Divertissement in Ballet and Medieval Romance

The Shades from the Australian Ballet's production of La Bayadere

When I was watching "Dancer's Dream: La Bayadere," a documentary on the restaging of the ballet choreographed by Rudolph Nureyev, yesterday I tried to find more similarities between medieval romance literature and classical ballet. I'm going to start by talking about what I noticed about ballet itself and then come back to the connections to romance.

First of all, I noticed, listening to the dancers tak about their jobs portraying certain roles and emotions onstage, that the plot, or narrative itself, is really of secondary--if that!--importance to the audience. Much like opera, or even classic movies, audiences do not go to ballets to "find out what happens" or to watch some suspenseful action-packed story. Almost always, the audience is very familiar with the narrative and, in case they're not, a synopsis is printed in the program. Why do people attend these, then? What is offered by these performances? The answer, of course, is the very reason that the arts are referred to as the "humanities." That is, the audience wants some glimpse into the reality of human existence, to be brought to feeling by the artform itself. Even if the narrative is shoddily constructed or has elments of utter fantasy, or the narrative takes place in radically foreign settings, the expectation is that the emotions portrayed, explored, and interpreted by the performance is something that will be deeply enjoyed by the audience.

Love, anger, jealousy, betrayal, ambition, greed, confusion, and distress are some of these emotions recurring throughout high artistic performances and audiences eat them right up. Thus, in the case of La Bayadere, no one attends the ballet to learn about what life was like for temple dancers and rajahs in "legendary India," or to attain a better grasp on some true story. They go because the fantastic plot elements merely provide an excuse for the artists to meditate on human emotion. I would argue, as well, that such meditations happen outside of the movement of the narrative. Turning back to La Bayadere, even though it can be characterized as a "pantomime ballet," relying heavily on physical acting to illustrate the plot, it is the moments when the action is interrupted, when the narrative is suspended, so that a particular feeling or mood can be adequately and artistically developed. These are the moments that are the most famous in the ballet--the images everyone remembers, like when the corps de ballet, representing the "Shades," or ghosts of the dead temple dancers, descends from the Himalayan mountain tops in a slow progression where one dancer at a time adds on to the line and dozens of arabesque penchees are performed one at a time, but completely in unison. The sadness and beauty create a haunting effect, leaving the audience in awe. I remember when I saw the ballet performed live, this was the moment when the elderly woman behind whispered, "It's SO beautiful!" The scene itself contributes nothing to the plot; it is a break in the action. However, the surreal feeling of the effect is indispensible to the ballet's impact on those watching it.

Operas work very much the same way. For example, the famed "Va Pensiero" chorus performed by the Hebrew slaves in Giuseppe Verdi's Nabucco is a moment when nothing is furthered, no action occurs, but the dramatic effect is essential in deveoping the theme of sadness and abject hope. The chorus is, without a doubt, the most memorable and haunting scene from the opera, and during Verdi's funeral procession, the crowd on the street broke out into singing it.

Arias in operas function the exact same way--there is a pause in the unfolding of the action to allow for a moment of artistic accomplishment for a variety of purposes: to develop a certain emotional effect, to further characterize an individual character, to get inside a character's mind and emotions, to show off the technical skill of the performer, and so the composer can spread their creative wings. Solos in ballets accomplish these very same things, all without strengthening the plot. Therefore, what I'd like to conclude is that plot narratives in these high artforms are mere excuses to create these moments which are the truly important and remarkable artistic creations. They are reason that the operas and ballets exist in the first place. A plot must simply exist so as to excuse these by placing them into a necessary but somewhat arbitrary context.

The second act of Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker is the perfect example. Clara, having been received at the Court in the Clouds and celebrated as the temporary queen, is treated to a series of entertaining dances. None of the dances further the plot in any way and most of the act shows Clara meerly sitting there, enjoying the pieces. The Spanish, Chinese, and Arabian dances, and even the well-known Waltz of the Flowers (all very beautiful and rife for critical interpretation) are so disparate and disconnected from the overall themes and narrative of this children's Christmas ballet that they can only be excused by virtue of the context provided by a very weak plot justification: that she is simply sitting there watching these dances. These dances, called "divertissements," the French word for "entertainments," are actually much more critically telling than the plot narrative itself. No one could assume that this children's story about a young girl being given a Nutcracker for Christmas could actually carry the incredibly overt Orientalist and imperialist themes that are developed in these barely contextualized divertissements.

What I mean to say here is that for the project of a critical theorist, the plot itself provides no fertile ground for analysis, however, by looking at these moments when the narrative ceases--which I argue are the much much more important spaces within the arts--the true artistic and sociopolitical purposes of the piece are made manifest. It is because these are the spaces deeply important to an valued by the artists involved, that they become the more essential points of departure for critical engagement. Critics and theorists should begin here.

I also mean to suggest that medieval romances are filled with moments of divertissement. Where the plot ceases, the composer is given the space to flex their artistic muscle, to create moods, effects, character developments, and other important literary achievements. Assuming this, it is what we read in those moments of plot suspension that--by virtue of the fact that it was the composer's more prized work--that we can find the most interesting values embedded in the text. It is here, in these divertissement/entertainments that we can find most important work a piece of literature does.

For example, descriptions of physical beauty, fetishized commodities, exotic locations, and of course, the feelings of lovers, all take up huge numbers of lines in romances where the plot is not furthered. However, these are the spots where the composer is forced to rely upon his or her most sophisticated poetic artistry and where he or she invests most of their creative energies. Also, since composers were very conscious of their audience's expectations, we can assume that the audiences adored these sections of entertaining plot suspension. Thus, because of both the composer's and audience's investments in these moments, they are going to be the most telling about the contexts from which the romances emerged. I'm challenging romance critics to emphasize these moments in their engagements and to rely less on mere plot elements to draw out their analyses.

While I'm not trying to make any radical claims about the connections between romance divertissement and operatic and balletic divertissement, I am pointing out that by beginning with later works of art--operas and ballets--we can use some of the artistic conventions apparent in these to inform and educate our readings of earlier, literary artforms. Rather than looking at timeless and recycled narratives as important indices of cultural conditions, we should direct our inquiries at the more vital and interludes and detours within the narratives, as they are going to be from where we can draw our most interesting conclusions.