The Disneyfication of Ballet

I have had the pleasure of being in two different symphony orchestras that double as the pit orchestra for the same city's ballet company. This can be an extremely rewarding experience at times, getting to perform some of the greatest music ever written in its truest form. The Rite of Spring, Firebird, Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, and of course all of the canonical ballets of Pyotr Tchaikovsky. There has been a trend I've noticed after years of playing with these companies, though, that I find rather bothersome from a musician's perspective. It has to do with what kinds of contemporary ballets are being commissioned and performed, both in quality of composition but also in type and presentation. This trend could easily be argued to be part of the Disneyfication that has taken place in much of popular culture, where storylines are endlessly recycled and we rely on a small number of IP to produce a huge amount of entertainment. But in this case, we trade in our Mickey Mouse ears for a tiara and a tutu.

Ballet has a long and complex history that is not necessarily relevant to this essay. There are, however, several key points where the conceptualization of what ballet could be shifted monumentally. The first example stems from the 19th-century composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky, who was one of the first composers to truly elevate the musical aspects of ballet. Laura Jacobs writes in her book Celestial Bodies about Tchaikovsky's first ballet, Swan Lake, "Where ballet music of the time tended to be either tunefully thin or utterly forgettable, Swan Lake was the work of a musical genius." She goes on to point out that Tchaikovsky was the first composer to successfully apply a symphonic scale of expression to practical ballet structures. In other words, it wasn't just background music with a pulse for the dancers, but an equal artistic expression of the story that respected the audience's ears and the dancers' needs.

Tchaikovsky's ballets were so vast and uniquely autonomous that he was criticized by some at the time for his over-indulgence. It would have been considered distracting to have such rich textures emerge from the orchestral pit. These scores were thick and textural, and shifted harmonically much more than earlier romantic ballets. Still, Tchaikovsky managed to move the art form forward with his expressive music without overly rattling the cage. The plots of his ballets still presented like a ballet "should", featuring choreography that championed the "princess ballerina ideal," as Marcia B. Siegel puts it in her essay Choreographing Inclusion.

In other words, it had some level of continuation with the trend of supporting ideal movement, traceable back to the roots of ballet amongst European royalty where ballet was meant to show off how pristine the royalty was compared to the common folk. In fact, the conceptual origination of ballet was social hierarchy embodied in movement. By the 19th-century, this hierarchy was represented by the ballerina, whose perfection was often held up in equal terms to that of a princess, thus the term "princess ballerina ideal."

After Tchaikovsky, ballet shifted even further, again largely due to a shift in musical language. This time the shift was aided by Igor Stravinsky, another Russian composer who like Tchaikovsky was not limited by any one genre and used each genre to enlighten the others. In 1913, only 36 years after the premiere of Tchaikovsky's first ballet Swan Lake, Stravisnky's Rite of Spring premiered in Paris and resulted in an infamous riot that lasted throughout the performance. Unfortunately, the story around this riot has been largely put upon Stravinsky's music, but there was something equally revolutionary to his music happening on the stage that most likely was the true cause of the riot. The princess ballerina ideal was thrown out the window, instead replaced by a convulsing maiden dancing herself to death. Choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, Rite broke the rules of ballet. Rather than providing an idealism for movement, it presented a dystopian view of it. Rather than picturesque beauty and romanticized drama, it leaned into ritualistic and vulgar imagery. Jacobs calls this the "Chosen Maiden" - a new model for ballerinas of the 20th century that broke the mold so long held by romantic ballet.

So while Stravinsky is often accredited with the revolution that occurred in Paris at the premiere of Rite, it would be more accurate to say that he was continuing on the progression of the art form that Tchaikovsky started by building a massively symphonic and imposing score. Different from Tchaikovsky was the story and how it was portrayed on stage, but both composers were creating meaningful musical portrayals in tandem with their respective choreographic visionaries, bringing their next-level expertise of orchestral writing to an art form that was, up until this point in history, largely overlooked by the most skilled of composers.

The rest of the 20th played with these ideas, particularly with variations on the idea of the Chosen Maiden. Copland's Rodeo, for example, with its masculine female protagonist who tries to fit in with the cowboys. Or Fancy Free by Leonard Bernstein, where the entire point of the ballet is to make fun of those seeking the perfect woman, almost pointing and laughing at the history of ballet itself. Since these mid-century American ballet experiments, though, a fracturing of cultures, styles, and artistic goals has taken place.

There are now essentially two kinds of ballet companies in the United States: larger ones that represent any given big city in America, have a full-sized live pit orchestra for performances that take place in symphonic-type halls, and produce large-scale ballets featuring large casts of dancers and principle dancers; or, smaller ones that typically are more experimental, use live musicians but often not bigger than a chamber orchestra, and are more flexible in what venues they can perform in and utilize in more unique and inspired ways. While a handful of companies strictly exist to perform modern ballet, many companies of both varieties perform modern and classical ballets, a trend often attributed to British dancer and choreographer Dame Ninette de Valois. Indeed, it is common for ballet companies to feature either a premiere of a new ballet or a ballet by a living composer and choreographer in virtually every season, along with standards such as The Nutcracker.

Somehow, though, these so-called "modern" ballets feel like a return to the earliest days of romantic ballet, even before the revolutions of Tchaikovsky. The music is all too often composed by persons outside the standard symphonic pool of composers, presenting sounds of humdrum, monotony, and even tedium that do little to breathe life onto the stage. This may sound harsh, but the same could be said of orchestral ballet scores of the early 19th century. In the earliest days of romantic ballet, the music was purely secondary, and not meant to be a highlighted part of the event, even being discouraged from being too exciting so as not to distract the audience from the ballerinas on stage. It appears that this has somehow become renewed as standard practice for ballet music.

The subject matter has also regressed considerably. After the most profound of developments in the 20th century away from the princess ballerina ideal, we now live in an age where audiences appear to have returned to adore such an ideal. Some of the most popular ballets of the last 20 years have such titles: The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan. I understand the reason for this: there is a long tradition of ballets choosing subject material that audiences would already be familiar with. There is nothing inherently wrong with these stories being represented on stage. Rather, the issue would be with how repetitive these stories become. Something like: Act I sees the titular character breeze through some semi-dramatic events, and Act II is a celebratory scene with many troupes of various characters putting on dances for the titular character and the real-world audience. It's Nutcracker through different lenses, over and over again. If it wasn't for copyright, I have no doubt we would have a Lion King ballet with dancing elephants and giraffes. While that may be entertaining and encourage family attendance, it does absolutely nothing to push forward the genre in a meaningful way, nor would it likely inspire great symphonic scores on the scale of Swan Lake or Rite of Spring.

It should be noted that I am mostly referring here to full orchestra ballet scores. Every ballet company in America is doing interesting things with movement and dance, and dancers are pushing the formula in a variety of fascinating directions. However, because of the investment required in commissioning a large orchestral ballet, companies typically turn to the safest options for both plot and music. It appears that there are two universal criteria for these new large-scale ballets: the music must be unassuming, the plot familiar, and the choreography traditional and showy.

There are a few brave companies willing to break away with one of these criteria, but almost never all three. For example, San Francisco Ballet commissioned widely respected avante-garde composer Laura Auerbach to compose the music for The Little Mermaid in 2019. Auerbach utilized the full orchestra sound to create other-worldly music and even included unique instruments such as a theremin to represent the magical underworld of the sea. But the story is familiar, and while I have not personally seen it I imagine it easily portrays the Princess Ballerina Ideal fairly predictably. Perhaps this is an unfair assumption, and I would love to be wrong, but personal experience tells me otherwise.

To be fair, the model criteria laid out above (unassuming music, familiar plot, and traditional choreography) is a winning formula for ballet companies in terms of ticket sales. Ballet audiences love these new productions, and they typically sell incredibly well. I can only present three specific concerns I have: 1. that the "sameness" that ballet is facing will catch up with the industry in the same way that "super-hero fatigue" is catching up with Disney; 2. that by not pushing forward the genre of ballet from a musical or topical standpoint, we are in fact denigrating it back nearly 200 years into the past; and 3. we are overlooking the potential power of social commentary of ballet. In so many ways ballet represents gender division and social hierarchy, and because of that, it has an intense power to comment on those topics in a progressive way. Without using that power, at least to this orchestra pit musician, the ballet begins to feel more like popcorn fodder and less like the beautiful, commanding art form it truly is.

-P