Contractual Obligations: The National Ballet's Fiftieth Season

university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 2, spring 2003 JAMES NEUFELD Contractual Obligations: The National Ballet=s Fiftieth Season With the 2001B2 season, the National Ballet of Canada marked its fiftieth anniversary as a classically based ballet company. While much of the repertoire was chosen to provide a retrospective review of the company=s rich performance tradition, it was not just an exercise in nostalgia. The season focused unflinchingly on the future, with the world premiere of The Contract, an ambitious new work by James Kudelka, and his first original full-length work for the company. More of The Contract later. A more urgent matter requires discussion first. Six years into Kudelka=s tenure as artistic director, and fifty years since the company=s founding, what does it mean to describe the organization as >classically-based=? The question is no more a capitulation to nostalgia and sentiment than the season itself was. The company=s vision for its future is intrinsically bound up in its relationship to its past. And Kudelka=s retrospective glance demonstrated just how radically he has redefined that relationship since taking control of the company. If the choreography of Marius Petipa is the touchstone for a classically based company, then the most striking feature of the season was the absence from the repertoire (apart from the annual Christmas Nutcracker) of any full-length Petipa ballet. With the creation of works like Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty for the court theatre of imperial Russia, Petipa defined a tradition of full-length story ballet and a style of physical presentation of the human body that characterized >classical= ballet for a century after his death. Companies emerging in the twentieth century, like the Royal Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, and the National Ballet of Canada, measured themselves by the yardstick of the Petipa repertoire. Acceptance of his standard as an ideal inevitably coloured every other aspect of a company=s creations. The dancers who could present Petipa convincingly were schooled in a certain style of presentation founded on the five basic positions of the body, a style that emphasized the turnout of the dancer=s body, accepted the convention of women dancing on pointe, and understood the mimed vocabulary with which the involved stories of these ballets were advanced. Audiences too were schooled in these conventions. Like any highly conventional art form, ballet of this style was inherently artificial; it required fluency in the artifice, on the part of both performer and audience, for the art form to work. And fluency depended on familiarity. university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 2, spring 2003 An initial glance at the fiftieth anniversary brochure, then, proved shocking to any observer familiar with the company=s history. Celia Franca, its founding artistic director, had held firmly to the credo that the classics of the Petipa (and the earlier Romantic) repertoire were the company=s raison d=être. If it could dance those works, it could dance anything else; if it didn=t dance those works, it was failing in a fundamental part of its obligations to its public and its art form. It took Franca twenty-one years to get the company to a point where it could mount a full Sleeping Beauty. That production, by Rudolf Nureyev in 1972, proved to be the capstone of her career. Shortly after achieving this cherished goal, Franca retired as artistic director of the company. But Petipa was represented in the fiftieth-anniversary celebrations by only two extracts, both performed on a single program: Paquita, the surviving remnant of divertissements culled from a now-forgotten story ballet, and act 3 of Sleeping Beauty, the wedding celebrations of Aurora and Prince Florimund, again a series of divertissements including among them the famous Bluebird pas de deux. These ornate examples of nineteenth-century grandeur appeared on either side of Sir Frederick Ashton=s austere Monotones. The contrasts of such eccentric programming did nothing to flatter the florid conventions of the older tradition. The shock provided by the anniversary season brochure proved, on reflection, to be the shock of recognition; the season=s perfunctory acknowledgment of the Petipa tradition simply reflected the company=s overall programming strategy since...