Archives d’Auteur: Fenella

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Pour ne pas rester muette, car je n'ai pas les deux pieds dans le même sabot, i will write in English.

par Fenella | 19 mars 2012 · 21 h 10 min

Not in my appartement.

After Dances at a Gathering on Saturday night, I only wanted to stand quietly with the one I love and fantasize about how we could possibly try any of those lifts in our living room. Then, Appartement took me brutally back to the fact that our living room really needs a new coat of paint.

For:
a) the music
b) the program notes
c) the fragile beauty of the dancers
…all contributed to my distress.

a) The music. Imagine this: a Celtic folk group takes poppers, plugs in the amps, and tries to play acid rock variations on Steve Reich. When, near the end, the guy playing a thing that kind of looked like a violin got a solo where nobody danced but “police, do not cross” tape stretched accross the stage – that’s it, not a dancer in sight for endless minutes — I found myself fervently wishing he were no longer there. That he had devolved into a chalk-drawn silhouette on the ground as the tape had promised.

b) The program’s “To read before the performance” section couldn’t manage to make a single link between the two ballets. One paragraph on Robbins, one on Ek and et voilà! as if perfectly cooked. Robbins’s Dances at a Gathering “is a luminous exploration of a community joyfully celebrating dance as it wells up out of Chopin’s music.” (L.Gilbert, trans. R. Neel). For Appartement, the editor needed to cite Ek in an old article from Le Figaro: “something about everyday life without heels [“high” is omitted in translation, we see plenty of heels mostly waved in the audience’s direction] and points[sic], and diametrically opposed to everything the building [Palais Garnier] suggests.” If I were grading this paper, I would say: 1) what is your thesis then? 2) needs conclusion to pull concepts together 3) I cannot grade this until you do a rewrite.

c) Yet the company is blessed with beautiful dancers who commit themselves heart and soul to whatever. And do it as beautifully as they can. But all I did was sit there worrying about the impact of this movement on their knees and ankles. Every tiny articulation (and Ek’s movements are always definitely pat-your-head-and-rub-your-stomach challenging) rang clearly to the last row. While a piece like Dances isn’t easy on the body either, it takes you on a voyage where you don’t find yourself analysing every single complex component of movement as it happens.

Muriel Zusperreguy and Alessio Carbone make a perfect and passionate pair with split-second timing. I mused about how I would love to see them in Giselle together – either regular size or Ek. His version of that ballet reaches out to balletomanes in a humane and sophisticated way. For despite Giselle’s woes, at least she didn’t roast her baby in a gas oven [when Zusperreguy pulled it out at the end of the duet and dumped it into her stricken partner’s arms, the roar of laughter from the audience at this punch line truly sickened me].

Vincent Chaillet’s grapple with the couch made me think of both my cat’s daily manoeuvres and Ben Vereen’s boneless Fosse slither (thus this dancer gave me a moment of grace). I want to see Adrien Couvez travel back in time and join Forsythe’s company of twenty years’ ago. God, it was good to see Vincent Cordier doing something other than King in Sleeping Beauty while there’s still time, using his regal presence to make something out of a nothing part. And it’s time for Marie-Agnès Gillot to get back into a goddamned tutu and dance in those ballets which are indeed “everything the building suggests.” She once gave us the softest of Paquita’s, where her feet lovingly caressed the floor, the most thrilling of Lilac Fairies where her gorgeous arms made the air around her seem thick and liquid…why does she insist on dancing in pieces where she keeps needing to sport knee pads?

This ballet gives me three choices. 1) down not one but several drinks before and after 2) go stick head in a bidet until, et voilà!, perfectly drowned. But if so, could I do it on stage at the Garnier as Gillot did? At least, as it’s the first scene, it would be a beautiful death. For I would die knowing that I would never have to endure the rest of this piece ever again. 3) buy paint for living room.

Appartement is one of those pieces that derives its chic from telling you: “Yes, you are getting old. You no longer think ugly is as cool as you once thought it was.” So… the day when the Theatre de la Ville – the Parisan temple of modern dance — decides to present this program, but Ek precedes Robbins (where the “this is not your comfy Palais Garnier” aspect of Appartement would perhaps actually prove funny), I might just try to believe in such conceptually “sophisticated” programming. For years now in Paris, ballet has been too apologetic and modern too full of itself. Both audiences are about the same age.

After enduring these 47 minutes of depressing ideas, images, and music, when I walked out onto the splendid swirling vista of the Avenue de l’Opéra, all I could see was garbage on the ground, ugly posters, ugly people.

1 commentaire

Classé dans Humeurs d'abonnés, Retours de la Grande boutique

Tagué Adrien Couvez, Alessio Carbone, Marie-Agnès Gillot, Mats Ek, Muriel Zusperreguy, Opéra de Paris, Vincent Chaillet, Vincent Cordier

par Fenella | 8 mars 2012 · 16 h 10 min

Romeo and Juliet: O Happy Dagger

I would like to add one observation to Cleopold’s description of Cojocaru’s stage presence. She used her own way of moving, down to fluttering fingertips, to illustrate that quasi-animalistic/quasi-tamed state which girls live through circa age fourteen. At that moment in life a physical intelligence is there, but impulses — mostly rebellious – control their behavior.

Throughout, Cojocaru used MacMillan’s splendid choreographic outline for dancer-actors in order to strech her bodily contours into a repeated La Sylphide-like « let me escape from this flat world » gesture: a delicately thrusting up-or-outward movement of those flexible arms and fingers and toes. [MacMillan, even if he hated it, always did paradoxically encourage dancers to make parts their own. Not change the steps, mind you. But from the waist up was different and encouraged.
Interpretation reconciled with the steps he loved].Cojocaru kept reminding me of those kinds of girls who decide with a friend to leap out of a window together in some kind of wierdly exhalted state.

Juliet’s fluttering hands had been reaching yearningly towards Romeo ever since they met. Yet she also kept making gestures towards…escape. She’d clearly wanted to run away with him ever since that moment of stillness you described. Now in the last scene, as her fingers fluttered down towards him after stabbing herself her body seemed to be singing that they would find each other in a better world. That one which exists only in teenager’s dreams. The gestures made me think of a Gilda deluded enough to imagine that Rigoletto could actually find consolation in the idea that his dying daughter would meet her mother in heaven.

You, Cleo, never use binoculars, for you want the movement to speak and not the « grimaces. » I couldn’t resist at this point…I needed to be sure of what I was witnessing. For after stabbing herself she did something I’ve never, ever, seen done by a dancer or an actress in this role. This Juliet died with a radiant and ecstatic smile on her face for, clearly, she believed she was about to be reunited with the one she loved more than life itself.

Commentaires fermés sur Romeo and Juliet: O Happy Dagger

Classé dans Blog-trotters (Ailleurs), Ici Londres!

Tagué Alina Cojocaru, Johan Kobborg, Kenneth MacMillan, Roméo et Juliette, Romeo and Juliet, Royal Ballet

par Fenella | 2 mars 2012 · 20 h 00 min

A Very Biased Aperçu (there is no plot to summarize) of the pairing of Jerome Robbins with Mats Ek: buy your tickets now?

Dances at a gathering, Jerome Robbins (Chopin, 1970)

versus

Appartement, Mats Ek (FleshQuartet, 2000)

I hate visiting apartments with perfectly designed yet sterile décor, not a book in sight. Worse than that, a book unread chosen for its beautiful binding. I hate “high concept” evenings at the ballet even more. This season has proved more than irritating due to its tacky/cheaply conceptual programming: ooh, let’s do the opera and ballet versions of Cinderella and Manon. All that results in are confused patrons who wind up at the wrong theater for the wrong art form (I witnessed that).

Programming a satisfying double-bill should also be considered an art. Handled with care. Phedre and Psyche earlier this season didn’t work for me, either. Yes, gods wreak havoc on humans. So what’s the bigger connection?

The adorable Horst Koegler summarized “Dances at a Gathering” as…”a ballet about the feeling of togetherness.” Joyous yet delicately melancholy. Pairing it with “Appartement” – a cruel and violent dissection of the cost of remaining alone (that head stuck in the bidet, that man wrestling with a couch)sets up an overly violent contrast and does both of these great works a wretched disservice.

Yeah, right, as the blurb says: “both ballets are about relationships.” [I am not making this up, the season program uses the phrase « rapports humains » as if it were some heretofore unknown selling point]. Um, ALL ballets are about relationships. Even if you dance a solo on a bare stage you are caught up in a relationship with the audience at the very least.

Moreover, Lefevre’s rather wry justification of her choices on the Opéra’s official website – « ils dansent ensemble » [they dance together] makes me want to have a relationship with a gas oven. Well, yes, in general, dancers do indeed regularly dance together on one and the same stage…and to then illustrate this point with a clip from « Appartement, » where not a single one of the five soloists interacts with the other, indicates a rather cavalier attitude towards the intelligence of the paying audience.

As Christopher Fry makes a character howl in The Lady’s Not For Burning: just » Where in this small-talking world can I find/A longitude with no platitude? »

I know of many who are already planning to pay full price to watch “Dances” and then leave and go get dinner during “Appartement.” Fine for the box office, but cruel to the dancers, who try to give us all they have to give and find themselves in a half-empty house. Especially as one of the unsung virtues of this strange programming is that both pieces require large casts to perform little solos as if in a « tasting menu. » One of the pleasures these evenings might offer would be to discover a dancer — up front for even thirty seconds — whom one had never looked at before.

“Dances” was created on and for strong and mature personalities – at NYCB for Kent, Leland, Mazzo, McBride, Verdy, Antony Blum, Clifford, Maoriano, Prinz, and the unstoppable Eddie Villella – yet the Royal Ballet’s version shortly thereafter proved equally powerful. Yes, Nureyev of course, and then others whom you never realized they had it in them: Ann Jenner, for example, glowed. Robbins had somehow picked up on “l’air du temps.” On both New York and London dance stages, the late sixties and early seventies were filled with expressive artists who remained underappreciated – especially those who were female – caught painfully out of the spotlight due to the public’s obsession with Fonteyn and Farrell.

All you need to understand “Dances” is to take a good look at the huge painting (over 16 feet-more than 5 meters-long) that hung for over thirty years in each of Patrick O’Neal’s succesive Lincoln Center venues (call it Saloon/Baloon/ or restaurant).: “Dancers at the Bar” by Robert Crowl, ca. 1969.* It gathers together 33 dancers and dance-loving people (including the conductor Robert Irving, who is the one who convinced me that Minkus’s music isn’t all that bad if played as if it were music).

In the painting, several members of the first New York and London casts of “Dances” stare down at you: the elegant Monica Mason and tender Antony Dowell, the uncategorizable Lynn Seymour and the ever-underrated David Wall, along with the beautifully eccentric Leland and the handsome Prinz…while others just pausing on their ways to ABT or Stuttgart join them. This painting unites a pantheon of lithe and tired dancers just waiting, waiting, to shed their street clothes and transform themselves into whom they really were meant to be.

Ed Villella, Sara Leland and Heinz Clauss

Up until now, Paris also drew upon its strongest company members to make these very fragile masterpieces work. If you can’t tell them apart, the person next to you will soon be asleep (as I witnessed at « Dances » when NYCB passed through a dull phase. In the first row, that shouldn’t be possible).

These ballets could offer an ultimate thrill: nothing is more satisfying than having a dancer force you to change your preconceived notions about what they can or cannot do. Don’t let them become pretty books unread.

* Unfortunately, even flying to New York won’t allow you to see the painting anymore. Donated by the O’Neal family to NYCB after the last of their restaurants closed recently, it now hangs in the main rehearsal hall in the New York State Theater (which some now insist be called the David Koch Theater). Perhaps some day it will be placed in one of the public spaces of the building. For further information about the painting’s story, see Doris Perlman’s article in a 1997 issue of the American Dance Magazine.

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Classé dans Hier pour aujourd'hui, Humeurs d'abonnés

Tagué Appartement, Dancers at the bar, Dances at a gathering, Horst Koegler, Jerome Robbins, Mats Ek, O'Neal, Robert Crowl

par Fenella | 23 février 2012 · 20 h 22 min

A very biased plot summary for La Bayadere

LA BAYADERE [the temple dancer]
Choreography by Rudolf Nureyev (1992) after Marius Petipa (1877)
Music (not that bad, if not lazily played) by Ludwig Minkus

L’article en Français…

Even before he would create the great trilogy with Tchaikovsky – Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker – the French-born choreographer Marius Petipa produced several classic ballets in Russia all using the same formula: an exotic setting, a dramatic love triangle (as in most operas), and an acclaimed “dream scene” (which the French call a ballet blanc) where the hero sees his beloved multiplied into 32 ballerinas clad in identical tutus. This particular ballet had never been shown outside of Russia until the Kirov troupe brought its production to Paris in 1961 (along with Rudolf Nureyev).
Try to not take the “orientalist” aspects of this melodrama too seriously. Let yourself enjoy this fruity depiction of “local color” set in some kind of fantasy India, created by artists who had never been there except in their imaginations. Get swept away by passion as it was experienced in the 19th century!

ACT I (48 minutes)
SCENE 1: AT THE TEMPLE OF FIRE AND WATER
The noble warrior Solor sends his companions off to catch a tiger for the Rajah. It’s only an excuse to be alone, for Solor summons the Fakir and orders him let Solor’s beloved, the virginal temple dancer Nikiya [aka LA Bayadère] know that he will be waiting for her in the garden. Their love is secret and forbidden: they belong to different castes.
Solor hides and watches the entry of the Grand Brahmin, keeper of the sacred flame. He summons the priests and the bayadères (dancers of the sacred temple), as the fakir and fire-worshippers lacerate themselves before the altar. Finally, Nikiya performs her ritual dance. When she and her sisters bring water to the exhausted faithful, the Fakir passes along Solor’s message.
But first…the Brahmin corners Nikiya. He offers her his crown (and, yuk, the bald head beneath it). She uses the excuse that they are of different castes to try to get him to go away: she is only a lowly servant (pantomime gesture of lifting a water jug to her shoulder). But finally she has to just push him away.
When all depart, the lovers can finally meet and dance ecstatically. Unaware that the Brahmin is spying on them, Solor swears eternal love and fidelity on the sacred fire. The Brahmin clenches his fist and swears to crush his rival.

SCENE 2: AT THE PALACE OF THE RAJAH
Less sacred girls dance to please the Rajah and his court. He calls for his daughter, Gamzatti, to tell her that she is to be married, if she agrees, to the handsome man in a portrait on display: Solor. Gamzatti likes what she sees and exits. Solor enters, but is horribly surprised by the news. He cannot admit that he is already betrothed to another (to a dancer, no less); nor can he bring himself to disobey his sovreign. Nodding, he decides to figure this one out later.
Nikiya has been summoned to perform her usual ritual dance to bless an event at court. Carried about by the Slave (in the pas d’esclave), she strews flowers upon the princess. Neither Nikiya nor Gamazatti realizes that she is facing “the other woman.”
The Brahmin arrives and demands to see the Rajah. He spills the beans, as Gamzatti eavesdrops: Solor is in love with…that dancer. To the Brahmin’s horror the Rajah clenches his fist and pushes them downwards. He still wants Solor as a son-in-law, so Nikiya must be crushed instead.
Gamzatti, toying with her bridal veil, summons the impertinent dancer. After first pretending to be her new friend she gets into action: “see that portrait of Solor? Well he’s mine now! Take this necklace, you pathetic worm, it’s worth more than you could earn in three lifetimes! Leave him to me!” Nikiya cannot believe that the love of her life could betray her like this and finally explodes. Just in time, the nursemaid grabs the knife from Nikiya’s hand. Gamzatti clenches her fist and swears to crush her rival.

INTERMISSION (20 minutes)

ACT II (43 minutes)
THE ENGAGEMENT PARTY AT THE PALACE
Grand pageantry. All make spectacular entrances, especially Solor on an elephantine contraption (less spectacular is the droopy stuffed tiger his companions carry in). The conceit of a party allows for a series of colorful dances: with fans, with parrots, by the bridesmaids; by the airborne Golden Idol; by the Manou who balances a water jug on her head; by the “Indian fire dancers” who do a kind of can-can

…and finally it’s time for the:
Grand Pas de Deux, the celebration of Gamzatti and Solor’s engagement. It is a chance for the audience to enjoy glorious unabashed pyrotechnics. (Originally in Act IV, see note below)
Their dance just ended, Nikiya arrives to do her duty: yet another dance to consecrate a festive event. Distraught, she, keeps trying to catch Solor’s gaze. “Can this really be true? Can you abandon me just like that?” Gamzatti’s ayah gives the girl a basket of flowers – “from him.” The poor girl’s joy – he still loves me! – is shattered when the serpent hidden amongst the flowers bites her. Gamzatti sent the flowers, after first placing an asp in them. The lovelorn Brahmin offers Nikiya an antidote to poison, but Nikiya finally understands that Solor will never dare to renounce his caste and position for her sake. She prefers to die.
Only now does Solor realize what he has done.

INTERMISSION (20 minutes)

ACT III (40 minutes)
IN A PERFUMED GARDEN
Distraught, ashamed, still in love, Solor takes a giant dose of opium.
As he drifts to sleep the vision of an infinite number of idealized Nikiyas, clad in pristine white tutus and chiffon veils, waft into the garden. They are the Shades, bayadères who died for love and are fated to wander between this world and the next. You should be as stunned as Solor by the corps de ballet: dozens of soloist-caliber women sublimate their egos in order to achieve this kind of kaleidoscopic harmony. (Watch for three solos, given to the most talented young dancers). When Solor dances with the ghost of Nikiya each touch, each turn, brings them closer together. At one point, a long veil stretched between them symbolizes their connection. Solor literally jumps for joy in his solo. The act ends in triumph: Nikiya has forgiven him, therefore they shall never be parted.

Notes:
Act III — “The Kingdom of the Shades” — serves as a starter or touring version for many companies. Boiled down and sans elephant, all you need are: a ramp, a guy, a gal, and 24 to 32 pairs of thighs topped by white tutus ready to plié until they « feel the burn. »
Originally, there was even an Act IV! In it, Solor returns to earth and marries Gamzatti after all. This makes the gods angry, who then bury the entire wedding party under the the rubble of the imploding palace. This Samsonesque act has rarely been staged since WWI. Dramatically, let’s be honest, anything is a letdown after Act III. Solor comes off as a real creep for going back to his fiancée. But most of all, a collapsible set costs a fortune!