“Alte Liebe”
Choreographed by Britta Pudelko and Stephan Müller
Dock 11, Berlin
27 November, 2010
“Alte Liebe and the Bodies that Bear Ballet”
As I walked into Dock 11, a group of men lie piled atop each other in a circle. A woman enters, stately in her carriage, positively noble in her visage, and carried by feet which deigned not to look at each other and hips which threatened to topple this mesmerizing, aging queen. Her long neck and still willowy arms serve as tokens for her Royal pedigree and schooling. They command, majestically and impotently, that we not look at the wicked spell cast on her aged trunk.
Like Nijinsky’s Faun, the four dancers—all of them women, all “old”—bear a certain bifurcation. Most often the split is at the navel: the arms are still obedient to the dictates of ballet while the lower halves struggle against his unyielding expectations. But I imagine this reads very differently depending on the spectator’s own history with ballet. My training in ballet is limited, and my capacities even more so, but my own experience with this form compelled to false, however interesting, conclusions about the dancers. To my eye, that is, according to the way my bodily encounters shape my vision, ballet seemed to have begun its suit rather late in some of the women’s lives. The arms seemed to be grafted on a decaying torso. In the one case where a dancer could meet the “big toe resting against the heel” requirements of ballet’s fifth position, it seemed a dissettling vestige to me, a relic, like a saint’s dismembered and encased hand which refuses to age. I think of it as some position of succor more than comfort, like a trauma victim’s safe spot. However another dancer’s atemporal cambré, a slow arch of the back, harkened back, vertebra by vertebra, to a state of wondrous agility. Another dancer’s right femoral head seemed welded into its socket, Her hip was thrust forward because of it, and her feet both constantly turned out.
At times the lack of an ability to keep up with ballet was played to a humorous effect. For example, one of the dancers left off before attempting a move where one jumps and faces the opposite direction mid-air, called a fouetté. At another point, three of the women turn their tea party discussion to a dancer’s dramatic fall to her staged death. One commented that it was beautifully done. The fallen dancer then discusses how she is going to rise again, and gets up with an unballetic grunt.
Some, I concluded, were former ballerinas, others not.
I was, in some sense, mistaken. The program notes, and my Royal Academy of Dance-honed girlfriend, assured me that these were all thoroughly trained ballet dancers who’d spent years performing ballet. No doubt seeing these women as bearing their expertise to their current capacity would lead to a very different experience with this dance (and I hope some of you who will chime in), but I was never consistently convinced that this was the case with everyone. Instead, this narrative conveyed by the top halves of their bodies, the tale of virtuosity and notoriety, seemed to me as farcical as the legion of young men who were fondling and fawning after the women.
To put it another way, the alte Liebe wasn’t the chorus of young men. Instead, this lover is far more consumptive and contemptuous. It used the women, maimed their bodies, and left hobbling, physically muttering. Their public confessions/insistence of love made seem not only false, but the unconvincing, pathetic ravings of a corporeal dementia. The women profess to be former lovers of ballet, but he does not recognize them. What does ballet do for you? What does ballet do to you? I only scarcely recognized his mark on them.
