American Ballet Theatre: Alexei Ratmansky’s new Firebird / Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, NYC / season runs through July 7, 2012
I can’t imagine what Alexei Ratmansky was thinking of in creating his New Look Firebird. To begin with—and this is the first thing you notice–it‘s dressed for Las Vegas by Galina Solovyeva, with complementary décor (including a sci-fi forest with hints of porn) by Simon Pastukh. It wrests the fairy-tale narrative that Michel Fokine created for his 1910 L’Oiseau de Feu (in which good, abetted by generosity, duly conquers evil and is rewarded with love) into a tale that is sardonic at best, sleazy at worst.
Marcelo Gomes as Ivan and Natalia Osipova as the Firebird in Alexei Ratmansky’s re-imagination of Firebird for American Ballet Theatre
Photo: Gene Schiavone
Am I prejudiced by past experience? I first saw the Fokine version back in the day with Margot Fonteyn and can still remember her entrance and her boldly plucking a golden apple from a painted tree. The one civilized thing Ratmansky accomplished with his version was to use the full Stravinsky score instead of the customary suite. Of course that only lengthened the discomfort of the naysayers.
Judging from all I’ve seen of his earlier work, I’m convinced that Ratmansky is a humanist at heart. His ballets exude a wide and deep sympathy for the flawed human race; call it love, if you will, or, rather, love leavened with humor. As an artist—and he’s a major one, the very best we have in ballet—he has every right to see the world as loathsome, but he’ll have to make his case better than he does here.
Osipova with part of the Firebird ensemble
Photo: Gene Schiavone
Just so you know, the Firebird in this version comes as a multiple. There’s a whole flock of this rara avis, available in both genders. In real-life birdland—with the cardinal, for example—there’s a color distinction or other marking of the genders. Not here. Male and female alike, they’re poured into screaming-red unitards and sport headpieces ornamented with sheaves of feathers that reach into the air like flames, threatening to consume its oxygen.
Of course there’s a main Firebird, as well (her get-up includes a feathery bustle at the rump). I saw her danced by Natalia Osipova. Ratmansky has chosen to ignore this ballerina’s remarkable buoyancy and, with his enormous insight into who and what an individual dancer is, concentrated on another aspect of her dancing persona—a toughness that she seems eager to discard. It’s shown off very well, though, in her battle with Ivan—a tsarevich type played by Marcelo Gomes, who’s the curiosity-driven hero of the ballet—when he tries to capture her. He releases her finally and she rewards him with a red feather that he can use to summon her when he’s in need. Just as everything in the ballet is “too big,” so is the feather.
David Hallberg as the monster Kaschei with the Maidens under his spell
Photo: Gene Schiavone
The Maidens (lovely, gentle, and presumably virginal according to Fokine) whom the monster Kaschei holds in his thrall are, chez Ratmansky, plain and simple sex slaves. The choreographer makes this clear by, for instance, having them assemble, packed body to body in a horizontal line, so that he can slide his lips onto each mouth with a single kiss. There’s a main Maiden, intended in the end as Ivan’s reward, who not only shares a grotesqueness (and a turquoise wardrobe) with her sisters but is, as played by Simone Messmer, also wittier.
As Kaschei, David Hallberg (the incomparable classicist who, half an hour earlier, had been dancing the title role in Balanchine’s Apollo) was clearly having the time of his life being a campy Essence of Evil. But Ivan, after wielding the Emergency Feather, discovers the egg that harbors K’s soul and smashes it, leading to an unearned, unconvincing, and dumbly inept Happy Ending.
The Maidens, free at last
Photo: Gene Schiavone
I should add that there’s almost no distinctive dancing in the piece but this, given the circumstances Ratmansky set up or succumbed to, was inevitable.
© 2012 Tobi Tobias