Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Saturday January 1, 2011
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APOLLO'S ANGELS: A History of Ballet
Jennifer Homans
Random House
ISBN 978-14000606
643 pages
$35
Reviewed by Marie Arana
Ballet begins at the barre. It is hard work, rigorously disciplined, unforgiving. It takes brute physical strength, intense mental focus and a donkey's will. Even the most accomplished dancer begins her morning with five simple positions. By day's end, she will be defying the limitations of her anatomy, flouting gravity. She will become Apollo, a winged creature, a god.
For all the fleet, fugitive beauty of one performance, a lifetime of excruciating labor will have gone into it. There is no artistic career more physically and psychologically challenging -- or more heartbreakingly ephemeral -- than hers.
Though ancient rituals imbue this art, few dancers understand its long, complicated history. Filled with kings and courtiers, dictators and dissidents, rich and poor, the story of ballet offers a singular perspective on the evolution of our culture: a fascinating mirror on the arts. Nowhere is this narrative told more amply or more compellingly than in Jennifer Homans' triumphant "Apollo's Angels."
Her book is a delight to read, massively informed yet remarkably agile. As with the gravity-defying feats she describes, a lifetime of work is behind it: Homans is a former ballerina, a dance critic for the New Republic and a distinguished scholar at New York University. In this opus, she blends extensive research and a trouper's experience to deliver nothing less than a cultural history of the past 400 years.
She begins by telling us what every dancer knows: that little in this art form is explained, that much depends on a teacher's memory -- that, though it is a mute art, ballet is meant to be alive and present, not packed with a ponderous past. But a past it most certainly has. A precursor emerged in Italy in the 15th century, although the practice of ballet was not taken up in earnest until two centuries later -- and only because it was the favorite of a French king. Imagine, if you will, your head of state as the star of a dance festival, arrayed in diamonds, bursting onto the carnival grounds on a magnificent white horse, then leaping to Earth to execute fancy pirouettes and intricate gambols. This is precisely how ballet was born.
The king in question was Louis XIII, a contemporary of Shakespeare and Moliere, and a uniquely gifted dancer. He choreographed all the ballets himself, designed the costumes and assumed the leading roles in his dazzling spectacles. Often, he was seen as Apollo, grabbing at the sun. These were hardly pompous affairs: They were part burlesque, part acrobatics, filled with "outlandish obscenities."
But Louis XIII's famous son and heir, Louis XIV, soon raised the art to a higher level. Perhaps because he had shapely legs and a comely face, young Louis' performances acquired a noble air. Magnificently staged and elaborately costumed, these were not bawdy shows. Louis XIV took dancing very seriously. Meant to convey supremacy and power, the king's ballets became matters of state.
La belle danse, in short, began as a manly art. Learned alongside riding and swordsmanship, it became part of a man's obligatory regimen -- an adjunct to the military -- and, in the process, a ballet master became as essential to a 17th-century nobleman as a personal trainer might be to a Wall Street executive today. A courtier had to look good, after all. Dancing badly was not just embarrassing, it was "a source of deep humiliation."
But as one century slipped into the next, kings lost interest, courtiers no longer danced, males ceased to play female roles en travesti, and ballet masters began to cede the stage to ballerinas. By the 18th century, the Paris Opera's ballet dancers were all famous beauties, some of them doubling as notorious courtesans. One of them, Marie Salle, transformed the art by substituting a new eroticism for the old pomp and gravitas. She dressed in skimpy costumes, writhed "in disarmingly natural ways" and moved ballet from the court to the boudoir.
By the 1750s, ballet was transformed again by an intellectual named Jean-Georges Noverre, who pulled it back into a serious realm. Noverre had begun by performing with Marie Salle, although he was 20 years her junior -- much as Rudolf Nureyev would one day perform alongside an older Margot Fonteyn. Eventually, Noverre became a star in his own right, a prodigiously talented choreographer and ballet master in Marie Antoinette's court. It was Noverre who separated ballet from opera, establishing it as a full-fledged art, and it was Noverre from whom the ballet as we know it would spring.
Homans invests her captivating chronicle with a deep knowledge of what it means to move a body in novel ways. She recounts how Noverre's successor, Auguste Vestris, instituted the exaggerated foot positions that came into vogue after the French Revolution. That strictness and extremity of position altered the balletic body, molding its joints and limbs in ways that would have lasting effects on dancers. A joining of the heels -- the feet making a loose, informal vee, all too easy to achieve -- now became a draconian straight line, which had the effect of realigning the knees, hips and torso. Nowhere was the quest for precision taken more seriously than in Russia, where dancers eagerly submitted to this extreme. Eventually, Russians -- obsessed by the art's architecture and physics -- would make ballet utterly their own.
Finally, "Apollo's Angels" proceeds to an engrossing tour of ballet in its most glorious century. Here is the masterful Marius Petipa choreographing "Sleeping Beauty" to Tschaikovsky's flamboyant score; here is the genius Sergei Diaghilev in carnal love with his own pupil and creation, Vaslav Nijinsky; and here is the immortal George Balanchine, stealing rations in the bone-chilling cold of a St. Petersburg winter. Here, too, are Jean Cocteau's chic sets and Pablo Picasso's clunky costumes, and the privileged Frederick Ashton competing against a butcher's son, Antony Tudor, to win British audiences away from the Russians.
Homans explains how, for all the hardships and privations of communism, it was the Soviet Union that ultimately produced ballet's shining moment. The glories of the Bolshoi and the Kirov, and the emergence of one Russian star after another -- Ulanova, Markova, Baryshnikov, Makarova, Plisetskaya -- were so exhilarating, the pride so pervasive and national, that the Kremlin itself became involved. Even Stalin was an ardent fan.
As time passed, America came to inherit many a Russian star, including Balanchine, who single-handedly transformed ballet in this country. Homans' comprehensive history does not stint on this part of the story: She includes Jerome Robbins, Arthur Mitchell, Maria Tallchief, Martha Graham, Fred Astaire. A rich arc of history issues from first page to last, and it is impossible to do it justice in this review.
In the end, Homans' book is as much elegy as celebration. "In recent years," she writes, "I have found going to the ballet increasingly dispiriting." The art, she claims, has become all too timid, imitative and insecure. Audiences sense it. For ballet to make a comeback, she adds, "we would have to admire ballet again," reach for its noble origins, grab at the sun.
Never mind the gloomy parts. It's like a ballet, really -- say, "Giselle," "Swan Lake," "Firebird," "Jewels" or "Astarte."
No matter who dies, we know that beauty, nobility of the spirit and pure love will prevail. An art that celebrates such abiding human values cannot possibly be swept away with the scenery.
Or can it?
Marie Arana is a writer at large for The Washington Post. She can be reached at aranam(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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RATIFICATION: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788
Pauline Maier
Simon & Schuster
ISBN 978-0684868547
589 pages
$30
Reviewed by Rosemarie Zagarri
The preamble to the U.S. Constitution, which asserts "the people's" right to establish a "more perfect union," is more often invoked than understood. It was the states, not the people of the states, that were represented under the Articles of Confederation.
The state legislatures had been the agents for appointing delegates to attend the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.
Yet the Philadelphia convention decreed that it should be the people acting through state ratifying conventions, not the state legislatures, who should decide whether or not to accept the proposed new form of government. In this sense, the U.S. Constitution represented a wholly new form of government in which ultimate authority rested with the people rather than with the states.
Pauline Maier, the William R. Kenan Jr., Professor of American History at M.I.T. and one of the nation's foremost scholars of the American Revolution, explores how the process of ratification worked in each of the 13 states. In doing so, she transforms our understanding of what representative government itself means.
Eschewing a traditional focus on great men and their political ideas, Maier investigates the complex route to ratification in each state. After receiving the Philadelphia Convention's proposal for a new Constitution, the Confederation Congress, in accordance with procedures described in the document itself, recommended that the people (meaning white, male property holders) in each of the 13 states hold elections for delegates to state ratifying conventions. (Always contrarian, Rhode Island held a referendum instead.) Again according to the document itself, it would take ratification by nine states for the Constitution to go into effect. Representatives ran on a platform of support for or opposition to the document. What was at stake was nothing less than this question: Did ordinary people believe that an entirely new system of government, never tried before in history, was the best means of ensuring the country's future -- or was it a too-risky experiment that they dared not accept?
Far from the apathy that too often characterizes politics today, interest in the Constitution in 1787-89 was widespread. In print and at public meetings, would-be delegates to the state ratifying conventions waxed eloquent about the document's meaning. According to Maier, popular sentiment at the time resembled the present-day American "obsession with the final games of the World Series, but with greater intensity because everyone understood that the results would last for more than a season." In each state, newspapers scrambled to publish articles on the Constitution -- and sometimes faced public disapproval for publishing unpopular views. People debated the document's meaning in taverns, on street corners and at polling places, where they sometimes came to blows. In the state conventions, delegates dissected the Constitution clause by clause while citizens crammed spectator galleries to witness the proceedings.
The outcome of the process, Maier emphasizes, was far from certain. Many people needed to be convinced that the proposed system offered the best solution to the country's problems. The precise issues differed from place to place, often influenced by local circumstances. In some states, opponents of the Constitution most feared the new government's power to tax people directly;
in others, its power to create standing armies. Still others opposed the protection of slavery or argued that slavery was not well-protected enough. For many, however, the biggest stumbling block was the lack of a bill of rights. Although the Constitution gave the national government many new powers and significantly strengthened federal authority, it did not contain protections for individual rights and liberties. This was a troubling problem.
Drawing on the newly completed, multivolume "Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution," Maier shows in gripping detail how a series of key compromises at the state conventions kept the ratification process on track. In Massachusetts, for example, opponents of the Constitution agreed to ratify the document without imposing conditions or requiring amendments after supporters of the document promised that amendments would be added as soon as the new government went into operation. With this issue resolved, supporters secured just enough votes to win approval, with 187 delegates in favor, 168 against and nine absent. Despite such compromises, when the new government went into operation in March 1789, North Carolina and Rhode Island still remained outside the union.
Maier also highlights other unexpected twists and turns in the ratification process. Initially, for example, James Madison and many other Federalists regarded the notion of amendments to secure individual liberties as unnecessary and superfluous.
Critics of the Constitution, however, helped persuade Madison that such amendments would go a long way toward alleviating popular reservations about the proposed government and, not coincidentally, would preclude more substantial changes that might weaken the central government's authority. At the same time, certain delegates in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania promoted an alternative process of amendment, advocating the calling of a second Constitutional Convention. Only Congress' timely submission of amendments to the states prevented the second-convention movement from gaining momentum. Despite their defeat, former opponents of the Constitution quickly reconciled themselves to the new system. However disgruntled they might have been, unlike political losers in many other times and places, they did not resort to arms or call for secession. In fact, many former antifederalists chose to run for Congress.
In contrast to historians who see the ratification of the Constitution as the result of elites' manipulation of the masses, Maier tells a far more suspenseful and complex story. Her superb work provides an object lesson in the value of the deliberative process and the extent to which moderation and compromise are at the very foundation of our government. As Maier convincingly shows, the Constitution's preamble did not simply represent a rhetorical flourish or an abstract philosophical theory. It was the very means by which "We the People" chose to embrace a peaceful revolution in government.
Rosemarie Zagarri is a professor of history at George Mason University and the author, most recently, of "Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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