Alexei Ratmansky: 'Ballet Is Just Dancing' | LIVE from the NYPL

Recorded on October 8th, 2014 at the New York Public Library
Co-presented with the Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University.

Alexei Ratmansky in 7 Words*:
Serving terpsichore non stop - and loving it.

Alexei Ratmansky has performed with and choreographed for some of the world’s greatest ballet companies, including the American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, and the Bolshoi Ballet. This time he’ll take to a very different stage to reflect on his life’s work, which earned him a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2013.

ALEXEI RATMANSKY was born in St. Petersburg and trained at the Bolshoi Ballet School in Moscow. His performing career has included positions as principal dancer with Ukrainian National Ballet, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and the Royal Danish Ballet. He has choreographed ballets for companies around the world, including Mariinsky Ballet, the Royal Danish Ballet, Dutch National Ballet, New York City Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Kiev Ballet and the State Ballet of Georgia, as well as for Nina Ananiashvili, Diana Vishneva and Mikhail Baryshnikov. His 1998 work, Dreams of Japan, earned a Golden Mask Award from the Theatre Union of Russia, and in 2005, he was awarded the Benois de la Danse prize for his choreography of Anna Karenina for the Royal Danish Ballet. Ratmansky was named artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet in January 2004 and joined American Ballet Theatre as Artist in Residence in January 2009, for which he created On the Dnieper (2009), Seven Sonatas (2009), The Nutcracker (2010), The Bright Stream (2011), Dumbarton (2011), Firebird (2012), Symphony #9 (2012),Chamber Symphony (2013) and Piano Concerto #1 (2013). Ratmansky was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2013.

Intro music by BOPD - "New England is Interesting"

[edbonz]

Romantic dance and music are vital aesthetics. For why I disagree violently against Hegel, see this: ""Dance is underrepresented in philosophical aesthetics. This means that, as a whole, the philosophical aesthetics of dance lacks the full range of views that one can find in more developed field of aesthetics such as literature or music. One reason for this underrepresentation is identified by Francis Sparshott in “The Missing Art of Dance” (1983). Here Sparshott explains that dance was not originally construed as a fine art under the 18th-century system of the fine arts that culminated in G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophy (see Hegel 1835). Hegel’s idea was that the fine arts were those that realized the spirit of the people by bringing truth or the “idea” to light in material form (for more on Hegel’s aesthetics see Houlgate 2014). His system of the arts included only painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, and music, prioritizing the first three for being able to symbolize and represent truth visually and the latter two for doing so aurally. Music only made it into the system as a kind of analog of poetry, so Hegel elevated the kind of music that had a sung and verbal aspect above “absolute” or instrumental music. The idea was that the “fine” arts are those that contribute to knowledge and intellectual thought, with the implication that supposedly non-symbolic and non-verbal arts like dance were pre-lingual and pre-civilization, belonging only to the world of primitive gesture or to the low and the corporeal rather than to the elevated and cultural (see Levin 1983). Thus Hegel can perhaps be credited with what seems to be one underlying idea in analytic aesthetics – that for something to be construed as “art” at all it needs to be understood intellectually rather than responded to in bodily ways. Related to this is the idea that works of art (including dances conceived of as artworks) are created by transforming something from ordinary life or experience into an artistic symbol that exists and that is to be appreciated and experienced at a remove from “ordinary” life. (For additional literature providing reasons for dance’s underrepresentation in aesthetics, see Carter 2005, Sparshott 1988 and Van Camp 1981.)"" For why the works of a dance-master like Michel Fokine are vital see the thinkers at: www.aynrand.org. Thank you, NYPL for this --and your assistance when I visited your library years ago-- It was when there was a William Blake exhibition at the Met.