Journal Article

Red shoes and roses: a ballerina's history in the making

Jaeger, Suzanne

1997

Overview

It was the first ballet on the program for the Toronto performances - Lar Lubovitch's The Red Shoes, rather than the last, [KAREN KAIN]'s - that established the tension between historical event and aesthetic expression. The original story of The Red Shoes, on which both the 1948 film and the more recent broadway musical were based, was written by the Danish children's fablist, Hans Christian Andersen. It is a story about a young girl who, taunted by her playmates because of her shabby dress and bare feet, steals a pair of enchanted shoes from a wicked shoemaker. They turn her feet into sparkling, dancing feet. She is delighted and proud of who she has become and what she can now do. She soon discovers, however, that the shoes cannot be removed, and they will never let her stop dancing. (Is this the subtext to Karen Kain's farewell tour?) In the Hans Christian Andersen story, the girl must either be danced to death or have her feet cut off. She chooses the latter. In the ballet, she has the shoes removed by the magician to whom they belong, and she dies in his arms, spared the more horrible fate of the ghostly figures we see in a graveyard, young girls dressed in white, with long white - blond hair and red shoes, who dance ceaselessly to exhaustion even in death in an obscure hell for young women with red shoes. On the other hand, a person might not read the ballet according to such symbols at all. If the ballet is about pretty dancing, entertainment, or historical fact (been there, done that - seen Karen Kain's farewell tour) perhaps the interpretations and criticisms do not matter. One way to find out is to discuss the work, to reflect on it, to compare. How does the ballet affect us? How does it affect our children? What meaning do we bring to the story and to the ballet, and what do we take from it? What does the art of Karen Kain mean to us, and why should The Red Shoes be the opening ballet of her farewell tour? Of course, such questions are relevant only if one believes there are deeper relationships with dance art than its entertainment value. It depends on how we think history gets made, as an event generated either by media hype or from the more mysterious forces at play in the individual as he or she finds meaning in a particular work of art. Myth and reality, fiction and historical fact are not easily separated. The boundaries between the story of the ballet and of the ballerina's farewell are blurred. When do the shoes come off, and who is the evil magician? The iconolatry surrounding Karen Kain, promoted by the National Ballet and generated by the media, is doubly established by [James Kudelka]'s work. The characters in The Actress are caricatures, archetypes of artistes and patrons of the theatre. Kudelka reiterates the conventional myth of what it is to have a ballerina's life. (In a television interview shortly after the original premiere of The Actress, I heard Kain say that her life was not nearly so glamorous as that portrayed in Kudelka's ballet. What did all the little girls and boys in the audience understand of a dancer's passion from this ballet and from this farewell tour program?)

• Publisher: Queen's Quarterly
• Subject: Andersen, Hans Christian (1805-1875) / Ballerinas / Ballet / Ballet dancers / Ballets / Children / Drama / Fiction / Kain, Karen / Television