Is longer better?

Was it all a terrible mistake? A joke? A marketing expedient? Just lately I've been wondering. We don't go to one-act plays that often. We don't go to one-act operas -- okay, I know about Cavalleria Rusticana and Il Trittico so don't write -- and in movies the double feature has gone the way of all celluloid. So why the popularity of the one-act ballet?

In the nineteenth century, and even earlier, theatrical evenings were often a mixed bag -- sometimes even a bit of opera, a bit of drama, and a bit of ballet. But all the bits in these mammoth-length spectacles, to which it seems that people came, went, and then perhaps came back, were what we would think of as virtually full-evening entertainments. These programs were theatrical counterparts to those vast Victorian gourmandizing banquets of multiple courses, where the Lucullan skills of the chefs were matched by the gargantuan appetites of the diners. But look at Russia. During the final decades of the nineteenth century, ballet found its glorious hiding place here, being dismissed as a serious art everywhere save the happy, cultural backwater of Copenhagen. In St. Petersburg and Moscow the full-evening ballet -- and nothing but ballet -- reigned undisturbed.

So from whence came -- repeating myself with a difference -- the aesthetic dominance of the one-ct ballet, historically established during the first decade of the present century? An answer in four words. First two: Michel Fokine. Second two: Serge Diaghilev. And for those who like to descry private motives behind public acts, I'll add another two to the original four: Vaslav Nijinsky. Let me explain a little, in almost diagrammatic brief.

Fokine, dismayed at what he regarded as the decadence of ballet during the final years of Marius Petipa at St. Petersburg's Imperial Theatre, wished to reform dance according to his own Noverre-like, dramatically oriented principles. To do this, he experimented, as was the custom of the day, with short ballets, using young dancers from the company and the occasional student in semi-private performances outside the theatre. In such circumstances he staged such works as both versions of Chopiniana (the second of winch Diaghilev latter dubbed Les Sylphides), Egyptian Nights, subsequently reworked for Diaghilev as Cleopatre, and Le Pavillon d'Armide.

Diaghilev, himself thwarted in his ambitions at the Imperial Theatre and the court, and at the center of every cultural eddy in St. Petersburg through his sponsorship of the magazine The World of Art, resolved to take Russian art, painting, music, and opera to Paris, to gain it a wider acceptance in the then fairly narrow world. In 1909, at the prompting of the impresario Gabriel Astruc, he brought Paris a fun season not only of opera but also of ballet. The ballets were all Fokine's earlier works, together with a divertissement, called Le Festin, and Fokine's new staging of the Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor Many of these ballets featured Diaghilev's lover, the great dancer Nijinsky. Diaghilev -- at first not overinterested in ballet -- soon, for various personal and political considerations, became committed to it, and formed a permanent company, outside Russia, with Fokine as its choreographer and Nijinsky as its principal attraction.

Diaghilev, however, never abandoned his consuming interest in painting and music, and -- both as an impresario and artistic director -- maintained ballet as a trinity of dance-drama, music, and design in strict accordance with Fokine's principles to a manner, or at least to a degree, that dance audiences today might find difficult to comprehend. Music (spearheaded by the scores of the young Stravinsky) and, increasingly, design were of paramount importance to the Diaghilev ballet; and in the post-war period, up until Diaghilev's death in 1929, they were, in many ballets, more significant than the actual dancing. And, of course, for reasons at once artistic, economic, and expedient, Diaghilev's creations (particularly following his disastrous revival of the full-length Sleeping Beauty in 1921) were all one-act.

Ballet recovered from Diaghilev's death far better than was first expected. This is no place to go into history, but during the thirties classic ballet swept through the Western world, and it was primarily ballet on a Diaghilev scale and pattern. The one-act ballet, and its Diaghilevian concept of a combined operation of the arts, became not only a norm, but also an ideal. Yet even so, when the emergent national ballet in Britain (now the Royal Ballet) started to revive the full-evening Russian classics, and, beginning in 1949, to export them to the United States, it slowly became apparent that audiences, far from having an aversion to full-evening ballets, actually seemed in some ways to prefer them.

In America, the British invasion was followed by the Soviet Russians, the Danes, and whatever else the dominant impresario of the day, Sol Hurok, could cook up -- and the emphasis was always on full-evening works. And, despite the highly successful efforts of George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein to buck this trend with their New York City Ballet, the trend remained. And it is a trend that companies across the country are forced to contend with today. Full-evening ballets are simply more popular -- and every ballet director I know tells me this -- than one-act ballets. So perhaps Diaghilev's one-acters were simply a terrible mistake. I'm joking, of course. Partly joking. Nevertheless, directors nowadays are forced to provide full-evening ballets from an astonishingly meager supply.

Where are these to come from? There have been just two full-evening ballet scores written in this century that have won universal acceptance: Prokoviev's Romeo and Juliet and his later Cinderella. And these works versions, standard throughout the world repertory. But what else? Scores, and subsequent themes and choreography, can be constructed from existing music, and nineteenth-century ballets from Russia and Denmark might still be explored.

But this popular return to the full-evening ballet poses an international problem with particular national relevance. Next month I am going to discuss three recent productions. Colorado Ballet's A Midsummer Nights Dream, Houston Ballet's Dracula and Boston Ballet's Le Corsaire. I am not here particularly concerned with their success or failure (although all three appear to have hit their particular audience's spot) but their provenance, and what can be learned from it. If -- as audiences mm to be currently telling us -- longer is better, how is the dance world going to be able to meet a need, without a classic repertory, like opera, and without composers capable of filling a dance evening? The future of American classic ballet could depend upon the answer.