At the Wiener Staatsoper this spring, George Balanchine’s Divertimento No. 15 and Merce Cunningham’s Summerspace supported Pathétique, the Staatsballett director Martin Schläpfer’s take on Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6. But Balanchine, representing swish uptown modernism, and Cunningham, the shadowy chain-smoking ennui of the downtown avant-garde, seemed less like context than energy sources from which Schläpfer’s new creation borrows its effect. And there was an unexpected prelude.
Signs at the bottom of the grand staircase announced a half-hour talk by Schläpfer’s “dramaturgical partner,” Anne do Paço. It was optional, and only in German, but the talk strongly implied that to skip it was to miss something essential about the piece.
We were told what Schläpfer was trying to express (“autobiography,” “homoeroticism,” avoiding ballet technique that is “too perfect”). Mercifully, it wasn’t a trigger warning for any poor sheltered souls who might get upset by any of that, but it suggested we’re not to be trusted to see or think or feel anything for ourselves. That’s all done for us, a kind of emotional outsourcing we might call “moral kitsch.”
For Clement Greenberg, kitsch is compensation for the folk cultures destroyed by the industrial revolution; moral kitsch does the same thing for a lost solidarity politics that was mostly bogus to begin with. Kitsch is “predigested” pleasure. It imitates the effects of genuine art, which become instantly recognizable but undemanding emotional cues: leitmotifs that become clichés signposting character, mood, and plot.
Moral kitsch is different: it asks us to indulge a ghoulish, calculated sentimentality about other peoples’ suffering. We’re told not only when and where and how to feel something, but also to simplify and exaggerate our own feelings when we’re told someone deserves them. The evening’s running order made it unmistakeable: Schläpfer’s Pathétique was given a political feel even though there’s no politics in it. It received a ten-minute standing ovation.
Divertimento, one of only two Mozart scores Balanchine ever worked with, is what he called a “dance ballet:” five principal women, three men, and an eight-woman corps de ballet provide the “grammar of movement,” pursuing “ideal grace” not through narrative, as in story ballets, nor the mythic forces that move “mood ballets,” but the formal logic of movement on stage.
A parallel may be drawn with the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, in which “grammar” is about how meaning is shaped by use and context, not because words resemble the things they describe like pictures. So here, runs and jumps and turns and balances and lifts and holds are all like words; put together, they form phrases, passages, sentences, routines best compared to mass gymnastics displays, military parades, or fleets of fighter jets in V-formation. The dancers complement the music without directly reflecting it note by note, teasing out the hidden expressivity of “grace”: beauty’s invisible supplement, which enhances the classical rules of proportion, symmetry, and harmony while also redeeming imperfection.
Once Balanchine’s terms are clear, Divertimento becomes kaleidoscopic regimentation: the bodies align along points, lines, and planes, constantly shifting but always harmonic; each dancer moves as part of a larger whole, moving with corps d’esprit without playing a character, within the limitations set by the stage and the floor (Balanchine said a lot about floors). This clarifies some ballet critics’ misreadings, when they describe the men as princelings evoking a well-lost world of “serenity” or “courtesy” or “chivalry,” as if gamboling through the intra-Habsburg marriage market.
Cunningham’s Summerspace, described by the choreographer as a “landscape dance,” also lacks a story. Five dancers move to Morton Feldman’s Ixion, a “graph music” score against a hazy pointillist color-field set with matching costumes designed by Robert Rauschenberg.
Where Balanchine’s dancers respond to the music without imitating it, Cunningham’s are untethered from Feldman’s composition. They prance, leap, and hold awkward positions, slowly shifting into a sumo-squat with open arms as if embracing the world, or freezing like streamlined speed skaters mid-crouch.
Balanchine’s formalism is about line and flow; Cunningham’s is more elemental—bodies moving on a stage with sound. We hear their bare feet shuffle across the floor, the rub of costumes against their bodies, the thud of landings. And where Balanchine makes the secret effects of grace visible to all, Cunningham emphasizes another side of it: the apparent artlessness that makes art true art. It evokes that huffing seriousness with which children play, running to swing sets and pools and ice cream—the unselfconscious absorption they have when just doing what they’re doing, lost to adults.
Unlike Divertimento and Summerspace, Schläpfer’s Pathétique has a kind of story. It’s only discernible at certain moments, but there’s something familiar about the atmosphere of inner turmoil—generalized dissipation, alcoholism, the tragic death of some young beauty—and the way that we’re meant to feel about it.
A female soloist, clutching ballet shoes in her hands, flails about like a penitent, an agonized expression on her face; six dancers contort their bodies using bottles less as props than as ciphers, one raising the bottle to her ear, listening as if to a telephone, while another thrusts it into thin air as if plunging a dagger into the heart of a hated enemy, though presumably it’s directed at something on the inside; all thrash, legs in the air, drinking in dissolute despair.
The male dancers are all in metallic eyeshadow and dressed in sparkly disco wear, but this futuristic camp feel brings no levity. Moral kitsch can’t allow that because it’s working very hard at an impossible task: making all types of suffering look equivalent to each other while, at the same time, demanding we pay attention as one person tells us all about her own “personal journey.”
At the end, a male character collapses to the floor and shudders like he’s undergoing a seizure, almost repeating the movements of the drinking scene. He dies, and there’s a kind of memorial service with a dramatic change of music: the Tchaikovsky is over, and we get fifteen minutes of a trio (violin, harpsichord, soprano) performing a Handel aria, while the whole ensemble moves together, though imperfectly synchronized. All slump to the floor, crane their necks, and look up as if there’s some brighter future to come, and it ends.
Then, our standing ovation. People looked at each other with glee. They beamed at the stage, whistling as if they’d seen some true marvel—something extremely technically difficult that also opened them up to new, transformative learning. Maybe they really did feel like that, but it was hard not to connect it to the vague anti-Americanism I overheard in the lobby before the show and during the two intervals. There was a general sense that Balanchine and Cunningham represent a version of America at its best (meaning how self-satisfied Europeans would like it to be). This implies that average American folks were once especially open to new forms of artistic expression, but today they’re just philistines who need scolding correction by their moral betters from the Old World—as if male–male pas de deux were enough to topple the evil empire across the pond and help Vienna atone for its selectively remembered past. The applause wasn’t for the dancing. It was for us.
