Seeing Things: August 2005 Archives

Raw depictions of escalating hysteria from La Compagnie de l'Entorse depend almost entirely on Charlotte Schioler's gift for expressionist dance; The Velocity of Things is proof that postmodern tactics can benefit from an infusion of the color, pulse, and spirit Regina Nejman absorbed in her native Brazil. Village Voice 8/23/05

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

Of the four program-length productions the Bolshoi Ballet brought to New York, only Don Quixote, discussed in my Tilting At Windmills, sports choreography that you might term traditional—stretches in which you can recognize Marius Petipa’s diamond-brilliant designs.

I suppose you might call Spartacus traditional—the company is faithful to Yuri Grigorovich’s original choreography—but I’m not ready to accord a work made in 1968, and already so conspicuously dated, the honors due to tradition. Spartacus remains what it always was—a shamelessly overblown account of violent underclass revolt against a vicious, immoral master, the long-suffering heroic leader matched with an eternally faithful wife, the bad guy mated with a high-class prostitute—but it no longer fits the company like a glove. The male stars of today’s Bolshoi aren’t built (or trained) gladiator-style, like the dancers who thrilled New York in Spartacus thirty years ago. Slighter and sleeker, they’re lyrical types rather than lion-hearted virtuosi. And neither the men nor the women act in the tear-a-passion-to-tatters style that prevailed in the old days. Highbrow balletomanes have always thought Spartacus tacky, but now even its undeniable power to ignite the enthusiasm of the general audience is diluted.

Two other Bolshoi offerings claimed links to the company’s past, although their choreography was newly concocted. To say that The Bright Stream, choreographed by Fyodor Lopukhov in 1935 to a score commissioned from Shostakovich, is somehow the same as Alexei Ratmansky’s 2002 The Bright Stream, which retains only the music and (more or less) the libretto of the original (concerning high jinks on a collective farm), is rather like calling a play The Tempest because it retains Shakespeare’s plot, even though it dispenses with the Bard’s text.

In his day, Lopukhov (1886-1973) was well respected as a forward-looking choreographer, one who, incidentally, may have influenced Balanchine. What, indeed, happened to his Bright Stream? The powers in charge took against it. Stalin, furious with Shostakovich over the composer’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, apparently incited Pravda, the Communist party’s newspaper, to pan it as trivializing its subject. The ballet world was no kinder. Agrippina Vaganova, the celebrated ballet pedagogue, condemned it too, apparently because it failed to conform to her concepts of classical dance. The ballet did not survive in the Soviet repertory, and the affair crippled Lopukhov’s career.

Ratmansky, appointed artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet in 2004 after a politically stormy period in the company’s life, has been looking to the company’s past for repertory. His policy of incorporation as opposed to rejection works in tandem with the Bolshoi’s project of presenting all three Shostakovich ballets, to mark the composer's upcoming centennial. Last year he produced his version of Lopukhov’s “industrial” ballet, Bolt, and is now at work updating Grigorovich’s 1982 The Golden Age. While keeping, as I’ve said, Shostakovich’s bright bubbling score and the libretto that Lopukhov and Adrian Piotrovsky crammed with deliciously silly events, Ratmansky has fashioned his own choreography for The Bright Stream.

The piece is that rarity, a comic ballet, depicting the interactions between the locals working on the farm that gives the ballet its title and a group of entertainers sent from urban headquarters to congratulate them on their success with the crops. Boris Messerer’s absurdly wonderful sets and costumes—riotous harvests of fruits and vegetables, colors and patterns—set the tone of the piece: at once exuberant and tongue-in-cheek. The principal characters are a rural pair, Zina, who has abandoned her studies in classical dancing to become the farm’s “morale officer,” and her husband, a fairly witless “agricultural student” with a wandering eye; from town, a Ballerina (who, it turns out, learned her fouetté technique alongside Zina) and her equally nameless Partner; and, from a nearby dacha, an ill-favored, ill-matched couple immune to the decorum that might be thought proper to senior citizens. Against a background of folkish cavorting from various regional types, the principals fall into inappropriate flirtations and resulting assignations with one another, misalliances that render them, by turns, unreasonably hopeful, unhappy, slaphappy, cross-dressed, ridiculous—and, eventually, reconciled amidst communal rejoicing.

The choreography is not particularly inventive in dance terms and some perfectly good ideas (like the shenanigans of the Partner en travesti as a sylphide) are ruined by being indulged far too long. On the whole, though, Ratmansky’s work is able and diverting. The configurations for the ensemble are so smart and eye-catching, they put most Broadway-musical choreography to shame.

The best single thing in the ballet comes early on—the scene in which Zina and the Ballerina recognize each other as long-ago ballet-academy mates and proceed to dance a duet that’s both mirror image and challenge, recalling the steps they learned in each other’s company. The sweetness of their situation and relationship, coupled with the charming absurdity of the conceit that Zina, no doubt some years from her last ballet class, can still hold her own with a professional of the first rank, makes you melt. Although the premise is patently absurd, it invites you to accept it graciously, and this sense of your own generosity contributes to your feeling of well-being as you watch. The idea packs some psychological punch too, exemplifying the fact that women forge relationships through mutual empathy, a sense of shared experience.

The ballet is crammed with so-called character roles, but they’re little more than caricatures, not rendered—I suspect not choreographed or directed—with the subtlety of feeling that makes such parts resonate in the works of, say, the English Ashton and the Danish Bournonville. Ratmansky danced in and choreographed for the Royal Danish Ballet for several years before his present appointment and had every opportunity to understand the importance of such roles, but in his own work he can’t yet make them come alive.

Ratmansky’s checkered career has taken him to other venues too—like Balanchine in his early days, he has been an itinerant artist—and he draws his inspirations indiscriminately. This is not surprising, yet, unlike Balanchine, he doesn’t synthesize his sources. It’s relatively early days, but at this juncture, he seems to be one of those all-purpose choreographers—reasonably able and certainly clever in a variety of dance modes, but without any distinctive vision. Tracking his references in The Bright Stream became merely a pleasant parlor game. Here are my sightings: A thoughtful young woman, escaping from society to stretch out on the ground with a good book—Onegin (Cranko); a woman tricking her unfaithful husband into transferring his affections back to her by disguising herself as the object of his adulterous desire—The King’s Volunteers on Amager (Bournonville); a gauzy-skirted, Romantic-style sylphide—La Sylphide (Bournonville again), Les Sylphides (Fokine), the Trocks, because the role is played en travesti (with the difference that Ratmansky’s Sylphide knows that a man presenting himself as a sylphide is funny and the Trocks know that it isn’t); several men and women shifting gender in a single ballet—Far From Denmark (Bournonville); six look-alike friends of the heroine doing their charming little dance in chorus, like a string of paper dolls—Giselle (Coralli and Perrot); a feisty little miss from school—Graduation Ball (Lichine), The Lesson (Flindt); a dancer riding a bicycle cross-stage—Enigma Variations (Ashton), see also the entrance of the heroine on roller skates in Anastasia (Kenneth MacMillan); a human character disguising himself as an animal (don’t ask).

Whatever reservations one may have, The Bright Stream was the most easily likeable of the Bolshoi season’s four offerings, partly because the dancers seemed genuinely to enjoy being in it.

The Pharaoh’s Daughter harks back even further in time than The Bright Stream. Marius Petipa created the original in 1862, to a thin, sugared, intermittently agitated score by Cesare Pugni, the libretto derived from Gautier’s The Novel of the Mummy. The present version, created in 2000 by Pierre Lacotte, is, by the company’s own transparency-inclined admission, merely pastiche based on scholarship. Needless to say, it is also severely trimmed in scale, extravaganzas supported by tsarist coffers no longer being in the cards.

In its time, the ballet was one of those exotic jobs that commandeered the spectator's fantasy by improbable journeys to foreign climes. In our present globalized day, a fictive Egypt of pyramids and pharaohs, mummies and Nubian slaves, desert storms arriving on cue and death sentences executed by poisonous snakes—to say nothing of side trips to the underworld—can only be treated with genial irony. Lacotte, alas, can’t summon up the necessary wit and charm to carry off this shift in tone.

Lacotte’s edited version of the story line involves a titled British archaeologist traveling in Egypt. Having succumbed to local hospitality that includes a controlled substance, he is temporarily reincarnated (if the word can be used when the person goes back in time) as the brave but plebian suitor of—you guessed it!—a pharaoh’s daughter, name of Aspicia. Predictably, Dad, who was planning to marry off his gorgeous offspring to a fellow bigwig, disapproves of such a misalliance. Vehemently. Daughter, a hotheaded type like her parent, remains resolutely true to her lover and declares she’d sooner die than . . . . Well, you get the general idea. After many a melodramatic turn of events, all ends happily enough, but then the archaeologist awakens up from his dream and finds he’s in the wrong time frame for the consummation he so devoutly wished. Presumably, he’s got his memories for solace.

Lacotte is a product of the Paris Opera Ballet, and his Pharaoh’s Daughter resembles nothing so much as one of those day-long demonstrations of beautifully executed steps by that estimable company’s school. A collector of rarefied objects might dream of such a display of exquisite discrete items in which every detail is refined; it’s a paean to calm perfection. But theater doesn’t work that way. Theater demands a driving thrust, be it dramatic, rhythmic, or visual. It requires a constant play of light and shade. It thrives on the very human qualities of idiosyncrasy and imperfection. Lacotte’s work here has almost no dance impulse and even less dance invention (either in the enchaînements or the stage patterning, which is stupefyingly routine). Attention is focused on the steps themselves, particularly light, delicate configurations of petit allego, and on presenting them carefully and cleanly—immaculately, if possible. Understandably, this not always possible. The Russians, whose breeding emphasizes other matters, do not manage this sort of thing as well as the French, but, speaking in a foreign tongue, they do a remarkable job. And it must be said that this production gives old steps a new life. Where else, except in the Act I pas de deux of Giselle, do we get to see ballottés these days?

The ballet’s strangest scene takes place under water. Our tempestuous heroine, repulsing the increasingly threatening advances of her arranged-marriage suitor, flings herself into the Nile. There she enters the submerged kingdom of that river’s god (clearly a cousin to Neptune), who rules over a populace we can think of as naiads and tritons. Three river goddesses, from distinct geographical locations (Spanish, African, Russian) get to dance an engaging solo each, with appropriate local color. Then Aspicia gets a legato solo followed by an even slower pas de cinq. Is this a literal reference to “liquid motion”? When she floats down to this realm, she’s handed a naiad dress to change into (“The dressing room’s just behind that big rock, honey.”). Then, having persuaded the trident-wielding ruler to release her back to life on terra firma, she gets to don her street clothes again, whereupon she’s hoisted upward. This sounds—and indeed looks—very much like a crude version of the aqueous scene in the Blue Grotto that constitutes the second act of Bournonville’s Napoli. I can’t imagine that Petipa knew about Napoli, but surely Lacotte does.

In the leading roles at the performances I saw, Svetlana Zakharova (queen of adagio) and Maria Alexandrova were fine, each in her own way. Alexandrova must be particularly praised for having added much-needed phrasing to her material. Their partners in the Ta-Hor role, Nikolai Tsiskaridze and Dmitry Gudanov, respectively, were not entirely adequate, the latter largely because he was too small for his lady, though he’s too reticent for hero roles as well. The soloists were frequently distinguished, making me wish I could have seen them in more roles and more performances. The mimes never ranged beyond stock-character portrayals, but the ensemble, here as in all the other productions, deserved medals for effort.

For the record: Though Lacotte’s Pharaoh’s Daughter can’t hold a candle to Petipa’s in lavishness, it does boast a considerable animal population: a mangy gorilla of the human persuasion, a white cart horse of the equine persuasion, a life-sized (if not entirely lifelike) stuffed lion, and a giant cobra that is presumably a puppet. As is the way of such balletic reptiles (Cf. La Bayadère), this last creature is concealed in a basket of flowers. Surely some metaphor is at work here.

Photos: Damir Yusupov: (1) Maria Alexandrova and Sergei Filin in Alexei Ratmansky’s The Bright Stream; (2) Svetlana Zakharova and Vladimir Neporozhny in Pierre Lacotte’s The Pharaoh’s Daughter

© 2005 Tobi Tobias