And Suddenly I'm Crying
Trying and failing to explain why Kenneth MacMillan's ballet Concerto moved me to tears.
I just watched a recording of the 2010 Royal Ballet production of Kenneth MacMillan’s 1966 ballet Concerto. And suddenly, somewhere in the second movement, I found myself crying.
Sometimes when I watch or listen to something and cry, I can feel it building up in me. I always cry when I hear Bach’s Sonata No. 2 in A Minor for Violin[1]. I can feel the tears slowly massing and rising up through the first series of dissonant double stops; I feel the emotion gather inside of me and can choose to allow it to come out or to fight against it. But watching Concerto there was no such warning. I wasn’t aware of it beginning. One minute I wasn’t crying and the next I was. It wasn’t unpleasant – as if induced by sadness – the tears just arrived, stayed gently for a few minutes of the ballet and then, as quickly as they had come, left.
MacMillan’s Concerto was originally made for Berlin’s Deutsche Opera Ballet in 1966 when he was artistic director there. Four years later he would become the artistic director of London’s equivalent institution. The ballet is set to Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No.2 in F. It’s Shostakovich at his most fun. He wrote it for his teenage son’s birthday as a gift. It’s a light and delicate piece of music, far less stern than his other works. But in it there are moments of darkness. Birthdays are about joy - of course they are – but (forgive the ponderousness) they are also when we are reminded of our age and by extension our mortality. These moments are fleeting, gone so fast as to make you question whether you heard them at all – but they’re there, like a sour guest lingering by the bar at a birthday party. MacMillan’s choreography has the same. In amongst the joy and lightness he weaves moments of something nearing grief.
In this 2010 production the set is a swathe of warm colours. The dancers, dressed in monochromatic costumes with colours picked out of the stages of a sunset, appear to simultaneously blend in with, and stand out from, this background. The habit in set design for ballet is to create a contrast between the dancers’ bodies and the background so that their outline is clear and the positions they adopt are as easy as possible to see. Here the light blurring of that legibility means that instead of ‘reading’ the ballet as a series of positions it becomes something more fluid.
This fluidity in the language of design is contrasted by the musical language of the Shostakovich. Concerto No. 2, sounds like a conversation between old friends. It flits from one topic to the next and returns to them just as easily. Motifs are picked up and dropped; they are almost parodied by different instruments before being reclaimed by the piano. Sometimes the piano melody is simply laid out before a series of trilled complications drive it toward demanding virtuosity. In this music there’s a wonderful mix of joy and skill.
I wrote a while ago that I don’t yet know what my taste in ballet is. As I’ve watched more and more, I suspect that this might be a good description for what I like: the mix of joy and skill. MacMillan’s choice to choreograph to this piece allows him to create a ballet that engages in the culture of awe without pretention. Awe – the shock at skill or talent – seems to me a central tenet of the experience of watching ballet. Part of watching ballet is to see something almost superhuman, to watch an art form which demands so much virtuosity, precision and even suffering. The problem with awe is that it can force ballets into being mere showcases of talent, where things like meaning or joy are overrun by a piece which becomes only a way of demonstrating skill. Ballets, at their worst, risk being cadavers for which the only uses are as objects for techniques to be showcased upon. Yet by choosing this piece of Shostakovich, a piece with an elegant balance between joy and virtuosity (and the joy of virtuosity), MacMillan makes a ballet that uses the generation of awe in the audience to arrive at other emotions. It uses awe as a tool for emotional legibility.
It begins a little childlike. Two dancers on stage, close enough to be together but far enough to be read as two bodies rather than a composite body. As the first notes are played a perfectly circular yellow light, like a child’s drawing of a sun, appears between them. They mirror each other’s movements and then begin to move in the same orientations, the space between them always staying the same. As the piano motifs complicate so too does the movement. They pirouette into a series of turns and jumps accelerating with the music. This is where the awe begins. As it gets faster the question for the audience becomes: ‘for how long can these movements keep their perfection and acceleration?’. And because Yuhui Choe and Steven McRae are incredible dancers, they manage this dizzying moving up through the gears for an impossibly long time. And then, just as our awe is at its height, MacMillan brings on six more dancers all moving in unison, their bodies miraculously turning out the same perfection as each other.
Yet in amongst all this skill is such joy. MacMillan finds moments of parody; moments where a dancer seems to break the conventions of ballet and move as if they are waltzing or dancing to jazz. He finds negotiations with the music, sometimes matching his choreographed rhythm to the music’s and sometimes going against it. Again, there’s this childlike play. Like MacMillan is playing tag with the music. About two minutes in Choe looks down at her feet as if they are moving on their own accord – it’s funny. There are these lovely moments of adjustment: a dancer arrives in a position and their partner picks them up and turns them to face the other way or their arm adopts a sculptural pose and their partner tweaks it. It is almost as if this perfection is openly being laughed at by MacMillan. His dancers become parodies of a choreographer in a rehearsal room editing the details of their work. MacMillan is almost laughing at himself.
It’s a reductive word but this first movement is fun. As the first movement rises to its crescendo the fun builds. The awe isn’t just about the skill of the dancers but about how joyous they seem as they do it.
At this point there’s no sign of tears in my eyes.
Then the stage darkens. The applause begins. The yellow sun sets and, in its place, rises a far more ominous orange orb, its light the only light to illuminate the stage. We’ve moved from sunrise to sunset perhaps, or from a child’s imagination to ‘reality’. And violins begin to play, slower and with more melancholy than anything that has come before. Two new dancers, Marianela Nuñez and Rupert Pennefather, appear from out the dark edges of the stage and slowly walk toward one another. It’s here I think I must have begun, without realizing it, to cry.
He places his arm out as if it’s a ballet bar. She holds it and goes through positions, her gaze never catching him. It’s as if she is alone. Her face far more serious than those of the dancers before. He’s touching her but they are choreographed to be in separate spaces. And slowly, tentatively, he begins to watch her. The joy has evaporated rapidly off the music and is being replaced by something darker. They begin to dance together. And gently, very gently, their two spaces merge into one until finally, by the end of the movement, they hold each other in a final position as one body made of two dancers. By this point I am aware of my tears. The applause arrives, the stage fades to black and the third movement begins. The joyful aspects of the music return and the ballet’s third movement marks the return of the awe and fun of its first.
So why did I cry? And is it reductive to going looking for a reason?
I must admit that this wasn’t the piece I was planning to publish. I wrote before this a much angrier piece titled On the State of Ballet about how elitism and standoffishness of ballet’s institutions are causing people to feel unwelcome at the ballet. I chose not to publish this because I think that people are more interested in reading positive things on here and because that argument is best made by people with a better understanding of the economics of ballet than myself. After writing that I watched Concerto. I’m willing to accept that my tears may have come from the emotional whiplash of criticising the culture around an art from and then being moved by the art form itself. This is possible but I don’t think it’s the full explanation. I think, although there’s no way of knowing, that I would have been just as moved by Concerto if I hadn’t have just written On the State of Ballet.
Maybe it’s about the transition from emotional states. We experience life in a series of comparisons: feeling sadness makes happiness sweeter through its contrast. Perhaps, having never heard the music before, I was tricked into thinking this would be three joyful movements and didn’t realise that the fun of the first was to be a foil to the second. Ballet is made up of a series of positions, but it is the movement between them where we may find much of its legibility and where it must generate much of its emotion from.
Maybe it’s something more ethereal. I might have cried because of this narrative in the second movement of two bodies being together but in different places to working as one joined entity. That’s beautiful in and of itself.
The likelihood, however, is far simpler and yet impossible to explain. I cried because it was beautiful. To try and explain it or rationalise it is a fool’s errand.
Choreography is the organisation of ideas in space. Of course, there’s thought and method that can be analysed in dance but more importantly sometimes things are just beautiful and moving. Sometimes things make us howl with laughter or silence us with awe and refuse to allow us to point to something and use it to explain why. Does this mean analysis of art forms like ballet that are particularly good at this is a waste of time? I hope not. I hope that if you have read this far, I haven’t wasted your time. This analysis seems to matter even if it can’t ever be sure of its results.
Sometime things make us cry and looking for an answer will only lead us to one place, one answer so frustratingly simple: I cried because I was moved. That’s the only analysis I can be sure of.
You can find a recording of Concerto here. The RBO charges for these recordings but if you’re younger than 26 they let you access them for free with an account.
[1] I recommend Gidon Kremer’s recording of the Bach sonatas and partitas for violin. The man’s a genius.