From The Archives 20: The Performed Inanimate in Ballet

Ballet was never much my thing. When I was 5, my parents gave me a choice between doing ballet or soccer, and choosing ballet is one of my few life regrets. My entire childhood I felt drawn to soccer, but I never felt like I was good enough for it, and I've always wondered why I ended up choosing ballet. Since then, I've learned various levels of salsa, bachata, waltz, contra, tango, Turkish, cha cha, and bellydancing. So I can't say that I haven't been drawn to dance, but ballet was never gonna be my favorite of the lot. Even so, learning about it was a nice respite to learning about opera. 

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May 2019

           When in comes to the stage world, the definition of reality is layered under the various contexts happening with the performance. When it comes to ballet, it is understood by the audience that things will occur onstage that may not be possible or true in real life. The audience entrusts the performers to create something that feels and looks as real as possible, without there being any situations actually causing harm to anyone. The performers also trust the audience to suspend disbelief about the story they’re constructing. This mutual relationship of trust allows for performances to be created that challenge the idea of reality in ways that will leave the audience pensive. The inanimate status of dolls is put into question when they appear as characters in ballets, challenging the idea of reality and allowing for the performance to be a mixed process of questioning and building reality. 

            Reality is defined as being real, or at least close enough to real that it can be accepted as real within a manufactured context. However, every person has their own different experiences of the world, and their perspective of reality is built throughout their entire life as they gain more experiences and knowledge of the world around them. Reality in a staged production is assumed to be the same as in the real world, until it shown to be different. Sometimes it is only the existence of the story than may not be real, but sometimes the entire performance is unquestionably within a world different than our own.

When it comes to questioning reality, Todorov’s idea of the fantastic dictates that any event appearing supernatural falls into one of three categories. If a particular situation, or event, appears as a supernatural illusion but can be very much placed into and explained by reality, it categorized as “uncanny.” If the occurrence definitively cannot be explained by reality, it is an appearance of the “marvelous.” If however the event resides somewhere in the spectrum between uncanny and marvelous, with no certain answer as to whether it is possible or impossible and its relationship with reality is unknown, then that is the “fantastic.”  

            In ballet, the staged realities exist in a world that is mostly expressed through dancing. In the real world, dolls generally exist in the combined world of imagination and play. While people of all ages own dolls, they’re associated most with young children. Young children are still new enough to the world that their realities are still in the early stages of being formed, and one of their main jobs is to learn things like animals or numbers in order for them to understand the world within the language and context of society’s pre-established reality. Children use dolls to role-play situations they know exist, like sitting down at a table to eat food, as well as narratives and characters that only exist in their own imagination. The stories they create and perform are practice for both real life and for greater outlets of creativity. 

            Using dolls in play to build reality is characteristic of children, ballet allows for adults to reenter into a reality-building context on a level more suited to their intelligence level. It’s no coincidence that the word “play” has the dual meaning of both a staged performance and the action of amusing oneself (perhaps with a doll). Both performance and play have to do with stories and reality building, the only difference is whether doing it versus watching it.    

      

When people perform dolls, it becomes ambiguous as to whether the dolls exist in a reality where they are “real” or whether any action they make is something being imagined by a character and that they’re truly just inanimate dolls. Not only is the audience experiencing a visual performance of a version of reality, but that version of reality may show more than the character’s reality. The audience has the opportunity to be able to see multiple perspectives of a staged reality layered such that the question “what is reality?” can sometimes be unanswerable.

            The ballet Coppéliais about a girl named Swanhilda who investigates Dr. Coppelius’ life sized doll Coppelia when her fiancé Franz becomes intrigued by the doll he thought was a girl. When Franz and Swanhilda both come across Coppelia for the first time, neither of them realizes that Coppelia is a doll, and so they both make an effort to get Coppelia’s attention without understanding why they weren’t getting a response. As a ballet, the audience gets introduced to Coppelia in the same way as the characters do, because everyone sees Coppelia without a verbal explanation of her being a doll.  Throughout the production, the audience and Swanhilda discover Coppelia together, learning that the inventor wants to bring his doll to life, and preventing him from casting a spell on Franz in order to do so.

            The ballet ends without Coppelia being brought to life, but there remains the question of whether it could have happened. If the inventor’s spell had animated Coppelia, their reality would have been decidedly one that contained aspects of the marvelous. However, Coppelia was never turned into a living girl, and so her story ends up being an example of the uncanny because of the initial illusion towards the other characters and the audience that she might be real. Even though the audience learns that Coppelia is a doll, there is enough uncertainty over Coppelia’s existence that reality becomes ambiguous as to whether it is a world like our own or not.

            The Nutcracker is arguably one the most popular ballets known by both adults and children. In the US in particular, this Christmas ballet has become prevalent enough for there to be a significant cultural awareness of the basic storyline of the opera. During a Christmas Eve party, Clara’s godfather Drosselmayer gives her a nutcracker that her brother and his friends break. Clara takes care of the nutcracker, but when the clock chimes midnight, a mouse king appears and the toys come to life, with the nutcracker becoming a prince. Clara distracts the mouse king, allowing for the nutcracker prince to defeat the mouse king, and they spend the rest of the night watching performances in the Kingdom of Sweets.

            Whereas Coppelia doesn’t come to life, the nutcracker does. The ballet begins without any indication of the fantastic, and it is only when midnight hits that their reality shifts to something different than the real world. When they leave for the Kingdom of Sweets, the real world is completely left behind and Act 2 is spent in a marvelous world bridged to our own through Clara. As a ballet often seen by families, the reality shifts allow for a shared experience between both children and adults of childhood imagination and matters of perspective. While in the Kingdom of Sweets, there are a number of dances performed where the music follows certain tropes associated with the particular character that performs it.  The Arabian coffee dance has melodic patterns created to sound “exotic” and certain percussive instruments are used to emphasize the foreign sound. By including pieces that are intentionally composed to sound foreign, it gives the world of the Kingdom of Sweets an addition flavor of “otherness” to further differentiate between the different realities Clara exists in.

            When dolls are characters in ballets, it cannot be assumed that they are inanimate objects anymore. The question of whether they can become living people is often made ambiguous, or proved to be true in a version of reality that is marvelous. Just as children build their own reality with dolls in play, dolls in ballets create a variable relationship with reality that does well in a performative context.