Practice Makes Perfect

This post is not so much a review as a description.  Feel free to tune out.  

It's a lay person's reaction to a rehearsal of a highly specialized art form.  

If you're an expert in this field, please be gentle and forgive my gaffes!

Last night, I had the first-time privilege of attending an in-studio working rehearsal (not a final dress run-through) at the National Ballet of Canada.  Over the years I've participated in working rehearsals beyond number for choral music, piano, and theatre, so I was intrigued by the similarities and the differences in the methods, the working language, and the attitudes of all involved.

Right away, there's the almost untranslatable term repetiteur.  In ballet, this term embodies some aspects of the English words "teacher", "director", and "coach" without being precisely the same as any of those words!  The repetiteur's job is to teach the dancers the steps, moves, and expressive possibilities of the work at hand, while at the same time helping them to find their own creativity within the framework.  I suspect that a repetiteur would only be unneeded if a new work were being created in studio, in which case the choreographer would be working with the dancers while a busy assistant would be noting down everything that was done to be used in future stagings by a repetiteur.

In this rehearsal, the repetiteur was a figure of global stature in the field: Joysanne Sidimus.  Anyone familiar with ballet will certainly have heard her name.  She is one of the leading repetiteurs for the unique works of the famous choreographer George Balanchine.  The work under rehearsal was Balanchine's jazzy ballet Rubies, so the company couldn't have had better leadership in this rehearsal process.

As the rehearsal unfolded, I noticed some parallels to the musical and theatrical rehearsals of my own experience.  For example, there were the multiple repetitions of a short sequence, as the dancers ironed out the kinks in the technique and timing.  Balanchine, by the way, often filled his stage with multiple groups of dancers travelling at high speed on opposing courses, so this kind of work is an essential part of the process -- vaguely akin to the theatre's "blocking" rehearsals.  One sequence was repeated with the two different soloists from the two casts each in turn running over the same movements.

There were the comments shared by Sidimus with the dancers as they worked.  Here I sensed the parallel with the notes I would give as a theatre director.  Concern for the well-being of the dancers was exemplified as she warned one dancer that there was no way he could continue coming down on his knee so emphatically without wrecking it.

There were the moments when repetiteur and pianist had to coordinate the exact best point in the score to restart, also a frequent problem in choral rehearsing.  And there were times when the dancers had to confer among themselves on the best way to work through a tricky combination of moves -- again, a situation that all actors can certainly relate to!

On a couple of occasions, the dancers got sufficiently tangled up that Sidimus told them to simply "walk" the part first.  This meant that they moved in time with the music, giving small-scale indications of the full movements, turns, gestures and leaps that would come in the next run-through.  The parallel with a cast of opera singers who are "marking" (singing the parts through at low volume or even in a lower octave) was unmistakable.

Another interesting observation I made was the presence, on the sidelines, of several dancers who walked some parts as the rehearsing cast were working.  At least one of them, I knew, was nursing a minor injury, and others may have been too.

Now, I could take these parallels much too far!  For certain, no theatre or musical rehearsal I've been involved in has ever approached the exhausting physical demands of the ballet studio.  Not for nothing are ballet dancers all superbly conditioned athletes!

Even so, I was impressed by the good humour and cooperation evident among all the company as they worked.  It's easy to see that a team enterprise like this would be dead in the water if anyone were to play the assoluta or prima donna or star to excess.  I was also very impressed as Sidimus reminded the audience, and the dancers, that two of them were actually working through this section for the first time.

The rehearsal lasted for an hour, and ended at the next-to-last minute with a complete top-to-bottom run-through of the sequence they'd been rehearsing.  The result of an hour's intensive work lasted for about two minutes or so.  

After the rehearsal there was a reception, and Joysanne Sidimus spoke at some length about the unique features of the Balanchine approach to ballet, as well as her task as the repetiteur.  It was an apt reminder of the reason why Balanchine's work almost always appeals strongly to me -- the primacy he assigned to the music.  She mentioned in particular the way he would say that the most important person in the studio was the rehearsal pianist.  Sidimus gave some very illuminating examples of things that Balanchine used to ask his dancers to do, to think, to be.  This talk also heightened the value of the rehearsal experience in retrospect for the audience.  All in all, then, a truly fascinating evening.  I hope I've captured some of the flavour of it for you!

P.S.  Speaking of "flavour," the cookies at the reception were delicious too!