Seeing Things: July 2005 Archives

The movement of "Reel"--now angular and thrusting against the air, now sinuously splayed against the ground--looked as if it might belong to an ancient tribal culture with ties to various postmodern nations (Tom Pearson); With no obvious structure and only the smallest hints of message, Breezy Berryman's "Widow's Walk" satisfied simply through the precision, vitality, and rhythmic sense of its five robust dancers (Joyce SoHo Presents). Village Voice 7/25/05

Bolshoi Ballet / Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, NYC / July 18-30, 2005

Sometimes I wish we could TiVo live performances. I’m thinking just now of the Bolshoi Ballet’s Don Quixote. It had some marvelous moments, one of which I’d be happy to revisit in perpetuity—when I saw it the second time I was amazed that such a miracle could be repeated—but, for the bulk of the production, a single sighting was plenty. The choreography has evolved from Marius Petipa’s 1869 original (Petipa led the Kirov Ballet, but made his feisty Don Q for the Bolshoi) through Alexander Gorsky (1900), to the current production (1999) credited to Alexei Fadeechev, and the program acknowledges other contributors-along-the way. The Ludwig Minkus score—tune after dancey tune, many of which will haunt you for weeks—continues to serve its purpose, but the present account of the action fails utterly in meshing, let alone doing even separate justice to, the tragically visionary and the irrepressibly comic. As for the overall performing style--well, the circus is never very far away.

Now about that miracle. About two and a half hours after the curtain goes up, on comes a girl in a pale yellow tutu and dances the briefest of solos. It is composed largely of grands jetés. The girl is small and compactly built, with a look of childlike wonder about her. The jetés are incomparably light, a cross between floating and flying. There seems to be no effort behind them and no ego; they just happen. It’s one of those moments that occurs in ballet from time to time, when issues of classical technique drop out of the picture and all you see is pure dancing. One of those moments in which you understand perfectly what ballet is for or, perhaps, fall under its spell for the very first time. The dancer’s name is Natalia Osipova. She entered the company just last year.

The other swell thing about the production was not the classical material but a series of what I’d call Moorish dances. Slow, sinuous solos for women in long skirts and heeled shoes, with deep backbends as their motif, these were balleticized versions of ethnic dance. In the case of a gypsy number in Act II, performed with intent by Anna Antropova in a flame-colored gown veiled with ash gray, the material was streaked with dark, fearsome passions. It was a pertinent reminder, amid much bravura and comic cavorting, that life—even just the part of life that can be represented in a ballet—has multiple textures and profound depth.

Opening night, Kitri was played by Svetlana Zakharova, the company’s most glittering star and a favorite with the local audience. She exemplifies the ballerina model that both the Kirov (her company of origin) and the Bolshoi now favor—tall, exceedingly long-limbed, frighteningly thin, with a tiny head, bowstring arches, and a hip joint so mobile it permits those eerie extensions in which the leg, flung straight up, permits the dancer’s knee to graze her cheek. All of this is thought to be beautiful.

Zakharova is celebrated for her legato dancing, in which time seems to slow down as her body etches one infinitely graceful line after another on the air. As Kitri, a role better filled by a soubrette type, she goes out of her way to be extroverted and exuberant, proving several times over that, yes, she has mastered Maya Plisetskaya’s flamboyant trick of arching backward in full sail while tossing her leg up behind her to kick the back of her head. Zakharova is right on target here in going for vivacity and bravura feats, but the results have little spontaneity and even less joy.

I preferred Ekaterina Shipulina as Kitri. Her gifts are more modest than Zakharova’s and she lacks Zakharova’s appetite for glory, but her body is closer to the range of normal, and when she dances—even with all the show-off acrobatics and emphatic flourishes endemic to Bolshoi style—what she does looks like something a spirited young woman might really do if she were animated by love and dancing, It looks almost human.

Andrey Uvarov partnered both Zakharova and Shipulina at the performances I saw. He’s a genial presence and expert at ballerina handling in matters of multiple supported pirouettes and one-armed lifts. On his own, he’s notable for legs that work like rapiers on big leaps, like scissors in vertical jumps with beats. Gratifying as all this is, though, he’s not a star, and the role of Basilio (or Basil, as it’s been reduced to here) requires both megawatt charisma and, what’s more, a flair for comedy.

Not much energy was invested in making the mime a telling element in the proceedings. Still, the two leading all-mime roles were well cast to give us a tall, gaunt, Don Quixote (Alexey Loparevich), representing the life of the imagination and moral values, offset by a short, solid, jovial Sancho Panza (Alexander Petukhov), embodying the life of the belly and expediency. The rich fop, Gamache, was nicely observed, too—by Victor Alekhin—and Kitri’s mom, unessential to the plot, was nevertheless rendered deliciously by Evgenia Volochkova.

As for the corps work, only a killjoy could fail to get swept up in the vivacity of the village square scenes with their castanet clacking, fan fluttering, cape swirling crowd. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the sisterhood of dryads aimed appropriately at refined delicacy. But almost everyone, from top to bottom in the casting hierarchy, seemed to be doing nothing more than a conscientious job. Don Q takes its title from a character who’s a visionary, but this production is merely a showpiece in which vision would be a decidedly foreign object.

Photo: Damir Yuspov: Svetlana Zakharova as Kitri in the Bolshoi Ballet's production of Don Quixote

© 2005 Tobi Tobias

I didn't so much mind the gratuitous brutal hostility--one must, after all, move with the times--but the adolescent acting out of childish fantasies rooted in the grotesquely disgusting . . . Village Voice 7/19/05

In a ruminative homoerotic duet rife with emotional subtlety, even acrobatic moves look like the characters' natural means of expression. Village Voice 7/19/05

American Ballet Theatre / Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, NYC / May 23 – July 16, 2005

Ever on the lookout for lavishly decorated program-length story ballets—the sort of entertainment the general dance-going public apparently prefers to sterner affairs—American Ballet Theatre joined the U.K.’s Royal Ballet to revive Frederick Ashton’s 1952 Sylvia.

The ballet is set to delectable music by Delibes: the score composed for the ballet choreographed in 1876 by Eugène Lacoste for the inaugural season of the the Paris Opera’s lavish Palais Garnier house plus parts of the same composer’s La Source. Delibes, dance fans will recall, was the first composer to make ballet music worth listening to even when there’s no dancing to look at; he paved the way for Tchaikovsky.

At its creation, Sylvia received a mixed reception. Ashton himself may have had reservations about it; he tinkered with it periodically, even creating a trimmed version and a radically condensed one. Nothing quite succeeded, and the ballet was gone from the Royal’s rep by the mid-sixties. Fragments of it, appearing subsequently on gala programs, served as tantalizing reminders that there was something in the work—perhaps a good deal—worth keeping.

The present production, which returns on the whole to the original, was staged by Christopher Newton, a Royal Ballet veteran, who admittedly had to do a good bit of “filling in,” his sources being incomplete. A similar restoration process characterizes the current scenery and costumes; the original, Second Empire-style, designs by Robin and Christopher Ironside have been renewed by Peter Farmer. All the beauties of the ballet are still apparent—indicated if not completely realized—as are all the problems: it’s too long; the tale is both too unlikely and too flimsy; the divertissements that flesh out the third act are not, all in all, compelling. I concur with the opinion of the British critic Richard Buckle, who, back in ’52, called the ballet “a confusion of excellence and weakness.” Still, I feel personally grateful to the parties involved for providing me with such a civilized experience in the theater and, for long passages, one of such rarefied beauty.

Ashton’s libretto derives from a pastoral drama by the Renaissance poet Torquato Tasso. Sylvia, a nymph of Diana, goddess of chastity (and of the hunt and the moon), refuses the adoration of a shepherd, Aminta, and taunts Eros, the god of love. Eros revenges the insult by forcibly (watch those arrows!) opening Sylvia’s heart to softer feelings. At this transformative moment, Sylvia is abducted by Orion, an “evil hunter,” and carried off to his luxurious cave to be bent to his lustful will. Eros, who can now count Sylvia among his converts, duly rescues her (not, however, before she has shown some canny resistance on her own behalf) and unites her with Aminta (handsome and pure-hearted as a hero should be, but oddly passive). In a final—and essential—coup, Eros persuades Diana to countenance the pair’s love, reminding the goddess (via a vision, of course), that even she has known sensual delight—in her infatuation with Endymion. A galaxy of mythological beings and their attendants duly makes the Sylvia-Aminta nuptials festive, decorative, and grand, but it’s the pas de deux Ashton created for the bridal pair that makes the occasion sublime.

When the choreography is wonderful, it is very wonderful indeed. It reveals a lyric poet whose work, intelligent and refined, is also deeply sensuous. The ballet’s first act, set in a shadowy glade populated by naiads, dryads, and fauns, as well as a “statue” of Eros that turns out to be alive, creates a mysterious, magical atmosphere even before the narrative action (and thus an expressive element) kicks in. The entire act provides a constant stream of beauty, delicacy, grace, and invention. An exquisitely fashioned dance for Sylvia and her sister nymphs—a private moment in which they allow themselves a respite from the hunt—is a marvel of construction. Opening with a solo of small, tender movements that suggest what the heroine might be if she shed her feminist agenda, it proceeds to interlace the dancing of the solo figure and that of the eight-member ensemble so deftly that the results, a blueprint for astute manipulation of figures, look like a natural, almost casually conversational, event.

Throughout the ballet, steps are used in unusual ways, and this is quietly arresting, as is their subtle, often maverick timing. Despite the “good taste” that characterizes his choreography, Ashton provides the most astonishing lifts, among them one in Sylvia’s struggle with Orion that leaves her hanging upside down from his shoulder—all seductive flesh being treated as a hunter’s prey. Later, in her final, rhapsodic duet with Aminta, Sylvia leaps fearlessly backward into her lover’s arms to end in fish-dive position, like a crescent moon plunged down to hover over—and illuminate—the earth. As with Balanchine’s choreography, you look at Sylvia and think, Now whoever would have thought of doing that? Yet at the very same time, what is happening seems inevitable. Of course, the choreographer’s signature prevails everywhere—the precise, quicksilver feet coupled with a fluent torso that, as one of his dancers put it, leaves an echo of itself behind.

Ashton created Sylvia for his primary muse, Margot Fonteyn, and it is a paean to her qualities. In the first act Sylvia displays her near-militant chastity, which is erotically alluring in its own way; in the second, she is poignant as a damsel in distress and then, better yet, ingeniously uses her sexual allure to dupe her would-be ravisher; in the last act, all radiant serenity, she embodies the ecstatic love that stands at the border of happily ever after.

In the two casts I saw, Gillian Murphy was excellent according to her own lights. As the occasion required, she was dramatic in her Bette Davis style—proud, resistant, resolute, almost imperious—and then, as the occasion changed, taking her to territory she hasn’t yet fully conquered, enticingly erotic (to foil her captor) and, succumbing to Aminta, melting with the kind of love that involves both body and soul. Michelle Wiles, on the other hand, was utterly at sea in a role where her strong, clean technique was insufficient. She’s a long, lean American-athlete type, like Merrill Ashley, and would do better in the kind of repertory Ashley danced, where emotional expression wasn’t absolutely necessary. Management must have thought otherwise about Wiles, because it promoted her to the rank of principal dancer just after the Sylvia run.

I felt I wasn’t seeing just the right people in the two male leads, rather several Mr. Almost Rights. Marcelo Gomes was given a shot at both the love-struck but essentially ineffectual Aminta and the wicked Orion. He was better in the latter role. A born danseur noble, Gomes often looks more interested in his bad-guy roles. Maybe he finds stock-character goodness boring; playing against type seems to stir his imagination—and activate his sense of humor. Maxim Beloserkovsky as Aminta and Gennadi Saveliev as the villain were both too bland. Further performances will improve matters; they almost always do. Let’s just hope the ballet stays in the repertory. At the curtain calls of the performances I attended, enthusiasts—I among them—were clapping with the kind of fervor audiences use to save Tinkerbelle’s life.

Photo: Rosalie O'Connor: Gillian Murphy in the title role of Frederick Ashton’s Sylvia

© 2005 Tobi Tobias

Simply through scrupulous descriptions of what people wore, the writer brings social and theatrical milieus alive. Village Voice 7/5/05

American Ballet Theatre / Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, NYC / May 23 – July 16, 2005

American Ballet Theatre seems to ricochet between desperate attempts at “making it new” and revisiting its past repertory and honoring it with revivals. A quartet of this season’s golden oldies formed a program of their own—the “Fokine Celebration”, a retrospective bill comprising Les Sylphides, Petrouchka, Le Spectre de la Rose, and the Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor. The first two works are major; the second two, minor—but each in its singular way characterizes Fokine’s freeing classical ballet from its earlier restraints. The ballets were choreographed—or, in the case of Les Sylphides, drastically revised—under the aegis of Serge Diaghilev and his legendary Ballets Russes and were danced by the likes of Nijinsky, Pavlova, and Karsavina. Eye witnesses to the works’ first incarnations are gone, but many photographs, to say nothing of written accounts, survive to convince us that the original productions were a hard act to follow. Attempts are made the world over, but ABT has a particular interest in doing justice to Fokine, Les Sylphides and Petrouchka having been staged for the company by the choreographer himself early in the 1940s, when ABT was merely Ballet Theatre—and newborn.

Mind you, apart from Polovtsian Dances, these ballets are not relics. They are wonderful elements of the classical dance canon that are viable today. That viability, however, is in large measure dependent on their staging and performance. If you see an execrable performance of As You Like It, you can still believe it’s one swell play on the evidence of the text alone. Ballets have no easily accessible text to assure their reputation. They exist largely in the here and now.

The ideal Les Sylphides, the Sylphides of my dreams—I’ve seen ravishing fragments of it over the years, most often at ABT—would look utterly spontaneous, a vision that arose on the spur of the moment. ABT’s current staging of the ballet, by Kirk Peterson, is one of those ventures that tries so hard to be stylistically correct—an achievement to be sure, but not essentially an aesthetic one—that it ends up devoid of breath. Suffocating under this demand for refinement, the dancing takes on a mausoleum quality. I wished the participants would have a rehearsal or two at which they danced the ballet straight through at a markedly swifter pace than the one the orchestra now assigns it, and another at which, instead of being instructed to parse the choreography, the dancers were urged to “just throw it away.”

As the central sylphide, however, Stella Abrera looked windswept, miraculously so. After many a season of efficient but mechanical operation, she seemed to have awakened to the dancer she could be. This was wonderful for the ballet, and wonderful for a performer who has been characteristically steely, not gauzy; determined, not aspiring. Here she took wing, soared, was thrilling. She was weightless and buoyant as gossamer, yet impelled by surging energy. I haven’t seen anything like it in Les Sylphides since the days of Lupe Serrano and Sallie Wilson.

Her partner, Marcelo Gomes, offered the familiar beauty of his weighty, velvety dancing, but his performance was over-scrupulous. It was as if someone had painstakingly explained to him how a neo-Romantic poet would behave in a spirit-filled midnight glade and he, affable artist that he is, was doing his best to comply. His work was very picturesque, but not for one moment was I convinced that he inhabited that figure, body or soul. Towards the end of the ballet, he suddenly came tearing through the space like a man possessed, another creature entirely from the one he’d been playing up until that point—as if a coach had seized him in the wings just before his penultimate entrance and whispered urgently, “Loosen up! Go for it!” The moment was incongruous with everything that had gone before, but vividly alive.

The two secondary female leads in the Abrera-Gomes cast—and another pair in an alternate cast I saw—made a conscientious job of the rarefied quality Petersen’s staging focused on but were either so over-refined as to be eerie or simply saccharine and bland. Many observers found them lovely, but I can’t see how the word “lovely” applies to an effect that’s so studied. As for the all-important work of the ensemble of sylphs—which, in motion, complements the soloists, and, in lacy group poses, serves decoratively as their landscape—it, too, was well-intentioned and dutifully executed, but the end result was gluey and dogged by a step-by-step quality that’s death to musical phrasing.

The almost unquenchable merits of Petrouchka are, first and foremost, its glorious Stravinsky score, then its opulent, raucous designs by Benois, its imagination-invoking tale of a puppet with a soul, and the fact that the choreography is sound as a drum—both in its construction and its choice of movement vocabulary for each of its principals. Its staging for ABT by Gary Chryst (once a memorable Petrouchka with the Joffrey Ballet) needs to acquire the patina a production accumulates with repeated performance, but seems to be pretty much on the right track.

The individual performances I enjoyed most were Angel Corella’s in the title role and Monique Meunier’s as the Chief Nursemaid, a character that might slip by unnoticed unless its interpreter made her remarkable. Meunier, lifting her radiant face to the wintry sun and slapping back her long, heavy golden skirts, was both earthy and ecstatic, alive to everything going on in a fairground roiling with diverse personalities and agendas. I wondered how Corella made his benighted then tragically triumphant puppet so telling. Partly, he followed Chryst’s canny admonition not to play the role for its pathos. Partly, it’s the specificity of his interpretation (every move seems impelled by an idea) and his ferocious concentration. The rest? Perhaps, as Henry James proposed, “the rest is the madness of art.”

When I last wrote in these pages about Le Spectre de la Rose, I was astonished to read, subsequently, so many of my colleagues’ dismissing it as slight, silly, or impossibly unsuited to this day and age. I still love it a lot. This is how I described it in the fall of 2004: “Le Spectre de la Rose is a nine-minute ballet choreographed by Michel Fokine in 1911 for Vaslav Nijinsky and Tamara Karsavina. It is set to Carl Maria von Weber’s Invitation to the Dance and based on a poem by Gautier that opens “I am the spirit of the rose / That you wore last night at the ball.” A young woman, having danced in society, comes home to her Biedermeier boudoir. The ecstatic dreams of young romance surround her like a perfume. She draws a full-blown rose from her décolletage and holds it to her face, absorbing its fragrance, then falls, languid, into her easy chair and drowses. A male spirit, costumed as the embodiment of the rose, leaps through her open French doors and dances—all voluptuous virtuosity. The incarnation of nature and its intransigent impulses, he induces the virginal dreamer to join him, then releases her to sleep and vanishes with a faun-like leap that, when Nijinsky performed it, made history.”

When I wrote this last season, I thought Herman Cornejo was unlikely to be bettered in the leading role. While I haven’t changed my mind, I’ve enjoyed seeing others do the part this season. As the Spirit of the Rose, Angel Corella chose to emphasize not the phenomenal leaps, but the arm work that, ornamented with unexpected angles and baroque curlicues, makes this figure compellingly strange instead of merely beautiful. He also chose—and I wasn’t so keen about this—to make his dancing a flowing stream. Operating on a single, midrange, level of energy, he sacrificed the driving impulse that suits the role and minimized the light and shade that usually enriches his work. Dramatically, he was utterly convincing, conveying the Spirit’s urgent purpose in getting the dreaming girl to participate in the headiness of the dance, urging her passage from virginal romance to erotic passion. The young Danny Tidwell, of whom we can expect great things, made a tentative but touching debut in the part—sweet, lyrical, correct. I look forward to seeing what happens next.

The Polovtsian Dances provided a diversion in Borodin’s opera Prince Igor, and, if legend doesn’t exaggerate, plunged the Parisian audience attending its premiere in 1909 into a state of tumultuous enthusiasm. The piece, devoid of plot, is a travelogue on Tartarland, where the male warriors are gracefully savage; the teenage girls, tomboyishly spirited; and the adult ladies, beauties who veil their faces and bare their midriffs, temptingly sinuous. If the choreography seems hokey and forgettable today, its theme tune—co-opted for that Kismet song “Stranger in Paradise” —will stay with you for weeks. Be warned.

I was happy to see it as a historical artifact, in its present lively staging by Frederic Franklin, the spryest nonagenarian in town. (He knew the piece from his years with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and miraculously got today’s dancers to perform the material without condescension.) I was far from persuaded, though, that this ballet is indispensable to my delight in dance. Yet the second grader I took to a matinee of the Fokine program—despite her tender age, a seasoned and discriminating aficionado—liked it best of the four works she was seeing for the first time. Go know. She had the honor, in an accidental intermission encounter, of meeting Franklin, a few minutes with whom could persuade anyone to like anything, so benign and filled with eager, innocent vitality is his temperament. Perhaps only he could stage Polovtsian Dances in good faith.

Photo: Rosalie O'Connor: American Ballet Theatre dancers in Michel Fokine's Les Sylphides

© 2005 Tobi Tobias