And it's still the easiest joke for a comedian to either jump into tights and, you know,
float around.
The idea that a man could be sensitive or be involved in anything that had sensitivity,
it's played upon as a joke.
I guess because enough of them, you know, number one they wear tights and enough of
them lisp to, you know, make people want to comment on it.
For some, there's nothing funnier than a man practicing this distinctly feminine art form.
But the real punchline is that ballet isn't a woman's art form at all.
In fact, ballet was not only created by men, it was created for men.
It was created by women, it was created by men, it was created by women, it was created
by women.
The male dancer, if not for his commitment, prowess, and vision, ballet as we know today
might not exist.
Under the male dancer, ballet leapt from court entertainment to popular art form, achieved
new dramatic heights, and found a permanent place in the hearts of audiences the world
over.
And what was the male dancer's reward for his enormous contribution?
One hundred years of ridicule.
The fact is, men danced long before ballet came along.
In fact, they didn't dance with female partners until the 12th century.
Before that, men danced ritualistically in Egypt, ancient Greece, and Rome.
The Spartans even took dance as part of military training.
That in basic military training, soldiers are put through drill in order to be able
to carry themselves properly, to discipline the instrument that is their body.
And classical ballet and military training have that analogy.
In both cases, it's to be able to discipline the body.
And it obviously has different objectives.
Very much fewer corpses lie on the ballroom floor than do on the battlefield.
But nonetheless, this is what it's about.
Even ballet, long considered a feminine art form, is the brainchild of the male sex.
It was rather a strange evolution, I think.
It was started by men and in the court, and then, but ballet as we know it in its beginnings,
they rather got pushed to the sidelines or the background.
This is the birthplace of ballet's first male star.
Now, most of the world's great male dancers, from Nijinsky to Nureyev, were born in poverty.
But not all.
The exception was Louis XIV, the central character in the story of the male ballet dancer.
The story opens at the Palace of Versailles, where a grand celebration is taking place.
The king, Louis XIV, encourages all of his male courtiers to dance.
He even performs a solo himself, as the Sun King.
Women, meanwhile, are reminded that throwing oneself about with physical abandon is unladylike,
and they are fitted with restrictive costumes.
The second act takes place in the world's first dance school, where, at King Louis's
behest, ballet grows from court entertainment to academic practice.
Primo ballerinos include Pierre Beauchamp, who defines the five basic positions of the
feet, ballet's technical building blocks, Jean Balin, the great dancer and innovator
whose practice of leaping is today named after him, and Jean-Georges Nover, who develops
plausible plot lines and emphasizes a more realistic style of acting.
But as in all great romantic ballets, misfortune visits the male dancer in the form of a light
and lyrical creature, the ballerina.
The male dancer falls from grace and all but dies.
And in the joyous third act, he is rescued by a group of handsome heroes and restored
to his former glory.
Let's talk about that second act and the famous fall from grace that reduced opinion of the
male dancer from this.
Men in ballet, I think it's wonderful, I love to watch them.
Well those guys are amazing, they do things our greatest athletes couldn't do.
To this.
Male dancers?
I haven't dated any of those for sure.
Oh those guys, I think some of those guys are pretty light in their loafers.
Interesting use of words, because the reason for the male dancer's downfall was this.
With the coming of the industrial revolution, Europe rebelled against traditional forms.
Artists and audiences alike looked to something that transcended the squalor and anonymity
of their age.
Art focused on beauty, fragility, and idealism.
What better personification of these ideals than the female form?
And what better tool to elongate and extenuate that form than the pointe shoe?
All through the 19th century we needed to float.
The ideal was woman, floating on a tiny toe tip, leaving the ground, hiding the effort.
With the advent of the pointe shoe, ballet was now entirely centered on the ballerina.
Try as he might, the male dancer could not come up with a comparable feet.
He even tried to dance on pointe himself.
Another part of the costume the male dancer appropriated from the ballerina proved to
be more than a facile plea for equal stage time.
Eventually, tights would become the male dance costume of choice and would help to reintroduce
audiences to the beauty of the male form.
But for many years before that, tights would hang around the male dancer's neck like a
noose.
When I joined the National Ballet, I would kind of say, you know, aren't you embarrassed
wearing tights?
The ballet costume is very functional.
And it's to enable freedom of movement.
And it's also to enable us to appreciate the line of the body.
And if tights happen to facilitate that, which they do, why not wear tights?
I mean, if you want to wear baggy pants doing an arabesque, it's not going to look very
effective.
So this is the reason why those costumes and those steps happen to work very well together.
And now if people are worried that that makes men look effeminate, you can't deal with that.
It's in the eye of the beholder.
I remember once a talk that Edward Villela gave at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston
in which they asked what it was like to grow up in Queens studying ballet.
And he said, well, not too many guys in Queens were wearing tights.
And it's true.
He didn't have a supportive environment, but in fact, he was wearing the costume that he
had to to dance the steps that he was dancing.
And for those of you who are wondering what it is we wear under our tights, and I know
you're out there, it's this, an undergarment known as a dance belt, which helps to define
the body in an aesthetically pleasing way.
How's that for getting around the censors?
Well, what is the importance or significance of a dance belt?
Well, I think we'd sell more tickets if they weren't worn.
But tights, belts, hats, shoes, capes, no accessories could steal focus from the ballerina.
So for the next hundred years or so, the male dancer contented himself with raising the
function of the portour to a high art.
And I think for female dancers, the biggest difficulty is that we are the one out in front
and we actually have the easier job in the sense that we have to create the flow of movement.
We have to create the shape of the movement and our male partner behind us has to facilitate
that movement and work along with us without hampering our ability to move.
So it becomes a very, very high skilled thing.
Aided by her portour, the ballerina could now claim the entire art for herself.
Ballet had become a distinctly feminine art form.
Even into the first half of the 20th century, male participation in ballet would be the
result of accident rather than design.
And those who brave the stigma of effeminacy would pay a considerable price.
Whenever you ask a man how he got started dancing, it was always some convoluted way,
some accident that happened.
Usually, anyway, it was like he went to ballet class with his sister, was sitting there and
somebody dragged him in or something like that.
I got hit by a baseball, knocked unconscious while I was hanging out in the streets while
my sister was away at a local school.
And when my mother found out I was brought home unconscious and she wasn't there, she
dragged me to my sister's school.
I couldn't sit there and watch 40 giggling girls without having some kind of response
physically.
And so I waited until they started to jump.
I went in the back of the room, started to jump, and I started to make fun of it, disrupted
the class.
And the teacher gave me a dirty look and said, to my mother, you either get him out of here
or stick him in tights at the bar.
So the next day, there I was in tights at the bar.
I heard so many male dancers say how they had to fight their way.
They always were getting into fights and defending themselves.
In my school days, these are just examples, when some of us who weren't boarders would
go to the tube stations to go home and there were all schools converging and our children
talk and shout at each other, whatever, and what school do you come from?
No one ever really said the Royal Banner School.
We were fools.
Most of my time with my friends, I was proving that I was as virile or more virile, fortunately
for me, being very, very physical, very, very fast.
And with the ballet training, I was that much quicker and stronger than anybody else.
So I didn't stand for too much.
It's kind of interesting that at that time, though, if you had been on the stage as a
hooper, you were accepted.
But if you were on the stage as a ballet dancer, different story.
You have to remember that in North America, men began dancing, usually in their middle
to late teens.
And many of the men that chose to dance at that period were gay men.
It was an area they thought they could be safe in.
That has changed enormously in the last 30 or 40 years when we are now choosing eight-year-olds
to be in our ballet, to begin training.
And the percentage of gay men in ballet has reduced enormously.
And I think it was about men being afraid of going to this art form that had gay men
in it.
It frightened them.
You know, what if people think, people may think if I go to see this, that this interests
me.
So I will not go.
This is a feminine art form.
Now, the other reason I believe that's true is the compensation involved.
So why are men going into something where men cannot make a living, which was true in
the 40s and when I started dancing in the 50s?
So you had to be sort of careful.
You have suspect motives and you have a large percentage of gay people in this.
It's something to be suspect about.
Whatever form this reproach and harassment may have taken in 1836, it hardly bothered
one dancer, August Bornenville, the man who would start the revolution that would reinstate
the male dancer.
That year, this Danish dancer choreographer saw a production, La Sylphide, at the time
a vehicle for the great ballerina Marie Taglioni.
Bornenville returned home and restaged it with the emphasis on the male lead.
In Paris, then the center of world culture, the male dancer was dead.
But in Denmark, thanks to Bornenville, he was alive and kicking.
I think Mr. Bornenville's own ego helped us produce those male dancers.
He very much wanted to showcase his own dancing, even when he was director of the Royal Danish
Ballet.
And if you will notice in a ballet he did for himself and his star female pupil, Lucille
Grande, called La Sylphide, the Sylph, all of his variations have very clear endings.
All of her, everything she does trails off, does not complete, and he starts dancing in
the middle of it.
This is so that he will have applause and she will not.
Very calculated.
Then in 1909, an event occurred which would once again reverse the male dancer's fortunes
and restore him to his early glory.
That year in Paris, the curtain rose on a talent so formidable that even today people
speak of him in mythic terms.
His name, Vaslav Nijinsky.
Unlike Louis XIV, Nijinsky was born into poverty in 1888.
After his father left the family, Vaslav's mother placed him in Russia's premier dance
academy, the Imperial Ballet School of St. Petersburg.
Nijinsky's instructors were schooled in the style of August Bornenville.
They groomed young Vaslav for stardom.
In his teens, Nijinsky began appearing in productions by the Mariinsky Theater, where
he came under the influence of choreographer Michel Fokine.
Together, under the subsidy of impresario Serge Diaghilev, Nijinsky and Fokine would
dethrone the ballerina from the world stage.
You hear about the fabulous leaps and the way he would stay in the air, as they said.
And you can almost picture it.
And then you see how through the years and the tradition development and how technically
really the male dancer technique has developed enormously through the many years.
And you see someone like Nureyev perform Spectral Arrows many, many years later.
And you see a Soloviev, for example, perform it also too, and you say, wow, can it actually
have been that good already then?
And can it actually get better than that?
That's what's so beautiful and amazing.
When Diaghilev first imported Nijinsky to the West, the French were driven wild by this
virtuoso display of Russian male dancing.
As a result, Western audiences developed an insatiable appetite for Soviet male dancers.
Over the coming years, Russian companies, each with their male stars, began to tour
the West on a regular basis.
But by the middle of the century, wanting to sustain this broader acclaim and seeking
greater freedom of expression, Russian dancers began to defect.
For one particular dancer, this precarious act came easy.
After all, rebellion had always been a part of his fiery individualistic character.
So at an airport outside of Paris in 1961, the greatest male dancer since Vaslav Nijinsky
declared himself a free agent.
One was very ready to perhaps put the mantle of Nijinsky on another living being.
And he came with this enormous sort of furore of a Russian defecting.
So it was self-made mass media publicity.
But of course, he had the great, enormous charismatic talent to back it up.
Dance was popular within the world of dance.
Everyone knew who Nijinsky was in the world of dance.
Nereyev took it one step further.
He brought ballet to mass public like the Beatles did.
He brought it to a world that never knew about what dance was all about.
Unlike the androgynous Nijinsky, Rudolf Nereyev would bring to ballet the very quality that
exempted men from it in the first place, animalism.
It was like an animal, flailing nostrils and marvelous tartar cheekbones and the passion
and the power and the quietness as he leapt and he stole onto the stage.
I'm really so tiger on stage.
I saw lion on stage.
I saw huge, big, big animal on stage.
1962 would be a milestone year for Nereyev.
He would be paired with Margot Fontaine to form the most famous dance partnership of
our time.
She was very wary at being at her stage in her career and this young tiger that had jumped
into the midst.
He was wild and crazy.
He wanted it absolutely right.
And then you have Margot whose musicality was absolutely impeccable.
And so therefore if you look at them, they weren't that much different.
On the outside perhaps, but inwardly their desire to find this absolute purity and cleanliness
and simplicity was the same.
So it was really a wonderful match.
Thanks to the showmanship and iconoclasm of Nijinsky and Nereyev, dance history has been
rewritten.
In their wake, most of the full length classics originally developed for the ballerina have
been restaged to include solos, variations and psychological depth for the male roles.
Originally Sleeping Beauty, the male dancer did not have a solo in the third act.
He had a coda, the second little solo, he had a coda.
He did not have the main big solo that was later installed years later.
Originally in La Bahia there, the male dancer did not have a solo in the second act in
the Kingdom of the Shades.
His big solo came inside the palace, one act before.
Today when they perform just the Kingdom of the Shades, they have his big solo from the
palace with the big coda of the Kingdom of the Shades.
Further, a number of male dancers have gone on to command handsome salaries and participation
amongst the young is at an all-time high.
I think now they're almost reigning supreme in a way because one hears around the world
that there's more talent in schools amongst the boys than there tends to be amongst the
girls and I know a lot of directors believe it's sort of the time of men.
And as for the stigma?
As far as the stigma goes, I do think that the stigma of effeminacy from a male dancer,
I think that is just about a thing of the past.
There's no question that there has been a far greater acceptance of what we do generally
but more specifically what our male dancers do, a far greater acceptance now than there
ever has been.
From the days of Louis XIV through to the artistry and acclaim of Nijinsky and Nureyev,
the male dancer has come full circle.
It's incredibly gratifying and rewarding.
I mean, you know how many guys go off and learn to play instruments or in a rock band
or take the musical side of that spiritual fulfillment and then on the other side they
will do the physical, the sports side of that fulfillment.
But well, this is both in one.
Nice.
Music
Oh,
I'm
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Imagine you're a young dancer.
Imagine that you've been invited to a gala evening to dance the greatest moments from
the classic ballets.
Imagine yourself dancing these great works in front of a full house, in the company of
some of the greatest dancers in the world, heroes long admired.
Imagine the electricity.
Imagine the chemistry.
Imagine the poignancy.
And when all is said and done, imagine you and your fellow performers basking in the
applause.
And as you take a bow, imagine yourself thinking, God, I hate these things.
Every ballet has its memorable moments, the black swan pas de deux in Swan Lake, the rose
adage in The Sleeping Beauty, the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet.
Audiences enjoy these moments so much that they're often performed separately, the same
way that a hit show tune is often performed outside the musical it's from.
These excerpts are usually performed at galas, which are black tie fundraisers for dance
companies or charity.
It's the same as you'd have in an athletic contest.
I mean, there are certain climaxes in the bullfight and on the cricket pitch and so on.
Certain things that stand out, moments that are great, worth celebrating.
So you carve them out of the ballet and present them as a smorgasbord.
For an audience, attending a gala is twice as pleasurable as attending a ballet.
Firstly, it's an evening composed exclusively of highlights.
And second, galas are a great format for a dance company or group of dance companies
to show off their best dancers.
The gala needs to be that, it needs to be one extraordinary dancer after another coming
out at their absolute optimum best.
Ironically, for the dancer, it's these same reasons, the volume of stars and the nature
of the dance pieces that limit the gala's appeal.
Whenever you go to a gala, the biggest problem is that, first of all, as compared to being
one of, say, five or six principal dancers in your own company, you're there in a whole
company of all principal dancers, and therefore all requiring the same amount of time, the
same amount of preparation time, of stage time, of recognition of whatever, of publicity
of this, of that.
And you realize that when you go to a gala, you're not going to get the extra time, you're
going to get your ten minutes to prepare or whatever, and that's all.
Despite the fact that one felt that it was, number one, a performance opportunity, and
number two, either for a good cause or whatever, there was always an element of competition
about it.
It's the circus.
It's the queen.
We will see who is the one to turn the best, who is the one to fall.
That's it, a bit.
I think that, I think it was also taking what were technically difficult and challenging
things out of context.
I mean, getting up to do Black Swan when you hadn't done the white act, and I was just
so, I think just very difficult.
I used to find it horrible.
You lose the context in which the dance first appeared.
Now if it's a dance that's purpose is simply to show off, to show off in a very civilized
manner I grant, then that's fine.
But when there's a narrative understanding that you should have of where that fits into
the ballet, then I'm sort of sorry to lose that in a gala, because you are just having
things yanked out of context.
There's little artistic directors can do about the atmosphere of one upmanship at a gala,
but they usually resolve the dancer's dilemma with the material by mixing in a number of
short abstract ballets.
Inevitably these mood pieces are the hit of the evening.
A perfect example of one of these works is a short solo developed by choreographer Michel
Faucine.
Though Faucine was at the cutting edge of dance, he devised this piece as a throwback
to the age of the white ballets.
Reconstructing a period style, Faucine developed a poetic piece for a childhood friend about
a bird in the throes of death.
The piece was the dying swan and the friend, the incomparable Anna Pavlova.
Her style was never controversial, her technique a little heavy handed.
But nevertheless, Anna Pavlova did more to popularize ballet than any other figure.
She toured the world with her own company from 1911 until her death in 1931, leaving
indelible memories with thousands who had never before seen ballet.
She went through the whole world, never mind how small was the city where she was, she
was always bringing ballet and bringing her name equally to everybody.
The Dying Swan was her signature piece.
Its rich technical and emotional demands suggest what an absolute master Pavlova must have
been.
I suppose it's something that you need to perform many times to really find your own
unique way of doing it, you know, because it's so associated with Maya Plisetskaya and
Pavlova.
You know everyone sort of has an image of how they would imagine it being done and it's
hard even in our own minds to break through that and find your own way of expressing yourself
in a piece like that.
Not an easy act to follow, which brings up an important question.
When you have so many great short pieces and excerpts, how do you decide in which order
to present them?
It's a bigger challenge than it is to put a full-length ballet on, theatrically, you
know, and give the audience a good experience.
I mean one either has to put them together thematically or to outright say, you know,
boast and say this is how versatile these dancers are and do, you know, a contemporary
piece, a tutu piece and a theatre piece, you know, but they're difficult to put together.
They tend to have a certain sameness to them because the pas de deux form, the duet form
in ballet is we dance together, we each dance alone and we dance together again.
Now if you've seen that three or four times or five or six times wherein dancers have
taken the material and sculpted it on themselves and done their best steps, they tend to all
then look the same and after four or five of these.
So one has to craft the evening in a way that keeps them separate and try to do things that
are very different from each other, not things that tend to look alike.
A piece that is a mainstay of many a gala is Le Corsaire, a dazzling display of leaps,
turns and spinning jumps.
When
it's danced at its very best, Le Corsaire, it collects all of those aspects of dance
all in one wonderful little package and that is athleticism and zest and courage and musicality
and joy and exuberance and artistry and it literally can knock the roof off a theatre
and lift people to their feet.
From Le Corsaire, we move to a piece that recalls the great age of the romantic ballets.
However, unlike his dying swan, Faucine's Les Sulfides set to the music of Frédéric
Chopin features no real characters and is free of any idle pyrotechnics.
If approached in that spirit, in the spirit of it not being an old classical ballet, you
know, the white tutus, almost a cliché, but understanding that it came from a new spirit
and a new exploration and that in fact Faucine was influenced by Isadora Duncan when he choreographed
Les Sulfides in its almost impressionistic approach, it can be really one of the most
exquisite ballets to dance.
...
If ballet has a golden age, it may well be the time of Marius Petipa, the great choreographer
who, between 1847 and 1903, developed some 60 full-length ballets.
In the last days of Russia's imperial theater, Petipa devised a piece in the Tchaikovskyian
tradition of his heyday.
Though Petipa was then in his 80s, he hadn't lost his touch.
In fact, Raimonda is so full of choice moments, artistic directors have a hard time deciding
which one to perform at a gala.
Come on, hold it up.
If
Petipa had a flaw, it was his almost total disregard for the male dancer. In fact, when
choreographing, Petipa often left whatever little solos the male dancer had to his assistant. One
of them, Lev Ivanov, thought enough of the danseur noble to develop this gala circuit
favorite, the bluebird, from Petipa's The Sleeping Beauty.
The old showbiz dictum, always leave them wanting more, is perhaps truer in the gala
dance evening than it is anywhere else. What better way to wrap up then than with the flash
and fire of the most spirited moment in all of ballet, the grand pas de deux from Don Quixote.
A pretty solid lineup, but stringing together a medley of ballet's greatest hits isn't enough
to lure an audience to a gala. There has to be stars, performers with that magical quality
no one seems to be able to explain.
Well, you don't choose stars. They make themselves. There's no one teacher or a group of teachers,
directors, can actually make a star. You're born with it. I mean, nobody can make a Karen
Kane. You can train her physically. You can give her images. You can tell her little stories
to help interpretation. But if that dancer hasn't got it inside, if she's not born with
it or he is not born with that indefinable something, then nobody can do it. I mean,
I guess God could do it, but I couldn't.
Well, there's many, many different elements, but I think the final, final thing that makes
you a star is the public and the way that they relate to you, the way that you communicate
with them, the way that they see you, the fact that they recognize something in you
that is unique.
So if the public is the one definable element that goes into making a star, then it goes
without saying that dancers have to give them what they want. And that means appearing in
galas.
But I understand the necessity for those things. You've got to be flashy and glitzy, especially
when you are performing for a so-called gala audience. There are audiences that respect
and love and have knowledge of your repertoire and manner and style. And there are audiences
who will come only to a gala. And those are very important audiences because they support
you.
And hey, it's not all bad.
I think it's a great experience when you have a gala and you go there and you see every
company. You see a couple from London, a couple from the English National Ballet and Royal,
and then you see the Kira and the Bolshoi. They're all beautiful, but they're completely
different. And they all have their own way. And every dancer has their own way. I think
that's a great experience because it's not that one is better than the other, but they're
different. That's what gala is all about.
To wit, one can successfully argue that galas are responsible for developing a new breed
of performer, the universal dancer.
There's a Russian, there's a Vaganova method, there is an Italian method, Cicchetti, and
there is a Royal Academy of Dancing, which is an English method. But the wonderful thing
about the evolution of our art is that these methods are gradually coming together. And
it is now absolutely possible for a Canadian or an American dancer to go and join the Bolshoi
Ballet and fit in very well, thank you very much, or vice versa.
You can have little mannerisms of style which are different. I mean, it's possible that
the French style will use a little more turned up wrist, a little more flowery use of the
hands than, say, an English style which is rather simple and flat, plain. But those are
very small details these days.
Very small indeed, like the concerns of the world's great dancers in comparison to the
endless pleasure they bring to the public every time they put their remarkable talents
on display at a gala evening.
Thank you very much.