Sid Smith, who has been writing about dance since the early ’80s for the Tribune, was the recipient of this year’s Ruth Page Award, which goes to individuals or organizations who’ve contributed to the art form. The award is bestowed by the Ruth Page Center for the Arts and its foundation, established in 1970 by Page, the Chicago choreographer credited with pioneering American themes in ballet and whose version of “The Nutcracker” was an annual tradition for decades.
Here are his remarks from the presentation last month at the Ravinia Festival in Highland Park.
The question I’m asked most by folks who never go to dance is, “When you watch dance, how do you know if it’s any good?”
The question I’m asked most by folks inside the dance world, however, is, “Were you ever a dancer?”
As to the latter, I can now confess that at age 5, I was a pupil at Miss Madeline’s Studio of Dance, climbing the proverbial steep and narrow staircase in the 1950s in downtown Mobile, Ala., awarded the coveted role in her annual recital listed in the program as “an elf.” Unfortunately, there are no surviving reviews. I also took a beginning ballet class in college when I got interested in writing about the arts, an experience that remains invaluable, because I could see in the mirror how hard it is to execute a basic plie with grace. Staring at my spiky, angular portebras, I concluded the only role for which I suited was Ichabod Crane.
More seriously, I’d now like to read briefly from the “Iliad,” written down by Homer in the 8th or 7th century B.C., some 2,700 years ago. Late in the epic, the god Hephaestus, the blacksmith of Mount Olympus, forges a new shield for the warrior Achilles, who’s about to go into battle. In one of the longer passages of his long poem, Homer transforms the shield into what today would be a kind of computer animation, filling it with all sorts of moving pictures, the Earth, the sky, the sea, the blazing sun and the moon, all the constellations, a wedding feast, a marketplace dispute, a farm field, a king’s estate, a vineyard and a herd of cattle.
But at the very end of all this, for his crowning image, the god, and I quote (from Robert Fagles’ translation), “brought all his art to bear on a dancing circle … where young boys and girls … danced and danced, linking their arms … and now they would run in rings on their skilled feet, and now they would run in rows, crisscrossing rows, rapturous dancing. A breathless crowd stood around them struck with joy.”
In Greek mythology, the god Hephaestus, by the way, is lame.
Ten years ago I was struck with a catastrophic illness that robbed me of not only the ability to walk but also much of the strength and mobility of my hands and fingers. I spent over a year with those magicians known as physical therapists, who had to get me back up on my feet and even restore my ability to move my fingers, starting with exercises taking dozens of small toys out of a box, one by one, and then putting them back in. You draw on every trick you can think of in such a challenge, and, yes, I found myself often remembering dancers, and all the stories of injuries and struggles they’d shared with me, of the rigors of their daily class, of the bravery, determination and excruciating pain that goes with this art form.
Soon after I returned to work, one of my first assignments was the National Ballet of Cuba at the Auditorium Theatre. What might seem the smooth, flat plain of the Auditorium lobby is, for some of us, a rolling, uneven sea of tiles. But I managed, quite proud of myself all the way up those pesky stairs to the orchestra seating. There, as scheduled, I encountered a pre-show interview of Alicia Alonso conducted by Chicago critic Ann Barzel.
And I thought, man, I got nothing on these two. Ann, now deceased, back then saw more dance in a week than I did in a month, even as she neared age 100, and she left behind a vast archive of backstage footage she shot on her camera, chronicling otherwise lost decades of dance, no doubt sometimes getting in the way.
And Alicia was one of the great American Ballet Theatre ballerinas struck blind in 1941 by retinal detachment, which back then, before laser, was treated with surgery requiring you to lie flat on your back, unmoving, for an entire year — a dancer’s hell.
But she could move her feet — and did.
“I danced in my mind,” she later said. “Flat on my back, I taught myself ‘Giselle.'”
She returned to dance again, one of her earliest performances a critically acclaimed debut in the role of Giselle.
I mention Homer because I can’t help but think dance is the very first art, and as evidence I point out that it needs no implement or device, no reed to make musical notes or drawing stick to paint images on a cave — just the human body. It can’t be proven, but I believe the very first instance of creative artistry in the human race began with a lonely dancer, moving to a music found only in nature.
And I mention Alicia because I think dance is the most defiant art, the one that recalls another poet, who wrote, “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” a command to fight death. Dance is the art of the impossible. Ask someone on the street if humans can stand straight on one leg and stretch the other leg straight upward, as if to form 6 o’clock, and I bet most would say, “Oh, no, that’s not possible.” Of course, I see it all the time. In fact, I saw it just last night.
I was asked to tell you what dance means to me. To me, dance is the first art and the bravest; it can help heal the lame and, paradoxically, it can comfort the blind. And thus it rightfully won pride of place on a magical shield carved by a god in the first literary masterpiece of our civilization.
So, when you go to a dance concert, how do you know if it’s any good? I’ve thought long and hard, and best I’ve got is, “Why don’t you just go? Just go. And you’ll be surprised.”
