Sleeping Beauty + Friends
Above the shabby red velvet curtains hung two curlicue chandeliers, glittering with crystals. The lights went down, the packed, decidedly art-world, audience fell silent and a recording of a lush overture (which composer Kaffe Matthews created from the scores of various ballets) burst into sound – and then, owing to a technical hitch, suddenly stopped. People shifted in their seats and whispered, ‘Is this part of it?’ After a few minutes, to a collective sigh of relief, the music stuttered into life and Karen Kilimnik’s ballet Sleeping Beauty + Friends (2007) – conceived and choreographed by the artist after Marius Petipa, August Bournonville and others, in collaboration with choreographer Tom Sapsford and designer Stevie Stewart – began. But the hitch was oddly apt; Kilimnik’s idiosyncratic approach to making pictures and installations (examples of which were on display concurrently in the artist’s solo show at the Serpentine Gallery) – an approach that has never privileged skill over wonder – was, however inadvertently, translated to the theatre and only served to add to the evening’s shambolic charm.
The curtain rose to a scene of a sleeping man in a kilt and ballet pumps, surrounded by craggy cliffs and reams of mist; before long he was joined by a smiling sylph in a frothy dress. They proceeded to chase each other coquettishly around the stage, doing tricky, pretty things with their limbs: a scene from La Sylphide, with music by the wonderfully named Jean-Madeleine Schneitzhoeffer. This was followed by a collage of music and ballet; in true Kilimnik fashion the Sleeping Beauty of the title was not actually performed, while scenes from Swan Lake, Diana and Actaeon, The Pharaoh’s Daughter and Don Quixote were. Thus in the blink of an eye the action morphed from the Scottish Highlands to the castles of Spain, and tutus shared the stage with plastic-looking bronze chest-plates and a matador's cape, accompanied by music that bounced merrily from country to country and century to century. The dancers were Matthew Hart, Emma Brunton, Gavin Fitzpatrick, Kimberley Rawson and Hannah Rudd; they looked good to me, but then what would I – or many of those in the audience – really know? After all, this was a ballet performed for one night only, for those not totally au fait with the complexities and nuances of dance. The theatre was so intimate you could hear the dancers' every panting breath and see individual beads of sweat glisten on their smooth brows. Each narrative was chopped up; the result sailed very close to pastiche. Every ballet cliché made an appearance: the fixed smiles, the big jumps, athletic twirls, batted eyelashes, love-you-hate-you-love-you dashes about the stage, sparkles, virginal embraces and other-worldly mist. For a moment I wondered if I was witnessing a ballet version of the Reader’s Digest abridged literary classics, but then I dismissed the thought. This was much odder.
Like Joseph Cornell before her, who was, of course, equally entranced by ballet, art, for Kilimnik, is an escape valve from the abrasive reality of everyday life. Her approach to history and gender is breathlessly apolitical and often wilfully ignorant. Russia, for example, which she returns to again and again, is all sleds and snow, tsars and princesses; there’s not a serf, a pogrom or a revolution in sight, and protagonists are often historically inaccurately dated or recast as a pop cultural equivalent – Paris Hilton, say, becomes Marie Antoinette, and Leonardo DiCaprio Prince Desire. In this she is a decadent artist par excellence: surface is all, especially if it glitters. Youth and beauty and a kind of dreamy hope must surely, in her world, transcend the nasty realities of uprisings, arguments or the ruined toes that lurk beneath the pink satin of every ballerina’s pointes. But, then, there’s no reason she shouldn’t concentrate on the world that makes her happy: she’s an artist, not a social worker or a revolutionary. Yet some commentators have suggested that her approach is ironic, or deeply knowing about art history; I beg to differ. What comes across in Kilimnik’s work is a kind of wide-eyed joy; ironically, it is its deep lack of criticality that, at its best, drives it and gives it its odd strength.
Yet sometimes a project demands a more rigorous approach to precedent than pastiche. If you’re going to venture into a field in which you’re not – despite being a fan – an expert, then you need to have a very good reason to do so – other-wise you run the risk of creating a product that would be considered sub-par in its own field and a little meaningless, if entertaining, in your own. How deeply did Kilimnik really dig into the work of the choreographers and composers to whom she was purportedly paying homage? I fear she hardly broke the earth. I tried to imagine the equivalent of Sleeping Beauty + Friends happening the other way round – ballerinas knocking up, say, a few art installations for a ballet audience for one day only – and failed. There lies the rub.
Jennifer Higgie
