Breaking new ground in ballet to create magic

As my birthday present to myself this year, I bought a ticket to American Ballet Theatre's production of Jane Eyre.  While it would never occur to me to go to a movie by myself (and I never have), and while I can usually find someone to go see a play or musical with me, I've never considered even asking anyone if they wanted to go to the ballet with me. It's something I enjoy alone, occasionally getting into a conversation with the middle-aged or older people around me who ask if I'm a dancer (when I watch ballet, I might as well wear a neon flashing sign with arrows saying "DANCER").  Afterwards, I call my mom and give her my long, passionate commentary on what I've just seen and, as is the case with Jane Eyre, continue to talk to her about it for days afterward—because I find ballet fascinating and beautiful and wonderful and, at its best, a reflection of human emotion, connection, and expression at its most revealing, primal, stripped-down level, not to mention a testament to the potential of the human body and the dedication and hard work of those onstage.

But no one wants to go to the ballet. They find it boring, slow, boring, old-fashioned, and boring. Spins and tricks like what they see on TV shows can hold their interest, but a full-length story ballet too often holds little interest for the average modern young person—at least in my social sphere.  Many think ballet is nothing but white tights and tutus and scurrying around on your toes with your arms over your head.   With such a concept of "ballet," it's no wonder that they feel it has no relation or connection to everyday life.

One significant hurdle that shapes the public's view of "ballet" is the costumes.  How can my hockey-loving husband get interested in a night of watching guys dance around in white tights and no pants, while the ladies wear skirts that stick straight out and wear light pink tights that bear no relation to their skin color?  I get it.  When I was little, I remember having a Barbie coloring book.  It had a picture of Ballet Ken, dressed for the stage.  I was five or six at the time, and though I was already taking ballet, I wasn't familiar with the classical stage garb for the art.  I remember gasping and asking my mom why Ken wasn't wearing any pants and then giggling when she told me that's how men dress in ballet.  To this day, despite having donned plenty of tutus, I don't understand either tutus or the fact that men wear tights instead of pants.  Let's be real—it takes longer to get invested in a story emotionally when the guy is wearing a shirt but with... shiny white nylon tights, and when the girl is wearing an umbrella as a skirt.  No one has ever dressed like this in real life.

Oh hey there, did you forget your pants?

  Costuming, whether in movies, on the stage, or in real life, helps create a character. How someone dresses informs who they are.  When a character onstage is dressed in a way that bears little resemblance to how a real-life person would dress, it automatically creates a barrier between the person the audience sees onstage and the audience themselves—it inhibits the audience's ability to relate to the character and to what they're watching, to see themselves in the character and story onstage, to see how the dancers reflect their own innermost feelings, fears, wishes, hopes, and desires.  We as an audience can still be pulled in by the magnificent dancing and acting, but we're already seeing the dancers onstage as something other than reflections of ourselves.  That's a huge barrier to any type of theatre being as effective as it could be.  Dancers on Broadway, whether men or women, even with highly technical and ballet-influenced work, are able to wear costumes that still show off the leg line cleanly but also provide the general look of everyday clothes.  Why can't ballet do the same?

Movin' Out, with costumes that reflect real-life clothes, on Broadway

Much of the answer to this is "tradition."  Ballet has always been done with tutus and white tights, and so it always will be.  Just as certain mime movements have always been used to mean certain things in ballet, certain structures have always been used for presenting a pas de deux, certain arms are almost always used for certain steps... but why?  Why can't we continue to honor the tradition that ballet is steeped in while also allowing it to be a living, breathing, evolving art form?

The production of Jane Eyre I saw, which originated at The Northern Ballet in England in 2016 and was choreographed by Cathy Marston, fully embraced the notion of ballet as an evolving art form and defied tradition in breathtakingly effective fashion, in almost every way conceivable.  It repeatedly left me asking myself, "Why have I not seen another choreographer do this yet?" and drew me in to the story and characters emotionally in a way I never before have at the ballet, despite my immense love of the art form.  And it has left me thinking about it after the fact for days and craving discussion about it... something I have done for theatre but cannot remember ever doing for ballet.  In short, it was the most emotionally effective ballet production I have ever seen, and it did so by breaking the rules of ballet.

The moment I stumbled upon the trailer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNa5rJ0JTEw) I knew I had to see this production.  Swan Lake it clearly was not. Pants for men, skin-colored tights for the ladies, and precisely the correct feeling of gothic romance present in the book.  I have always avoided film versions of the book Jane Eyre, which I have loved since first reading it while walking on the treadmill when I was around nine.  It is one of those books I very distinctly remember reading—I don't just remember the story itself but the reading of it, as if I have a video of my reading experience that I can play in my head.  I remember the feel of the book, the typeset, turning the pages, the dark, eerie feeling that enveloped me as I read, propelling myself forward on the treadmill even as Jane propelled herself forward as few women of her time could.  These characters jumped off the pages and became real—the first real characters I can remember reading in classic literature, whose feelings I felt as if they were my own.  What better characters to portray through dance?  Their inner turmoil and inner lives, their relationships with themselves and with each other and with society, are so full and rich that no art is as truly suited to expressing them as dance.  But what about ballet?  Can an art that lives bound by so many rules truly express the emotions of such rule breakers as Jane Eyre, Edward Rochester, and Charlotte Bronte?

Cathy Marston answered the question with a resounding Yes—and by breaking the rules herself, just as Bronte did in her groundbreaking work.  In ABT's Jane Eyre, gone are the classic positions of the arms, gone are the structures of how a pas de deux sequence should proceed, gone is the classic shoulder sit lift where the man parades the woman around as she sits on his shoulder and we all admire his strength and her beauty.  In its place is a ballet where each move means something, where dancers only touch if their characters touch, where a conversation is not mimed but rather danced, where you see and feel Jane and Rochester fall in love, where the dancing progresses the plot rather than the plot repeatedly pausing to showcase technical virtuosity that, though brilliant, does little or nothing to tell a story.  Isabella Boylston's Jane Eyre and Thomas Forster's Edward Rochester lived and breathed and felt as fully and deeply as any character on a page, on a stage, or on a screen ever has, without ever speaking a word.

Though at the ballet's beginning I found myself missing the technical ballet choreography I've grown accustomed to in ABT's productions, by the intermission, I was mesmerized and electrified by how deeply I had been drawn into the story, how incredibly invested I was in the lives of these characters.  If any dancer's arms ever went through first or fifth positions, I missed it.  And yet I didn't miss it.  Because what purpose would it serve here?  None.  And not one step in this production—not leg, nor foot, nor arm, nor hand, nor head—was created without serving a purpose and having a meaning.  Dancing and acting became one, and the dancers' bodies became vessels to express their souls.  The effect was stunning.

Isabella Boylston and Thomas Forster in Jane Eyre

Yet the official reviews, and some older audience members around me, clearly felt differently.  Their main complaints seem not to be so concerned with what the ballet is but rather what it is not.  It is not classical ballet, and any expectations that it is will be sorely disappointed.  Clinging to expectations seems to prevent them from allowing themselves to be wrapped in by the steps that are there.  One review criticizes the repetition of a movement phrase that exists between Jane and Rochester, failing to note that it is a movement theme for their relationship just as a film score has themes for relationships and characters.  In the framework of a classical ballet, the steps might just be repetitive, but in the framework of a story about characters and relationships, the repetition serves a purpose.  Jane even attempts to recreate one of the couple's movement themes with a potential suitor after she has left Rochester, and his failure to pick up on it serves to inform Jane's decision that she will never find what she had with Rochester with anyone else.  When she finds a broken Rochester, who is perhaps feeling too sorry for himself, at the end of the story, she literally kicks his leg to get him to engage in this same movement phrase again with her.  It is a moment at once humorous, heartwarming, heart-wrenching, feisty, and loving.  This subtlety was seemingly lost on reviewers too caught up in comparing the ballet to something it isn't rather than evaluating it for what it is.

At work this week, I found another dancer who had seen the production, and we talked for an hour and a half about both it and the evolution and potential future of ballet.  As companies across the country fold or downsize and increasingly move towards contemporary ballet that is still highly technical but tells no story, I don't know what the future of ballet is.  However, I hope it is one with room both for the full-length story ballets of centuries past and for brand-new full-length story ballets that use the immense power of the human body to create full characters and tell a story through dance.  Northern Ballet's production history includes 1984, The Great Gatsby, Peter Pan, and A Tale of Two Cities.  I can only hope that that spirit of innovation crosses the pond to this country and more rule-breaking, full-length story ballets like Jane Eyre are produced with regularity here.  How about Fahrenheit 451? The Scarlet Letter? Even Pretty Woman?  And what about the classics, always done with choreography that varies little from its centuries-old creation?  I dream of a Swan Lake where Prince Siegfried wears pants, and where not one swan wears a tutu.  And where every time Siegfried and Odette touch, the audience feels the same bolt of electricity I did when Rochester and Jane touched in Jane Eyre, rather than simply seeing a man who has to put his hands on a woman's waist to support her in turns or a lift.

Maybe if that happens, I not only can ask friends to go with me to the ballet with reasonable hope that someone will say yes, but I can even get my husband to go to the ballet. And that would really be magical.

~

Clips from Northern Ballet's production of Jane Eyre: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHh6uElAJr8

Northern Ballet's production of Jane Eyre