Musings from a Dance Scholar: What IS Contemporary Ballet?

Program 2 at San Francisco Ballet prompts one of those unanswerable questions that I see bandied about occasionally on internet ballet forums. With dances by three leading contemporary choreographers – Wayne McGregor, Mark Morris, and Christopher Wheeldon – the question inevitably arises, what IS contemporary ballet?

Now this question of labels and aesthetic rubrics is, some might argue, totally beside the point. As long as the performance offers compelling choreography and astounding dancing, who cares what we call it? And yet I think it’s an important question to ponder, as we move into a “post-Balanchine” world with its many new directions in ballet choreography. (Balanchine being George Balanchine, the Russian-born choreographer who modernized ballet in the 20th century.) One frequently heard definition of contemporary ballet is that it combines both ballet and modern. This seems overly broad to me. After all, Balanchine used movement drawn from modern dance, such as the deep contractions and weighted steps of the “Melancholic” variation from The Four Temperaments (1946). Combinations of modern and ballet have been occurring since modern dance was invented in the early twentieth century.

So how do we think about this? One clue is how many contemporary choreographers have moved to emphasizing process over product. And this process is very often a scientifically informed one. McGregor, for one, has collaborated with neuroscientists, anthropologists, and dancers in examining how the body and brain register meaning in dance. By using conceptual tools borrowed from digital technology, his work aims to disrupt habitual ways of moving. It’s almost choreography as scientific experimentation, with a decided interest on the process by which movement insights are generated.

This is different from, say, the way Balanchine worked; he regarded himself as a craftsman rather than a researcher, putting together movement phrases from a variety of sources according to the demands of musical structure. The result of McGregor’s process may be equally astonishing in its beauty and daring – particularly when performed by a company like SFB, which has the artists to pull off no-holds-barred choreography – but his way of getting there marks a common new direction in the production of current work.

San Francisco Ballet in Wheeldon's Number Nine© (Photo ©Erik Tomasson)

Carrie Gaiser Casey, PhD Carrie Gaiser Casey received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2009 with a dissertation on women in early twentieth century American ballet. She teaches in the LEAP (Liberal Education for Arts Professionals) program at St. Mary’s College of California, which enables professional dancers to earn their B.A. while pursuing their careers and has presented at SF Ballet Adult Education Programs.. Prior to her academic career, Carrie danced professionally with the Fort Worth Dallas Ballet and was a full scholarship student at the Kirov Academy in Washington, DC.