One Hundred and Eighty Four

I watched Serenade on YouTube today.  It was the first ballet Balanchine choreographed in the USA, and still one of his most popular.

He said it had no story.  He created it as an exercise in movement for American dancers unfamiliar with classical European technique.  But there’s always a story.

All art is about life, but not the life most of us live.  To live is to move; and to dance through life, moving gracefully from birth to death, is to live well.

In the past, the life well lived was that of the warrior who fought bravely, and gracefully, in the service of his master.  But we tell ourselves the war is over now, and celebrate the victors, our masters.  Our art celebrates their power and the beauty of their possessions, especially their women, who compete among themselves to serve their master best, and please him most.

Our society is based on property, so only property owners are fully citizens.  We call it a patriarchy only because we still think of men as owning property, and of women as being property; but in our society few men own property.  Most, like women, are property.  We pretend all men are equal because men who are the property of other men fear/hope they'll be used as men use their women.

The most powerful men own the most beautiful women.  In celebrating the beauty of women, we celebrate the men who own them.  Serenade is an ode to the beauty of women, but behind every Gelsey Kirkland there’s a Balanchine, playing Pygmalion to her Galatea.

Our art celebrates the beauty of women; but because they belong to other, more powerful men, it also takes revenge on women for making us desire them.  Poe said the death of a beautiful woman is the most poetical topic in the world, and we agree.  But it’s not just the beautiful woman who dies that we celebrate; it’s the beautiful woman who dies of love for an ordinary man.  From Atargatis, the goddess who loved a mortal so much that she accidentally killed him, and in her grief threw herself into the sea and became the first mermaid, calling mournfully to passing sailors, to the beautiful courtesan who's desired by many rich and powerful men but like a virgin loves no one until she falls in love for the first time with a naïve young man from the provinces; and then she dies.

The beautiful women of Serenade dance alone, celebrating their beauty and the power of Balanchine, the choreographer who made them beautiful, until they’re intruded upon by a lone male dancer.  They lead him onto the stage, covering his eyes, and later lead him off in the same way, as though he’s intruded on some female ritual ordinary men aren’t meant to see.  It reminded me of Pentheus, spying on the Bacchantes’ orgiastic celebration of their god.

It also reminded me of all those paintings of the secret life of women, from orientalist scenes of the seraglio to genre scenes of women caught unawares at their toilette.  The private life of women is secret only because men make it so by pretending women are a mystery, a separate species instead of merely people with vaginas, just as men are merely people with penises.

The power men attribute to women merely because they’re women is an illusion, as is the power women attribute to men merely because they’re men and the power the poor attribute to the rich merely because they’re rich.  We build our world from such illusions.