Ballerina Evelyn Hart's Life After Retirement
Prima Ballerina’s 30 Years of Triumphs and Challenges
Mar 17, 2009
Besides dance, ballerina Evelyn Hart's The Hart of Art also showcases “behind the scenes” photographs from her professional dance career. One of Canada's true ballet stars, Evelyn Hart is now studying biology, helping her understand why the physical technique of ballet has changed, ever fascinated by the changing role of the artist in today's society.
Suite 101: In the Hart of Art you talk about the importance of the artist's role in today’s society. How has this changed, after performing three-plus decades ?
Evelyn Hart: "My observation is that it is such a different era, and that it is now such a technical focus. Bodies are stretched more and they are going in a much more gymnastic sort of way ,and the technique is developing, which is really interesting. That is sort of the way an art form does go. The thing about it is, that along conversely with that development, I think it is like an 'overshoot.'
"I am taking Biology, so I am learning about population overshoots, and I am hoping that at one point. it will evolve back, because I am finding that the era I grew up in, I feel, was a particularly rich one before this 'big gymnastic splash' in dance started to happen. Of course, there was the whole economic era of having to compete with megamusicals and Cirque de Soleil, and the mentality of the public.
"Dance at that time was incredibly sophisticated and really depended on personality and interpreters. Therefore, the art was much more focussed on the interpretation, rather than just the exploitation and the physicality of it.
"For me, that is always the most interesting element. How do you take a movement and express what it is that you want to express, and for me, everything therefore, could become new. Whereas now, the obsession is about this new (dance) vocabulary, but it is not necessarily for me, seeing anything new or anything more ( in today's dance technique). It is a lot easier to do that with a more expanded (ballet) vocabulary.
"What I think is the challenge within the ballet vocabulary, today is: okay – within these parameters, how do you take all of that (older technique) and add that, (new technique) and create something that is incredibly refined and specific?
Suite 101: So the audience will still come along with you …
Evelyn Hart: " Yes. It’s trying to find this way of understanding that the art form is really about communication. It’s one thing to create something that you can look at, but again, it’s the same thing as painting. What is that ephemeral thing that makes one painting resonate and another one not?
"Again, part of it is subjective, because certain things are going to resonate to different people, but I think, also to a certain agree, it's in the mind and really about what people are exposed to, because the more you are exposed to something, the more you will want to see it."
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