Archives for 2005

My most recent book for children, WISHES FOR YOU, with pictures by the celebrated Danish illustrator Henri Sorensen, has just been issued by HarperCollins Children’s Books in a paperback edition. It makes a wonderful present for very young children–and for their parents, grandparents, and other well-wishers. The book can be ordered, in either hardcover or paperback, via www.amazon.com or www.barnesandnoble.com. And, yes, it is, in a sense, autobiographical.

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

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

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