Most modern ballet outfits are immodest because most ballet companies follow the example of Russian ballet groups, which are motivated by atheistic humanism.
May I take it as given that you haven't gone to the beach since 1938? Aside from a bit of walking around shore towns on Cape Cod on chilly September days, I myself haven't been to a proper beach since 1966, but even then what was on general display was infinitely raunchier than what can be seen at an authentic classical ballet performance of today. Anyone who's really on the prowl for the sordid and the vile will, of course, have little or no trouble finding it—but when was that otherwise?
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Whatever Russian influence exists in the international dance world stems mainly from the Mariinsky Theatre company of old St. Petersburg and dates from the period 1860–1910; that is, well prior to the Judaeo-atheist Bolshevik Revolution.
Furthermore, the principal choreographers and ballet masters of the St. Petersburg Ballet during that period were, first, Arthur Saint-Léon and then the great Marius Petipa. Both of these gentlemen were French, incidentally. What is more, the leading dancers of the company were largely Italian, French, and here and there a German. So much for the Russianness of "Russian ballet groups."
None of this ought to surprise anyone with a more than skin deep interest in ballet, since the form made its greatest advances in the 1830s through the 1850s in Italy and France. What is still more, none of this should surprise anyone who understands anything about Peter the Great and his development of St. Petersburg as a "window to the West."
Yet even in that arch-Russian city, Moscow, many of the Bolshoi Theatre company's leading lights—choreographers, directors, principal dancers—were western Europeans. As readers of
War and Peace ought to remember, a quarter of the book is written in French to accurately represent the usual language choice of the upper-crust characters that make up the bulk of its dramatis personae (even those far more down-to-earth Muscovites, the Rostovs—Natasha's family—all spoke French save en famille).
While it is true that by the late 1930s, the long-sustained Russian Orthodox and Tsarist elements had been utterly expunged from both the Bolshoi and Kirov companies, the plain fact is that the tradition of dance brought to London and most of all here to the States (originally by Diaghilev's famed Ballets Russes—note the Froggie name!) is that of the Tsarist period. That is to say, it was preeminently the Petipa tradition—sometimes called the Petipa-Ivanov tradition, to give due regard to Lev Ivanov, Petipa's sole important Russian associate from the late 1880s on. But Ivanov was a Petipa disciple down to his marrow, not some proto-Bolshevik atheist swine.
Since 1940, the major influence on classical dance in every respect and in every country (ask any academically trained Russian or German or French dancer or dance student if you don't believe me) was and remains George Balanchine (+1983). However messy his private life was at times, Balanchine was no Marxist, no atheist, no Freemason, no Jєω. In founding and directing the New York City Ballet and its accompanying school, which was run with a strictness aptly described as monastic—pre-Vatican II monastic, that is—he plainly invoked the traditions of the Mariinsky Theatre company and its school, at which he was trained and whose Petipan methods and artistic ideals he worked at replicating in the West. He had no truck with onstage nudity, pornography, or indecency of any sort, though I will certainly grant that anyone who finds the Anna-Vronsky segments of the plot of
Anna Karenina too steamy or smutty for sinless consumption probably should steer clear of a revival of
Bugaku and one or two others of his 150-plus ballets.
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My point in this, my second and last comment on this thread, is
not that, as a form, ballet is ipso facto a vessel of sweetness and light. It certainly isn't, nor is it likely that anything
new being produced, in ballet or in any other of the (once) high arts, is worthwhile at any level or in any way. That's just how things are—how virtually
all things are—today. Think of the crowd that holds the reins in politics, in finance, in "news and information," in "entertainment": everything they touch they befoul and distort. Everything they control, if it ever had value, becomes a fun-house-mirror version of itself. In sum, everything is in the process of being reframed in line with "the movies," that bastard business-cuм-"entertainment" form they have run almost since its corporate inception (that is, since they stole the patented inventions of Thomas Edison and used their money and influence to buy off or destroy their Gentile competition, all of which was infinitely more talented than they themselves were).
The result? Most forms of high culture are in steep decline, and none of them will be recognizable in their historical forms by 2050, barring a worldwide cataclysm that involves the overthrow and re-ghettoization of these disciples of the power referred to in John's Gospel as the "prince of this world." Assuming, that is—and a huge assumption it is—that they don't destroy everything once precious to their enemies (guess who?) before their own eclipse. (Such things have happened many times before, after all.)
No point in my going on, not with most folks here still being movie and TV watchers. Besides, the only jeremiads truly worth reading were written by Jeremias.
Topic: Is Ballet sinful? (Read 5566 times)