The Ballet Russe quit Boston last Saturday after a two weeks' run, leaving in the minds of many exactly the same feeling that it had always left, namely that the ballet as exhibited nowadays in the various Ballets Russes is an anachronistic artificial genre, without roots in the life or culture of the people, and totally lacking in appeal to a twentieth-century citizen. Perhaps it is impertinent to talk about ballet in a column devoted to music. But since music frames ballet just as it does opera, I think it fair to discuss ballet in relation to society as a whole.

Ballet Degenerate

French and Russian Ballet, then, is a rotted hulk of the great pre-war ballet of Serge Diaghilev. It is too clogged with unnaturalness to have very much meaning today. For one thing, its stories are mostly mythological or fanciful, handled as though in a complete vacuum, with not the slightest trace of anything to link them with real life. The music, too, is defective in that it is addicted to effect and picturization rather than spontaneous expression. But probably what makes old-style ballet so sterile is the fact that this is primarily not a dancing age: that is, it is an age in which one dances not to express emotion, but for recreation. The motions of the human limb per se do not have aesthetic meaning for us. So that there is something a trifle anomalous in the sight of the Russian ballerina pirouetting and pointing, performing entrechats and arabesques in many a graceful convolution, all to sketch out some ethereal emotion which might better be conveyed by ten lines of print or ten bars of plain music. And as for ballet's being an "interpretation" of music; if the music accompanying a ballet is really good, it can stand on its own feet without interpretation. If it isn't good, dressing it up with a lot of arty toe-dancing doesn't, in my opinion, make it any more worth hearing.

Ballet Expresses Rapture

A ballet devotee may tell you that the business of ballet dancing is to express ecstasy. Perhaps so. But somehow, in this "undancing" day and age, ecstasy if it is to be expressed at all must be expressed differently, through notes or words. Creative dancing is remote from our way of life, as remote as bodily nudity. In Greek days, choral dancing was an integral part of the religious life of the people, and thus it became a perfectly natural medium of artistic expression. I doubt whether the audiences at the Radio City Music-Hall today really enjoy the short ballet sequences in the show. If they do, it is because of their decorativeness, and not any emotional content. The Communist Party has found in ballet a potent medium for disseminating its ideology--this is good because here the dancing really says something important to the spectator, and does not just fill the eye with spectacle. Certain naive ballet companies, too, are experimenting with dances on American themes. This may become a successful genre, and a vital branch of our culture. Until it does, the ballet of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, the Original Ballet Russe, and the other remnants of the Diaghilev troupe, remains here on suffrage, kept alive by a demand for spectacle of a highbrow, somewhat snobbish, sort.