In Ballet, the Limits of Abstraction

Novelist and dance critic Laura Jacobs mourns the sterility of the New York ballet scene. She blames most of the problems on abstraction and longs for more ballets that tell stories. In the hands of a few masters like Balanchine, she thinks, abstract or "plotless" ballet can be wonderful, but in other hands it is boring or even destructive. She remembers a favorite work of hers from 30 years ago that showed soldiers on the eave of war flirting with women in a park:

Midway through the dance the music drops out and the mating calls of loons are heard. This brings a haunting quality of darkness, water, tumescence to the stage; we feel the full-bodied romantic yearning of young adults and of nights that feel eternal. That these young men, because of war, may be at the sunset of their lives makes the dance almost unbearable. They are thinking of love, and watching them, we are thinking of death. This is meaning. This is about something. This is art.

Not knowing much about dance myself, I have no opinion as to whether Jacobs is right about contemporary ballet. But I am struck by how similar her thoughts about abstract ballet are to my thoughts about abstract painting and sculpture. There are abstract works that I like. But when I don't like an abstract work, I find it blank and empty and sometimes irritating. An abstract work that does not move me repels me with its nothingness, as if it were an assertion that meaning and feeling and purpose are stupid wastes of time. It seems, not just bad, but cynical. And, as Jacobs says about ballet, abstract works come after a time to seem endlessly repetitive; can anybody tell the difference between one Calder mobile and the next?

Modernism, I think, has spent itself. The whole project of reducing images to simple forms, of conveying meaning with subtle variation in shades of beige instead of figures, of stripping things down to their essentials, has grown tired and stale. So, I think, has the gentle mockery of Pop Art and postmodernism. The only way forward for art is to return to its ancient roots, in creating beauty and telling stories.