Favorite Ballets – Monotones II

Monotones II is a ballet choreographed by Fredrick Ashton for the Royal ballet in 1965. It is done in white unitards and is a pas de trois to the music of Erik Satie from 1888 called, Gymnopedies.

In our version, we wore white helmets that we often joked about them making us look like space men. Which was apropos … because this music was designed to reflect the cool, symmetry and infinite celestial pulse of space and time.

The ballet is two men and a woman working in unison and creating perfect geometric patterns, as they seem to float in a type of space walk and dance.
The light seems to shine from above and all aspects of this ballet are designed to give the illusion of floating in suspended patterns of beauty and picturesque images that become still, then continue to flow into the next beautiful pose.
This ballet is a work of pure, minimalistic, Ashtonian, classical structure, and flow.
The goal for all three dancers is to not wobble as I am constantly on point … and the men on demi-point … for much of the ballet. While the ballet looks to the asexual aspects of form (as everyone is dressed the same), its focus is on the femininity and flow that the female dancer in the pas de trois can manage to elevate through an unfaltering precision, distant gaze, glacial coolness, and hopefully exquisite attention to the detail … of each unique position.
She exists in another dimension and yet is still somehow, sadly yearning in her humanness.
The men in this ballet (Bob Argobast and Tom Morris) … their every move is to support and, in a way, glorify the ballerina. They hold a forceful but calm grace of great masculinity that is to merge and become one with each other and the music. They lift me into positions that are almost throne-like above their heads.

I love the men in this ballet because they have to have great core strength to be on demi-point and dance while supporting the ballerina (who is on point), while we all have to move in unison as one body or bodies spinning and floating in space.
This ballet begins with the woman in a split on the floor with her head on her right knee. Then the men pick her up in this position and begin slowing turning her in a series of promenades around like a slowly moving music box ballerina.
It is celestial, transcendent, planetary in its movements, arches, swirls, and shifts in position. Each one complimenting the next.
It is a ballet with an endless series of perfect pictures and stillpoints that seem eternal and serene, while they are sublime and perfect in their unique expression in that moment.

Ballet is a method to take a beat, a rhythm, and an emotional tone, then to tweak it into patterns that work together by also managing to extend that same note or musical sequence to be fuller … through our movement.
All dancers seek to find a way to show one’s own unique personality that is mixing into the step, the music, and the flow of the energy in the audience … in that moment.
The music takes us for a ride … and then we take the music beyond the notes so we can take the audience with us into the cosmos of emotional complexity that lives and breathes within our very being.

Ballet is deeply intimate. Ballet requires mental, emotional, and physical control to ascend it past the physical and into the transcendental.
Monotones II was just such a ballet.

The starkness of the empty stage with the bright lights overhead, shining on these pure white unitards, requires a type of perfection in movement that defies logic but demands exact patterns, forms, and effects.
The three of us became one in our flow and flight, in our soul and might, and in our passion and delight.
It was an honor to dance with both these fabulous … young and handsome men.

Rarely do we get to see and move so specifically with others in a way that allows the “Me” to fully become a “We”.

While Bob is on the other side dancing with other friends that have moved from the human world into the divine … I am sure he is smiling right now, as I remember, both of these beautiful and heartfelt men in those few special moments in time, together … where we brought a bit of heaven to earth.

I feel Bob often from the other side supporting me in writing down my thoughts and feelings so that others can become excited to discover the world that we so gratefully got to explore and witness.
I am sure he is guiding other souls that can feel and desire to tap into those same places … that to us were so familiar.

So, I offer a toast to both Tom and Bob for being such loving reflections of my own essence in a ballet that will live forever in time.

We shared a special moment and one that I am sure neither Tom nor I will forget soon. Especially with Bob on the other side reminding us of the fun and joy that was so openly shared in our youthful exuberance and wide-eyed wonder that was the theater.

~Suzanne Wagner~