Lakes of swans.

A few months ago I found myself writing about the importance of repertory to classic ballet companies and emphasizing the significance of ballet's somewhat short supply of classics. I was trying to stress--without actually being crass enough to come out and say it so crudely--that a good old ballet was infinitely preferable to a bad new ballet, and that the art of ballet itself will be in an increasingly bad way if we do not conserve and nurture our past, thus making present generations of audiences and dancers alike aware of dance history.

In general, most people appear to have agreed with me, and, considering it in general terms, I suppose it's a fairly easy proposition to agree with. Despite that proverb, no one is in favor of throwing out babies with bathwater, and my admonitions put in such similarly simplistic terms would obviously inspire easy assent. Yet building a classic repertory, and more particularly maintaining a classic repertory is, as a few company directors have now pointed out to me, more difficult in the real world of the theater than it might appear in the theoretical landscape of a magazine article. And one of the major difficulties is provided by that fascinating mechanism of ongoing arts support in the community--the subscription series. This has proved a blessing to classic dance companies across the land. But it has been--as is so often the case--a mixed blessing.

However, before discussing subscriptions, their virtues, and their pitfalls, let's move to basics and ask ourselves what constitutes a ballet classic. In the ballet world classic is an extraordinarily tricky word, sending out a number of oddly mixed messages. For one thing we apply the term to the whole range of ballet technique, as opposed to other styles of dance. Well, that's okay--a bit confusing, perhaps, but understandable. Then we use it to describe virtually any work that is not brand new--as in "twentieth-century classic."

Finally, and most confusingly, we carelessly refer to those old nineteenth-century ballets--that precious handful starting with La Sylphide and Giselle--as "the classics," completely ignoring that they are quite evidently products of the "romantic" movement, and that to call Giselle a "classic" ballet is simply a contradiction in literary terms, so perhaps Victorian might be safer, if less attractive, nomenclature.

In fact, when I was promoting a "classic" repertory earlier I was thinking not of those ballets in the virtual "public domain" of the nineteenth century but primarily of the Diaghilev works and onward--Fokine and all the post-Fokinean choreographers who have a copyright to their works--where the choreography is usually regarded as being at least as integral to the final entity as the music. However, there is no doubt that whenever the subject of repertory emerges, the popularity of that tiny but mighty handful of nineteenth-century "classics" has an importance out of all proportion to their numbers.

Brave is the company that does not include Swan Lake as an attraction for its audience; even Morton Baum, that enlightened head of the City Center way back when, prevailed upon George Balanchine to include a one-act version in New York City Ballet's basic and uncompromising diet. The Nutcracker, for virtually every company in the land, is not merely a ballet but has become the company's annual breadwinner. Giselle and Coppelia, while not as popular, have their always honored, sometimes hackneyed, place, as do The Sleeping Beauty and August Bournonville's version of La Sylphide. In modern times--and in versions as varied as they are variable--have come the only two full-evening modern scores that can match these Victorian goodies in popularity, Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet and his Cinderella. And that's almost it.

The extraordinary thing is how few full-evening, blockbuster staples are considered essential to the repertory of almost every company. It only seems as if there are lakes of swans. In recent years the list has been slightly enlarged to embrace various quasi-Russian productions of Don Quixote, and perhaps La Bayodere, Raymonda, and Paquita. (This season Boston Ballet is even staging Le Corsaire.) The Danish Bournonville repertoire is basically restricted to La Sylphide, although here and there you may find a Napoli, while, even more surprisingly, the North American and international full-evening repertory has been further extended to include Frederick Ashton's La Fille Mal Gardee, Balanchine's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and other works by John Cranko and Kenneth MacMillan, in addition to a company's own Romeo and Juliet.

Put like this it sounds like a fairly formidable list--some twenty ballets in all if we add Cranko's Onegin and The Taming of the Shrew and MacMillan's Manon and possibly his Mayerling. Now compare that with the number of works available to an opera house or--and here the comparison actually becomes ludicrous--the number of major orchestral works open to your local symphony.

So, as a few directors have pointed out to me, apart from those revivals of short, virtually contemporary works all created in this century, the repertory options are far from vast. But--and this is something I failed to take into sufficient account in my earlier clarion call to find our ballet future largely in our ballet past--those far from vast options are then cruelly reduced by that mixed blessing I mentioned earlier--the subscription series.

Now many companies across the country are, by virtue of their subscription success, in the odd position of having people actually looking at the offerings for the next season and saying, "Swan Lake--but we've seen that." It's a real problem, and subscriptions also exacerbate the difficulty of acquiring a genuine revolving repertory, providing a whole range of works during one week--a highly desirable performance pattern that, outside New York City, exists. I think, only in San Francisco. Finally, in the performing arts we can usually have demand only when there is supply--reversing every precept known to modern economic man. As I maintained earlier, the key to classic ballet's health is repertory--but here perhaps we have to consider the locks (and their rarity), as well as the key.

Clive Barnes has written for Dance Magazine since 1958.