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San Francisco Fifty Years Ago
(Kenneth Rexroth’s complete columns from the San Francisco Examiner)
July 1960
Three Poets in the News
Kabuki Theater
Poetry and Ballet
Ballet and Jazz
The Royal Danish Ballet
The last few weeks have been exceptionally troubled ones in the history of
the world. The papers have been full of earthquakes, riots, bitter quarreling
between the two nations who hold in their hands (in the hands of a few fallible
and none too saintly men) the destiny, in fact the survival, of the human race.
Still, unless somebody pushes the wrong button, it will all pass away soon
and men will ask what all the fuss was about. Only the earthquakes will have
made a small difference in the earth’s surface.
Horace said it long ago, and after him Shakespeare, and then Théophile
Gautier. Homer has outlasted Troy more than 3000 years, and a poem to a girl all
the Caesars, and a book of sonnets and plays the rise and decline of the
mightiest of all empires.
Three poets have been in the news in this time of moving and shaking. Boris
Pasternak died, officially dishonored in his own land that he so stubbornly
refused to leave. Certainly the day will come when one of the few things
remembered about Khrushchev is that he embarrassed the old age and hastened the
death of a great poet.
Future ages will probably see little difference between our commercial mass
culture and the Russians’ — except over there you have to like it, you can’t
get away from it, and it is pretty much all there is. Imagine what life would be
like if they looked you up for insisting that you didn’t like Wouk or Welk. What
makes vulgar literature vulgar is the lack of all true comedy or tragedy.
The Russians, or rather their leaders, are still convinced they can afford
little of either. Pasternak was certainly their greatest writer, and his work
reminded me of that other great disillusioned revolutionary, Turgeniev, full of
the wry pathos and comedy and melancholy of Russian life — somber nights, the
flowing of vast rivers, plans that come to nothing, obscure lives that might
just as well never have been. This is hardly wholesome literature for a nation
constantly striving to overtake and surpass itself and everybody else. It’s bad
for business.
Jules Supervielle was one of the most inconspicuous of all modern poets. He
never wrote anything startling, he never did anything startling. He never signed
any manifestoes. He was never part of any movement. His poetry was quiet,
whimsical and uncomplicated. When he died last month the French realized, with a
start, they had lost one of their greatest writers.
Like some of the other greatest poets in history, he wrote modestly about the
great platitudes. In a period of rampant experimentation, he introduced a few
valuable innovations in poetic technique, but so quietly you had to be a poet to
notice them.
Supervielle wrote mostly about himself, nature, animals, lovers. He had no
unusual ideas about any of these subjects. In many ways he was very much like
Pasternak, if Pasternak had flourished in a less troubled country, or like our
own Robert Frost. “Wry pathos, sad comedy, melancholy” — all life has it, not
just Russian, but in France it was easier for Supervielle to laugh. He and his
work both seemed so simple and unpretentious. But looking back, now that he is
dead, all the critics realized that here, for once, they could apply to a writer
a word — magnanimous — which isn’t merited by many writers nowadays. A great
heart, a noble purpose, a quiet voice, how many modern poets have them?
In the midst of international turmoil and domestic politicking, the United
States Congress authorized the preparation of a special gold medal, and
instructed the President to give it to Robert Frost. No reason — just
admiration and good feeling. Here again the future may well call this a lucid
interval in a time of lunacy.
They say that President Eisenhower has been far from happy lately. He wanted
to go down in history as a man of peace. He hoped that his last year in office
might mark the beginning of a great new epoch in history, the beginning of the
time in which men turned, at first little by little, away from war, and never
turned back. Had this happened, surely he would be remembered with gratitude for
many hundreds of years by men everywhere in all the world. It didn’t happen.
Let’s hope he can console himself for a moment with this one small act of peace
and honor.
Robert Frost doesn’t need the honor. His poetry will probably be here after
both Congress and the Politburo are gone. But the President, acting for the
American people, shares in the immortality of Frost’s poetry and of all great
art, and acknowledges that, when all is said and done, it is a greater thing
than the reputations of statesmen.
Since certainly no other paper in America, and few in France, will have
quoted anything by Supervielle, and since you, patient reader, will probably
never hear of him again, I think it would be nice to leave you with his farewell
poem, written some years ago when he learned that he had a fatal disease. The
translation is my own.
HOMAGE TO LIFE
It is beautiful to have chosen a living home
And stayed there awhile, and to have let the hands
Light on the world, as on an apple
In a little garden, to have loved the earth,
The moon and the sun, as old friends
Who have no equals, and to have committed
The world to memory as a bright horseman
Gives himself to his black steed, to have given a face
To words like “woman,” “children,” and to have been a shore
To the wandering continents, and to have come upon the soul
With quiet strokes of the oars, for it is scared away
By too brusque an approach. It is beautiful to have known
The shade under the leaves, and to have felt age
Creep over the naked body, accompanying the pain
Of the dark blood in ourselves, and gilding its silence
With the star, Patience, and to have all these words
Moving around inside the head, and to choose the most beautiful of them
And make a little feast with them, to have felt life,
Hurried and loved, to have ended it
In this poetry.
[July 3, 1960]
NOTE: Rexroth later published
a somewhat different
translation of this poem.
This coming week the Kabuki Theater from Japan will be here, and in our
family, for one, we are all going. Our two little girls are devoted to Oriental
theater and we go to all the shows in Chinatown and to Japanese and Chinese
movies, at least to those that reproduce the conventions of the old time
theater. I can imagine nothing more entertaining for children, including the
circus.
When my oldest daughter was 4 she loved to get dressed up in kimono and
swords and give a performance of Benkei on the Bridge, a Noh play which
she had seen just once in a movie. I see they are giving some episodes from
The Forty-Seven Ronin on the second bill. This should hold spellbound even
those little boys who care for nothing but horse operas on television.
Really great Japanese troupes seldom leave the country. About 30 years ago
the Kengeki Theater played here for several weeks — mostly to a Japanese
audience, in what is now the Marines’ Memorial Theater. There was a Kabuki
company at the World’s Fair. A few years ago a popularized and feminized version
of the Kabuki toured the world and came to San Francisco, where it played to
enthusiastic, crowded houses.
Meanwhile, in Japan, the company and the girl star were violently attacked
for misrepresenting themselves. True, they were not authentic Kabuki, but I
thought they were fine and so did the rest of the family. We went every night.
This coming week will be the real thing, the most beautiful and the most
profoundly moving theatrical form left in the world.
Is “it’s fine for the children” good theatrical criticism? It certainly is.
The greatest plays in history deal with permanent and characteristic human types
involved in relatively uncomplicated situations, the simple predicaments all men
everywhere might get into. True, the heroes and heroines and villains may have
quite complicated responses to those simple situations, but these complications
must be, as they are in life, deeply imbedded in clear and definite actions.
Psychological and moral depth must be there, but there only to be discovered
by those in the audience who themselves have such depth. These qualities cannot
be written on the surface or they destroy the integrity of the action. The
surface meanings of the action must be such that anybody but a fool could
understand them immediately. It seems to me that this defines a drama which can
be understood at its simplest level even by children.
I have always taken my girls to every performance of Shakespeare, no matter
how amateurish, that turned up in San Francisco. They never seemed to have the
slightest trouble understanding what was going on. True, the understanding was
in their own terms — but they kept track of the actions and enjoyed the jokes
and thrilled to the tears and deaths. Behind the surface they saw lay mysterious
tangles of the human mind that critics and psychoanalysts will argue over for
centuries. I suppose that it is in this way that the greatest drama can be said
to “teach life.” From our first experience we are tempted to take the pill by
the sugar coating, but in drama, without the sugar coating there is no pill.
This does not mean that great drama is not true to life — that is the way
life is. They may not deal with the most wholesome subjects, or with situations
that we think of as common in our society, but who would deny that a child, or
the simplest adult mind, could understand the great Greek tragedies of the
family troubles of Orestes and Oedipus?
On the other hand, simplicity in itself is nothing. It must be like the lead
at the tip of a pencil — the sharp point of action behind which lies a whole
instrument or vehicle, made up of troubled and struggling human minds. At hand
we have two perfect examples, both, it so happens, dealing with the Orient.
The World of Suzie Wong is not a vulgar and trivial play because it makes
prostitution attractive. It is immoral because it falsifies life and reduces
human motives not to a simple, but to a silly pattern.
Its star is one of the most beautiful and talented young actresses I have
ever seen in my life. Is it “good entertainment”? I think not. If you are
easily moved, it’s fun to watch, but afterwards you feel tricked. You do not
feel tricked by A Winter’s Tale or The Merry Wives of Windsor,
both of which, incidentally, were written for no other reason than to make
money.
So with the Japanese Kabuki and Noh plays. You may feel a little like a
non-Catholic who has strayed for the first time into a Solemn High Mass on
Whitsunday at a cathedral. Everything is in an incomprehensible language. Every
motion is accompanied by mysterious music and outlandish chanting. The actors
are busy doing things for no apparent purpose, yet they behave as though each
act had the most tremendous import. Everyone is robed in the most splendid
garments of red and gold. People treat each other with the most elaborate
courtesy.
You say, “This is all a meaningless ritual.” Then suddenly, for no reason
you can tell, it all slips into place and you are caught up in the dramatic
illusion, carried away by the spell. Gradually you realize, by means of the very
ritual itself, that the performance is dealing with the most important issues of
life, stated in the noblest terms.
The vulgar theater pretends to be realistic. Shakespeare, Greek tragedy,
Kabuki, each is a more fantastic illusion than the other. Kabuki is far more
formal than classical ballet, and like nothing that ever was “really” on
heaven or earth. Yet when you come away you don’t feel tricked. Instead, you
feel that, for a little while you have lived on another planet, where the
ordinary life we live is restated in noble terms, with a beautiful clarity and
ritual elegance.
[July 10, 1960]
Thanks to the people who wrote or phoned about the Supervielle poem. No,
there is no collection of his poetry in English. Yes, I have translated other
poems by him, but I have never thought of publishing them. Any of the many local
poetry publishers care to make an offer?
The good thing about this response is that it demonstrates once again
something I am always saying, that people do like poetry. They like good poetry
that says something to them. It is true that for many years there has been a
very poor audience for most current American poetry. But why not? Most of it has
been, not “modernistic,” but dull academic stuff by petty people who lead
dull, petty, academic lives. In the right circles it has been thought terribly
unfashionable to write about anything so vulgar as love, death, nature — any of
the real things that happen to real people. The reason, of course, is that real
things don’t happen to petty people, and if they do, they can’t understand them,
much less assimilate them and glorify them for others.
As for any hint of social responsibility — for many years the poetry prizes
and fellowships and teaching jobs have been controlled by a little clique of
imitation Southern Colonels of literature, disciples of Thomas Nelson and T.S.
Eliot, the “classicist, Anglo-Catholic and Royalist” from St. Louis. Who, pray
tell, outside a Confederate Veterans Home, has been interested in such stuff as
that?
On the other hand, poets as widely different as Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg,
e.e. cummings, Dylan Thomas, Kenneth Patchen, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence
Ferlinghetti, sell better, much better, than most novels. It has nothing to do
with modernist or conventional verse. It has less to do with social attitudes.
T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, absurd reactionaries though they are, sell well,
because they convey the immediate conviction of meaningful life. This is perhaps
the primary function of the poet, to give life convincing meaning. “I am come
that you might have life, that you might have it more abundantly.” People who
fulfill that promise may be crucified, they are rarely ignored.
We should get over the cultural inferiority complex wished on us back in the
days of H.L. Mencken. Who says America doesn’t honor poets? I have always been
treated with a respect verging on reverence — as a poet — by my neighbors, and
I have always lived in a very ordinary American working-class neighborhood. Not
only that, but considerable numbers of the neighbors over the years have read
the things I have written and enjoyed them. Mencken never seemed to notice that
the people he abused so roundly read him. Fact is, he made a very good
thing of it, moneywise.
More people by far in the United States go to symphony concerts than go to
ball games. (Not that ball games aren’t fine, too.) Can the same be said for
England or France? Indeed not. When I tell friends of mine who are editors of
French papers that the readers of a San Francisco newspaper applauded my
publishing a poem of Jules Supervielle, they will think I am kidding them. Oh
well, some day doubtless we will outgrow our reputation as uncivilized
frontiersmen. First, it would help if we outgrew it completely in our own minds.
Last Saturday we had dinner in Opus One. This is one of the more quiet and
congenial places in North Beach. It is a great pleasure to eat where everybody
seems to enjoy feeding you, and the food is good, half French, half Greek,
cooked by Nausicaa, a Greek poetess who is one of San Francisco’s most
remarkable personalities. (I might say that whenever, in this column, I
recommend food or drink, “the management” knows nothing about it, and has not
come through with any payola, not so much as a free drink.)
Then we went to see “Ballet 1960.” My, my, what a lovely evening! If the
meal had been enjoyable because everybody seemed to have a good time cooking and
serving and mixing drinks, imagine the pleasure of ballet where everybody in the
company is having an absolute ball.
Ballet is terribly hard work. A ballerina works about as hard as a coal miner
or a fry cook and counter man in a skid row restaurant. Most ballet companies
are ridden with strife and jealousy. Nothing of this was apparent in “Ballet
1960.” They all acted like a bunch of model children have a hilarious romp.
They knew what they were doing, they loved doing it, and they loved giving it to
the audience. The effect on the audience was as might be expected. They went
home in a state of profound euphoria. Everybody had a good time.
This is what makes the theater worth going to. This is “show business” in
the real sense of the word. When perfect rapport and good will start flowing
back and forth across the footlights you have something that the movies and
television can never give. This is what makes “audience personality” and great
audience personalities are very rare. Eleanora Duse had it — but so did Al
Jolson, a ham if there ever was one, so did Pavlova, so did Danilova, so did
Kreutzberg. Louis Armstrong has it, so does John Lewis. As Lester Young said of
swing, “if you don’t have it, you’ll never even know what it is.” When a whole
company has it — that’s something.
Maybe I had better explain what “Ballet 1960” is. It is the inner circle,
so to speak, of the San Francisco Ballet. It includes most of the more finished
dancers of the parent company. They have formed a smaller group to gain greater
freedom to do new things. This means freedom from expense and cumbersome
technical responsibilities as much as anything — it does not mean some sort of
“revolt.”
Many of the criticisms that have been made of the San Francisco Ballet, by
myself and others, have been the result of conditions under which the company
has to operate. Many of these conditions are beyond the power of the
Christiansens or anybody else to change overnight. The smaller group has been
formed to get around some of them. And get around them they surely do! This is
ballet for dancers and balletomanes, for people who know what’s happening.
There seems to be a quite adequate number of such people around, maybe not
enough to fill the Opera House for a long season, but plenty to fill a small
theater several times over. The turnaway compared favorably with the Newport
Jazz Festival or the Un-American Committee hearing — but was handled peaceably
with the promise of many more performances to come.
I don’t really feel much like “criticizing.” We all had a real good time,
especially our Katherine, age 5½. We sat in the
front row, right on top of the show, in the tiny Contemporary Dancers Theater,
and she got a clear idea of what it means to be a ballerina — the joy, the
excitement, and the hard work. It was a pleasure to watch her face, solemnly
taking thought of her own future.
One thing — some of the pieces were “jazz
ballet.” These two words in combination raise more questions than even “jazz
poetry.” Next week if I might, I’d like to take most of the column to discuss
some of them.
[July 17, 1960]
Ballet and Jazz
Last week I promised that, if nothing intervened, I would air my opinions about
jazz and ballet. Nothing has, except the Democratic Convention, so I guess I
will, but first I would like to say just a few words about politics, a subject I
dislike and usually avoid.
For anyone who can remember the bitter and exhausting fights
that went on in the party conventions of the ’20s, it is very apparent that a
great change has come over American politics. It has affected both parties about
equally. In fact, as long as it ran a candidate for President, it even affected
the minuscule Socialist Party. This, of course, is the steady drift to
unanimity.
Along about the first of the year it was already obvious to any
informed and moderately cynical observer who the candidates of the two parties,
barring accidents, were going to be. Nobody else really had much of a chance.
The real decisions were all made long before the conventions opened, in fact,
even before the primaries. Is this a good thing? I, for one, am not prepared to
say, but it certainly bears thinking about.
For over a hundred years the American Presidency was decided
after a complicated struggle between various factions, all fought out in the
open, and responsive to a large degree to expression of the popular will. We
think of the politics of unanimity as being characteristic of the more or less
totalitarian regimes of Europe. I wonder. Ever since Franklin Roosevelt, we,
too, have had our indispensable man. Now in both parties the basic decisions, of
candidate and platform both, are arrived at by methods different from what we
used to think of as the “democratic process.” These methods may well be better
than those which produced the candidacies of Davis or Coolidge or Harding, but
they are certainly different, and it would be wholesome to recognize them for
what they are.
Now, back to the arts, always a more troublesome subject than
politics. There were two numbers in the recital given by “Ballet 1960” which
purported to combine ballet and jazz. I got the impression, talking to some of
the people, that they were proud of these two numbers and thought they were
doing something valuable and different. They were fun to watch, everybody seemed
to have a good time doing them, but were they ballet and were they jazz? I
wonder.
One, danced to the music Symphony in Jazz by Lieberman,
was just not jazz at all. I don’t know who Lieberman is, but his title was a
misuse of the language. This is popular program music of the kind written by Mr.
Grofe. The other, Session, danced by Sally Bailey, Zach Thompson and
Roderick Drew to drumming by Ran Kaye, was more a romp than a dance.
Again, everybody had a wonderful time. Ran Kaye was both a good
drummer and a terrific “audience personality,” but I don’t feel that,
dancewise, the possibilities of jazz, or to be specific in this case, Latin
American music, were really exploited. I think the whole problem is a lot more
difficult than, so far, this group has realized.
To date there has never been a good jazz ballet. The nearest
thing to it was written long ago — Darius Milhaud’s La Création
du Monde, which sounds a little like one of the full-dress
Ellington-Strayhorn productions, and written some years before they were.
John Alden Carpenter’s Krazy Kat
used a certain amount of ragtime and some self-conscious Whitemanish material.
It was a sensation in its day but it dated very quickly and is no longer done.
Sidney Bechet’s The Night Is a Sorceress is hardly ballet — it has since
been taken up by “modern” dance groups, and the music is rejected by
practically all jazz critics. I think this judgment is harsh; it has a lot of
Haitian mystery to it, and considerable rhythmic imagination. Still, it is
musically pretty thin, and owes its effects largely to the mood it creates.
Frankie and Johnny at least is in the “jazz idiom,” but again, I am afraid
it is both musically thin and awfully self-conscious.
The fact of the matter is that not
enough goes on musically in most jazz to give a ballet company enough to do.
“Serious” composers who adapt jazz to larger forms invariably do not know what
they are doing. Furthermore, choreographers, and I guess dancers, too, think in
terms of the popular stereotypes. Jazz is supposed to be wild, crazy, hot,
abandoned — savage drums in the jungle while the missionary soup comes to a
boil. It doesn’t matter who — Ruth Page, Agnes De Mille, Balanchine, there’s a
sort of “ballin’ the jack” figure with snapping fingers in the air, that looks
like Clara Bow doing the Black Bottom, that they all love to give the chorus
every chance they get. It is acutely embarrassing.
Try it yourself. If you know
ballet, put on a good Count Basie record and try to “cast” it. Try to
visualize a ballet company keeping busy. There is always something for a
principal, sometimes two, but start dividing up the rhythm section amongst the
chorus — what have you got?
Furthermore, the forms themselves
are too much alike. Try to match something like The Nutcracker or Swan
Lake, let alone Stravinsky, movement by movement, with jazz records, for
musical variety. It is pretty hard to do. Again, the big production numbers,
attempted by even some of the greatest bands in jazz, turn out to be failures —
as jazz, or just as music, let alone as ballet material. The most charitable
thing to say about something like Ellington’s A Drum Is a Woman is that
it is not Ellington at his best.
Still, I don’t think the problem is
insoluble. First, somebody in ballet has got to bone up on what is jazz and what
isn’t. Then, start modestly and quietly. Debussy’s Afternoon of a Faun is
not a long or complicated piece of music, yet it is still one of the great
classics of the ballet repertory.
Forget about Clara Bow, and try a
calm little mood piece, using a bona fide, universally recognized, good jazz
orchestra, live or recorded. Then try something which has considerable formal
variety, for instance the Modern Jazz Quartet’s One Never Knows. The
piece Cortege on this record would make exactly such a short, modest,
quiet number as I have suggested.
Finally, work with a good band,
with an intelligent and articulate leader. Get a jazz composer to write a suite
especially for ballet. There are plenty of good ones for every taste, from Benny
Carter to Alec Wilder, take your choice . . . my choice would be Charles Mingus.
These men are not stupid or musically illiterate. They’ll give you more capers
to cut than you can find in The Nutcracker. I suggest “pure” ballet,
white or in leotards, but if you need a plot, it might be a good idea to get a
scenario from a poet who understands the depth and breadth of human emotion of
the best jazz.
But please, pretty please, forget
all about Clara Bow going “hot ziggety-zig.” Like, man, it’s the cat’s
pajamas.
[July 24, 1960]
The Royal
Danish Ballet
August 12, 13, 14 and 15, the Royal Danish Ballet will be here. This is the full
company’s first visit to San Francisco.
A few years back a small troupe of the stars played here and
made a very good impression, at least technically. They are beautiful dancers
and a constant pleasure to watch, but for their American tour they picked tried
and trusted chestnuts of the international repertory, and they chose to present
them in a more or less “pops concert” style.
The full company is, at least in Europe, a different matter. Let
us hope that it has not, out of a mistaken wish to play down to American
audiences, left its special splendors and originality at home.
One of the big troubles with foreign companies on tour in the
States is that they insist on doing programs they think are what the folks in
Oconomowoc want to see. They are either insufferably folklory, or they stick to
fare as innocuously internationalized as the menu in a third-class London hotel.
One of the worst offenders in this regard, for my taste, was
Sadler’s Wells. For all their noble style, the repertory some seasons was pretty
close to being “tourists’ ballet” and hardly distinguishable from the London
summer performances, for tourists, of the Royal Festival Ballet. Gradually they
are learning, and in the last couple of years we have seen choreography that
truly expresses national groups at their individual best.
Another thing that nobody even mentions, like the Emperor’s new
clothes, is that many foreign companies are not very good by any standards. The
Paris Ballet is simply dreadful. They can’t keep time, a habit they look on as
an Anglo-American affectation. They habitually lose each other on stage. The
very positions are only rough approximations and hasty assumptions. They don’t
know the music is there. Of course, for a generation, they were under the
direction of a man who boasted that he loathed music, all music, and looked on
it as an intruder in ballet. Paris is not the worst. Just because it’s
transatlantic is no sign it’s good.
The Royal Danish Ballet is very good indeed. It has the longest
continuous tradition in Europe. On August 15 you can see Vicenzo Galeotti’s
The Whims of Cupid and the Ballet Master. This is the work of one of the
first ballet masters in Denmark, an Italian who assimilated himself completely
to Denmark and knew how to develop the native potentialities of its first
dancers. It was put on the stage in 1786.
All during the first half of the 19th century, Copenhagen was
lucky to have an even greater artist, one of the primary inventors of the
Romantic style, August Bournonville. The company is giving three of his works,
Napoli, The Conservatory, and La Sylphide. The last, which is one of the
two or three finest ballets surviving from the 19th century, is not to be
confused with the Chopin Les Sylphides.
The company is famous for its version of Les Sylphides,
too, which it calls Chopiniana, but the company is not presenting this.
La Sylphide is a dramatic ballet, a Scottish legend of a fairy in love
with a mortal. The music, as I remember, is by a Danish composer, Herman
Lovenskiold. There is nothing muggy or sentimental about it. They handle it with
a clean, efficient lyricism, a combination of precision and wistful melancholy.
Romeo and Juliet is Frederick Ashton’s choreography for
Prokofiev’s music, first performed at the Copenhagen Ballet Festival in 1955.
This, of course, is one of the most sumptuous of all modern ballets. The Danes
give it their own special flavor, quite different from the versions of other
companies.
Mona Vangsaa and Henning Kronstan, for my taste, seem much more
like the real Romeo and Juliet than do most other performers. After all, they
were a couple of innocent, desperate children. Their roles do not permit the
slightest hint of hardness or professionalism. I suppose the whole company has
certain characteristics that fit it especially for Romeo and Juliet, a
kind of sweetness, lyrical innocence and carefully controlled abandon. This last
quality is very important. It means powerful emotion which pushes at the very
limits of the most highly developed technical skill.
Some years back when I saw Frank Schaufuss as Mercutio and
Niels Bjorn Larsen in their mortal duel, I was reminded of the transcendental
rhythmic accuracy of Japanese swordplay, with its overtones of Zen mysticism.
Similarly, Margrethe Schanne and Erik Bruhn in La Sylphide manage to
convey a mystery and pathos so delicate that, for once, you really are convinced
that La Sylphide herself is a fragile, nonhuman spirit that a hostile human
breath could destroy.
Don’t let me give the impression that the company lacks ordinary
balletistic skill. Far from it, they are so skillful, indeed, that in lesser
pieces they are, if anything, a little too finished. When they have nothing more
important to do, they tend to approximate the spit and polish of high precision
entertainment dancing.
When they first appeared in Paris after the war they dumbfounded
the French critics. If caustic Parisian ballet critics put down Balanchine as
“highbrow Rockettes,” heaven only knows what they thought of the Royal Danish
Ballet. Since they didn’t have, as an initial assumption, an inferiority complex
about Denmark like they have about the United States, they gave the company
nothing but praise, unadulterated huzzas and plaudits.
If Paris accepted a style as unlike Serge Lifar, let alone
Petit, as could be imagined, with such enthusiasm, the company should certainly
be more than welcome in San Francisco, where we share in a modest way many of
their ideas about what makes good ballet.
I feel a little rash, writing this story, in advance, about a
company I have only seen in Europe. But actually I have perfect confidence in
the Royal Danish Ballet. I know well the pieces they are giving, and the dancers
(audience-wise, not personally, I’m not much of a backstage-trotting critic) and
I am morally certain that they will be one of the big weekends of dance, not
just for 1960, but absolutely.
Like the Grand Kabuki, these are great artists with a great
style which they have spent two centuries perfecting, and there is no
possibility I will be disappointed.
[July 31, 1960]
“San Francisco Fifty Years Ago” is an ongoing project of posting
all of Kenneth Rexroth’s columns for the San Francisco Examiner
(1960-1967). Each of the columns is being
posted on the 50th anniversary of its original appearance. Copyright 1960-1967 Kenneth Rexroth.
Reproduced here by permission of the Kenneth Rexroth Trust.
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