Jacobs Laura - Celestial Bodies: How to Look at Ballet

H OW TO LOOK AT BALLET? W HILE WRITING THIS book, there were moments when I felt it could have been subtitled How to Think About Ballet. We assume that how to look and how to think are two different things. Yet when it comes to balletto all dance, actuallylooking and thinking, separate faculties at first, eventually begin to work as one faculty. Looking becomes a form of thinking.

We know that dancers develop their bodies to a point of exquisite coordination. But we in the audience do the same with our seeing, so much so that the dance is actually happening on both sides of the footlights. We begin to place our trust in visual echoes, references, and metaphorsglimpses and images that we assume everyone sees but that, as we learn later when talking to others, sometimes only we have seen. Thats the way this art is. And while there is often consensus on what a gesture, a step, an entire ballet may mean, interpretations can also vary widely. We all bring our own history to the ballet, each of us with his or her own interpretative framework, and these too inform a performance.

Through aural memory, which is stored in the brains auditory cortex, humans have the capacity to retain whole songs, symphonies, and scores seemingly forever. Sight is different. We remember what weve seen in snapshots or, at best, in seconds of live capture. Most of us cant replay in our minds eye long skeins of movement from past performances. And anyway, on a big stage there is no way to take in every inch of whats happening. This means that no matter how many times we see a ballet there will always be something new to wonder at, to puzzle over, to see for the first time. With a change in cast, there will be dancers who emphasize different aspects of a role and bring different meanings to a work. Because we cant ever completely possess a ballet, it continues to surprise.

This freedom from finality is why companies can keep the greatest ballets perpetually in repertory, where they circle around and back, year after year, bringing new insights and deepening discovery. Paradoxically, this rhythm of cyclical or eventual return, of ballets never gone for long, also brings a reassuring stability, a steady heartbeat, to the art form. Ballets can be delicious meringues, old friends, vintage wines, great loves, grand banquets, spiritual sustenance, long-standing enigmas. Some ballets (we each have our own list of these) are like difficult relatives at a family gathering: here they come again, oh well, cant hurt to catch up and see how they are doing. Other ballets loom large. What would December be without The Nutcracker? It is as loved and leaned upon as Handels Messiah and Dickenss A Christmas Carol.

As we become more comfortable with our own cognitive leaps and turns, our own wanderings within a work, we will bring new spins to a ballet we thought we knew. The greatest ballets reward endless looking. They are glass-bottom boats, Prousts madeleine, C. S. Lewiss wardrobe, Bluebeards castle, Freuds couch, Dr. Caligaris cabinet, Kubrickian space odysseys, and superkinetic PlayStations. They take you places you never dreamed of going.

Ballet is energy and energy is life. As with any foreign territory, we can approach an evening at the ballet with a fear of the unknown or with an open heart, a belief that success is in the seeing. The way to go is with an open heart.