The Boston Ballet at Harvard: A Glimpse of a Dance Form in Flux

"This is a demonstration of 10,000 hours of practice," said Jill Johnson, dance director and senior lecturer in Harvard’s Department of Music. Standing in front of five Boston Ballet dancers on stage in the Harvard Dance Center on a frigid Friday night, she introduced them for a rehearsal and Q&A organized by the Ballet as part of their Dance Talk program.

The program featured excerpts from William Forsythe’s 1996 work "The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude" as well as selections from Hans van Manen’s 1989 piece "Black Cake," both of which the Boston Ballet will perform this spring. The event began with a staging demonstration by Johnson in which she rehearsed the choreography of "Vertiginous" with the dancers, followed by a performance-style exhibition of "Black Cake." The dances were succeeded by a Q&A session with Mikko Nissinen, artistic director of the Boston Ballet, Johnson, and company dancers Dusty Button and Bradley Schlagheck. While both pieces were examples of neoclassicism—they reworked classical-era ballet in a more contemporary style—the performances offered glimpses into the Boston Ballet’s programmatic ambitions to expand beyond popular repertoire this season to solidify the company’s place at the forefront of contemporary ballet.

At the event, the Boston Ballet showcased work that members described as deeply challenging but rewarding. "[‘Vertiginous’] is like a box of power bars," Johnson said during her rehearsal demonstration, alluding to the ballet’s character as a kinetic flurry of movement that is incredibly technically demanding. She also elaborated on the philosophy behind Forsythe’s choreography: "What is important is being able to individualize, building on the tradition of ballet as an offering to say, this is what I think about art." The piece, according to Johnson, uses ballet as a vocabulary to ask how far classicism can be pushed—and it turns out that it can be stretched farther than one might think. Button and Schlagheck discussed how working with Forsythe’s ballet is consequently more liberating than working with traditional ballet forms, even allowing them to start rehearsals with hip-hop music. "It takes a second to realize that you have the opportunity to explore the swag," Schlagheck said.

The central focus of "Black Cake," on the other hand, consisted of three pas de deux in which the power dynamics of each couple rapidly shifted in a bizarre fashion. In the Q&A, the speakers used these unconventional duets as a platform to expound on the changing gender politics in ballet. "The level of analysis applied to a work depends on how much of our contemporary outlook we expect a work to hold," Johnson said. "Black Cake," with its uneven gender dynamics, is a relic, the speakers said; today’s choreographers are instead interested in the relationship between the male and the female, a relationship that is no longer always binary. The speakers also described their relationship with music as the backbone of dance; according to them, the exploration involved in neoclassicism centers around climbing in and around music in many different ways.

Audience members said that the Boston Ballet dance talk exposed them to a different kind of intellect than is found in the everyday circuit of classes in the Science Center and long nights at Lamont. "It’s important for Harvard students to be able to see the role of the ballet in our greater arts community and...how accessible it is," said Mary-Grace R. Reeves ‘16, the founder of the Harvard chapter of the Boston Ballet College Ambassadors Program. Friday’s performance offered a glimpse into the thinking of professionals who bridge the cerebral and the kinetic—and imparted a reminder that an appreciation of dance is, as Reeves said, something that all can make part of their Harvard experience.