Dance is perhaps the most fleeting of all the performing arts and I sometimes marvel that we’ve been able to preserve any ballets at all. Sure, there are videos and films, but the real art of the ballet is still passed on in oral tradition and you’d be surprised how much of the ballet repertoire exists only in the memories of the people who danced it.
So, let’s say you had a hankering to put together a famous work created, maybe 70 years ago, or even a work made last year. A musician could pull out a score and set to work learning it immediately. For dance, though, things are a little bit different.
Although there are several notation systems for movement– Labanotation and Benesh are among the best-known –unlike musicians and composers, many dancers and choreographers can’t read or write in either one. Most rely instead on memories, recordings, and the feeling for movements stored in their muscles from years of doing a ballet. Trained to pick up a series of steps within minutes and retain them --plus any changes a choreographer might make – it is the dancers who keep these works alive over the years.
Even though videos and films have helped to preserve dance immensely, recordings can be unreliable—any misstep from a dancer can be carried through the years as choreographic gospel. And a film also won’t necessarily relay the inspirations or feelings that breathe life into a step.
Enter the repetiteur – the ballet master or mistress whose job it is to guard the collective memory of these works.
On a warm afternoon, in the Contra Costa Ballet studios, dancers of Company C Contemporary Ballet are still scattered about the studio readying for rehearsal when Donald Mahler, a distinguished-looking, silver-haired gentleman, enters and chats with the Company C’s ballet mistress Lou Fancher and director Charles Anderson.
“You ready?” calls out Mahler finally as he settles into a chair at the front of the studio, “You swear?”
A ballet master of the Antony Tudor Ballet Trust, Mahler is in Walnut Creek for a whirlwind couple of weeks, during which he’ll stage “Dark Elegies,” one of Tudor’s most somber and difficult ballets on this young troupe of dancers.
As the dancers scurry into place for the opening, a sudden change comes over their faces, as if something had suddenly clouded their eyes. The mood shifts palpably and suddenly all focus is on the quietly anguished Gianna Davy and Elliott Gordon Mercer, who dance a pas de deux in the center of the room.
Austere and emotionally weighty, Tudor’s “Dark Elegies” was created in 1937 for Ballet Rambert—now the Rambert Dance Company and Britain’s oldest dance company. Tudor’s Expressionist choreography, filled with angular breaks, and twisting limbs, seems to match the wrenching music, Gustav Mahler’s “Kindertotenlieder” or “Songs on the Death of Children.”
Although there is no explicit narrative, the two scenes of this one-act ballet clearly paint a picture of a small community in mourning for the loss of their children. Through choreography laced with fiendishly difficult steps and jagged body angles, Tudor strives to show the inner turmoil outwardly without launching into histrionics – a balance that is a difficult one to master, and the devil can be in the details.
Only a few minutes into a run of the ballet, Mahler shakes his head.
“No, that’s not right,” he says pointing at the feet of the women corps, “That’s not right. Let’s stop. Let’s fix that.”
He adjusts the emphasis of where they’re placing their feet, corrects the direction slightly. The changes seem small and perhaps very minor, but ultimately, it makes a clear difference to the quality of their movements.
Mahler’s association with the Tudor legacy dated back to his own youth, when he hitchhiked from Syracuse to New York for his first taste of ballet in the big city.
Mahler studied with Tudor and Margaret Craske in the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School, then danced for the National Ballet of Canada and Metropolitan Opera Ballet, where he would later become the Director of the Ballet. Now considered an expert on the work of Antony Tudor, he spends much of his time staging the choreographer’s works for such companies as American Ballet Theatre, the Joffrey Ballet, Ballet West, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and Alberta Ballet.
Like the most skillful ballet masters, Mahler has a mental file not only of each ballet, but also of the many variations that may have been made over the years. Mahler will not just set what he has stored in his memory banks, but he also continues to refines those recollections, enabling him to stage each work in a way that he feels will be true to Tudor’s intention, and yet still work on the dancers in front of him.
Mahler, a cheerful raconteur with numerous amusing and woolly stories, cites a section of the “Dark Elegies” in which the dancers are on their knees on the floor and then tilt backward at an angle. For years, he says, he set the tilt at a 45-degree angle backward. More recently he had an encounter with a dancer who had worked with Tudor and was certain that the dancers had leaned backward all the way until their heads touched the floor.
“I wasn’t sure,” he said, “Because no one else seemed to remember that, but then much later, I saw a very old clip of film of the ballet, and there they were, all the way back.”
Back in the rehearsal, Mahler makes indications with his hands and murmurs to Fancher, “You’ll have to have them work on that. That should be fixed.”
Fancher nods, and you can see her writing the mental note to herself. In another week, Mahler will return home, and it will be up to her and the dancers to carry it on.
Company C Contemporary Ballet performs “Dark Elegies” along with “3 Epitaphs,” “Hush,” and “Firebird” at the Amador Theater in Pleasanton on Saturday (April 7) at 2 pm and 8 pm. For more information, call (925) 931-3444, www.companycballet.org
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