is the title of a poem by Frank Bidart, about his first viewing the 1956 filmed performance of the Russian ballerina Galina Ulanov in the ballet Giselle. It begins:
Many ways to dance Giselle, but tonight as you watch you think that she is what art is, creature who remembers her every gesture and senses its relation to the time just a moment before when she did something close to it but then everything was different so what she feels now is the pathos of that difference.
Reading the poem last night, I thought to experience for myself what Bidart did, and so turned to a YouTube search: “Galina Ulanova Giselle.” There are multiple videos available; I chose the one linked to above because it shows the entire first act uninterrupted, and also includes the title cards giving a summary of the plot. (There is a corresponding video for the second act.) At just past the three minute mark Ulanova steps on the stage, and a 46-year-old woman becomes a young peasant girl dancing her first love.
Wonderful indeed to have this preserved, to be called up at the click of a button, to watch it on a tablet and listen on earbuds in one’s bed before sleep. But also just one of millions of YouTube videos, and likely thousands of ballet performances, available to be thus called up — so many eager for our attention that the impact of any one of them is likely attenuated.
But not always. It’s easy to exercise the elder’s privilege of nostalgia, to reminisce about the days when art came to one as an intermittent delight: the LP bought with one’s monthly allowance, the out-of-print treasure rescued from the stacks of a used bookstore, the art film seen in a limited run at the cinema way downtown.
I will resist that temptation. Art is art, even if it comes to you embedded in a jumbled flood of “content,” bereft of its aura. Bidart, who grew up a closeted gay teen in an uncultured rural town, ends his poem as follows:
Ulanova came to Pomona California in 1957 as light projected on a screen to make me early in college see what art is.
May you too find in the light of a screen someone to make you see what art is.
