***WARNING: SPOILERS***
I essentially wrote The Dormant Age as a way to praise and commemorate my lifelong hobby as well as a critique on modern ballet and its destructive ways.
Madame Roberts is clearly the good foil to the bad Madame Angulaire. She teaches her students not only ballet but how to live with grace throughout life—from youth (Dawn) to old age (Natalie).
The main launching point for the conflict came from a college course (of course) called, Meaning and Purpose of the Arts, where I was introduced for the first time to Martha Graham’s work. I will never forget the day when I watched that video of her thrusting herself to and fro in that ridiculous and ugly purple tube of fabric to the choppy, sporadic sounds of the piano (Lamentation, 1930). Ballet requires music, otherwise it is just pantomime or without movement it is no longer dance. But even the music deteriorated into irrational bits, screeching out with no rhyme or reason. The whole scene felt like some sick charade. I wanted to scream in the middle of class I was so angry. My body shook as if I had been slapped violently across the face, or as if my professor had spit on me for daring to believe that classical ballet was beautiful, something above the rest, when I should be wriggling in the ground like a worm.
The way I knew ballet was as a set of purposeful movements aimed at ennobling Man. Dance was not meant to show him ugly and weak and utterly irrational. Yet, here before me was a dancer trying to turn the art I knew and loved and honored into garbage.
So, I wrote about how our “modern art” movement is destroying the simple line. There is nothing wrong with this line. People just want to be different and get their doctorates based off of lies. The post-modern movement in art means doing the exact opposite of anything classical. It is upholding death over life.
Already being a staunch Objectivist, I could feel the evil in that classroom that day. The book idea was clear to me then, only earning my degree and then earning enough money pushed back the writing work until recently.
Classical ballet is all about growing up learning to refine one’s movements, to take hold of the subtle changes in the body. A child has minor control over their mind and body, but an adult controls both. The ideal Man has grace and poise—utter control—over his entire being. (Remember Tolstoy’s line about how bad families are equivalent to how many bad philosophies there are out there versus the few good ones). Classical ballet upholds a good, rational culture, while modern ballet seeks to destroy it and leaves nothing in its place.
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