Why do opera fans and ballet fans resist each other's art? Both seem to be an elaboration on music: an elucidation, an exaltation; and yet there is a mutual distrust among audiences. It seems out of date. Fresher would be to celebrate the genius of both forms, learning from one to inform the other. Both are theatre. Both are music embodied. Both can transform the viewer through excellence.
Both require an architecture of form and a vocabulary of norms to rub up against, to bend, to both subvert and confirm. Both are old traditions that are always contemporary. Both owe more to narrative and story than either wishes to admit. Both are complex webs of signification, looping and interlocking signs and tropes to reveal something new from the old and something familiar, loved or trusted from the new.
Both forms can shock. Both forms can bore. Both forms require a time and a place and a willing audience. Both forms unfold. Both forms exist in a moment of perpetual risk: at any moment the performance could tumble, and yet, almost always it does not. Both forms are metonymic stand-ins for life. The curtain rises, we risk, we dare, we try, we fail, we succeed, we try again and then without exception it ends. Opera and ballet both remind us to love more, try harder, and think better thoughts. What can we bring from opera to ballet, and what can we bring from ballet to opera? How can each benefit from the other?
