In The New York Times, Roslyn Sulcas wrote recently that “gloom pervaded” the ballet world of the 1980s and 1990s, gloom purportedly dispelled by the three choreographers whom she interviews in a piece entitled “Three Kings of Ballet Choreography.”
That would be Wheeldon, Ratmansky and Peck.
To support her point Sulcas quotes Jennifer Homans, writing in the Times that “a lifeless othodoxy” was reigning.
Except that Homans wrote that in 2002 not in 1987, as Sulcas claims.
In any case, the picture Roslyn paints is simply not accurate.
In 1980 ballet–at least in America–was at it’s all-time height of attendance, and media attention, coming off the dance boom of the 1960s and ’70s. Do people realize that balletgoers routinely lined up for standing room in those days?
Creatively, the thrust during the 1980s in new work was crossover collaborations where modern dance choreographers were invited to create for ballet companies. How many great works came out of that fusion is subject to debate, but it did provide for some artistic dynamism.
By the end of the 1980s ballet was beginning to be impaired by the reactionary culture of Reagan’s Washington, and by the corporate consolidation of the media, but was still prominent and respected in society–much more so than today. Attendance was not what it had been a decade earlier, but much healthier than today’s.
Although Sulcas is focusing on artistic product, the implication is that ballet itself has been revitalized by these three choreographers. But the reality is that attendance is far lower than it was in 1980 or even in 1989. And in terms of the media, the Times itself is one of the few publications–“mainstream” or not–that gives more than an extremely intermittent passing glance to ballet.