A Nocturnal Upon St. Steven's Day

Upon first listening to a Tom Waits record, the response of the uninitiated is often the same: ‘This guy cannot sing.’ Waits growls, hollers, mumbles and whispers as he voices the various narrators in his songs. Fluctuating between a moaning falsetto and a tectonic rumble, he gives the impression of a man barely in control of his own voice. Yet this is misleading, for the truly stunning thing about Waits, which one grows to realise, is that he isn’t merely winging it: he has complete control over that seemingly unmasterable voice.

This puts me in mind of the way Steven Gerrard plays football. Gerrard hunches over the ball as he moves forward with it, often dragging it out from underneath him, constantly looking like he is on the verge of miscontrol – either knocking it too far forward or getting it stuck beneath his feet. He looks rushed and desperate, always at the very edge of control. These are not characteristics that you would usually associate with great players, yet despite all this, Gerrard is an exceptional footballer – one of the most gifted in the modern game. Like Waits, Steven Gerrard has made an art of consistently producing controlled acts out of apparently uncontrolled movements.

Bad As Steven

On the pitch he is impulsive. The fully-qualified physician and former Brazil captain Socrates once said that ‘someone who thinks doesn’t run, and someone who runs doesn’t think.’ Gerrard runs everywhere. In fact he never looks like he’s thinking; rather he looks like he’s feeling. The football practiced by Gerrard is driven by two things: impulse and emotion. In short, he does what he feels. Perhaps this is why, as Brian Phillips of Run of Play has pointed out, Gerrard’s best moments seem to come when he has the ball for the shortest amounts of time – acts of explosive voluntarism:

Most of his greatest moments have come from touches of the ball that lasted under two seconds. This is precisely why he’s disappointing when he’s played out on the wings: from the center of midfield his intuition has the most available targets. He takes criticism, when he isn’t playing well, for his number of aimless passes; it surprises people that he isn’t more accurate, because of his tactical forehead and furrowed-browed look. But in truth he’s just the sort of player who will kick the ball away often. His calculations are so instantaneous and unscrutinized that they’re bound to be frequently wrong. But when they’re right, he’ll see something that no one else sees, stretch out, and do something amazing.

Gerrard arrives late to thunder in a dramatic blooter; he pings the ball across the pitch into the path of attackers; wearing a pained expression he attempts to rouse his teammates. Gerrard seems to exist entirely in these almost photographic moments rather than in a liquid temporal procession. And in all these moments he fully communicates the passions that he is going though. Never a player who goes about things quietly, Gerrard ensures that we are always aware of what he is doing on the pitch. Each action is exaggerated and theatrical – each sign must have ‘absolute clarity’. No wonder he is so adored by the Liverpool faithful, demonstrating as he does such paradigmatically British sincerity – he is an honest lad, probably a hero, unlike the conceited Latin schemers seen abroad. His perceived honesty is seen as the exception, rather than the norm.

The way in which Gerrard plays football, emoting his way across the pitch in various moments of brilliant heroism and drama to the tune of ‘God Save the Queen’ (as sung by Tom Waits) puts me in mind of the distinction that Gallic essay-buff Roland Barthes draws between the boxer and the wrestler:

A boxing-match is a story which is constructed before the eyes of the spectator; in wrestling, on the contrary, it is each moment which is intelligible, not the passage of time. The spectator is not interested in the rise and fall of fortunes; he expects the transient image of certain passions… In other words, wrestling is a sum of spectacles, of which no single one is a function: each moment imposes the total knowledge of a passion which arises erect and alone, without ever extending to the crowning moment of a result. Thus the function of the wrestler is not to win; it is to go through exactly the motions which are expected of him.[1]

Barthes speaks about wrestling in contrast to boxing, where the latter is a sport and the former is not. Boxing is a chronological story, the goal of which is at the end – the win. In wrestling the end is not what is of importance, rather the process itself is the source of meaning. If, then, we see in Gerrard characteristics more suited to the wrestler, we start to see more clearly the limitations which have marked his game, for good theatre does not mean a successful team.

That feeling that you're feeling is what most people call a feeling.

The irony is that whilst Gerrard is undoubtedly one of the greatest footballers of his times, he isn’t actually that good at playing football. By this I am not referring to his technical ability which is, as I have already stated, of the highest level. Rather I am referring to his ability to act as a player in a football team, playing a game of football involving positions and tactics. There has long been a debate as to which position Gerrard is best suited to. The truth is that Gerrard’s best position is not any position that can be topologically located on a pitch. His best position is in his own head; it is at 2-0 down in a cup final; it is as Hero. If we are to compare Gerrard to a player of similar technical ability, then, in Ruud Gullit we can see the contrast: Gullit was world class in several positions on the pitch; whilst Gerrard is world class, in no position. This speaks in part of the historical suspicion of tactical development in British football, where the value of players who are positionally and technically reliable is often overlooked (consider Stewart Downing and Tom Huddlestone, for example).

The wrestler’s primary intention is to entertain and this is done through the communication of emotion. In the way he plays football Gerrard is one of the most emotional, and one of the most entertaining, players in the game. Yet the wrestler, unlike the boxer, is not focused on the win. What makes Gerrard entertaining is not always something that actually helps his teams in winning games. Of course this needn’t be a problem. Rafa Benitez almost won the league with a fantastic Liverpool side that employed two holding midfielders behind Gerrard, to allow him and Torres the freedom to express themselves further forward, facilitating his heroism. Throughout the season he was fantastic and Liverpool were deeply unlucky not to take something away that year.

When Gerrard tugs at his captains’ armband it is almost as if he is trying to draw his power from this symbolic item. He, as much as any player, seems fully engrossed in his symbolic position on the pitch; so much so, in fact, that he often is more aware of this than his tactical position. Gerrard is simultaneously a problem and a solution – to this extent, perhaps his expected gradual phasing out of the Liverpool team over the next few seasons will actually better them. He is a wrestler trying his hand at boxing. At times this may be confusing, and often incredibly irritating, but at the very least it is always entertaining.

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[1] Roland Barthes, ‘The World of Wrestling’ in Mythologies, trans. by Annette Lavers (London: Vintage Books, 2000), p.16.

Dmitrii, Stalin, and the Diva: the cognitive dissonance of football and ballet

This site has elided musty old artefacts of Russian culture and football before, when we suggested the formal proximity of Andrei Arshavin and Joseph Brodsky. In a sense, though, such an elision is too easy: football and poetry are such distant cousins that they can be arranged together in pretty patterns without risk of friction. A more incestuous subject of comparison would be dance, the most athletically physical art form. How often have we heard players of a particular vintage described as ‘balletic’? When sport is played well enough, it seems to resemble dance. Dance is athletics’ nearest cousin in the canon of respectable art forms; and it is perhaps because of this intimacy that attempts to reconcile the two are more fraught than facile comparisons of strikers and sonneteers.

Those of you without a sense of purpose in your lives may have noticed two photographs at the bottom of Football in the GULag’s homepage. On the right is a collection of ‘raving sorts’ enjoying a football match in the Soviet Union (I imagine in Leningrad in the 1930s). Front-right, squinting through Bauhaus spectacles, is Dmitrii Shostakovich, coolly ardent football fan and self-conscious colossus of twentieth-century classical music.

Nerd

That Shostakovich adored football is well documented; it was he who coined the phrase, ‘the ballet of the masses’. He would often take in two matches on Sunday afternoons, in support of the Dynamo and Zenit Leningrad teams of his hometown. His letters to his friend Isaak Glikman, which have been translated into English, furnish us with touching and trivial insights into his quirkily obsessive relationship to the game: quotations from matchday programmes, newspaper clippings, eulogies and curses for the fluctuating form of Dynamo/Zenit stalwarts. Glikman remembers how Shostakovich was coaxed into football by the artist (and professional boxing referee) Vladimir Lebedev; how, in contrast to Lebedev’s and his own ‘extraordinarily uninhibited’ matchday fashion, Dmitrii would sit through matches in a state of intensely quiet excitement; how he would procure a dacha for himself and Glikman in the provinces, only to abandon their rural idyll after a few days in order to return to Leningrad for a match; how, with his wife absent one weekend, Shostakovich invited the entire Zenit team to his apartment for dinner, and ended up playing his latest compositions on the piano for the increasingly drunk and accommodating players. There is a sense too in Glikman’s nostalgia of the proximity of football to dance. The football of Shostakovich’s reveries was characterised by ‘elegant and intricate movements and a special kind of football choreography: not for nothing was one of the Dynamo stars, Pyotr Dementiyev, affectionately known locally as ‘The Ballerina’.’ ‘In those days,’ Glikman ponders in a brilliantly succinct dismissal of all football since Hitler, ‘the actual process of play was very important’.[1] Yet despite this alignment of interests, the one formal conjoinment of his private passion to his professional art that Shostakovich realised in his long career – the 1930 ballet, The Golden Age (Zolotoi vek) – was a private and professional failure.

The Golden Age was the first of Shostakovich’s only three ballet scores, composed between 1930 and 1935 (followed by The Bolt (Bolt), 1931; The Limpid Stream (Svetlyi ruchei), 1935), all of which sunk into critical and popular anonymity – and Shostakovich’s own disfavour – as a result of the shifting Soviet cultural politics of the 1930s. All three were revived only after the composer’s death. The libretto, originally titled Dinamiada, the work of Aleksandr Ivanovskii, was the winning entry in an officially-sponsored competition aimed at promoting ‘Soviet ballet’; it called for ‘new forms of dance, such as acrobatics, gymnastics, et al.’.[2] The narrative concerns the travails of a football team of bright young things, who travel from the USSR to a composite bourgeois country referred to as ‘Faschland’ to take part in an industrial exhibition, the eponymous Golden Age. A frisky female native of Faschland falls for the strapping captain of the team, and attempts to seduce him, incurring the wrath of her boyfriend (named, succinctly, ‘Fascist’). The capitalist pigs in charge of the exhibition see their blossoming romance as an opportunity to stage some phoney ‘class harmony’, and advertise a forthcoming dance between the captain and his belle. The captain, his mind properly focused on the morality of labour and zonal marking, declines the invitation, and he and his team are promptly arrested on trumped up charges. ‘Fascist’ dons the Soviets’ uniform instead to act out the dance with Diva, only for the workers of Faschland to free their Soviet brethren and initiate a final ‘Dance of Solidarity’.

A long way from Bolton

Beyond the nerdy thrill of one of the century’s finest composers scoring for football, there is much to enjoy about The Golden Age in this original conception. This is the brash young Shostakovich of the deranged opera of Gogol’s The Nose and the cantankerous early symphonies; allowed to act the part of a 1920s avant-gardist by the relative creative and economic freedom of the New Economic Plan, alive to twitchings from Berlin and Paris. A tale of youthful and muscular class solidarity is enlivened by trappings of urban, bourgeois, and popular culture. Action takes place in a music hall; football is made dance; Diva seduces with a sultry foxtrot. Even the scene titles are fun: ‘Dance of the Black Man and 2 Soviet Football Players’; ‘A Rare Case of Mass Hysteria’; ‘The Touching Coalition of the Masses, Slightly Fradulent’; ‘Total Unveiling of the Conspiracy – The Bourgeoisie in Panic’. In the spirit of Kurt Weill in Weimar Germany, or Charles Ives in New York, the classical was being rejuvenated by streaks of city life and populist melody. The ballet’s production team embarked on an equally polystylistic crusade to keep pace with Ivanovskii’s and Shostakovich’s energy. The young choreographers, Vasilii Vainonen and Leonid Iakobson, undaunted by their first commission, included folk and popular dances, acrobatics, puppetry, boxing, and a satirical polka about the Geneva Peace Convention; designer Valentina Khodasevich created a set of dynamic, Constructivist angles and distinctly ‘civilian’ costumes. After its première at the Kirov Theatre in Leningrad on 26^th October, 1930, the ballet enjoyed 19 showings throughout the 1930-31 season, was exported to Kiev and Odessa, and was scheduled for performance before the city Soviet; overall, a ‘noisy success’, by all accounts popular amongst its urban audiences. I have been unable to find any footage of this original production (for reasons outlined below), although the finale from this 1980s, perestroika-era revival does give a somewhat mollified sense of the appeal of the original.

That despite all this The Golden Age is little-known, we can put down to chronological misfortune. As the 1920s gave way to the 1930s, so a process of artistic centralisation and prescription spread through the Soviet Union.[3] ‘Bourgeois’, ‘formalist’, avant-garde works fell from favour as the First Five Year Plan, the Great Leap Forward to Socialism, and the Cultural Revolution that characterised (some would say caricatured) Stalin’s reign kicked in. A refined impulse towards formal traditionalism in the arts, an attempt to solidify claims of a grand Soviet culture by making that culture as stolid and granite as possible, did not bode well for a production such as Vainonen’s and Iakobson’s; the golden age of experimentation itself was grinding to a recriminatory halt. On the eve of the scheduled performance for the Leningrad Soviet, a piece by Iurii Brodersen in The Worker and Theatre journal began the backlash. ‘How could it happen that the ideology of the bourgeois music hall, that urbanist mongrel, that ideology so hostile to the Soviet theatre, how could it penetrate to the stage of the state theatre, and what is more, in such an excessive dose?’ he hollered.[4] The score and the staging proved too modern, too urban, erotic, athletic, and too involved for the new traditionalists. As the production was quietly withdrawn, the initial enthusiasm of the audience became lost in the historiography, until it was possible for later conservative revisionists to dismiss the ballet as an unfortunate symptom of its infected era. An example of ‘the measles of formalism’ that stymied Soviet ballet’s development, according to Leningradskaia Pravda in April 1936; ‘musical cacophony, piling up alien orchestral stunts… [that] have had an extremely negative effect on the genuinely Soviet, realistic ballet’,[5] noted a commentator in 1950. Perhaps the best blindside to Shostakovich’s 1920s bravado came in 1948, again in The Worker and Theatre: ‘the aesthetic taste of the Soviet audience proved to be better than that of Shostakovich, and his ballets flopped one after the other.’[6] Harsh words, yet Ivanovskii and his colleagues perhaps had fair warning, when the veteran opera singer Ivan Ershov happened upon rehearsals for the ballet, and was appalled. ‘What on earth are you doing?’ he asked Ivanovskii. ‘Surely you know that ballet is a fairy tale, a fiction?’