Why do we go to the ballet? How to convey the immediate and vivid physical thrill of beautiful bodies doing splendid things, like "athletes of God"? How to describe the choreographic marvels, the rich rewards of music and design in perfect combination? And, how on earth does one dispel that false but persistent image of a rarefied elitist and remote art — especially in the face of great companies performing too much pretentious waffle masquerading as dance, inept stagings pretending to be the real and intoxicating things?

Yet audiences today. newcomers or calloused habitués, respond to an art that touches us on a deep level of understanding. We see bodies that have been shaped by a lengthy training which is wise with its 300 years of sweated experience so that the body becomes more beautiful, more legible on stage, more intense and potent in expression. The most refined and most stylised form of Western movement, ballet can say more than words, speak more directly than words. We sometimes forget how primal is dance's function. In communities as different as those of aboriginal Australians, of African villages, in Bali or India, dance still concerns human existence, matters of faith, our journey from cradle to grave, a group's social and sexual identity: it is central to human experience.

Clement Crisp, Why go to the ballet?
Published in BBC Music Magazine 1996 Ballet Special Issue
Copyright © 1996 by BBC Worldwide Ltd. All rights reserved.

Posted 17 March 1997

| No Comment menu | E-mail to Chaz