Speaker 1:	Hello. I want to welcome you all in the next of our series of the fall faculty lectures. This evening, we will have Grace Ledbetter from Classics and Philosophy, and here to introduce her is her colleague from the Classics, Rosaria Menson. 
Rosaria:	Hello, I'm Rosaria Menson from Classics and I'm really delighted and proud to introduce today's faculty lecturer. Of course, Grace Ledbetter doesn't need an introduction, but this is a good time to review some of her accomplishments and the things that she did both for the college and in her own work as a scholar. 
	Professor Ledbetter gained her BA Classics and Philosophy from Greenmore College and then made Philosophy from the University of Virginia, and a Ph. D. in Classics and Philosophy from Cornell University. The consistently dual track of her preparation as well as her dual title here at Swarthmore, she is a social professor of Classics and Philosophy, begin to give an idea of the breadth of her competence in the humanities. She regularly teaches the ancient philosophy honors seminar, different courses on Plato, including the particularly successful Plato and his Modern Readers, and she is the author of several articles on philosophical topics such as stoic passions, the notion of cause in Plato, and the Socratic method of reputation. 
	At the same time, she also teaches Greek and Latin at all levels and she teaches and she writes about a broad range of ancient poetic texts, especially Homer, [inaudible 00:01:43], the lyric poets, and the ancient [inaudible 00:01:45], who as she shows were philosophers in addition to being poets just as [inaudible 00:01:51] and even Plato were poets as well as philosophers, and I will mention in this connection, her book titled Poetics before Plato: Interpretation and Authority in Early Greek Theories of Poetry, which was published in 2003 by Princeton University Press.
	There is a third strand that is especially relevant to the topic of today's lecture. Grace Ledbetter's devotion to the humanities goes well beyond the marriage of philosophy with literature. Rather, it embraces the arts in the way in which in subsequent ages, both the visual and the performative arts have appropriated, experienced, reinterpreted, and reread the classical tradition, the Roman and Greek tradition. What we now call, as Grace Ledbetter herself will explain in her lecture, reception of the classics.
	On this side of the visual arts, she has stark incorporation with Patricia Riley, the interpretation theory past seminar on Greek myths in art and literature, and on the side of the performative arts, I'm sure that many of you know that she comes from a family with a strong musical tradition and she is herself a belly dancer, and here at Swarthmore, she started a course on Greek myths in opera, ballet, and modern dance, and has given a number of lectures on this subject. 
	Most importantly, Professor Ledbetter is in the process of writing a book entitled Apollo Dancing: The Greek Mythology of the Classical Ballet. This is a monograph that examined how Balanchine and Stravinsky ballet have followed [inaudible 00:03:43] which was produced in 1927, provided a new foundation for ballet in the twentieth century by transforming the Greek myth of Apollo emerging ballet with Greco-Roman classicism. It is really the research that she did for this project that largely informs her lecture today on ballet and the Greeks. Welcome, Grace Ledbetter. 
Grace:	Thank you, Rosaria. The field of classics has opened up in an important way. Classicists are currently in the grip of a development that has significantly expanded our field and set exciting new agendas for teaching and scholarship. The development I'm referring to is usually called reception studies, although the use of the term reception here is tricky. Reception in this context does not refer to reader response theory, or to hermeneutic theories of reception and audience response originating in the work of Hans Yaus. Reception studies in classics are rather examinations of how Greco-Roman literature, art, and philosophy have been interpreted, appropriated, reshaped, and reenvisioned by later literary and artistic traditions, continuing on through the present. 
	This new work is deeply interdisciplinary because it requires scholars to work at the intersection of at least two different fields. For example, in both classics and art history, if one were examining the way that the Greek god Apollo has figured into the history of art and has been reenvisioned and adapted for various different purposes. The images in front of you right now show three different Apollos. The first on the left is the Apollo Belvedere sculpture, famous sculpture, which is a second century copy of a fourth century BCE original, but it's already an interpretation, a variation of a much earlier history of the iconography of the god Apollo. 
	The second is Louie the 14th, who is himself dressed up as the sun god, who in his age was identified with Apollo. So, we could say this is Louie as Apollo, and he is dancing the role of Apollo in a court ballet. He famously danced the role of Apollo many times, he was a trained dancer, he took it extremely seriously and Apollo was his most famous and important role for many different reasons.
	The third image on the far right is Cy Twombly's Apollo and the Artist from the 1970s. This is part of a series of works where Twombly uses mythological names and features to respond to what he calls the Greek love of transformation and metamorphosis. It's a really interesting series of works, but this is his Apollo. Classicists now examine these reimaginings of Apollo as moments in the developing myth of Apollo itself. In classics, there had always been trouble of what classicists were accustomed to call the classical tradition, or the [inaudible 00:07:20] of a given author or text. These studies tended to focus on the value of the original and of preserving its legacy. 
	Today's reception studies in classics take seriously a post-modern denial of stable meaning. They speak not of classicism, but of classicisms - that is, different constructions of what counts as classical. They highlight the plurality of meanings that come to reshape and reenergize a given myth or figure of antiquity. They recognize that a myth may be used for a variety of purposes and serve any number of ideological ends. 
	The use of classical mythology might be a means of legitimizing a project, envoking a genealogy for an innovative claim. It might convey primitivism or modern sophistication. It might take a reverent or an antagonistic attitude toward antiquity. It might be reaching for an authentic past, or ironically drawing our attention to the impossibility of doing so. 
	The subject I'm going to be talking about today is drawing from a larger project in reception studies that I've been working on for a few years. The basic question it asks is what role classical antiquity has played in the history of ballet, beginning from ballet's traditional origins in 16th century French ballet décor, and on through the 20th and 21st centuries. 
	Today, I'm going to be focusing on one ballet in particular, and one moment in the history of ballet that happened to mark a pivotal turning point. In fact, this is the ballet that got me interested in this project to begin with, both because it's a personal favorite and because it uses both Greek mythology and Greek aesthetic structures to great effect. It is also not an exaggeration to say that this ballet set the agenda for the 20th century's most important and long-standing contribution to ballet, which is George Balanchine's neo-classical ballet. 
	Now a well-established style of ballet with an entire repertoire and company, the New York City Ballet, devoted to its preservation and development. The ballet I'm talking about is Stravinsky and Balanchine's Apollo, originally Apollo and Musagete, with music and scenario by Igor Stravinsky, and choreography by a young George Balanchine, premiered at Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Paris in 1928. Viewed in retrospect, Apollo is an unequivocally modern ballet, forward-looking and innovative. It has rightly been called the crucial work of neoclassicism in dance, leading not only to the immense body of Balanchine's future work but to so much else in 20th century ballet. It's been called an untarnished masterpiece, the fountainhead of Balanchine's repertory, and for all intents and purposes, the beginning of the history of modern ballet. 
	As we shall see, Apollo adapts an archaic Greek myth from the sixth century BCE and presents that myth in a version of classical ballet that is made to merge with paradimatically Greek aesthetic structures and patterns. Why does this ballet choose a Greek myth as its subject matter? How were Stravinsky and Balanchine reworking this myth, and how does the ballet construct antiquity in the classical? How does antiquity intersect with or even express what is modern in this ballet? By the end of this talk, I will propose an answer as to these questions, but let me say at the outset that in my view, this ballet uses classical mythology and models from Greco-Roman art to redefine classical ballet from the ground up; in effect, to create a new myth of origin for ballet and a new idea of the classical. 
	Another way of putting it is to say that the ballet Apollo succeeded in making ballet seem Greek. Apollo was created at a point in the history of ballet in the late 1920s when the future of classical ballet was deeply in question. The peak of classical ballet was, for most perspectives, long past with the great romantic ballets of the 19th century. Experimental in both productions of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes were a hope for ballet's future. It's important to pause for a minute to look at the history preceding our ballet. 
	In the 19th century, romanticism helped to crystallize what we think of today as classical ballet, and this classicism has essentially nothing to do with Greco-Roman classicism or the Greco-Roman world. A fascination with the supernatural, with exotic lands, and local color drew inspiration not from the Greek gods but from sylphs, Wilies, and the swans of German folktale. If Greco-Roman mythology, mythological themes appeared, they were one among many examples of exotica. The great romantic ballets, Les Sylphides, Giselle, 1841, one of the earliest ones, Swan Lake, 1877, Sleeping Beauty which is the latest, adapt stories from folktales involving other worldly women and they share an un-Greek romantic structure. 
	Each of these ballets dramatizes a feminine idea represented by a class of non-human, unattainable, virtually identical women. Sylphs, Wilies, swans, and fairies, with supernatural power over men, and inimitable sex appeal. The man's love for one of these women either ruins him or saves him, and sometimes it's not clear which. Greek mythology does not find its way into this material because of cultural forces turning away from Greek ideals in the 19th century, but also because romantic love and especially perfect realms of feminine beauty do not figure much, if at all, into Greco-Roman mythology. Conceptually, romantic ballet is about two worlds: the mundane world of the village and the court and the transcendent world of swans, Wilies, and fairies or sylphs. 
	The structure of these ballets is almost compulsively repetitive, and the things it tends to say over and over again are: Women are of a single type: beautiful, unattainable, and lethal. Women lack agency. They are controlled by evil sorcerers, fathers, or stern and resentful mother figures. Their relationships with men offer a romantic but impossible ideal of love. Except for Sleeping Beauty, which has a happy ending and is not coincidentally a latest of the ballets, so it's not really romantic, the male and female protagonists tend to end up either ruined or dead. The immediate cause of destruction is often deception on the man's part. The scenes in these ballets involving the otherworldly creatures dancing in a group with seemingly perfect symmetry often create the most sublime, poetic, entrancing, and technically breathtaking parts of these ballets. The signets dancing in a row in Swan Lake, the grand pas du Wilies in Giselle, the fairies in Sleeping Beauty are all good examples. 
	I'm going to play you a short clip of one of the most famous examples. This is the grand pas du Wilies. The Wilies are the spirits of the women ... this is from German folktale, this is the ballet Giselle. Women who have died before they're married and they haunt graveyards at night, and if a man happens to roam into the graveyard that is a live man, they force him to dance to his death, and they have this kind ... they also dance incredibly beautifully and in perfect synchronicity. They have this very icy beauty that's very similar to the swans in Swan Lake, very similar to the fairies in Sleeping Beauty. I put these all in the same category.
	This is a very famous scene. It gives you a good idea. You've probably seen it before.
	The synchronicity and the central geometry of these dances can produce startling effects. Furthermore, the classical pas de deux of the dance between the man and the woman becomes a highly refined and structured centerpiece of romance and eroticism in these great ballets. 
	These romantic ballets of the 19th century have become the canonical works of classical ballet, and their power is largely due to the fact that the man now acknowledges classical ballets defining choreographer brought superior technique from the French and Russian schools to St Petersburg in 1847. There, Marius Petipa, dancer and choreographer, eventually became ballet master and made Russian imperial ballet preeminent in the world. 
	His Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty, as well as his versions of the French classics like Giselle, La Bayadere and Le Corsaire still form the center of the traditional classical repertoire. Petipa could be said to have done two great things for ballet: he deepened the expressive power of ballet technique and he invested ballet with the grandeur and the nobility of czarist Russia.
	Ballet's classicism became defined as a combination of academic dance, dance de col, and 19th century balletic conventions, nothing to do with Greco-Roman classicism. Academic dance is a particular vocabulary of movement that constitutes the technique of classic ballet. Beginning with the five positions for the feet that were developed by Pierre Beauchamp in the late 17th century, the canon of steps and positions in classical ballet gradually grew, and by the 19th century was refined and codified into a system that is still the basic one used today, even though the variations in growth continue.
	Dancing en pointe was introduced in the early 19th century, and in the 1830s the dancer Marie Taglioni used it famously to express ethereality. There she is. Besides the turning out of the legs and feet, an unnatural yet beautiful position that allows the lines of the dancer's body to be maximally visible and maximally extended, one of the most critical components to the look of classical ballet is the sense that the movements of the dancers' limbs emanate from a still and immovable center. Petipa's choreography showed how adhering to the rules of academic dance creating the formal clarity, harmony, and symmetry and order it demanded was artistically beneficial and had tremendous expressive potential. 
	The classicism of romantic ballet in the 19th century combined these aesthetic elements of formality, structure, and lyricism with conventional or canonical images and themes. It celebrated court life, and it favored grand, large-scale productions. Petipa's ballets were unavoidably associated with aristocratic social structure and its attended elitism. As famous dance critic Deborah Jowitt has shown beautifully how these ballets reflect back to their audience the same divisions between royalty and commoners, court and village that structure the audience's own hierarchal worldview. 
	As she puts it, the spectator looked back at a stage world that flattering mirrored their own in protocol, decorum, and elegance. The ballerina and the premiere dancer, like the czar and czarina, were framed by a select company of soloists, the grand dukes and duchesses, and by demi-soloists, court officials if you like, and by a further stratified court of ballet. The parades, the grand entrances, the large ensemble dances in the ballets affirmed the power of ceremony. The surviving ballets of this period - The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, La Bayadere - contain courts of their own.
	The great romantic ballets of the 19th century are there for unavoidably redolent czarist Russia. The 1917 revolution, however, overturned the authority of imperial ballet and attacked ballet's relevance by associated it with the old order. Ballet was in danger of fading away under new political and social forces, and it might have disappeared completely had it not been for the hugely ambitious experimental and sensational tenure of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes from 1909 to 1929, which revitalized ballet with a saturation of artistic talent and innovation. Just some of the big names involved: Fokine, Nijinsky, Nijinska, Stravinsky, Picasso, Bakst, Pavlova, Cocteau, Massine, and finally Balanchine. 
	Here are some of them. That's Nijinsky, and a poster of the Ballets Russes. Here's a painting depicting something from the Ballets Russes. That's Cocteau. That is Michel Fokine, and Isadora Duncan, whom I will discuss in a minute. 
	Known for its lavish stage, exotic and controversial productions, most famously Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, choreographed by Nijinsky, the Ballet Russes attempted in many different way to depart from the formalism of academic dance and in some cases like in The Rite of Spring to deliberately overturn the ideals of lightness and symmetry. 
	This time marked radical shifts from the classicism of Petipa. Innovators like Alexander Gorsky emphasize naturalism and characterization, while Michel Fokine who dominated the Ballets Russes's earlier years explicitly called for reform in ballet. While not abandoning ballet technique, Fokine perhaps influenced by Isadora Duncan whom he saw perform in 1904, introduced non-classical use of arms and had his dancers employ upper body movement more freely. Among Fokine's famous ballets, Chopaniana which was later renamed Les Sylphides, The Firebird, Petrushka, Geherizade was his Daphnis and Chloe, 1912, with music by Rubel. 
	As well as the earlier ocasin gallatea, 1905, and the unis with choreography based on Greek vase painting. Fokine used classical mythology for some of his many different types of pieces with their own exotic flavor and characteristic movement. For examples, his actors in Galletea used acrobatic tumbling for the finds that were based on ancient Greek vase painting. By contrast, his most famous ballet, Les Sylphides, draws not from the Greek mythology but from familiar 19th century traditions of romantic ballet. 
	Fokine was an innovator in ballet, and his influence by Isadora Duncan which he denied but which no one else denies is that Isadora Duncan presented a very particular reading of what was Greek about dance, what would make a Greek dance, and it's really very different if not antithetical to classical dance. Isadora wore a toga, she read Greek, she danced to Greek poems being recited, she did this in her childhood, and she thought the Greek was all about being natural and free, freedom of movement. She was against ballet, she didn't like ballet. That wasn't her main motivation, but this was an idea of greater freedom of movement, natural movement, not the formalism of classical ballet. When Fokine used Greek themes, it was with that in mind. With a departure from the classical, from the formal rules of ballet. 
	So too Nijinsky, great dancer and choreographer, used ancient Greek ball reliefs and vase painting as models for the look of his Afternoon of a Fawn which is a 1912 ballet from the Ballets Russes which employs an archaic Greek aesthetic in service of exoticism, novelty, and non-classical movement.
	Now you see the two dimensionality of this pose from the ballet. It's meant to be two dimensional, it's meant to look like a Greek vase painting. It's not meant to look like classical ballet. It's meant to look exotic and non-classical, so this is Greek being used for anti-classical dance, for new sorts of dance. One of the overall effects is that return to ancient Greek subject matter became associated, at least temporarily, with a departure from traditional ballet, on a path already opened by Isadora Duncan's modern dance. Meanwhile, later experimentalist choreographers at the Ballets Russes continued to invigorate academic technique with gymnastics and acrobatics and interest in jazz, constructivism, strong eroticism, Soviet political ballets, and new demands about the relationship between dancing and music.
	Although their ballets do not survive, these trends became important influences on the commonating moments of the Ballets Russes. 
	A talented dancer and a pianist with a formidable musicality, Balanchine joined the Ballets Russes in 1924 as a choreographer after he had studied dance at the Imperial Ballet School in St Petersburg, piano and music theory at the Conservatory, and formed his own experimental dance ensemble called The Young Ballet. 
	Although Balanchine's earliest choreography had been influenced by modernist trends like constructivism and his Prodigal Son, which was written in 1929, and is still a standard part of the repertoire, is constructivist. So he retained that, to some extent. Balanchine and Stravinsky as well had seen the Sleeping Beauty as a child. At that point, Sleeping Beauty was a revival, so they had seen it when they were young and it was being revived, the classical ballet was kind of long past. And carried throughout his life a worshipful admiration for Petipa's choreography and for much of romantic ballet. 
	Balanchine's ambitions as a choreographer thus combined a desire to retain what he found powerful about classical ballet, the basic vocabulary of academic dance, the pas de deux, the ultra-femininity of the ballerina, with a desire to innovate and modernize ballet. The productions at the Ballets Russes had in general boldly rejected classical ballet and this had resulted in ballet seeming somewhat adrift or at least in a phase of unstable transition. At the instigation of Stravinsky who was himself going through a neo-classical phase, which is a whole other story that I could comment on later. 
	Balanchine choreographed Apollo Musagete to the music and scenario that Stravinsky had already written. In the context of Stravinsky's previous ballets and the many other bold experiences in Dionesian ballet that audiences had seen at the Ballets Russes - The Rite of Spring, The Firebird, for example - Apollo would have seemed like the product of a moral conversion and an attempt to scold ballet for its debauchery. Apollo returned to classicism with a vengeance, not only to classical ballet but also to an archaic version of the Greco-Roman world that emphasized an extreme form of purity, clarity, and spiritual loftiness.
	Apollo's austerity was striking, as was the way it appeared to distill the essence of classicism. In bold contrast to The Rite of Spring, Stravinsky's music for Apollo is radically pared down and ethereal. Written for a strings only orchestra, its rhythms evoke 18th century French ballet music, Rameau in particular, and its overall tone is measured. It conveys a prominent sense of awakening. There are only four dancers in the ballet, one man and three women. The ballet's choreographic lines are unusually sharp and geometric. The dancers often appear in devotional poses. The ballet showcases many of the essential elements of classical ballet, and it also has the dancers form a tableau that appeared two dimensional and reminiscent of Greek vase paintings and friezes.
	Apollo was not merely classical, it sanctified classicism. When the ballet was revived in New York, its sets and costumes grew more and more spare, white, and abstract, until it finally took the form that we're going to see in a clip that I'm going to show. But this, these, this is what Apollo originally looked like. The original sets and costumes were more elaborate and evocative an archaic Greek atmosphere. Rocks in the background evoked the notoriously rugged terrain of Delos where Apollo was born, while the chariot which you cannot see here provided a Greek motif that nodded to the French classicism of Louis XIV, the sun king who is of course famous for dancing the role of Apollo.
	The original costumes for the ballet, also designed by Beauchamp, were long tutus with Grecian touches for the muses and a gold tunic for Apollo. They were not the minimal white costumes that Stravinsky had envisioned and that Balanchine eventually adopted, nor were they terribly elaborate. Ballet's historic origins in the French court are summoned, and at the same time we move farther back in time to archaic Greece.
	The ballet's simple narrative tells a metical story about the origin of dancing. In the prologue, which Balanchine cut as soon as Stravinsky died, Leto gives birth to a fully adult Apollo who is nevertheless wrapped in swaddling clothes. The mother disappears, leaving her son in the hands of nymphs who help the god with his first awkward movements. The nymphs bring him a lute and begin to teach him to play. Left alone, Apollo makes his first attempts to dance. Three anonymous muses appear, danced by the same three women. There are only four dancers in this ballet. Apollo now leads them as a sort of choreographer, trying out some basic movements and lifts. At several points, he appears almost to bless them in a kind of choreographic rite of passage.
	At the end of the prologue, Apollo awards each muse an emblem of her particular gift: a pen, a mask, and a lyre, and with it her identity. We now have on stage Calliope, the music poetry, Polyhymnia, the muse of mime, and Terpsichore, the muse of dance. Stravinsky chose these three muses because, he said, he said because of the close connection they have with dance. Now the ballet proper begins with a kind of judgment of pairs scenario. 
	Each muse dances a highly individualized variation for Apollo, hoping to win his favor. Apollo sits quietly in judgment, rejects the first two and finally chooses Terpsichore as his favorite and dances with her. Now, if I'm successful I'm going to show you the clip of that part, of the three muses each dancing their variation in the order of Calliope, Polyhymnia, mime, and Terpsichore, and the thing to think about here is what's different about Terpsichore. She's the third one and she's the winner, so there's supposed to be something magically different about her to make her the muse of dance. They're all dancing pretty well. Okay, now. 
	Calliope. This is New York City ballet in the 80s. But this is a Balanchine celebration, so very famous dancers. 
	So she wins. And Stravinsky said that that was the key, one of the many different contradictory things he said about the ballet, but that the mystery of Terpsichore, what it is that's different about her was the key to the whole ballet, and so people have talked a lot about what's different about her dancing. You may have noticed any number of things, whether you know anything about ballet or not. I'd actually be interested to know what you noticed about it, but I'll tell you that the two things that stand out to me are that she has more classical balletic movements, even though she has a lot of non-classical balletic move, but she has a lot of the standard ones over and over again, and maybe the most striking this is that she's fully coordinated in her upper and lower body. She's more flowing. She looks more flowing, where the other ones are both encumbered, one by her tragedy, and the other by her not being able to talk at all so she has her ... her upper body is not free, whereas Terpsichore has fully classical upper body and fully moving upper body.
	This takes place after the scene that I just showed you. After Terpsichore wins, she gets to dance a pas de deux with Apollo. They dance the dance of the man and the woman together, so their pas de deux is both innocent and sensual, and includes a swimming lesson, that's what dancers refer to it as, a swimming lesson. In a solo, Apollo now demonstrates his newly developed balletic grace and virtuosity. Terpsichore returns and the two of them dance together another pas de deux. The music speeds up and lightens and the two muses rejoin the dance. Apollo does not reject them after all, he only subordinates them to Terpsichore. 
	The ensemble dancing in this section builds the complexity of the piece as a whole. It's lively, playful, and presents some unforgettable configurations. For example, one of the muses and Apollo moving as a chariot, they look like a chariot moving across the stage, and of all three in a sun formation, which is now a very famous scene from the ballet. It was originally near the end and now it usually forms the absolutely last pose of the ballet.
	Zeus calls the group to Parnassus, and they solemnly ascend. That's the end. One could say that the pose in this figure represents what has happened in this ballet. The unification of the three muses with Apollo and Terpsichore in front defines what has been born, developed, and experimented with and finally established: the art of dance. Poetry and mime are subordinate but essential components. Apollo and Terpsichore have established the existence, priority, and nature of dance.
	The initial critical response to Apollo was mixed, but most opinions focused on the ballet's unapologetic classicism. By classicism, they now meant its balletic classicism, and yet it would seem that many treated its Greco-Roman classicism as part of the same phenomenon. Classicism seems to cover both of these things, and even in some contemporary writing on Apollo, there's no clear distinction made between the two classicisms. Some praise the unprecedented purity of Apollo's classicism and the sincere spirituality of Stravinsky's music. Naked of responses to the ballet found Stravinsky's music largely ineffectual and the ballet's classicism refrigerated, that is, cold, unemotional, pat, presenting a museum-like exhibition of the past. 
	Despite the initially mixed critical reviews, Stravinsky and Balanchine were elated, and felt that the ballet was a watershed for them artistically. They turned out to be right. From my perspective as a classicist, what Apollo did was to merge two classicisms: balletic classicism and Greco-Roman classicism. It merged them extremely successfully, even magically, since as I repeat, they do not have anything fundamentally to do with each other. It did this in two ways: first, by writing a new myth of origin for ballet, a myth that locates ballet's origins in archaic Greece.
	Stravinsky chose the archaic Greek myth of Apollo from the sixth century BCE Homeric hymn to Apollo, which he had clipped to his board when he was composing the music. As the text upon which to base the ballet's simple narrative, Apollo was born and he assumes his particular power as a god. Stravinsky's choice of the archaic Apollo myth allows the ballet to accomplish two important things. Firstly, it grounds the ballet in an actual Greek myth, which it modifies to suit its own purposes and cultural context. The ballet begins where the hymn does, with Apollo's birth. Whereas the hymn has Apollo declare that he is the god of prophecy, the bow, and the lyre, the ballet focuses only on dance. Dance is included, however, in the hymn's domain of the lyre, an emblem of Greek musique, which is a combination of poetry, music, and dance, which were more often than not found together, simultaneously.
	There are two scenes of dancing in the archaic hymn. The festivities on Delos, some of my students know this hymn pretty well, which include dancing and Apollo's dancing with the muses on Olympus. Other than dancing with the muses, the Apollo of the Homeric hymn is not portrayed as having any particular relationship with them. Moreover, the hymn is more concerned to portray Apollo's displays of threatening power. His transformation into a dolphin, his slaying the python, his abducting the cretin sailors for his own use on Delphi, whereas the ballet portrays him as an awkward youth who through the inspiration of three muses becomes the god of dance. 
	The ballet also portrays a balance and playfulness in male-female relationships. Apollo becomes the muses' leader only after they teach him. There is an ongoing theme of flirtation between Apollo and the muses that is simply not in the hymn. Where in fact the only male-female relationship portrayed is that of Apollo and his mother Leto and what is emphasized there is his immediate escape from the maternal clutch and the fact that he did not need to be nursed. In fact, he seems to be born fully grown. 
	Stravinsky and Balanchine's version of the myth thus preserves some elements while it changes others. The basic fact of the god Apollo as the originator and god of dance, however, remains grounded in the archaic Greek myth. If Stravinsky had simply made up a story about the origin of ballet, the myth they present would not display the same aura of authenticity. The choice of the Apollo myth allows the ballet to incorporate allusions to an earlier period of ballet, when Greco-Roman classicism was closely tied to the art. The choice of the god Apollo in and of itself alludes to the court ballet of Louis XIV, since he was famous for dancing that role and for having taken on the title of Sun King, equivalent to Apollo in that age.
	Scholars have uncovered other allusions as well. Stravinsky's music for Apollo echoes Rameau, the star sun configuration you see here perhaps alludes to the sun king. The dancers at one point form the chariot that I've already mentioned. The choice of the Apollo myth does allow Stravinsky and Balanchine to further connect balletic and Greco-Roman classicism by incorporating allusions to a time in the history of ballet when the two were indeed closely connected, and that link is now portrayed as going back in time even farther to archaic Greece. 
	I've now come to the final part of my argument, which has to do with Balanchine's choreography for Apollo. Perhaps the single most powerful way that this ballet blends classical ballet and Greco-Roman classicism so as to make ballet seem Greek is the way that Balanchine masterfully draws or displays a number of parallels between classical ballet and Greek art. These parallels make the choice of a specifically Greek myth for the origin of ballet seem far from arbitrary, though it is. They make it seem as though ballet is organically connected to Greco-Roman art and artistic ideals. The constellation of Apollo and his muses, for example, reproduces the relationship between choreographer and dancers, as Apollo moves from being inspired by watching their dancing to leading their dancing and at times constructing it.
	Part of the story of the origin of ballet is to set out a model of a male choreographer inspired by or auditioned for by female dancers, and then choosing them, making a hierarch among them, and choreographing their movements. The ballet's mythic effect makes Apollo into a choreographer. The connection is plausible since in Greek myth, Apollo is after all the leader of the muses and the god of dance. Perhaps the most striking way that the two classicisms are blended together by the choreography is that Balanchine creates many tableaux and movements that allude to a set of structures typical of Greek vase painting, friezes, and sculpture. 
	Consider how the following moments from the ballet show striking parallels. Apollo's ... so, on the left is the Apollo Belvedere and on the right is a scene from the ballet. The angle of the open chest, the lifted chin, the diagonal running from right hand to left in the statue, and from left hand to right in the dancer are all remarkably similar. The dancer's pose on the right can furthermore be said to interpret the statue's classical contraposto position. The relaxed dynamism of the statue, with its weight on one foot and its shoulders tilted off axis, becomes in the ballet the more rigorously geometric active muscularity of the dancer's position, which would seem to infuse classical balletic elements into the Greco-Roman aesthetic ideal embodied in the statue.
	Consider too, finally, how prominent features of the Greek funerary plaque on the left are echoed by the ballet. The scene on the right. The tableaux on the figure in the funerary vase ... well, the tableaux in both figures strongly echo the verticality ... sorry. The tableaux on the right strongly echoes the verticality of the figures on the funerary plaque. The plaintive arm gestures of the mourners on the funerary plaque reach out and up, in much the same way that the muses' arms do. Overall, the configurations from the ballet both strive for two dimensionality and a sense of ritual gesture that we see on the funerary plaque. Balanchine himself explicitly acknowledged that parts of the ballet were meant to look two dimensional, and he gave one of his dancers, in the New York City Ballet, later instructions to go look at the Greek vases in the Metropolitan Museum. 
	The echoes of repetitive ritual-like gestures that we find in the ballet, the figure on the right, recreates a sense of ritual significance. Less specific than the mourning on funerary plaque, but nonetheless striking. By synthesizing balletic with Greco-Roman classicism, Apollo presents its version of classical ballet as though it were the original kind of ballet, the essence of classical ballet. We might naturally consider this a backward-looking, nostalgic gesture, and in some senses it was. However, it was precisely this ballet's particular use of Greek mythology that allowed it to redefine ballet from the ground up, as it were, and to serve as the programmatic modernizing force that it did for the 20th century ballet. 
	Seen this way, we turn into antiquity as a way to move forward. The mechanism at work here is a return to origins via mythology, and an accompanying redefinition of the basis of the art. Moreover, if as some theorists maintain, myths address anxieties, Apollo can be said to address the anxiety that ballet at the time was adrift, and to provide both the anchor and the reinvigoration to move it forward. We might add finally that Apollo reshapes an ancient Greek myth by positing the supremacy of dance among Apollo's arts at the same time that it deifies and mythologizes the choreographer himself, who is here presented as a god. Thank you.