgment applies not only to one choreographer but to the majority of progressive artistic efforts in the world today.
Restraint, nuance, stillness - will they ever revive amid the wham-bam cacophony that is modernity? Are we returning to the primitive? Did we in the west reach a cultural apex, (and if so when was that exactly?) from which we are descending at increasing speed? Will poetry soon be reduced to slam and rap, buildings to boxes of varying sizes with the odd one being an outlandish shape, (Bilbao, the London Gherkin, the Obama Library) but none constructed with any thought of beauty, visual art to the more outlandish things on display at Frieze in Regent's Park at the moment and theatre and cinema to shams of social engineering and warped history.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In that last context, this appeared on my telephone the other day and seems apposite:
