The New York Times-20080127-Time to Retire Those Sets and Tutus

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Time to Retire Those Sets and Tutus

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THE aggressively angled, jazzy bodies and sexual playfulness in Rubies, the centerpiece of George Balanchine's 1967 ballet Jewels, still make audiences' eyes pop. Like much of his choreography in New York City Ballet's current season, they seem ever fresh.

Then there is the matter of what surrounds this fabulous movement: the extra-choreographic elements that contribute to a complete artwork. From tiaras and puffed sleeves to backdrops that make the dancers look as if they have been plunked inside precious stones, the designs, for some, are at odds with Balanchine's sophisticated choreography. (The Jewels set was updated four years ago by the original designer, Peter Harvey. The Karinska costumes remain.) It's embarrassing to everybody who has visual taste, the Italian choreographer Luca Veggetti said with a laugh.

In the early 20th century the impresario Serge Diaghilev employed artists like Picasso and Matisse for his Ballets Russes. The results were not always successful, and Balanchine's Ballets Russes tenure may have exhausted his interest in extravagant designs, which sometimes overwhelmed the choreography. But the attempt at innovation was there. Too often today, in a field beset by box office pressures and fealty to tradition, it is not.

Ballet remains trapped in 19th-century conventions, said Mr. Veggetti, who regularly collaborates with filmmakers, photographers and videographers but usually designs his own sets and costumes. Those big productions we see -- really, they're just not very good, even as stage design.

Christopher Wheeldon, who is concluding his residency with City Ballet to focus on Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company, said people in ballet almost have been trained, particularly in the house of Balanchine, to disregard the design.

It's O.K. that it's not that great because what's within it is just so beautiful, said Mr. Wheeldon, whose first collaborating artist in Morphoses was the couture designer Narciso Rodriguez. But insiders, he added, forget that the public sees the overall picture.

I put a lot of thought into how the light corresponds with the hue of the costumes and, if we can only do a leotard, how can we make it sculptural and interesting? he said, referring to his company's tight finances. If the design is good, it can hold the interest in another way.

The success of any art is subjective, and most viewers can list their choices for hideously ill-conceived designs. But to some, ballet visuals are particularly stodgy.

In opera people expect and anticipate and argue about new stagings, the choreographer Mark Morris said. Hooray. A civilization exists. But a ballet crowd, as defined, won't accept a new thing, he added. It's like, 'How dare they use those black tutus for 'Swan Lake'?

Mr. Morris blames sheltered dancers, crazy balletomanes and traditionally conservative boards and ballet masters. He also pointed to gatekeepers like the Balanchine Trust, whose control has led to work he called very much ossified.

Not all dancers prefer the status quo. There's nothing worse than wearing Easter-egg yellow and the blue tights, Mr. Wheeldon said. You just think, 'Oh really, you want me to put that on?'

He said that visual innovation is often frowned upon in the field and that commissioned scores eat up budgets, leaving little money for design elements. There's a little bit of an attitude, 'Oh, well, they're just doing that to hide some kind of weakness choreographically,' he said. There's a snobbery that ballet doesn't need that; it's just fine as it is.

He cited the influence of Balanchine, who was not particularly attuned to decor, as a factor. Many of his works -- the leotard ballets -- are famously stripped down; others feature variations on the chiffon skirt and standard ballet bodice, Mr. Wheeldon said. People became really invested in that aesthetic, and nobody questions the fact that all the girls in the corps are wearing bubble-gum pink and that they look like meringues.

City Ballet's general manager, Kenneth Tabachnick, who has worked extensively as a lighting designer, cautioned against generalizing about a Balanchine aesthetic (his catalog lists 465 dances) or his impact on an entire field. But Betsy Erickson, a ballet master at San Francisco Ballet, also noted Balanchine in talking about the greater emphasis on design in European ballet, as opposed to American.

She further hypothesized that there is not as much crossover with the modern world in the United States as there is in Europe, so innovation has been slower to reach American ballet. Modern dance -- from Martha Graham's, Merce Cunningham's and Trisha Brown's collaborations with major visual artists to periodic re-examinations of the proscenium stage to today's do-it-yourself aesthetic -- has more consistently addressed design.

Leslie Norton, an associate professor of dance at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., agreed. As far as anything innovative in art, it's not happening in ballet the way I think it's happening in modern dance, she said. Ballet is in a very conservative mode right now.

She cited productions like American Ballet Theater's new Sleeping Beauty last spring, which drew unfavorable comparisons with Thomas Kinkade's paintings and Disney animation. Surely Walt's artists would have imitated Corot much less crudely, Alastair Macaulay wrote in The New York Times.

Ballet Theater's artistic director, Kevin McKenzie, defended the production. It was a conscious choice to go storybook, he said. We try as much as possible, at American Ballet Theater, to keep things relevant but stay close to the original concept. The classics are the springboard.

This emphasis, Professor Norton said, is a problem. As companies rely on classic story ballets for box office hits, she said, art gets left behind.

People want to go see full-length ballets and spectacle, the same way they want to see 'Phantom of the Opera,' she said. The level of ballet technique keeps getting higher and higher, but you look back to some of the Diaghilev ballets, and they brought in the latest artistic concepts, the latest literary concepts, and really challenged you. They weren't geared toward children, even with fairy tales.

High-profile collaborations still occur. The painter Chuck Close designed backdrops for Jorma Elo's C. to C. (Close to Chuck), which had its premiere with Ballet Theater in the fall and boasted Ralph Rucci costumes and a Philip Glass score. Mr. Close called the work a true collaboration, but it was striking to hear the disparity between his description of design meetings for the ballet, orchestrated by Ballet Theater, and the beliefs he shared with the artists he worked with in his youth. Some critics questioned the ballet's overall coherence.

Peter Martins of City Ballet worked with the Danish painter Per Kirkeby for his Swan Lake in 1996 and Romeo and Juliet last spring, but the designs were not well received. In tinkering with existing war horses or engineering inorganic collaborations, ballet too often puts itself in an awkward in-between place, neither here nor there. This is hardly a recipe for good art, innovative or not.

A visual artist has his own universe, Mr. Veggetti said. If you want to approach it, you have to understand it, first of all, and see how that universe can approach yours.

The art of the theater, he said, is an art apart.

[Illustration]PHOTOS: Top, the costumes for Rubies, designed by Karinska for the ballet's 1967 premiere, in a 2007 performance by the Royal Ballet; left, American Ballet Theater's 2007 production of The Sleeping Beauty, with scenery by Tony Walton and costumes by Willa Kim; and above, Isamu Noguchi's decor for Martha Graham's Night Journey (1947), a modern- dance classic with the choreographer herself. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY ARNOLD EAGLE, COURTESY OF THE MARTHA GRAHAM CENTER OF CONTEMPORARY DANCE; LUKE MACGREGOR/REUTERS)