Balanchine, Kirstein wrote, “knows ballet as ballet is dead.” Instead he had reinstated another term, “choreodrama,” and according to Kirstein, planned a revolutionary kind of theatre around it. The form would be that of the old ballet—Kirstein argued that revolutions preserve the best elements of the past, which included balletic form—with new content delivered in new ways.124
Although Seven Deadly Sins creates a peculiar textual dynamic in retrospect, Lincoln Kirstein and others saw it as part of the 1933 season at the Theatre des Champs- Elysées, the former home of the Ballets Russes and Ballets Suédois. It was during that same summer that Kirstein would ask George Balanchine to relocate to New York City as ballet master of his fledgling School of American Ballet (and later the New York City Ballet).125 As we have seen in the scenarios of the Parisian companies, the writer and the choreographer worked in tandem to complete the embodiment of the text through production. In retrospect and in isolation from the archive of a given project of the Ballets
124 Gay Morris. A Game for Dancers: Performing Modernism in the Postwar Years, 1945-1960. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2006, p. 42.
125 Diana Menuhin, a dancer in Les Ballets 1933, recalled: “Balanchine took me for a walk round and round the square afterwards in the warm July night. 'Dianochka,' he said, 'today a man came to see me, an American man, and said he could offer me a school and company if I go to America— would you please come?'” Diana Menuhin. “Les Ballets 1933”. Dance Research: The Journal of the
Russes or Ballets Suédois, the dance text is understood to be dependent on other partner plans for music, scenography, costumes, et cetera. In production, textual harmony is confirmed by the continuous presence and teamwork of the collaborators. In contrast, Brecht dismissed himself from the artistic process as soon as the text of Seven Deadly Sins was delivered to his collaborators.126 Echoing his physical absence, as it stands now, the dance is technically missing from the page, and if a reader is unaware that Brecht’s sung text is meant to be accompanied and balanced by a dancing body, the dance is missing from the work as a whole. This pushes the experiences of reading and seeing Seven Deadly Sins into opposition in a manner wholly different to other dance texts.
Whereas other works discussed in this study necessitate the creation of a bespoke reader-spectator, the Seven Deadly Sins project forbids it. The dance exists only in the event of the work’s performance; otherwise it occupies an implied space alongside text. The embodiment of the word cannot be completed in the text because Brecht carved out space for dance without articulating its contents. The fact that embodiment can only occur in production invites us instead in this case to consider the choreographer as writer. Etymologically speaking, this is not out of order.127 The consequent ambiguity that Brecht’s partial text affords extends a particularly free invitation to the choreographer. As Susan Jones explains:
What so intrigued the literary Modernists about dance was the immediacy with which the dance draws attention to problems of creative authority, the way that it so readily brings into focus an issue of creativity that resides in the body and outside the medium of words.128
126 As Steven Hinton notes, Brecht flatly resisted any credit for the work after its premiere, insisting in a Danish radio interview, “Weill wrote [the text] based on a poem, which I had made, but he is himself responsible for the making of the dialogue.” (quoted in Stephen Hinton’s Weill’s Musical
Theater: Stages of Reform. Oakland: University of California Press, 2012, p. 204) In the same
interview, Brecht seemed to resent his artistic differences with Weill. It has been noted that the two had experienced something of a falling out following their collaboration on Mahagonny, and Sins would be their last.
127 Modern English derivative of the French choréographie, from Greek khoreia "dance" and
graphein "to write".
128 Susan Jones. "Knowing the Dancer: Modernism, Choreography, and the Question of Authority"
Part of this so-called “intrigue” comes from the intervention of the body into the performance of the textual plan. The separate-ness between the body and the word problematises the control of authorship at the same time that it reiterates the very tension around which Brecht’s ballet is crafted.
With Brecht long gone from Paris and the ballet’s written scenario technically superfluous, The Seven Deadly Sins of the Petty Bourgeoisie in 1933 was primarily Balanchine’s work. Balanchine was solely responsible for the original “live” production in Europe and the New York premiere, having established the work’s ‘authentic’ choreography, which capitalized on the qualities of dancer Tilly Losch as Anna II.129 “Balanchine would eventually take advantage of Losch’s considerable expressive, dramatic, and acrobatic abilities as the piece evolved more as a pantomimed morality play than a ballet, emphasising character and narrative over ‘pure dance’”.130 That is one way in which Seven Deadly Sins fits comfortably into the company of other ballet texts. The text’s ambiguous presence did not just allow Balanchine to move away from “pure dance”, but demanded that he do so. Balanchine became, in the choreographic role, an equal partner in the text’s authorship. In fact, Seven Deadly Sins became so inextricably “Balanchine” that when Lotte Lenya (who had been contracted to reprise her role as Anna I) learned that the 1950s revival was abandoning Balanchine’s choreography, she exited the project.
Now the work’s autonomous “writer”, Balanchine himself seems to have held conflicting opinions of the place of text in dance. “In later years [Balanchine] declared that a good ballet required no program note. Yet the beautifully produced and illustrated [souvenir programmes] for this company are full of lengthy, even poetic, ballet
129 For a detailed account of the two Balanchine productions, see Susan Manning’s “Balanchine's Two Productions of ‘The Seven Deadly Sins’, 1933 and 1958”. Dance Chronicle 9:1 (1985), pp. 96- 118.
synopses”.131 The souvenir programmes of the Ballets Russes and Ballets Suédois are so littered with textual ephemera that the concept of dance fades into the background until the work is performed. Seven Deadly Sins, in its current published state, obscures the dance to the point of non-existence. Even if, as editors have noted, Brecht cared little for his brief dalliance with the ballet project beyond its natural capacity for political statement, it is nonetheless a member of a family of like texts. The text only dictates the spoken part of “Anna I” with a mind to the eventual presence of the dancing “Anna II”: it in no way prescribes the quality of the danced action. This invitation to interpretation is demonstrated by the long line of choreographers who have taken up the work after Balanchine.132 However, the ballet in performance has sometimes met with lukewarm—even antagonistic —reception that illustrates its complicated textuality. “It is barely ballet”, wrote a critic in Le Midi on 9 June, 1933, “But it is very much art”.133 As Niels Krabbe notes,
One of the stumbling blocks was, at the time, and is, still now, the work’s genre affiliation: in print and in performance reviews, both from 1933 and later from the production in Copenhagen in 1936, we meet diverse genre designations like cantata; short opera; ballet-chanté; ballet pantomime; pantomime; a story acted, danced and sung; and so on. The audience was thus having a difficult time attuning its expectations in the proper direction and the traditional ballet audience, in particular, felt disoriented.134
The earlier critic’s doubt of the ballet’s faithfulness to genre (“It is barely ballet”) echoes the text’s reluctance to fit into any easy classification on the page.
In performance, the blurred authority between the body and the text is likely to blame for the ballet’s confused reception. “Nothing in Balanchine’s Franco-Russian ballet background could have prepared him to cope with the foreign aesthetic, text, and scenario
131 Anna Kisselgoff. “Dance View: Taking Fresh Stock of Les Ballets 1933”. The New York Times. August 19, 1990 http://www.nytimes.com/1990/08/19/arts/dance-view-taking-fresh-stock-of-les- ballets-1933.html [last accessed 10 June 2015].
132 Lynn Taylor-Corbett notes that Pina Bausch, Kenneth MacMillan, Richard Alston and Donald Byrd all have interpreted the ballet anew.
133André Coeuroy, “Les 7 péchés capitaux”. Le Midi. June 9, 1933.
134 Niels Krabbe. “Kurt Weill’s Deadly Sins in Copenhagen”. This article can be read online: http://static6.oneclick.nielskrabbe.dk/2013/10/559ab808c676a885aa60ca7c09af13665bcfedec221.p df [accessed 22 May 2014].
of Weill’s ballet chanté”, writes Kim Kowalke. “Weill’s score demanded a different relationship between dance, music, and the other elements. As an idiosyncratic orchestral song cycle, it was virtually complete in itself, resistant to staging, except as a type of mimetic enactment of the narrative implicit in the lyrics”.135 While I agree that Weill’s work contains some aspects that presented unfamiliar challenges to the choreographer, in particular the negotiation of the corporeal presence of the non-dancing body of Anna I, I would argue that Balanchine was primed for a production built of various aesthetic elements and corresponding challenges. Furthermore, that the work “was virtually complete in itself” is a problematic view. To say that the work was resistant to staging is to ignore its intended purpose—to lead to a live performance in which body and text rely on one another in order to achieve full expression and meaning.
If the dance’s absence problematises the way in which Seven Deadly Sins was and is conceptually negotiated, how does the work function as a printed text? There are further implications for the reader of the text because of the author/choreographer division of labor. As I claimed in the beginning of this section, because the Seven Deadly Sins project forbids the creation of a reader-spectator, who through visualisation bridges the gap between text and performance, the experience of the text is restricted to one of two possibilities. Either it is a printed song-cycle that can be read in the same manner as a poem, or it is an event that brings together all the textually disparate elements of music, text, and body. Reading is severely restricted, but can we more successfully rationalise the relationship between text and dance by placing the printed text alongside historical incidents of performance? It is a given that Brecht’s text was present in performance through the voice of Anna I, and possibly in the printed program of the Les Ballets 1933 season. In performance, the space left for dance was suddenly filled with the absent companion-text to the libretto. That text, however, is ephemeral.
Because dance is not dictated by Brecht’s text, no ‘authorial’ version of the ballet exists outside the products of Balanchine’s direction, and even then it is impossible to “read” this dance. There is no film recording of either the original production of 1933 or the New York production in 1958 and no record of Balanchine’s choreography, but Allegra Kent, the New York production’s Anna II, recalled her danced part in a magazine article in 2011, vividly revealing the freedom which the sparse libretto afforded Balanchine and his dancers in imagining movement. We can also get a sense of Balanchine’s movement vocabulary from photographs and first-person accounts of the production. How does text seem to have influenced the production process? Of the third episode, Kent recalled:
“Anger” explodes in Los Angeles, where “every door is open to welcome extras.” Anna II has movie work. Dressed like a circus girl and riding side- saddle, I’m up on a giant, white-lace horse supported by two men. We prance around the stage. Then in a moment of stillness, I slide off my high horse into an entrechat six, feeling ebullient. All these movements are filmed against a candy-cane background by a cameraman who looks like Groucho Marx. But I become enraged when I see a stagehand tormenting an animal. Uncontrollable fury rises in me and I beat him savagely with my riding crop. L.A. is over.136
The bombastic quality of the ballet as described by Kent stands in sharp contrast to the evenly metered composition of Brecht’s text. We cannot know how Weill’s score and Brecht’s text worked temporally with Balanchine’s movement: if and when passages of synchronicity made room for extended phrases of movement, and so on. It is thus ironic that Kent references the presence of a diegetic cameraman who films and captures her movements.
Balanchine inscribed the missing half-text of Seven Deadly Sins in the same way that Anna II inscribes what Anna I cannot through her own means. Conversely, Anna I through her detachment from Anna II’s means of expression provides the necessary framework for what Anna I does. In a parallel manner, the contributions of Brecht and
136 Allegra Kent. “Sinful Memories” Dance Magazine (May 2011) http://www.dancemagazine.com/ issues/May-2011/Sinful-Memories [accessed 14/02/2013]
Balanchine are separate but inextricably bound; they structure and inform one another in terms of mutual boundaries of space and time. They also respond to one another by projecting alternately contrasting and harmonizing emotions. It is a relationship negated outside of performance. The place for Brecht’s text in that case is relegated to the aural track of Anna I’s lyrics, while Balanchine’s text claims supremacy over the combined effect.
It seems that Balanchine’s contribution defied narrativity in a manner similar to its fundamental textlessness. According to company member Diana Menuhin, the dancers loathed the piece,
…because any left-over dancers (like yesterday's cold meat) had to pull on huge cloaks which covered the head as well and rush on vaguely brandishing poles and exuding either sin or the punishment of same. Tamara Sidorenko and I never did find out what we were doing; while Pavel Tchelichev and Balanchine, together with four kilometres of white silk and some very ingenious lighting, put Tilly into a marvellous dress of emerald green satin with a great wide train which we would gather up in the wings and let fly as Tilly ran on looking suitably bewildered.137
Whatever the result, Balanchine was indeed well-suited to fill the space created by Brecht precisely because of its emptiness. For Balanchine, Brecht’s text meant freedom and, for Brecht, Balanchine meant completion. It is no wonder that, two years later, he would refuse to choreograph Cummings’s Tom: A Ballet, a text which, as we will see later, did not need him.
The audience also complained that there was “nothing to clarify or elucidate the heavy darkness of the Germano-American text...".138 Considering that the role of Anna II is partly to “elucidate” Brecht’s text through her corporeality, what about the text might have caused a perceptible, even problematic, “heavy darkness”? Presumably it was the work’s overbearing, even pedantic handling of its subject. It is also curious to note the Dancing
137 Menuhin, pp. 66-67.
138 Quoted by Esslin from a contemporaneous anonymous review in The Dancing Times from August 1933.
Times critic’s reference to the text: that could indicate that the audience did have the text in their hands in the souvenir programme, or else that it had been released to critics ahead of the premiere. In either case, one spectator at the very least was cognizant of Brecht’s text while viewing the ballet. Like the two Annas, the two texts were conflated in the moment of performance, and yet signalled to one another’s difference as well.139 Seven Deadly Sins, in production, is characterised by the shared visions and dual texts of writer and choreographer; we can now turn to the parallel psychological/physiological opposition of the work’s protagonist.