Flipping through the most recent issue of Princeton Alumni Weekly magazine, I came across a short feature on Simon Morrison that sparked my interest.

Simon was one of my favorite professors at Princeton.  Beyond his friendly demeanor, sense of humor, and great gift for delivering extremely engaging lectures, he’s just plain brilliant.  The foremost Prokofiev expert, he is a music scholar with a profound scholarly interest in dance.  Simon has uncovered sections of various scores and subsequently commissioned new dance productions to be created using newly-revived scores and historical accounts of original productions.  For example, I had the exciting experience of performing in one of these world premiere revivals, Claude Debussy’s Toybox, at Princeton in 2010.  In 2008, Mark Morris’ company premiered Romeo & Juliet, On Motifs of Shakespeare, which Simon commissioned Morris to choreograph according to his historical and musical research of Prokofiev’s original conception of this production…

…which brings this train of thought to ARB.  Simon was guest lecturer at the On Pointe Enrichment Series event, “The Music of Romeo and Juliet”.  It was wonderful to hear one of his engaging lectures again, this time not in a theater, lecture hall, or classroom, but off campus in a studio of Princeton Ballet School.  You can view his lecture in two segments here (1) and here (2).

I started reading the Princeton Alumni feature on Simon, and a quote of his struck me as especially emblematic of this On Pointe lecture:

“I'm interested in talking about familiar classical music and explaining why it can be dangerous, illuminating, and enriching.”

A comment that ARB board member Diane Kuhl's made on ARB's Facebook page really compliments this sentiment.  She characterizes Simon’s lecture at ARB as an “[e]xcellent, illuminating presentation on one of the most glorious scores written for ballet…[which] journeyed into the political, cultural and emotional forces that melded Prokofiev's masterpiece.”

Simon took Prokofiev’s well-known, well-loved Romeo and Juliet score and turned it inside out, exposing that the conventional production is actually just what's left of Prokofiev's creation after years of, in his words, “revision, vandalism, reconsideration, and re-thinking.”

Here’s a small taste of the brimming-with-info lecture: Prokofiev’s ideas were censored by the Soviet government.  Among the features of Prokofiev’s original production that were chopped out by the Soviets were political parades marching through ensemble dances and an ending in which Romeo and Juliet seem to walk out of the plot into some other world of light instead of enacting scenes of tragic death.  Prokofiev’s happy ending Romeo and Juliet was meant to present these young lovers who stay together against the wishes of their oppressive elders as an allegory for young progressives creating a new politic, different from old, pre-Russian-Revolution political thought.  Prokofiev thought of Romeo and Juliet as progressives whose spirits did not die, but rather stepped out into a new life.

Simon revealed that the ballet Romeo and Juliet with which we’re most familiar today was actually unfamiliar to the composer himself.  It’s more akin to the version that came out of five years of political censorship.  However, as Simon remarked, Prokofiev’s politically-charged performance of Shakespeare’s play probably would not have had such a broad, timeless appeal as the censored version, which begs the question, “Is censorship ever good?”

Perhaps I am so drawn to address this question right now because the rhetoric of internet censorship from SOPA and PIPA debates is fresh on my mind.  Regardless of your views on these acts, specifically, it generally goes without saying that censorship is a limit on free speech.  For Prokofiev, political censorship affected what he wanted to say creatively through his work.

When it comes to art, though, isn’t work continuously subjected to revision, a mild form of censorship?  In the case of dance, specifically, a work is passed directly from choreographer to dancer for its first production, but is often subsequently staged by a different rehearsal director on a different crop of dancers, leaving room for slight changes or misunderstandings of the choreographer’s original intentions, even after the most careful and faithful measures in restaging.

Also, isn’t every version of a ballet in some sense a revision of the original?  Choreographers create new versions of ballets all the time, just as Douglas Martin is creating a new production of Romeo and Juliet for ARB, editing other versions until they feel it reflects their vision of the story - a re-vision.  When ballet companies perform the classics today, they are performing the product of years of revision – a product which is often far from the production’s first-ever opening night performance.

Prokofiev tried to revise Shakespeare to make his production reflect his political sentiments.  Everyone in their own time is trying to put their own spin on tradition or to preserve tradition in their own way, but, really, it's all revision.  While censorship may not be “good”, or true to the original, it certainly can create beautiful art and intriguing accounts of art history…