Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet by Jennifer Homans (review)

The centennial of the most notorious ballet premiere of the twentieth century provided the occasion for the Joffrey Ballet to tour its 1987 reconstruction of Nijinsky’s choreography for Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps and to remind us of several aspects of the unique difficulties of the transmission of performance arts. Ballet still does not have a universal system of notation and thus depends primarily upon transmission by living performers to remain in the repertoire. Nijinsky’s masterpiece did not give rise to a tradition by which it might continue to live. The subtitle of the Sacre—Pictures of Pagan Russia in Two Acts—suggests an explanation for its lack of longevity if viewed in the context of the history of ballet as told by Jennifer Homans. Although religion and nationalism are elements of the cultural context in which any art develops, the kind and degree of their prominence may be productive or destructive. Nijinsky’s choreography failed to survive because it was too pagan and ultranationalist for the inherently hierarchical and cosmopolitan art of ballet.

Homans’s history of ballet from its origins as a ritual performance of physical and metaphysical order in the court of Louis XIV to the decades after the death of George Balanchine in 1983 traces the complex interactions of religion and nationalism in Western Europe, Russia, the Soviet Union, and the United States. She shows by her meticulous research how the developing discipline of classical ballet both draws on and distances itself from popular and local forms of entertainment and recreation. Often it is by some personal serendipity or political cataclysm that ballet has found its greatest opportunities to flourish: the Ballets Russes never performed in Russia before or after the revolution, but Diaghilev gave Nijinsky, Stravinsky, and Balanchine the occasion to work in Europe in ways that would have been impossible in the Russian Imperial Theater at that time. A generation earlier, however, Marius Petipa, foundering in the French ballet, had created the signature dances of Romantic ballet, The Nutcracker, Sleeping Beauty, and Swan Lake, for that very same Imperial Theater. In each case, and later when Balanchine began his School of American Ballet, claims about the national character of the art were—given its heterogeneous history—prospectively rather than retrospectively correct. The attempt to create authentically national ballets, as in the case of Nijinsky’s Sacre, ran contrary to the transnational and transcendent capacities inherent in dance and music. Louis XIV, a nationalist par excellence, understood the performance of ballet as affirming the sacred order of a hierarchical universe.

It was not accidental that Louis’s favorite role was that of Apollo, the Sun King and divine warden of the arts, or that Balanchine recounts how he first understood the artistic value of selection in choreography when he studied Stravinsky’s score for his 1928 ballet Apollo, a piece that has retained its place in the international repertoire. When Balanchine wanted conflict as his theme, he did not choose the Dionysian blood sacrifice of the Sacre, a piece he had not been allowed to choreograph in his youth in Russia and to which he never returned when perfectly free to do so. Rather, he and Stravinsky collaborated on Agon (1957) and synchronized the differences of music and movement in modern versions of seventeenth-century French court dances. The sarabande, galliard, and bransle may have originated in pagan practices, but now they were set to both diatonic and twelve-tone scales and made to demonstrate the value of complex orders being regulated by human time, rather than by the primeval cycle of the seasons.

Homans makes clear in her paean to Balanchine that his desire to make compositions for his dancers and his audiences came from his belief that art can nourish the soul when it articulates the value of a metaphysical and sacred order. As he said: “God creates, I assemble.” The elegiac ending of this history of ballet mourns not so much the loss of a...