Circus and Ballet: The Source
Photo Credit: Heidi Lee
In collaborating this year on 2 upcoming projects with Angela Buccinni Butch of @themuseabcirque: Stravinsky’s Firebird and Nutcracker as part of a performance workshop series, I find myself in awe of the potentials and the full circle/spiral nature of marrying classical ballet with circus arts. The beauty inherent in these ballets wants to be lifted and surrounded by the magic and mystery of circus, bringing a symbiotic dimensionality to both.
These projects, are a coming back to the source. Evolutions happen in spirals, as you return to a point on the circle you find that it’s a new level that balances on the one behind it. And what have we come to define as ballet? A set of poses and coordinations? Definition by design is limiting and even as we learn to work with the body and the technique we experience a spiral and an expansion that continues for as long as we would give ourselves to it. Why would it not be the same in the form itself? For a continued spiraling expansion that is meant to summon us to the truth about ourselves. To shed the dross of our humanness and reveal the godhead versions of ourselves. So these projects feel like an arrival home, to the beginnings of ballet, motivated by the call not to a particular form, but to the harmony, the magic, the realm changing potentialities.
If you go back the origins of classical ballet, King Henry II married Florentine Catherine de Medici, and it was Catherine’s influence on the court and her sons that spawned the future of classical dance. She brought to France the tastes of the Italian nobility who mounted huge dance spectacles that included “flaming torch dances, choreographed horse ballets with hundreds of mounted cavaliers and masked interludes with heroic, allegorical, and exotic themes.
The ballet master Gugliemo Ebreo, writing in Milan in 1463, described festivities that included fireworks, tightrope walkers, conjurers, and banquets with up to 20 courses served on solid gold platters with peacocks wandering on the tables.”
Then, in 1570 Charles IX (Catherine’s son) established the Académie de Poésie et de Musique, another step in the direction of the eventual codification of classical dance, influenced by Neoplatonism, its member “poets believed that beneath the shattered and chaotic surface of political life lay a divine harmony and order- a web of mathematical relations that demonstrated the natural laws of the universe and the mystical power of God. Melding their own deeply religious beliefs that the Platonic notion of a secret and ideal realm more real than their own perceived world, they sought to remake the Christian Church- not through the old practices of Catholic liturgy but through theatre and art. Working with players, poets and musicians, these men hoped to create a new kind of spectacle in which the rigorous rhythms of classical Greek verse would harmonise dance, music and language into a measured whole. Number, proportion, and design they felt, could elucidate the occult order of the universe, thus revealing God.
A powerful alloy of mystical theology, recondite magic, and classical rigour, the new Academy represented a distinct form of idealism: music and art could summon men to their highest capacities and goals.”
Quotes taken from Jennifer Homan’s Apollo’s Angels. The greatest and most comprehensive ballet history book ever written.