On Ugliness and Art -- a Passage by Alexandra Ranieri

I have been thinking a great deal lately about the studio where I took ballet lessons as a young girl. I was brought up on videocassettes of Swan Lake and The Nutcracker, and these I adored. The elegance of the dance, by which the dancers were made to seem weightless, as if nothing but their will to remain kept them tied to the earth, absorbed me—I loved this hazy world of chiffon, and organza, and tulle.

Imagine, then, my infant shock when I first arrived at the studio. It was in a low, modern building, with wide thin windows that looked like a pair of eyes narrowed with suspicion. And the studio itself—so ugly, so bare! It was impossible under these fluorescents to picture oneself on a lake of dreams, or surrounded by dancing confections. Then there was not a scrap of chiffon in sight—we wore leotards and ugly pigskin slippers. Everywhere was the smell of sweat, and the evidence of human exertion.

I had a vehement reaction against this place, which seemed to me so brutal, and so far from the gauzy world in the videocassettes. Yet now I remember the studio with fondness. It was my first lesson in the foundation of art, the absolute necessity of ugliness in the pursuit of beauty. Without tedious, repetitive lessons in a bare studio there can be no Giselle. Likewise without persistent clumsy attempts and many hours struggling, head splitting, to comprehend language, there can be no stories, no poetry, no drama. Beneath every Vermeer there are plans as plain and workmanlike as those drawn up for the foundation of a house.

This process, this becoming, which I once found so brutal, I now love with the same ferocity and identification that Cathy declares for Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. It comprises “the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary”.