sarma

I think it is a Greek phenomenon for a small dance company to be privately subsidised as well as state funded by the Ministry of Culture in order to perform classical and romantic ballets. Usually, ballet dancers work for big or smaller companies which are of some renown in terms of their contribution to the art of dance and which companies are able to support the necessary number of dancers for staging complex ballets; they also offer high quality spectacle with the right costumes, stage design and so on…In our country, the National Opera House can only take on a small number of dancers whilst renews its repertory very slowly. Thus, private initiatives are called for to fill the gaps. Staging a romantic or classical ballet in part or in its entirety as well as the vision behind such initiatives are questionable, their good intentions notwithstanding, mainly because of the “philosophies” of the people behind such activities. The desire for Greece to acquire its own tradition in classical ballet continues unabated; however, the training in classical dance in Greece also has carried on in the same way for decades! We will return to this thorny issue though a bit later.For the moment, we will examine the heroes of “Sylphide”, which was presented for the second year running by the Company of Classical Dance of Niki Kondaxaki.

“La Sylphide” (and not “Les Sylphides”, it is a different work altogether) is considered the pinnacle of the romantic repertory. The story is set in Scotland. The anglosaxon scenery, foggy and full of mystery, is the ideal ambient for an ambivalent, preoccupied hero, like the central character of this ballet, James. The story concerns itself with the time just before James’ wedding. It is then that our hero will show his first “crises”, with everyone around him wondering what might have caused the changes in his mood. He falls in love with a sylph (according to fairy tales the sylphs can span magic on someone and affect his reason and mind); the sylph is part of ether according to paganistic myths. When the sylphide appears, James loses contact with his environment, forgets those around him, leaves all of a sudden, stops dancing and participating in the celebrations that his friends put together for him and his fiancé Effie. He is troubled and withdrawn. He finally follows the sylphide to the forest, where he is happy and watches her and her friends dancing in harmony with their surroundings.

The inexplicable mood swings of the romantic hero towards whom his friends and family adopt an initially tolerant and protective stance is part of the ballet’s thematic context. James is rather different from the rest of them. How could he not be different when he is able to talk with the sylphs as the tradition of the poets would have it? This is a female characteristic and certainly beyond what is acceptable in male behaviour. It seems at times that the sylph is just a part of James’ own self; a stage design which concretely presents to the audience James’ ambivalence vis à vis his impeding life change and marriage. He becomes hyper-sensitive, lonesome, melancholic and day dreaming; he stays away from the celebrations of his friends and his beloved. James’ gullibility will lead him to accept the handkerchief that a witch gives him in order to keep his beloved sylphide. However, this act will kill her after she loses her wings and James will remain alone consumed by guilt.

This motif will be repeated in endless modifications in the storytelling of classical ballet for several decades. As is the case with many fairy tales, animalism and magic are the cornerstones of the myths that the audience, especially ballet followers still want to see today. These two conditions, animalism [zoomorphism] and death, are a female destiny (who however, remained centre stage for over a century, staved off the male dancer thus changing the balance of presentation). The woman-bird (Swan Lake), sylph (Sylphide), madwoman/dead (Giselle), doll (Copellia) compose the main dramatic axis which the choreographers have invested with a myriad of technical difficulties, culminating on dancing sur pointe, thus obliterating the weight of the woman-dancer. All these roles constitute a kind of “elimination” which is in accord with the technical ploy of dancing sur pointes. In Georgia (of the old Soviet Union) male dancers dance sure pointes to show off their muscular strength.

Paradoxically, in the West, dancing sur pointes is only for female dancers and in the service of faithful exhibition of their ethereal (a-sexual?) being to the audience, in a dynamic communication between stage and social roles. It should be noted, that “elimination” through the characterisation of the ballet storylines, concerns also the lack of volition (in the case o the mad or dead hero/ine) whilst zoomorphism comments directly on the connection of the essence of femininity with instinct, eroticism and nature. Nature can cause madness in a sense, as it does to the male hero of the “Sylphide”, whose internal conflicts are presented as eruptions similar to the darkness and intensity of natural phenomena. The romantic hero does not adopt the certainty of what “must be” as in the immediately preceding era but is consumed by hesitation and uncertainty, led by his emotions. Death is not the end result of heroic acts but caused by passion, love, impulse. Subsequent works of the romantic repertory such as Giselle, put forward the image of madness as the stereorypical female reaction. The two worlds become separated and end up in the sombre style of classicism and the conformist values which will govern the male and female behaviour in the ballets by Marius Petipa. The fluidity of the romantic era, the naiveté and innocent mediation between the unintelligible and the audience that the first few ballets had to negotiate were lost. Good and evil become poles with distinct and recognisable features. The magic in the hands of male magicians with the implicit insatiable sexual appetite (?), the resistance to death of the women dressed in white, even the unfaithful lovers do not share anything in common with James’ dark castle, the sylphs or witches who concoct magic potions and seduce the spectator in a gothic atmosphere which is intensely moving and seductive.