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Portes Ouvertes au CNSM

 
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Katharine Kanter



Inscrit le: 19 Jan 2004
Messages: 1412
Localisation: Paris

MessagePosté le: Jeu Avr 15, 2004 12:15 pm    Sujet du message: Portes Ouvertes au CNSM Répondre en citant

Open House at the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique (CNSM)
April 10th and 11th 2004

WARRING NOTIONS


A gentleman friend with a keen interest in the ballet sat quietly through four or five hours this afternoon of sundry Events at the CNSM. As the Choreographic Workshops closed the two day’s travails, he turned and said:

“Are the girls in the classical section really that much prettier, or is it just an illusion created by the rhinoceros-like stomping in the modern section ?”

A query to which all reply would be ungallant.

Would it be ungallant though to suggest that girls hefting six-foot men, girls hefting other girls, girls hefting furniture, girls pitching themselves straight down onto the shoulder blade, girls displaying sundry anatomical oddments, might not be placing the fairer sex in the best light ?

Indeed, a professor acquaintance of mine has just told me that it took him three months of retooling to slim down the Man Mountain Methusaleh thighs of one his female students, who had spent six months in a modern troupe gallumphing about lifting great strapping men. Not to speak of what it did to her back.

This writer too, watched the Choreographic Workshops. Although the choreographers are all students (ergo, the less said the better), one would nonetheless expect their time in one of Europe’s best schools to be spent on something other than discothèque and break-dance, the pits being a thing “danced” to Eminem rap.

Exhibited to unfortunate effect in one “dance” in bathing costume, their bodily alignment strikes one as rather less than ideal as well. Which poses the question of whether these children be learning anything of substance, other than ideology ?

The sinister, nihilist slumping of modern dance gives me the heebie-jeebies. While, from the standpoint of motion alone, how can anyone claim that this be “natural” ? That it be more “organic” than the classical dance ?

Since when does one define as “natural” flailing one’s arms about in the socket, falling headlong to the ground, or pulsating like some fell Thing swum up from the depths of everlasting night ?


Laban vs. Benesh notation


Amongst the events at the CNSM Open House, was an outline of Laban and Benesh notation, by two experts in the respective schemes.

The Laban scheme uses symbols, inscribed onto a vertical stave, which would be fine were music but pounding a drum. Music, however, proceeds from left to right on a horizontal stave, and Benesh notation, written onto a five-line stave, lies neatly beneath the musical score following it ‘word for word’ as it were. Oddly enough, as the two systems were shewn in succession, one acquired an almost immediate “feel” for the Benesh, and I can still recollect quite clearly both the movements, and the little passage the notator taught the public.

There is more to all this.

Rudolf von Laban is a not-unknown quantity in art history, and history tout court. Posthumously, von Laban and his accolytes appear to have gained a stranglehold on the dance world, their names breathed in quiet reverence.

This is amazing.

Until such time as people stop being so namby-pamby, and resolve to take seriously the ideas in Laure Guilbert’s book “Danser avec le IIIème Reich” (Editions Complexe, Brussels, 2000, reviewed at http://auguste.vestris.free.fr/Essays/Laban ), we cannot and will not call off the dogs.

Fueling this particular line of research, “Hitler’s Dancers: German Modern Dance and the Third Reich” by L. Karina and M. Kant, has just been translated into English, and published by Berghahn Books.


Enter the Idealists

As foreign readers no doubt know, in the classical section, the Conservatoire’s teaching staff is so high-powered, that it reads like the roster of Mensa International. Pressure of work prevented my attending the classes given by M. and Mme. Atanassof, and Mlle. Charmolu, but I did catch the demonstration-classes for the young men in the second (roughly fourteen to fifteen years old perhaps) and third year (fifteen to sixteen years old) classical section. Given their age, it would be wrong to single anyone out, but the second-year lads are very promising indeed, though done down by cocktail-lounge “bruitages” emanating from a pianist who seemed to be sleepwalking.

In the third-year group, which is when things start getting really technical, and also when people tend to grow taller quite unpredictably, certain weaknesses in our methods come to the fore. What we have is the slight torso of a child, set on the strong legs of a sixteen-year-old. As a result, a couple of the lads have projecting shoulder blades; the neck muscles being foreshortened, the head will drop forward, the sternum cave inwards, and the bosom narrow. This in turn, will adversely affect one’s respiratory capacity and one’s balance. One fellow, with the ideal build of a Bjarne Hecht or Ib Andersen (not too tall, the legs not over-long), had difficulty with balance in any position, even attitude on the flat, although with such proportions, all that should, in principle, be almost “within the body”.

The weak torso has been an issue since we dust-binned épaulement thirty years ago. So far as I can see, in the short term the only way round it, other than a head-on clash with the teaching profession, is Pilates. Although some schools swear by weight-lifting, that cannot, surely, be the answer, since the skeleton continues to grow until the early twenties, and one wouldn’t want weights bearing down on less-than-perfect alignment. Pilates would give these youths the muscular strength, re-align the neck and body, and support the movement precisely the way an opera singer supports the breath.

Thinking out loud here: we have one or two gentlemen in the Paris Opera who, rather than burning up their forces as they dance a variation, actually appear to be building or generating, in the gathering-in on oneself and the unleashing, the folding and unfolding, fresh reserves of air and energy from within, and as they finish, accordingly appear keener than when they began. In part, the illusion of the stage, but only in part. Strange and contradictory as that might seem, that is what we all aim at. But it cannot be done without épaulement.

There is one further, intractable aspect that every professor today is faced with: his pupils’ anxiety. The instant their young charges step from the ballet studio into the streets outside, they are faced with stark ugliness and cruel social injustice. In young men, an aspiration towards the heroic, towards righting wrongs, is innate, and they will tend to take to heart the suffering of others far more keenly, than do the girls. This alone can lead to poor posture, as they are “carrying the weight of the world” on their shoulders. Proper deportment will not lift that burden, but it may make it seem a little less.

In an ideal world, a classical dancer need study no calisthenics whatsoever outwith the ballet. Does the art form not claim to rest upon a complete and self-contained system of physical training ? In practice, however, this is the year 2004, we lack all épaulement, while the world is a roaring mess. We have got to face facts. Otherwise, we may be storing up ingrained weaknesses that will explode as injury the moment the chaps get into a troupe, and find themselves in that zoo we now call choreography, surrounded by screeching baboons.


Marble without a flaw

What is more beautiful, than to see the leap of joy in a student’s eyes on mastering a difficult enchaînement ? But what will happen to these young people, when they join a troupe, assuming they have the luck to find a classical troupe at all ? Over the last fifteen years, how many talented graduates of the Conservatoire have foundered on the rocks of the post-modern, to end up in the dole queue ? Only the truly great will be able to call up the indomitable will to stand and fight, no matter the cost to one’s personal ambitions.

And so, a deep bow to their professors, putting out into angry seas.

The Open House ended with the aforesaid choreographic and repertoire workshop, for a total of 75 minutes of modern dance, and roughly fifteen minutes of the classical. More’s the pity, as the extracts from Serenade and Lifar’s Suite en Blanc, put up by Francesca Zumbo and Gilbert Mayer, had moments of real artistry.

Earlier in the day, Wilfrid Piollet’s demonstration of variations from the répertoire with fourth-year students was thronged with onlookers. Stripped of foppery and “stage tricks”, elemental forms emerge. In a brief passage from the second Act of Swan Lake, the plastique begins to appear as a continuum, breaking out from the marble under the sculptor’s mallet. The intelligence steering the body was such, that had one seen the young woman’s hands alone, one could have told the steps.



***


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