Category: Dance

An image from “Five Ballets from Paris and St. Petersburg.” Six drawings from Act One, No. 6, of Henri Justamant’s staging manual for Paquita, circa 1854. Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung der Universität Köln, Schloß Wahn, Inventory Number 70- 479, pages 16– 19.

At 856 pages and 3.4 pounds, Doug Fullington and Marian Smith’s new book, Five Ballets from Paris and St. Petersburg—Giselle, Paquita, Le Corsaire, La Bayadère, Raymonda (Oxford, July 2024) is an impressive tome. And it is even more so once one begins to add up the long list of archival sources its two authors corralled, deciphered, and analyzed, a list that includes musical scores, violin reductions created for rehearsals (known as répétiteurs), two different systems of dance notations (Stepanov Notation, developed in Russia, and Justamant notation, created in France), choreographic drawings, librettos, program books, posters, period reviews, first-person reminiscences, and more. Each of the five ballets in question is analyzed with amazing thoroughness, tracing themes and details from one source to the next, and by so doing creating a kind of 360 degree immersive portrait. By the time you’re finished reading about each of the ballets discussed, you feel like you know everything you could possibly know about it. In fact, you can almost see and hear that ballet as it was performed in Romantic-era Paris or pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg.

But there is more to Five Ballets than maniacal thoroughness. The book is also a wonderfully engaging read. Fullington and Smith have shaped this Mont Blanc of minutiae into a narrative that keeps you happily engrossed, consuming detail after detail as if they were pleasurable bonbons. They have also made a valiant effort to convey why people enjoyed these ballets and found them exciting and entertaining in the first place. With all the serious discussions being had around cultural insensitivity, exoticization and the fetishization of female characters, the question inevitably arises: Why even bother with these works.  Well, as Marian Smith put it recently, when you peel away layers of cliché and coarseness accrued over the course of the twentieth century, you often find works that are full of variety, contrasting dance styles, storytelling, humor, and relatable, appealing characters. You can also distinguish the good from the bad. These ballets were meant to keep people engaged, entertained, and moved. It is worth looking at them a little bit more closely, figuring out what made them tick, and perhaps drawing a few lessons from them.

Marian Smith and Doug Fullington in Seattle

Smith is a professor emerita of music at the University of Oregon, the author of Ballet and Opera in the Age of Giselle, and editor of La Sylphide: Paris 1832 and Beyond. Fullington is a musicologist and dance historian who for several years was also Audience Education Manager at Pacific Northwest Ballet. And he is one of the foremost experts in choreographic notation, one of a small number of people in the world who know how to decipher Stepanov Notation, a system developed by the dancer Vladimir Ivanovich Stepanov at the Imperial Theaters in St. Petersburg in the late nineteenth century and subsequently used to notate dozens of ballets in the company’s repertory. Both Smith and Fullington have consulted in the staging of nineteenth-century works, including Giselle at Pacific Northwest Ballet and Paquita at the Bavarian State Ballet in 2014. Currently, Fullington is collaborating with Peter Boal on a historically-informed production of The Sleeping Beauty at Pacific Northwest Ballet that will open in 2025. (He also recently took part in a staging of La Bayadère set in the Far West at Indiana University.)

Long story short, the book, which took Smith and Fullington five years to complete, was a massive undertaking. But what has emerged is anything but heavy—it reflects the two author’s understanding of and delight in the materials they have discovered and worked with. As Smith put it to me recently, “It’s what we do for love.”

The three of us spoke recently via Zoom; Fullington was in Seattle, Smith in Eugene, Oregon.

Congrats on the publication of Five Ballets from Paris and St. Petersburg. What a sense of accomplishment you must have. So, tell me, why this book now?

Marian: Well, one thing is that we found out about a trove of notations scores by Henri Justamant in Germany from a friend, Stephanie Schroedter, who was doing research on the opera composer Giacomo Meyerbeer at a library in Wahn, outside of Cologne. [Note: Henri Justamant was a French ballet master and choreographer who worked in Paris, Lyon, and Brussels in the mid-nineteenth century and who notated scores of ballets being performed in France at the time.] When I saw the list of scores, I just about flipped. It included Le Corsaire, and Paquita. Doug and I zoomed over there in 2015 and we just ate it up. The scores were so explicit, it was almost like seeing a video of the ballets. Doug had already done a lot of work on the Russian Stepanov notations made by Nikolai Sergeyev. We wanted everyone to know about these discoveries.

Doug: Going even further back, I was inspired by Roland John Wiley's book from 1985, Tchaikovsky’s Ballets, which my parents gave me when I was 17. That was a model for me. I tried to do something similar in an article I wrote for Ballet Review on Raymonda in 1998. And of course, Marian wrote her wonderful book on Giselle around the same time. The two of us met in 2000 at the Bournonville Festival in Copenhagen. We finally got to a point where we felt like we had sufficient information on a certain number of ballets, and we thought “Let's do something with this.”

Giselle, Act One, No. 4. Adolphe Adam’s autograph score, 1841. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département de la Musique, MS- 2644, fol. 22r.

Both of you assisted Peter Boal in his 2011 staging of Giselle for Pacific Northwest Ballet. Did you refer to the Stepanov and Justamant notations then?

Yes. Marian and I used the Justamant most particularly for the pantomime, because the Stepanov is more spare in that respect. We used a hybrid of sources.

How did the two of you combine your complementary skills in this gargantuan project?

Doug: Generally I dealt with the Russian versions of the ballets and Marian dealt with the French versions, with some overlap. We sent what we had written back and forth.

Marian: We did a lot of editing of each other's chapters.

Doug: And Marian really led the way on the analysis of musical scores. I tried to apply the same approach to what I was doing with the choreography. Marian also authored the chapter that explains why nineteenth century ballet was so popular.

Such an important chapter, especially because there is so much discussion now about these ballets and whether they are offensive and how to deal with the offensive bits. Which sometimes brings up the question, Why even keep them?

Doug: So many of the ideas around nineteenth century ballet are really based on mid-twentieth- century [Soviet] productions. Part of what we wanted to do was set that aside and really look at what the ballets were like when they were first created.

15-16. Costume drawings by Henri d’Orschwiller depicting Georges Elie as Inigo and Carlotta Grisi as Paquita, Act One. Pencil, watercolor, 1846. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Bibliothèque Musée de l’Opèra, D216- 15 (80– 91). 17. Caroline Lassia in the Pas des manteaux from Paquita. Lithograph published by Martinet, Galerie Dramatique, 1846. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Bibliothèque Musée de l’Opéra, C- 261 (19,267). 18. Costume drawing (unsigned) depicting Hussards (of seven regiments) in Paquita, 1846. Pencil, watercolor. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Bibliothèque Musée de l’Opéra, D216- 15 (80– 91).

Why did you choose these five ballets?

Marian: Partly because they’re all in repertory in some form, and people know them. There are so many other ballets that aren't in repertory, and those are fascinating, but we don't have a way get a sense of them. With these, it’s easier for us to conceptualize what the originals were like.

Why not Coppélia or The Little Humpbacked Horse, or Nutcracker…

Doug: Some of it comes down to the practical question of having what we felt were sufficient sources.  And personal interests too. I love Raymonda, and the score, by Glazunov. And with La Bayadère, it's just so well notated. Corsaire is, I think, deeply misunderstood because it has been changed so much. And we had worked on Paquita and Giselle, so there was a practical side to it as well.

Marian: We were also really interested in finding a through line between France and Russia—French ballets that lived on in Russia.

I'm curious with these more exotic ballets, like Le Corsaire and La Bayadère, that are usually considered the most problematic for contemporary audiences–what was your approach? What were you trying to find out about them? And did your research change the way you thought about them?

Doug: Well they’re obviously products of their day, so they represent social norms and ideologies of the time. We tried to take a neutral approach, pointing out the things that we found problematic, without offering solutions, because that wasn't the purpose of the book.

Marian: I think I did write in the Corsaire chapter that it’s so Islamophobic you couldn't possibly stage it the way it was now. But the book is less about concrete solutions than about knowing what actually happened, which itself can help lead to solutions. One thing that I found is that the character of Medora is supposedly Jewish. [According to the libretto.] She’s the heroine, she's admirable, and she's beautiful—all good things.

Why do you think these exotic subjects were so popular, both with creators and with the audience? Is it partly because people couldn’t travel places, so this was the next best thing?

Marian: I think that’s part of it. In Paris, in addition to ballets and operas set in exotic locations, there were panorama theaters where paintings and representations of exotic settings were displayed, and they were very popular. The appetite for exoticism was apparently insatiable. And it was being whetted by France’s imperial incursions and the seizure of artifacts. What counted as exotic is interesting, too. Germany was exotic. Spain was exotic. Scotland. The Americas.

How did composers like Ludwig Minkus and Adolphe Adam go about depicting these far-off places musically?

Doug: If a composer wanted to compose a mazurka or czardas or a Spanish dance, that musical language was accessible. They knew what those dances were supposed to sound like. But for a ballet like La Bayadère, set in India, there was a lot of guesswork. Minkus only tried a couple of times for a few bars to create an “Indian” sound. He would use harmonies that he wouldn't use in common practice, extending the harmonic and melodic language. He drew on norms developed by other European composers who were writing exotic works, particularly in the French opera.

Paquita, Act One, Pas de sept bohémien, pages 4–5, choreographic notation in the hand of Nikolai Sergeyev, circa 1903. MS Thr 245 (28), Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

What are the different strengths of the composers you encountered, like Adolph Adam (Giselle and Le Corsaire), Édouard Deldevez (Paquita), Ludwig Minkus (La Bayadère), and Alexander Glazunov (Raymonda)?

Marian:  I just love Adolphe Adam—everyone who studies him loves him. I think the Giselle score is brilliant. He was a man of the theater, and he knew exactly what his job was. It’s not just that he was practical, which he was, but he was so full of ideas, and great with atmosphere. And the Corsaire score—some of it is just hilarious. There’s a lot of pirate music, some of which sounds like Gilbert and Sullivan. He writes a fugue in which the subject is the first four notes of a pirate song, so he’s mixing something humorous and rough and crazy with a very sophisticated German genre. It’s a hoot!

What is it that separates these scores from the “great” ballet scores by Tchaikovsky and Délibes?

Marian: The earlier scores were more directly tied to the action. They were attentive to every move. You can almost picture the composers right there, responding to what the dancers are doing. Later, the music becomes more big-picture, and can stand on its own.  

You write about “parlante” music, or “speaking” music, in these ballets, which is an idea that I love. What are the characteristics of this kind of music?

Marian: It’s almost like a recitative in opera. It doesn’t have a clear pulse all the time. It’s following what sounds like speech. Sometimes, it even sounds like a voice, or like instruments imitating a voice. It can also echo the melody of a song in a way that brings the words to your mind. I think the audience was so tuned into these melodies that they could actually hear the words.

You’ve drawn from an impressive assortment of sources: musical scores, répétiteurs, Stepanov notations, Justamant notations, libretti, program books, drawings by Pavel Gert, reminiscences. How did you get your arms around all of this material?

Doug: I think that's the value of two people working on a project—you can apply different kinds of expertise. I also had help. Kyle Davis, a dancer at Pacific Northwest Ballet, helped me figure out how to refer to certain steps, the order of the French terms in a combination, that sort of thing. We had many Zooms during Covid. And Andrew Foster, the ballet historian in London. I would send him the production performance histories, because he knows so much about Russian casting. Between Marian and me, and the assistance we received from other people, we were able to really make use of the sources. People were helpful and generous and just really, really nice.

Marian: I had a lot help from Lisa Arkin, a close friend of mine who is a character dancer and also a great mime. She acted out some of the passages in Giselle and we talked through the characters. It was extremely helpful.

How did you go about locating and accessing all of the resources? Where were they? And how hard was it to deal with the Russian archives in the context of the war?

Doug: I was lucky to get everything I needed from the museums and archives in St. Petersburg and Moscow before the war started. I worked closely with archivists at the Bakhrushin Museum and the Theater Museum in St. Petersburg. Once the war began, they very sweetly said, congratulations to you and Marian, we’re so sorry but we’re not allowed to work with you. Alexei Ratmansky made a few things available to me that he had. Lynn Garafola provided some programs. Marian and I went to Cologne together, and we went to Sandra Noll Hammond’s beach cabin in Santa Rosa California—Sandra is a nineteenth-century ballet expert and worked with us on the Justamant scores. Gallica, the portal of the French Bibliothèque Nationale is a great resource. We had the catalogue from Wahn for the Justamant notations. We knew about the Sergeyev collection at Harvard. All of that is digitized now. We would write to archives and ask, Do you have this thing we’re looking for?

Giselle, Act One, No. 2, Titus répétiteur, 1841/ 1842. St. Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music, GIK 7114/ 8a, pages 6– 7.

Do you think there are more materials out there that you haven’t yet had a chance to see?

Doug: I do think sources will continue to be found. There has to be a Corsaire répétiteur somewhere at the Paris Opera. It’s listed in the nineteenth century catalogue, so it has probably been misfiled somewhere.

Marian: The répétiteurs were bought and sold because people were using them in the rehearsal studio. So there are probably a lot still in private collections.

In your view, what is the advantage of this 360-degree approach?

Marian: It helps you to see and hear the ballet better. You find out what it must have been like in the theater.

How are the Justamant notations different from Sergeyev’s, written in Stepanov notation?

Doug: With Sergeyev, once you get past Bayadère, for which he made a very clear copy and worked off of a rough draft, the rest of the notations seem like he was writing down what he was seeing in the studio, as an observer. For example when he describes the mad scene in Giselle, he wrote down what Pavlova was doing with her hand, rather than saying what it meant. You get the idea of him perhaps not being completely inside in the creative process, even though he was acting as a ballet master. But Justamant created manuals for restaging, with a lot of practical information, like lighting instructions, and a list of properties. Very functional.

What sense of Justamant do you get from the notes?

Doug: He must have been a real character. There are dozens and dozens of manuscripts, and they are so meticulous. He notated everything, from academic classics to light works. There is even a ballet on roller skates in there.

Why did he notate everything?

Marian: I think some of it he did for his own use. We couldn't say this outright in the book, because we couldn't prove it, but I bet that, for example, he would see Corsaire in Paris, write it down, bring it down to Lyon and stage it there, and then he could restage it somewhere else, as he did with Giselle. He also made presentation copies. My colleague Helena Spencer actually found one online and bought it from an auction house. But also, who knows, maybe he just enjoyed doing it. He had a little place near the Bois de Boulogne where he would sit with his black ink and his red ink. His friends would come over and see him making these manuscripts. I think he was obsessed. He loved writing these things down. I’ve wondered what it would be like to meet him and to tell him what we've done.

And Sergeyev?

Doug: I think he had a frustrating career. There was all the upheaval and turmoil in Russia in the first couple of decades of the of the twentieth century. He really latched on to the notation system. He seemed to love the repertory and be very proud of the Imperial Ballet and the fact that he was associated with it. But I think he was overwhelmed once Alexander Gorsky left in 1900, because he had to ask for two assistants to keep the notation work going. After the Bolshevik Revolution, he wanted to direct the former Imperial Theater and was turned down. He wrote to Paris Opera about staging and directing there, and was, on the whole, turned down. He wanted everybody to do the Shades scene from Bayadère, and theaters kept saying, you're past your sell-by date. He was working in a time of change that wasn't so interested in what he had to offer. I think it was frustrating working with Ninette De Valois in London, because she would make changes to what he did.

Why do you think both the Justamant and Sergeyev notations were forgotten and ignored for so long? I mean they weren’t really rediscovered until the seventies when Wiley wrote about them, and were hardly used until the Sergei Vikharev Sleeping Beauty reconstruction in St. Petersburg in 1999.

Marian: I think people wanted to remake things the way they wanted, because they're creative artists. And in ballet the idea of passing things down from body to body is so important.

Doug: And we went through a period where pantomime was out of fashion, and where academic dancing was seen as only that, academic. But then eventually you get to a point where you're so far away from the time when these ballets were made, and suddenly people are a little more willing to look back and see what they were really like. It’s like the early music movement: Let's see what Beethoven sounds like on the instruments Beethoven had at his disposal at the time. Let’s see what it might say to us now. But there was also a lot of distrust of Sergeyev, because of a political culture of maligning him personally and professionally. [After the Revolution, Sergeyev absconded from Russia with his trove of notations, which he used to stage ballets in the West.] What we tried to do in the introduction of the book was address his professionalism and his ability. Clearly he knew the notation system, clearly he knew the step vocabulary, and he was able to stage these ballets.

2. Carlotta Grisi as Giselle, Act One. Etching published by Hautecoeur- Martinet, Paris, 1841. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Bibliothèque Musée de l’Opéra, BMO C- 261 (15- 1474). 3. Sketch of Giselle’s Act Two costume attributed to Paul Lormier, 1841. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Bibliothèque Musée de l’Opéra, D216- 13 (81). 4– 5. Costume drawings by Paul Lormier of Duke Albert, Acts One and Two, 1841. Pencil, pen, watercolor. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Bibliothèque Musée de l’Opéra, D216- 13 (77– 78).

Maybe he was just not the most inspired stager—could that be it? And perhaps that led to distrust of the value of the information in the notes.

Doug: Definitely. Some accounts suggest that he didn't have that creative, inspirational spark. And in the West, he suffered a language barrier. Maybe he got frustrated easily. But also, today’s ballet industry seems largely wedded to mid-twentieth century versions, and when something diverges from that, people say either “We don’t do that” or “That’s not what it is.” There’s a narrowness in classical ballet regarding what kind of step vocabulary and combinations are acceptable. The notations ask you to have a more open mind about the elements that make up classical ballet.

Marian: A lot of people who are trained classically today are only trained in ballet steps, not character steps, and not even mime so much. And I think one of the keys to the success of the 19th century ballets was that they did have a wide vocabulary of steps, and it wasn't all classical. That has been lost.

In the book, you take issue with some of Nadine Meisner’s assertions about Marius Petipa in her 2019 biography. What do you think she gets wrong about Petipa?

Doug: We think she attributes certain developments or choreography to Petipa that he didn't necessarily do early on in his years in St Petersburg. Some of the things she attributes to him were more attributable to his predecessors.  Like changes in Giselle; there’s just not that much evidence that we could find that he was responsible for them. Petipa is part of a continuum of French choreographers, and just because we know far less about Perrot, Mazilier, and Titus, Petipa gets credited with a lot of things that other people probably did or did first. It’s all incremental.

So what were Petipa’s innovations, then?

Doug: One of the big ones we talk about is this development of the pas d’action from a one-movement scene that had dancing and action built into a more formal structure—a multi movement suite of dances. You can see an example of the multi-movement structure in Mazilier’s Le Corsaire: it has an opening of five variations and a coda. Petipa incorporated narrative action into this structure, as in the Rose Adagio in Sleeping Beauty. I don't find that combination of multi movement structure with narrative before Petipa.

Marian: It did exist before, but it followed the action of a particular ballet rather than having a set structure that you would fill in.

Did this also make the stage action more complex?

Doug: It did, and so did another innovation we refer to as polyphonic choreography, where there are three or more choreographic ideas going on at the same time. Petipa might have twelve men dancing one thing and twelve women dancing something different, plus six soloists dancing something else. Think of the Garland Dance in Sleeping Beauty, with its men, women, and children all dancing their own choreography. Sometimes there was also a lead dancer.

That sounds like Balanchine—like in Symphony in C! He was obviously drawing inspiration from Petipa. What about ballet technique—how did Petipa innovate there?

Doug: In the book we talk about the absorption of Italian technique in the late 1880’s and all the way through the 1890’s. You see it in the ballets he made for Pierina Legnani, in which she would repeat steps many times: 32 hops, 32 fouéttés. There are entire variations where you’re essentially hopping on one leg. We aren’t finding anything like that in Justamant. Petipa seemed to think that a lot of what the Italians were doing was distasteful, but those were the dancers he had to work with, so he incorporated their strengths.

We also write about Petipa’s curatorial approach to repertory. He kept a lot of old ballets in repertory long after they had been discarded in Paris, like Giselle. So that by the time we get into the twentieth century, they had a huge repertory in St. Petersburg, including ballets by Perrot and Mazilier as well as Petipa. He would revise the older ballets, but he also seems to have kept plenty of original elements.

What were your most surprising discoveries in the process of researching and writing this book?

Marian: I was surprised by what I read about Giselle. She was not shy. And as my friend and helper Lisa Arkin pointed out, she stood up to everybody. It was so different from what I've seen depicted so often onstage. There were some things in Le Corsaire that really surprised me. Like the outright anti-Semitism. It was like a textbook case that people could use in Jewish Studies classes or a class on the history of anti-Semitism. And it was supposed to be funny.

Doug: Mine are more choreographic. One is that the choreography notated by Justamant is definitely worth reviving, and I think it will look different from the Russian ballets. It’s more similar to August Bournonville’s choreography, which of course is rooted in French ballet. The Giselle steps are beautiful. There is a wonderful musicality and creativity. And going back to Petipa, I love the way he used steps and gestures that we would consider character dance, right in the middle of something we think of as classical.

Whom do you see as the audience for the book, and how do you hope it will be used?

Marian: The audience for the book—anyone interested in ballet, staging practices, theater, music, and ballet’s sister art, opera. and I have to say, some of the eyewitness reports about these ballets are quite fun to read. The book could be useful for anyone who might want to stage these ballets in some way, or even for creating a new ballet. A person could learn from the tenets of these ballets: variety, humor, relatability, those sorts of things.

Doug: And for the works that ballet directors are grappling with, like Bayadère and Le Corsaire, we hope it might add something to the conversation to know what they really were like. We hope artistic directors will read it. They're the ones choosing the repertory and having to determine what to put on stage.

SALT LAKE CITY — Ballet West's "The Nutcracker" is celebrating its 80th anniversary by being officially designated as a Living Historic Landmark.

"The Nutcracker" is one of the most well-known and well-loved ballets and is an iconic Christmas tradition for many. Ballet West was claimed as "America's First Nutcracker" when it debuted in 1944 with choreography from Ballet West founder Willam Christensen.

The show is now officially known as a Living Historic Landmark by the state of Utah, the studio announced Monday. This designation is the first of its kind and was made possible by Utah Sen. Luz Escamilla's bill in the recent legislative session.

A Living Historic Landmark is defined by the bill as a cultural event significant to the state's history, culture, economy or character, unique to the state, the first in the nation and has occurred annually for as least 65 years.

The company created a website for "America's First Nutcracker" detailing the history of the renowned ballet and how it has evolved over the years.

In December, Ballet West will be celebrating 80 years of the storied Christmastime performance, which "sparked a cultural and artistic phenomenon that is largely responsible for the ballet landscape in America as we know it today," a statement from Ballet West said.

Christensen created his version of "The Nutcracker" for the San Francisco Ballet in 1944 in an attempt to provide family entertainment during the difficult times of World War II.

Ballet West artistic director Adam Sklute said the production proved to be ideal because it used so many children in its cast at a time when many of the able-bodied dancers were enlisted in the military.

"What it then became was a wonderful phenomenon around the globe, first in America, and later on the world. When 'The Nutcracker' premiered in Europe in 1892, many critics did not like that so many roles were danced by children, that the ballet was so short, and that the story was light and gentle. It fell into obscurity for decades," Sklute said. "But those very things that were not popular from the original production were the very things that made the work a success when Mr. C produced it."

Christensen brought "The Nutcracker" to Utah, where it has been performed annually since 1955 — first, at Kingsbury Hall with the University of Utah, and then at the Capitol Theatre once Ballet West was founded in 1963.

"We are the only company that presents this version in the United States, and it literally started this 'Nutcracker' mania that every ballet company in America presents during the holidays," Ballet West executive director Michael Scolamiero said.

Renowned American choreographer George Balanchine produced his own version of "The Nutcracker" a decade after Christensen for New York City Ballet. Some would argue Balanchine's is the most well-known version of "The Nutcracker."

Company after company started adopting the tradition of the show, giving children the opportunity to perform alongside professionals.

"'The Nutcracker' has become synonymous with the holiday tradition, and that's all because of Christensen, who created this success that has become a major revenue stream for ballet companies around the world," Sklute said.

Ballet West's production has gone through four versions of sets and costumes over the eight decades, with the most recent upgrade in 2017. Tickets for "The Nutcracker" sell out quickly every year and go on sale Sept. 4.

Though I’ve heard ballet dancers say there are moments onstage when they feel more like actors than athletes, I’ve always assumed the choices available to dancers as actors were few, and that embodying a character was secondary to embodying the most perfect lines of one’s own body. Under ballet’s demands of technical precision, I thought character could only emerge within a confined menu of available steps and techniques, like a plant growing in a controlled lab.

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But when the dancer Aran Bell, in his role as Romeo, found Juliet’s lifeless body in the crypt, I finally understood. I was high up in my own balcony, in the cheap seats, but could see each muscle of his face tremble. He crumpled over his lover’s body, heaving with a depth of grief that let his dancing access his character’s centuries-old pain.

And when Christine Shevchenko, as the heroine Tatyana, emerged onstage in the final act of Onegin with her aristocratic husband. The lines of her lithe body were made even straighter now by pride and class ascension. Shevchenko spun victoriously through her St. Petersburg palace as if squashing her past provincial self like a bug beneath her toe box.

And when Daniel Camargo and SunMi Park, as the long-repressed lovers in Like Water for Chocolate, embraced after being forced apart for over twenty years. The lifts that Camargo held Park through weren’t the gentle and effortless arabesque lifts of polite characters; they were the hungry thrashings of desperate ones.

Throughout June and July, I watched American Ballet Theatre (ABT)’s New York City programming adapt literature to dance. I watched through antique opera glasses, and when I came back up for air, my eyes ached from looking through their magnification for too long. I wanted to drink every turn, every touch, every glint of eye contact.

Mostly, I studied dancers and their infinite individual planes of feeling. I followed the lines of characters as they flitted sleeplessly, tiptoed like children, reeled from shame, rebelled and transformed. I’d fixate on a dancer for so long that I’d miss a sequence in another wing of the stage or forget to drink in the profound symmetry of the full corps in formation. In the transformation of literature to performance, a story ceases to be something that I can control by holding it between my hands. But part of the pleasure of this season’s literary ballets was in the effort it takes to experience something fleeting—in the straining to see.

Ballet critics sometimes draw a line between story ballets—called staid in their use of rigid techniques to replicate traditional romantic arcs—and contemporary ballets that subvert classic molds with choreographic risk-taking and emphasize emotional gesturing over linear narrative. But the binary between narrative and non-narrative ballets feels to me like an unhelpful one. My experience of this season’s productions, old and new, complicated that distinction: the most traditionally story-bound productions proved just as capable of surprising me and holding intense grief, love, joy, and loss.

Maybe my eyes just insisted on seeing every balletic rebirth as a beautiful one. I felt closest to this season’s characters in their vulnerable and fumbling moments of transition, through class statuses and illnesses and coming of age and the thickets of love affairs. These in-between moments made them feel more kindred to the awkwardness and sensitivity of literary characters than to the perfection I once associated with ballet. Characters’ complicated psyches followed them as choreographers translated their lives to dance. If I squinted hard enough at the stage, I thought maybe I could glimpse their past lives in literature layered over their choreography, like looking at double-exposed film.

Many of this season’s source texts are only accessible to me through translated versions, where characters’ existence has already been negotiated by different cultural contexts and deepened or obfuscated through their transition from another language into English. At least forty-five writers and scholars have translated Alexander Pushkin’s Russian masterwork Eugene Onegin to English, wrestling with its poetic structure and context-specific cultural references and deeming it ultimately “untranslatable.” For a Russian speaker, Pushkin’s verses are carbonated by iambic tetrameter. The lines buoy between feminine and masculine rhymes, and the final two lines of each stanza land with crisp, symmetrical AA rhymes like a dancer’s feet landing on stage after she’s taken flight. Pushkin is cherished by Russian readers for his sonic innovations, which are inseparable from his materials (the Russian language) and which no translation could perfectly imitate with the materials of English.

The binary between narrative and non-narrative ballets feels to me like an unhelpful one. This season’s productions complicated that distinction: the most traditionally story-bound productions proved just as capable of surprising me and holding intense grief, love, joy, and loss.

Choreography makes “untranslatability” feel more like possibility. In the case of Onegin, John Cranko’s choreography uses the poetry of the human body to summon the parts of Pushkin’s novel that were deemed untranslatable—its commitments to rhythm, cadence, symmetry. In one particular scene from Pushkin’s novel, Tatyana (spelled “Tatiana” in American Ballet Theatre’s programming) has a turbulent night of dreams after meeting the cold and disinterested Onegin at her family’s home. She dreams that an avalanche of snow barrels towards her on a bridge, and when the snowbank shifts out of the way, a big, matted bear appears from beneath the white. The bear growls and rears its claws at her, and chases her through a forest where jagged branches yank off her earrings, scarf, and slippers. She’s saved in the dream by Onegin, who opens the door to a shelter and then fights off the hordes of cackling, hellish monsters that still await her. Onegin’s voice bursts into the fighting: “She’s mine!” In her dreams, Tatyana needs Onegin to protect her, and needs to believe he’d be the one saving, not the one harming.

The choreographer Cranko distilled Tatyana’s terrorizing by bears and monsters to the raw desire beneath the terror: her need to be claimed by Onegin as his. He reimagined the nightmare sequence as a romantic pas de deux, where Onegin materializes through the mirror in Tatyana’s bedroom. He takes her hand, glides her gracefully through space, and turns her delicately from a tour de promenade into effervescent pirouettes like she’s balancing on the head of a pin. She collapses into his chest, as if trust-falling into his outstretched arms. He presses her into vaulting overhead lifts—her head thrown back, her body arched, her legs dangling in front of his face. It’s the only scene in the ballet when Tatyana’s and Onegin’s desires intersect. Watching the principals Christine Shevchenko and Cory Stearns perform this duet in June, I could almost hear the whispers of trust and protection in their conversation of movement.

There are no monsters and bears who dance in Tatyana’s bedroom, but the adaptation to choreography feels faithful to Pushkin’s intentions in a more spiritual way. It’s as if the choreography sifts the novel’s elaborate nightmare through a fine mesh sieve and works with the small particles that remain: the essential pieces of longing and desire. The inaccessible words that hold me at a distance from Pushkin’s story disappear here, right in front of me, dissolved by the heat of the dancers’ bodies. At the end of the scene, Onegin walks back through the mirror portal he emerged from, leaving Tatyana feverishly dreaming. Their meeting—and the captive audience’s witnessing of their story—can’t last.

Another ballet this season, Like Water for Chocolate, finds a new balletic language for a story that has already been reshaped by translation. Laura Esquivel’s magical realist novel Como agua para chocolate was brought to English readers by the translators Carol and Thomas Christensen in 1992. Tita De la Garza, the protagonist, is cursed as the youngest daughter of her family: forbidden from marrying her true love Pedro and destined to care for her mother until the cruel matriarch passes away. Magical realism manifests in Tita’s alchemical homemaking. Her quail in rose petal sauce is an aphrodisiac so strong that it stops an army in its tracks. Her sorrow is so profound that it induces a mass episode of vomiting among everyone who ate the cake—for Pedro’s wedding to Tita’s older sister—that Tita wept while preparing. Through years of losses, the preparation of food is both a vessel and an elixir for Tita’s grief.

Much of this magic isn’t wholly reproduced in the Christensens’ translation. In one scene written by Esquivel, Tita rabidly knits and weeps until dawn, completing, in just one night, a quilt that should otherwise take a whole year to knit. But in the Christensens’ version, Tita only works on the quilt until dawn. The sheer ferocity in her knitting of the quilt, and the feat of completing it, both disappear. By separating the story from Esquivel’s intentions, the translators brought it closer to English readers’ expectations: making Latin American traditions of magical realism easier to experience and to believe.

If the politics of translation make characters and stories familiar to me and my English-speaking world, then maybe ballet can make them deliciously unfamiliar again. I can’t learn to read every language, but I can climb the bewitching velvet staircase of the theater and enter the balcony like a hidden portal in the dark. I can submit to the ballet’s multisensory surprises, squint to read the language of choreography, and watch dancers conjugate it in heartrending emotional registers. I can tune into dog-eared stories at new frequencies.

While the expression of desires and fears through movement is primal—everyone who watches dance has a body of their own—it would be an oversimplification to call dance a universal language. Like any language, ballet is an alphabet of non-exhaustive steps and techniques that choreographers re-imagine in equivocal, elusive, surprising combinations. It’s something I have to work hard to engage with.

This season, I sometimes joined my friends Sasha and Polina in the audience. With their combined thirty years of ballet training, they’re closer to native speakers of the visual language onstage. It’s not just that their reading of technique—recognizing that one dancer was particularly sharp, or another struggled to land in fifth position—lets them articulate opinions about the success with which a story was told. It’s more like their fluency in the language of choreography constructs, for them, the story itself. When they notice that the choreographer of Like Water for Chocolate opted for a contemporary form of renversé, they see that the character Tita’s world is changing: at the brink of the twentieth century, new technology and new social norms arrive on her farm throughout the story, modernizing her family’s life along with the language she dances. In Onegin, when Polina or Sasha recognizes that the choreography morphs from provincial Russian folk dance in the first act to bourgeois French-influenced steps in the final act, they understand that Tatyana is rising in the ranks of society, dancing with more conventionally elegant techniques as she ascends to more sophisticated circles. Part of the pleasure of watching ballet as an observer but never-participant is turning to these friends at intermission to ask their thoughts. I feel a deeper communion with the characters and their choreography when it takes effort to name and describe them together.

Vladimir Nabokov, in his project of bringing his literary forefather Pushkin to the English-speaking world, rejected the idea that translating literature should create a frictionless experience for a reader. In response to the many artists before him who tried to recreate the essence of Pushkin’s poetry in English, Nabokov argued that recreating sound, rhyme, meter, or pleasure is the wrong goal for an English translator. He believed “the clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase” and that an exacting treatment of each original word choice—combined with extensive footnotes that describe Pushkin’s poetic choices—is the only true translation. He translated the novel’s famous first stanza word-for-word like a court transcript:

Moi dyadya samykh chestnykh pravil,______ My uncle has most honest principles:
Kogda ne v shutku zanemog,_____________when taken ill in earnest,
On uvazhat sebya zastavil______________he has made one respect him
I luchshe vydumat ne mog._____________  and nothing better could invent.
Ego primer drugim nauka…____________To others, his example is a lesson…

It’s hard for me to reconcile the English lines with the promises of pleasure that accompany the Russian text’s legacy. The English words catch in my jaw, and I trip over “and nothing better could invent,” a punchline alienated from its subject. Who or what couldn’t create anything better? The translation loses every dimension of its color and character. It also loses the irreverent sarcasm that allows the narrator to reach out and touch native readers like a hard pat on the shoulder: the narrator is saying his uncle earned respect from others only once he fell ill, making his sickness a clever ploy which others should learn from. The shared experience of Pushkin’s genius among those who’ve read him in Russian—who describe his language as explosive, rich, groundbreaking—hides from me in plain sight, like I’ve overheard an inside joke and embarrass myself by asking what it means.

But Nabokov’s philosophy challenges my impulse to recoil from the difficulty of his translated version. His study of Eugene Onegin is a clinical, baroque textbook drowned in footnotes that intentionally gives readers a project rather than a leisure experience. His methodology demands that I become his partner in trying to reconstruct Pushkin’s original poetic choices. It asks me to work hard to compare the literal English output with Nabokov’s annotations—to squint to see where Pushkin’s pulse lives at the intersection.

Dance has the capacity to expand and deepen my understanding of story—adapting a plot without sanitizing it. But in classical ballet, that hasn’t always been the case.

In the challenging moments of Pushkin’s text that other English translations might smooth over, Nabokov leans in, naming and describing the difficulty. When he encounters Pushkin’s use of the word toska, he annotates the reasons why it can’t be neatly folded into the fabric of English: “No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause.” Its other shades of possible meaning include “a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning” and more quotidian sensations like nostalgia, lovesickness, or boredom. But Nabokov doesn’t think a word like toska renders the whole work untranslatable, just that it demands a deeper commitment to excavating the nooks and crannies of the word.

The ABT principal dancer Cory Stearns, who danced the role of Onegin on the night I saw the production, understood that his job included acting out these shades of meaning: holding all of Onegin’s pining, restlessness, and boredom in his dancing. In the production’s Playbill, Stearns describes riffing on his choreography when his character first meets Tatyana: “I do these pirouettes, and my hand goes to my head numerous times.” He makes a choice to give his pirouettes an aloof, arrogant edge, like someone playing with his hair while you try to hold a conversation with him. His performance approximates something like Nabokov’s call to action: a call to look closely and follow a character’s complicated psyche.

Dance has the capacity to expand and deepen my understanding of story—adapting a plot without sanitizing it. But in classical ballet, that hasn’t always been the case. Complex and messy characters have sometimes been flattened by choreography that funnels them into ballet’s available molds of pas de deux. These duets, typically choregraphed between heterosexual romantic leads, haven’t traditionally accommodated creating the same level of depth for relationships between characters who are friends or family (to say nothing about queer relationships).

This historical mold limits the possibilities for reimagining literature in dance, when so many of the thorniest and most interesting relationships in literature are non-romantic. In the text of Eugene Onegin, for example, surprising moments of tenderness exist in Onegin’s friendships with other men. In an English translation by James E. Falen (who sought to preserve the original rhyme scheme), Onegin’s friendship with the character Lensky is shaded with wry and earnest affection:

But Lensky, having no desire
For marriage bonds or wedding bell,
Had cordial hopes that he’d acquire
The chance to know Onegin well.
And so they met—like wave with mountain;
Like verse with prose, like flame with fountain:
Their natures distant and apart.
At first their differences of heart
Made meetings dull at one another’s;
But then their friendship grew, and soon
They’d meet on horse each afternoon,
And in the end were close as brothers.
Thus people—so it seems to me—
Become good friends from sheer ennui.

When I read this stanza, I paused at its gentle humor and human acuity, the men’s candid journey from irritation to intimacy breaking through the verse’s translation to English. The choreography of the ballet adaptation had none of this shy, reticent fraternal closeness; the most contact that the two men make with each other on stage is when they eventually fight to the death. I’m not saying this was an oversight on the choreographer’s part; John Cranko was intentional in his decision to re-envision the story through Tatyana’s eyes, and her character is given more agency and growth than Onegin’s character. But these choreographic choices have the same effect of altering a story by bringing it closer—more familiar—to an audience’s expectations. In this case, classical ballet constructs an expectation to follow a romantic arc that spotlights heroines and female dancers as pinnacles of beauty and desire.

When he adapted Like Water for Chocolate, one of British choreographer Christopher Wheeldon’s intentions was to challenge these traditions in service of the stories and relationships that don’t fit neatly into classical molds. In his choreography, the physical fighting between Tita and her mother Elena became one of the most captivating and wrenching scenes I saw this season, and it’s a duet that wouldn’t normally exist in the classical repertoire in the first place. While there’s plenty of fighting in ballet, it’s typically reserved for fatal duels between male rivals. It’s uncommon in ballet to choreograph the type of abject aggression between two women where, in Like Water for Chocolate, Mama Elena drags her daughter’s body down onto the stage and mimes beating her, the sound of her fists thundering through six tiers of a stunned audience.

This heart-stopping scene of violence is one of the ways Wheeldon tried to honor the complex DNA of Esquivel’s characters, working directly with Esquivel to build extensive profiles of the novel’s characters and Esquivel’s intentions, bypassing the secondary source of the English translation.

In the last scene of Like Water, the characters Pedro and Tita finally reunite in a duet that pushes the conventions of what a pas de deux can look like. Finally emancipated from the family obligations and abuses that held them apart, they’re free now to melt into each other like chocolate bars in warm hands. The beauty of that union is transcendent. At every turn, SunMi Park and Daniel Camargo (as Tita and Pedro) kindle and cradle each other’s dancing: on top of shoulders, draped over the nape of a neck, spun from the small of a back. The voice of the soprano Maria Brea beams through the orchestral pit like holy light. For the first time in the production, an operatic aria accompanies the score, a hymn shepherding the lovers home. Pas de deux translates to “step of two” or “dance for two.” Man and woman step together, and so do author and choreographer, collaborating across time and space.

In the English translation of this scene from the novel, Tita remembers a piece of wisdom from another man she had considered marrying during Pedro’s exile from her: “If a strong emotion suddenly lights all the candles we carry inside ourselves, it creates a brightness that shines far beyond our normal vision and then a splendid tunnel appears that shows us the way that we forgot when we were born and calls us to recover our lost divine origin.” The sentence grates a scrap of sandpaper against Laura Esquivel’s language. Adjectives kick and climb over each other, fighting to take up space and wring out the last word. But onstage, it’s as if the choreography distills and re-translates the magic and magnetism of Esquivel’s work. The dancers find the candle buried somewhere in the metaphor and nurture its flame.

In their final moments together, Tita and Pedro disappear behind a gauzy curtain. A towering special effects projection of fire and explosions, cast onto the stage, subsumes them in flames—the characters, now at the end of their lives, find eternity together in the afterlife. They’d nursed the flickering light, spun together in stronger and stronger tufts of air, and let the flame grow until the full blaze immortalized them. It’s the version of their lives that I’ll remember.

Christine Shevchenko and Cory Stearns in Onegin. Photo: Rosalie O’Connor, courtesy of American Ballet Theatre.