Larry M. Coleman

It means what you see.

—George Balanchine

This quotation of the legendary ballet choreographer comes from Celestial Bodies: How to Look at Ballet by Laura Jacobs. She follows his quip with, “Balanchine once said that when asked to explain one of his ballets. Think about that. It means what you see.”

How simple.

Now I want to contrast that with a much longer passage eight pages earlier in the same book. I find it absolutely beautiful all on its own, but while Balanchine’s is briskly elegant in its simplicity, Jacobs’s is eloquent in its splendor:

Let’s take a closer look at these foundational five positions [of ballet]. In every one of them both feet are flat on the ground, the body is centered over them, and weight is held mostly in the balls of the feet. These positions, which are architectural in their strict plumb line and unchanging sense of measure, support a system of spatial verities. All exercises in daily class begin, end, and constantly move into, out of, or through one or more of these positions, which means that there is a constant circling back—a dynamic of eternal return—that is built into ballet’s movement language and that gives the art its sensation of high-vaulted yet airtight enclosure. If you mapped out the paths through which a classical dancer’s legs must always travel—on the ground (à terre) and in the air (en l’air)—you would see movement corridors that are akin to the orbital paths of celestial bodies: demilunes, ovals, and ecliptic rings. The dancer’s solar plexus is like the center of an armillary sphere.

So gorgeous (especially the “dynamic of eternal return” and the comparison of a dancer’s center to the center point of an armillary sphere, which is a stunning comparison if you know what one of those is (and if you, don’t, here’s an explanation).

The reason I link these two is because of how utterly different they are and how interconnected they are at the same time. Balanchine was arguably the most brilliant choreographer of all time; certainly he looked at ballet at a level at least as deep as Jacobs’s and possibly even more. Yet he summed up his work into five words: “It means what you see.”

It’s okay for you to simply enjoy something—whether it be a novel, a piece of music, a ballet, figure skating, whatever it is—at its most basic level, even if you don’t absorb everything in it. If you see a pretty girl in an elegant tutu doing extraordinary things on a stage and that’s all you see, that’s all you have to see. If you see her as a vibrating string in the harmony of the spheres, that’s fine too.

An excellent introduction to Balanchine (and ballet itself, for that matter) is this short (three minutes) introduction to his work Serenade, which is beauty for the sake of beauty. As E. E. Cummings said of one of his plays, watch it in this frame of mind: “Don’t try to enjoy it, let it try to enjoy you. DON’T TRY TO UNDERSTAND IT, LET IT TRY TO UNDERSTAND YOU.”

Last week: Ken Kesey pets Schrodinger’s cat.

Next week: Pablo Neruda gives a Nobel-quality speech.

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