Introduction: Tale to Ballet, Ballet to Tale

Abstract

Introduction:Tale to Ballet, Ballet to Tale Anthony L. Manna (bio) In her first essay for this column, Elizabeth Elam Roth explored the ballet of E. T. A. Hoffmann's "Nutcracker and Mouse King," which Mikhail Baryshnikov choreographed for the American Ballet Theatre in 1976. In that essay Roth unraveled Freud's notion of the uncanny as it surfaced in Baryshnikov's ballet as both a psychical condition and aesthetic principle. She explained that the uncanny is repressed infantile material—"inherent psychological drives," according to Roth—that has been resurrected, but is not yet redirected (42). Claiming that "half a dozen of the complexes Freud cites as causing uncanniness are present in 'Nutcracker' and pivotal to its convoluted plot" (39), Roth looked to Hoffmann's text for tropes and patterns that justify Baryshnikov's uncanny reading of the story and to particularities of Baryshnikov's balletic art in concert with Tchaikovsky's musical score for aural and choreographic elements that translate the uncanny into an eloquent balletic narrative. What Roth discovered in Baryshnikov's ballet is a strikingly fresh, persuasive take on Hoffmann's story. As Roth details, Baryshnikov's is a production that destabilizes whatever romance, nostalgia, or sentimentality Hoffmann's story has harbored for some artists. Traditional sentiments about a familiar story are also subverted in the Royal Ballet's new restaging of The Sleeping Beauty, the subject of Roth's essay in this column. At work in this production, Roth claims, is the sublime, a concept whose protracted history begins with classical philosophers and is taken up, refined, and expanded, in turn, by Burke, Kant, and Freud. Whereas the "beautiful" resides in pleasure, harmony, and unity, the sublime follows from pain, terror, and disorder. The sublime works in surprising, subtle ways in the Royal's production of The Sleeping Beauty, according to Roth. It surfaces largely in discrepancies, contrasts, and contradictions seen, heard, and intuited throughout the production, and it is felt in the perplexing ending that gives new meaning to the sexual politics that have long haunted the tale and balletic interpretations of it. In its use of disparate, incongruous elements, Roth senses the Royal's urge to stress political, societal, and ontological themes. And while these themes are in fact embedded in the fairy tale, previous ballets either missed or bypassed them, opting, rather, to align the production stylistically and ideologically with the (post)classical manner of the seventeenth century, the manner that dominated the French court when the tale made its debut there. The Royal's rendering of the narrative inscribes some of the tale's dark matter and realizes the liberating, difficult dualities about life and human nature that a reading of the tale can uncover. What this complexity demonstrates, I believe, and what my viewing of a videotape of the ballet revealed, is that story metamorphosed into another medium need not be derivative, that it can transcend its source to become a thing as compellingly and hauntingly original as the Royal Ballet's restaging—with its strange allusiveness, its wonderful mix of style, tone, and theme, its critique of the empty promises of technology, and its relendess manner of confronting us with the limits of our tendency to reduce the world to safe, rational concepts. The Royal's is a daring production, by turns offbeat, dazzling, confounding, grim, and shrewdly dramatic. According to Randy Martin, a worthwhile strategy for getting to know dance is to "overread" it—that is, "to read more in the dance than its dancing can bear and to read through and past the dance to the point where it meets its own exterior or context" (178). Roth's commentary does this for me. It also makes me want to "overread" the tale in order to see better what the tale made the dancers make the audience do. For an audience of children, there is the attraction of the grand skewed spectacle that the Royal's production makes of the tale. But there may be more. There is the very real possibility that the ballet stripped of its romantic trappings and customary happy ending will liberate children to consider the uncertainties about life that this oddly coherent production—and...