Dancers are like horses. Some horses just want to go as fast and as hard as they can. They can tolerate the incoherencies and chaos of the racetrack, or the barrel racing, etc. of the rodeo. There are dancers with temperaments like that: they only want to go as fast and hard as they can. These dancers can tolerate the incoherencies and chaos of exhibition/competition dancing and may, if they last, do just fine in the entertainment world of show business. They are fun to watch and can thrill us with their tricks. Unfortunately, these dancers have a short shelf life. Like race and rodeo horses, they will be good for only a few years before being put out to pasture. The entertainment mill (should the dancers make it that far) will chew up these dancers, spit them out, and open its maw to gobble up the next batch of young people that will always be there, yearning for fame, adulation, excitement, and bright lights. These dancers, like the race and rodeo horses, burn out quickly.
There are other dancers and horses (high-school, dressage horses, so I am told) that have the talent and the temperament for artistry. For these dancers and horses the sun rises and sets on coherency, order, perfection, symmetry, balance, self-carriage, and, ah yes, meaning and purpose. These dancers and horses are maddened by the incoherency and chaos of less demanding, less meaningful iterations. These dancers and horses demand of their trainers something more, something akin to art, to soul. They demand “meaning.” Because of this “something more” and the much more careful, in-depth, and technically correct training these dancers and horses receive, they will be able to go on for years (barring injury) and will continue to get stronger and improve their performance. These dancers and horses will continually bless us by their depth of soul and what can only be termed “artistry”.
Long after their performance careers are over, the classical ballet dancer may continue to contribute to the soul life of the culture in ways that are beyond the reach of the competition dance circuit. For these dancers, it is not about fame and fortune; it is about the message, the artistry, the communication of soul. It is about meaning. As Viktor Frankl has written, meaning makes almost any suffering more tolerable. For the ballet dancer, as well as for the dressage horse, it is the moment of congruence and contact with the splendor of their own soul and with an artistic purpose beyond self-interest that makes the physical pain of all the hard work a mere trifle.
What Xenophon (Greek historian and military commander, 434-355 B.C.) remarked about the training of horses could apply as well (with minor adaptations) to the training of ballet dancers: “But if a rider teach his horse to go with the bridle loose, to carry his neck high, and to arch it from the head onwards, he would thus lead him to do everything in which the animal himself takes pleasure and pride.” We must teach the ballet student in a way that would "lead him or her to do everything in which he or she can take pleasure and pride." We ballet teachers must lead our ballet students in a manner which allows them to make contact with their own splendor and with a purpose beyond their own ego.
Slow and careful work is necessary. There are two axioms in training: (1) Nothing that is ugly can be correct (whether it is the shape of the hand or the fundamental stance); and (2) nothing that is forced can be beautiful. Moving with force is not the same thing as moving with self-power and confidence. A corollary to these two axioms is this: If something is executed technically correctly it will, ipso facto, require less force, and will, therefore, be (a) more beautiful and (b)conserve energy (something much needed in a long ballet).
A dancer who is emotionally abused, denigrated, and humilated by the teacher will not use his or her arms and legs more beautifully any more than a horse will move more beautifully if it is beaten. Both dancers and horses have souls, and there is an inexorable logic of soul that makes coercing either into superior performance ineffective. It's not that you can't coerce dancers (or horses). It's just that, if you do the most you will end up with is a dull, unenthusiastic, blank-faced dancer, incapable of expressing depth of soul. I like to paraphrase Xenophon's ideas on the subject of horse training, because what he says can be applied to the dancer as well. I have merely substituted the word "horse" for the word "dancer": "The result of training a [dancer] properly should be this: never to have a [dancer] whose energy is the energy of anger, for [dancers] when they are angry or annoyed will assuredly not use their legs with greater agility and grace. What one wants are movements that are at once pleasing and formidable to contemplate." — That is exactly what we are after in classical ballet training, "movements that are at once pleasing and formidable to contemplate" — like the magnificent, controlled power that we see in the well-trained horse.
Xenophon: "The objection to cruelty is simply that it doesn't work. The horse must move with self-carriage, from his own pride and pleasure. For what a horse does under compulsion, he does without understanding, and with no more grace than a dancer would display if a person should whip and spur him during his performance."
If a dancer becomes more beautiful in the course of her work, it is a sign that the teacher's training principles are correct. In the ballet, the development of the dancer's beauty is a sign of a true training philosophy. The discipline of teaching ballet entails continually making the right distinctions, not allowing oneself to be taken in (whether by a student or by one's own flabbiness of soul) into either asking for or accepting merely pretty movement. We need to make the right distinctions between the profoundly beautiful and the merely pretty. One of the reasons for the extreme difficulty of the classical ballet (and dressage) is that the difficulties are invisible. We are, in fact, trying to make it all look easy. It is the same whether the trainee is a ballet dancer or a dressage horse: The appearance of ease and the attainment of simplicity is neither easy nor simple!
