Forethought:
On Thursday, I walked out of a ballet performance at a loss for words. My friends, however, really wanted to talk about it – isn’t that how it always goes! My friend C tasked us what we thought the ballet had been about. J said that he thought it was a tale of utopia and dystopia. A said that she thought it was about the creation of the Earth. C said that it was about the dangers of the rise of AI. I, however, babbled something about shiny costumes because I couldn’t find the right word to describe what I wanted to say. I was feeling too many things at that moment.
The ballet was called Mere Mortals. It had been set to electronic music by Floating Point, choreographed by Azure Barton, and designed by an AI film studio in Barcelona. The performers slithered around to pulsing beats while wearing shiny jumpsuits that looked like black oil slicks. Large video panels showing AI-generated visuals thrummed in the background. As the ballet continued on, I felt my body tingling and sweating. I didn’t notice time passing until everyone came out to take a bow.
Later, in the car home that night, I realized that the word I was looking for was gesamtkunstwerk.
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I learned about gesamtkunstwerk from an ex-boyfriend who was very interested in opera. Before we went to see the Ring Cycle at the same theater I was now watching this ballet, I decided that I had to study on my own so that I could cut off any long lectures at the pass (“Ah, yes, I actually know about that already. Let’s pay attention to the performance!”) The most notable thing about the Ring Cycle is that it is at an extraordinary scale. It is not one opera, but four, with a total playing time of 15 hours.
It’s hard to describe the scale of the story, the music, the performance, and even the sets. Imagine a Tolkein-level of universe creation combined with full operatic music, choreography, set design, all performed live. The story is of the Norse gods and the one ring, but it could really be subject to infinite reinterpretation. In order to execute on his vision, Wagner introduced new instruments (the Wagner tuba, the bass trumpet) in order to fully express the music. The theaters require their own special stage to perform the Ring cycle properly. The 15 hours of music are so elaborate that every character has their own leitmotif, or musical signature, to describe them. Related characters have similar leitmotifs. The interplay of leitmotifs is so complex and fascinating that Proust’s novels took inspiration from them to create his own leitmotifs.
In a Wagnerian opera, all of the arts get equal billing: the music, the story, the dance, and the set. This is described as gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work.” Wagner did not believe in the “splitting of arts.” In his essays on the topic, he says that music, dance, and word should exist together in perfect harmony, on an equal basis, as it did in ancient Greece. The orchestra should appeal to the subconscious, while the gestures of dance emphasize and evoke an emotional reaction. The story and the music should be unified in order to unify intellect and emotion. As the critic Alex Ross says, “The implication is that his own work would aspire to the same synthesis, although he never says so outright.”
Wagner, in one of the two essays he wrote on the topic of gesamtkunstwerk, describes the entire purpose of art as “making the unconscious conscious.” It sounds exhausting for the performers, creators, and the audience to experience such a thing, more evocative of an emotionally-wringing therapy session than a night at the theater.
In his words: “most popular artists who do not in the least conceal the fact that they have no other ambition than to satisfy this shallow audience. They are wise in their generation; for when the prince leaves a heavy dinner, the banker a fatiguing financial operation, the working man a weary day of toil, and go to the theatre: they ask for rest, distraction, and amusement, and are in no mood for renewed effort and fresh expenditure of force. This argument is so convincing, that we can only reply by saying: it would be more decorous to employ for this purpose any other thing in the wide world, but not the body and soul of Art. We shall then be told, however, that if we do not employ Art in this manner, it must perish from out our public life: i.e.,—that the artist will lose the means of living.”
Gesamtkunstwerk is a cheesy and overused word. It became so popular during various artistic movements and then became used to the point of utter meaninglessness. A big culprit is the film industry. When film as a medium first became popular in the early 1920s, critics would cry that film was the real heir to the gesamtkunstwerk throne. They’d claim that if Wagner was around, he’d be a film “director who’d also really want to be the composer.” The critic Eisenstein wrote that cinema was the “genuine and ultimate synthesis of all artistic manifestations that fell to pieces after the peak of Greek culture.” But these guys get two things wrong. In most film 1) the director isn’t the composer and it shows: the dialogue and visuals are primary while the music is secondary, and 2) the main purpose is to entertain, not to provoke. Film doesn’t automatically mandate gesamtkunstwerk, as much as a real definition even exists for the term. The ingredients must include a true balance of the arts that challenges the viewer.
Art, in short, should make us sweat in our seats at the SF Ballet.
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Afterthought:
As I shuffled out of the theater, I picked up the program booklet by the theater exit. I read it at night, before going to bed. It describes the ballet as a tale about the rise of AI (C was right!) told through the tale of Pandora’s box. To be honest, the program booklet and the story irritated me. I actually completely disagree that AI is like Pandora letting monsters out of her box with Hope fluttering at the bottom – now that I know the final dancer is Hope, that ending ensemble item in shiny gold jumpsuits seems so obvious, I thought. I don’t think the story of building AI is so fatalistically terrible as opening a box of monsters, with the binary of Prometheus as forethought and Epimetheus (Pandora’s husband) as afterthought.
At first, reading the program booklet made me roll my eyes and dismiss the ballet as ignorant doomerist art. But I then realized that I was missing the point if I thought the program booklet mattered. Good art lets you step back and create something within it. Those who focus on the literals of the story are trapped. It is not meant to be a guide to the personal, political, and practical, but to go beyond these ideas to something more human that we can all appreciate, even if purely aesthetically. Wagner’s Ring cycle is ostensibly about retelling the story of German identity in post-1848 revolutionary Europe, if taken literally, but the breadth of scholarship on the topic shows that it’s limiting to dismiss it as a German nationalist work that Nazis loved. As George Bernard Shaw says in his essay “The Perfect Wagnerite”:
I write this pamphlet for the assistance of those who wish to be introduced to the work on equal terms with that inner circle of adepts...The reason is that its dramatic moments lie quite outside the consciousness of people whose joys and sorrows are all domestic and personal, and whose religions and political ideas are purely conventional and superstitious. To them it is a struggle between half a dozen fairytale personages for a ring, involving hours of scolding and cheating, and one long scene in a dark gruesome mine, with gloomy, ugly music, and not a glimpse of a handsome young man or pretty woman. Only those of wider consciousness can follow it breathlessly, seeing in it the whole tragedy of human history and the whole horror of the dilemmas from which the world is shrinking today.
He thought that the Ring cycle was about the fall of capitalism! If I wanted to think that the Mere Mortals ballet was about the risk of listening to totalitarian leaders and conformist ideas, I could. And the director of Mere Mortals seems to encourage that co-creation: at the end of the ballet there is a big DJ dance party in the lobby.
If I were back in the moment of replying to my friend’s question of “what’d ya think,” I’d say: the music, the sets, the costumes, the dancing, and the narrative were perfectly balanced. It was in harmony. I like the direction that this takes us in for art: AI’s scale could eventually allow for more easily accessible gesamtkunstwerk if one person could potentially do it all (dance, music, book!) with the help of an AI. As a dancer, I’ll admit that it wasn’t a ballet as we traditionally think of it. The movements felt more modern than ballet. As far as the story goes, I thought it was about the willingness to listen to charismatic leaders in situations of chaos and existential risk. I felt reverent, scared, angry, moved, and confused. I thought it was a love story.