Telling Tales with the Body

Abstract

Abstract Telling tales with the body was generally despised as a ‘lowbrow’ art form in the ballet world of the twentieth century—and there are still many practitioners and dance scholars who share this view. For most of the twentieth century, storytelling was not deemed to be something to which classical ballet should aspire. From the perspective of the new millennium, however, things look rather different. Stories are no longer eschewed by choreographers; indeed, it may well be possible to detect what one might term a ‘narrative’ turn in the classical ballet repertoire, where the ancient Greek and Roman epics are often providing the subject matter for these works. Chapter 4 explores the reasons behind twentieth-century ballet’s resistance to narrative and seeks to offer some thoughts on this early twenty-first-century narrative re-turn. This narrative eschewal in ballet matters because it has had profound repercussions beyond the world of dance, not least in the world of theatrical performance, where plotless dance is regularly invoked as a model for postdramatic theatre.