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 | 23 février 2014 · 13 h 04 min

Onegin : Dirty Feet

Haydée's ShoeOnéguine, Monday, February 10th (Pagliero, Paquette, Grinsztajn).

Among the weird objects I will admit I own and cherish: one of Marcia Haydée’s ravaged pointe shoes.  Standard Freed’s, ballet size 4 ½, lined hastily with something akin to ripped Kleenex. Broken and dirty and small, it still reminds me of how each time I saw her on stage all of her came together, how she grew beyond her limits and used the body beyond that shoe to tell me a story.

Whether by calculation or instinct – but certainly to the delight of the choreographer — the creator of Cranko’s Tatiana always drew the audience into her orbit.  In any role, Haydée could seem almost demonic: fearless – especially when hurling herself heavily at partners – greedily absorbing and consuming emotions and then expulsing them out of every corner of an unconventional body. Everything she did emanated from a radiant core and this dancer never feared looking ugly or going too far if it served the narrative. Even if  you imagined her partners screaming “ice pack” as soon as they hit the wings, you rooted for her from the top of Family Circle at the Met because she somehow possessed a Callas-like shimmer that made all of us up there feel as if we were sitting only three feet away.

Haydée had a controversial dance equivalent of “vibrato.” Haydée could be scary. I am devastated that whoever owns the rights to the few recordings of her performances make most of them utterly inaccessible. (And equally enraged by all the other “Dead Choreographer Trust Babies” who systematically force erasures on UTube. The choreography keeps getting sold to companies, but why should that require washing away the footprints of prior and current generations of performers?)

Please believe me, I do not live in the world of “I was there, you were not.” Indeed, what keeps me going to the ballet is the hope of discovering new performers I can root for and new performances that will keep these old masterpieces alive and memorable.

But alas, on February 10th in Paris, I could only root for Eve Grinsztajn’s Olga. She alone seemed to have read the poem and listened to the opera. Lacking access to old video recordings I rely on my fading memories of Susanne Hanke: lustrous and poised, possessed of beautiful feet in the days before beautiful feet became standard issue, politely fighting back but gently amused by her wilder older sister.  Grinsztajn alone of this cast radiated a thirst for life, a desire to fill the air with her limbs and pearly feet and take at least a few emotional risks. This energy sadly seemed to have been drained from the other leads before the performance even began.  If it has taken me too long to write to you, it is because I came home dulled and enraged and loath to hurt the feelings of these dancers and their fans alike.

Ludmila Pagilero should have read more of what Pushkin says Tatiana read: Richardson with his sturdy damsels in distress, his villains more appealing than his heroes, his warm irony, but also his tacky exuberance.  His characters eat, they are sensual!  Pagliero’s performance broke my heart for all the wrong reasons.  For, when I finally broke down and used my binoculars from the last row atop the Palais Garnier during curtain calls, I could see that her face was filled with spent emotion.  Her face, yes, but her body had never once ripped loose. Instead her instrument had been precisely calibrated, each time doing Cranko’s triple repeats of steps exactly the same careful and studious way.  Thus nothing was ugly, but not ripe or rawly beautiful or expressively expansive either. Everything she did seemed small. We want our heroines to be…big.

I’ve found that Pagliero needs time to grow into a role onstage and fill it out.  She lets go of the classroom by the 4th time, usually. (This was her 2nd)  Unfortunately, I will not get to see her again. She’s out. Injured.  Indeed I delayed writing in anticipation of seeing her on the 25th, expecting an “aha” moment. Was she already fighting against pain on the 10th? Certainly that could entirely explain away an overly cautious attack, a reluctance to get her feet bruised by Cranko’s dangerous partnering landscape.  Thus I do I look forward to the next time she gets a chance to take a chance on Tatiana.

But perhaps Pagliero’s wan Tatiana could be also be ascribed to a major lack of chemistry with Karl Paquette’s Onegin?  He should have read more Byron… While the ballet makes the “hero” less likeable, when you read Pushkin’s original, you get how multi-layered and complicated the guy can be.  Onegin’s only real problem – even if well-read — is that he doesn’t listen to (or realize that he has) a heart when there is still time. Paquette – like Haydée, or any of Byron’s poems – can be a marvelous vector of emotion and most pleasing to spend time with, but only when he is at ease (as in this fall’s “La Dame aux camélias”).  Here he, like Pagliero, seemed too stiff from the get-go, uncomfortable in Onegin’s alien skin. Instead of getting into the story, I sat there wondering during each of this couple’s encounters “what if.”  What would Haydée’s crazy shoes have forced out of Paquette, or an encounter with the toss-around madness of Richard Cragun (or the suave and creepy confidence of Heinz Clauss) have released out of Pagliero?

If Egon Madsen – the Antony Dowell, all pure lines and tender tension, of Stuttgart back then – could have been in the audience this night, he would have picked Florian Magnenet up by the ear and hauled his sloppy Lensky back into the rehearsal room.  I am not sure which of the rehearsal directors imported from Germany actually worked with Magnenet, but I blame them all for allowing such a half-baked effort to be presented on stage to the dancer’s disadvantage.  Let’s get over the fact that he is relatively good-looking and tries to turn that fact “into “acting, Magnenet has lost his bearings. He doesn’t even know how to land from a jump or launch into an arabesque anymore without wobbling all over the place.  After his solo I wanted Onegin to shoot him.  Blessed with beautifully arched feet, apparently, even that fact has become invisible lately.  Why doesn’t he use them, and the rest of himself, to pull himself up and out of approximate performances?  He needs to shake himself up as both artist and dancer before it’s too late.

After an evening so utterly lacking in poetry, I could only think of Edward Lear’s “serve up in a clean dish, and throw the whole out of the window as fast as possible.”  These dancers should dare to get dirt on their shoes. And when they will, the story will come alive again and we will have the excuse we need to whip out the crinkled Kleenex in order to joyfully smear tear-ridden mascara all over our faces.  Ah yes, that’s it, advice from the uxorious Robert Browning: “No, when the fight begins within himself, /A man’s worth something.” [Bishop Blougram’s Apology].

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

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par | 31 janvier 2014 · 7 h 51 min

Three faces of Onegin: a plot summary

OneginAt the Palais Garnier in Paris from February 3 to March 5, 2014
Choreography by John Cranko (1967)
Music by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (but not from his eponymous opera),
Orchestration by Karl-Heinz Stolze

The story is ageless: a young girl’s first love turns out to be a selfish and self-involved man who does not deserve to be loved by anyone at all. Onegin will realize the truth one day, too late for any possible happy end.

Critics at once deemed John Cranko’s decision to craft a danced version of this tale the equivalent of double-sacrilege. Alexander Puskin’s verse novel “Eugene Onegin,” (1831) is still venerated in Russia as the greatest exemplar of native language and style. Moreover, the great Tchaikovsky had adapted the tale into an opera in 1879. If at first the composer’s act of lèse-majesté made both Tolstoy and Turgenev sneer, his opera could now be considered the voice of a nation. Mutter or hum kuda, kuda, vi udalilis [Lensky’s cry of despair for golden days forever lost] upon landing, and the entire staff of the Novosibirsk airport will invite you out to dinner.

Given Pushkin’s gloriously insightful and disabused poem, Tchaikovsky’s deeply emotional lyricism…what more was left to say?

Ah, but John Cranko – South African by birth, English by dance training, and the person who make the Stuttgart Ballet in Germany world-renowned just before succumbing to  a heart attack in an airplane in 1973, age 46 – thought that translating these words and music into yet another medium could provide an incredible opportunity for his troupe of inventive dancer-actors to express themselves.

Denied permission to use any of the opera’s music, Cranko called upon the composer/orchestrator Kurt-Heinz Stolze to unearth all sorts of other lovely Tchaikovsky bits and pieces. In the process, they compiled a rich – and often less somber — score and a fully-rounded, sweeping, vocabulary of illustrative and inventive movement which both Pushkin and Tchaikovsky, I am certain, would have relished.

So, one day in the early 19th century, in a cozy country estate somewhere in Russia during the Romantic Era, the story begins….

ACT ONE: (35 minutes)

Scene 1: in the garden of a country manor

Tatiana, reading yet another Romantic novel in French, does not want to be disturbed. She’s an odd creature, not at all into the normal girly-girly things other women care about, unlike her mom 1) Madame Larina (Monsieur Larin is dead) 2) Olga, Tatiana’s sister, joyous and bubbly and silly — therefore most often cast as a blonde – or 3) the family’s faithful un-named nounou/nursemaid/baba. Tatiana’s birthday party will take place tomorrow, and she seems the least interested of all of them about what she will wear. You, irritated by the overly emphatic and tinkly music of the first scene, might share Tatiana’s dreamy remove.

The village girls, totally excited by the idea of a party, burst onstage. Sewing done, and a bygone romantic herself, Mom rekindles the folk legend that when you look into a mirror, the other face you see in the background IS your soul-mate. Lensky, a landowner and promising poet engaged to Olga, really likes this idea.

Tatiana, looking into that mirror half-heartedly and annoyed by being pulled away from her book, is startled to see the reflection of a tall, dark, and most handsome stranger, Eugene Onegin, just arrived from ultra-sophisticated Saint Petersburg with his friend Lensky. He’s the man of her dreams, who has just stepped out of a book.

From the start, however, Onegin clearly disdains Tatiana’s taste in romantic novels and quickly realizes that country-folk can prove just as dull as those who inhabit the salons of the big city. He cannot be other than polite to this little teenager who has glommed onto him, but he is boredboredbored by everything, by all of them, by life itself, and especially by all these happy locals who seem to have taken dance lessons from Zorba the Greek.

Scene 2: in Tatiana’s bedroom

Unable to sleep, Tatiana – who has learned from novels that men truly in love are too sensitive to take the first step –makes the kind of mistake that changes your life. Instead of asking her nursemaid for earthy advice, she begins to write a passionate letter to the first man she is convinced will cherish and protect the offer of her inexperienced heart and soul.

This is the “letter scene.” In Pushkin, the Tatiana actually drops rich classical Russian and writes her letter in French: the refined language of novels, of yearned-for sophistication. In Tchaikovsky’s opera, a glorious alone-on-stage aria re-translated into Russian semaphores Tatiana’s recognition of a kindred soul in Onegin. In a ballet, how? 10 minutes of watching a girl scratching quill and ink on paper in 3/4 time? 10 minutes of mime to the opera’s text? No. If twee local color had begun to get under your skin for the past twenty minutes, this is the moment when you will go, “Ohhh!” In the 19th century, the feelings of a hopelessly naive Tatiana could only find decent expression in words. Now, in dance, through the magic of mirrors, movement itself will bare her complicated – fearful and ecstatic — feelings.
Think of all those expressions we use: “I’m head over heels,” “he swept me off my feet,” “I could jump for joy.” Those are just phrases, processed by the right brain. That’s why this version of the story matters: the left-side of the brain takes over. No words, no reason, dance connects us between earth and all that heaven allows. Dance makes us rediscover the experience of pure and raw nonverbal emotion.

INTERMISSION (20 minutes)

ACT TWO: (25 minutes)

Scene 1: at Tatiana’s birthday party inside the manor house the next day

Everyone dressed up, visitors from the big city, Tatiana’s big day: what could go wrong? Everything.
Onegin unwittingly makes an ass of himself, the way you can only do when you believe you are so way cool you have no idea that you are just yet another pointless snob. He needlessly hurts the feelings of the local gentry, makes a big show of playing solitaire because that’s more entertaining than dancing with them. Bad enough.

Then Onegin makes two massive mistakes that will change his life. Imagining that he is so important in that great big world out there, he decides to “save” Tatiana from her illusions. He tears up her letter, so indiscreet and so dumb! and places the shards in her hand for burning. (In the ur-text, Onegin believes he acts out of kindness, harder to render in gesture alone, but the result of his words and actions -Tatiana’s pain – remains the same). That was in private. Tatiana, shattered, cannot resist the urge to make a fool of herself in the middle of the dance floor.

One person notices, and is pained by what he sees [but you will only catch this if the dancer in the role creates a rich persona right away]. He is Prince Gremin, a distant cousin of both, who has long admired Tatiana from afar. You get the feeling that Madame Larina had imagined this whole party around just such a match-making scheme.

Then, to drive the point home that he could have any girl in the world and that he is boredboredbored, Onegin — his second massive mistake — starts flirting with Tatiana’s sister. Olga reacts to all the rumpus in her usual girlish no-nonsense way. She cannot understand why her fiancé Lensky takes umbrage to his best friend showering attention upon her: “ But everyone knows you and I will be married for sure so just let me dance in the spotlight tonight! My darling boy, at least you chose a girl other guys actually find hot! Right?”

Prince Gremin finds this all most distasteful. Lensky finds this beyond outrageous…

Scene 2: at dawn, in a park not far from the country house

Lensky dances an aria where he reaches out — in long arabesques and deep bends — in which he seeks to take himself back to that golden past, to the fullness of life, to the one woman, to all the poetic words, he loves so much…and bids farewell to them all. For he, furious the night before, had challenged his best friend to a duel (Pushkin will be killed in a duel, too, in the pointless pursuit of saving his wife’s honor. Thus the novel’s text/the operatic aria,/this dance, each carry forward the same deeply ironic echo).

The two sisters burst into the clearing and hurl themselves upon both Onegin and Lensky, desperate to make them see reason. Listen to how the sisters’ music keeps going around in circles and cannot advance to another key, another melody. This noise reinforces how none of them can find a way out of this horrible dilemma. Only Onegin, starting to catch on to how absurd all of this is, flinches. But Lensky, bound by chivalric ideals, refuses to back down. Too full of pride, for once Onegin’s aim is true…

.
INTERMISSION (20 minutes)

ACT THREE: (30 minutes)

Scene 1: a grand ball in a Saint Petersburg palace many years later

Tatiana has married Prince Gremin, and their mutual affection forms a strong bond which all those invited to this soirée fully admire. Watch how Gremin – so uxorious he will not even need a solo to a splendid aria as in the opera — enfolds Tatiana in his arms, placing her delicately into view. Sigh along with her as she yields to this unexpectedly comforting form of mature love. This kind of love, she’d not been prepared for — or been taught to want — by all those Romantic novels back then…
A glittering, contented, and self-assured woman has replaced the awkwardly naïve country-bred teenager in braids. No one is more impressed than a hesitant Onegin, just returned from many years of travel as a kind of self-imposed exile.
In the empty ballroom, Onegin hallucinates that all the women he has seduced but never loved have come back to taunt him. Could Tatiana save him from himself after all?

Scene 2: in Tatiana’s private rooms in the palace

This time it’s Onegin who has written the passionate love letter and Tatiana who doesn’t know how to deal with it. Fidgeting with pages that seem to  burn her palms, she begs her husband (heading off on state business) to stay with her. While touched as usual, tender and tactful,  Gremin chooses duty over passion like a normal husband.
This time Onegin is not a hologram bursting out of a mirror, but a flesh and blood man who literally crawls on his hands and knees in amorous agony.  Older, wiser – he’s grown a mustache at least –seeking absolution and transcendence, Onegin imagines that she must take him back and save him from those long dark nights of the soul. He begs for the kind of love he finally understands to be real and true, even if the passion it arouses risks destroying them both.

So, if you were Tatiana, what would you do?

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Classé dans Hier pour aujourd'hui, Ici Paris

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par | 27 décembre 2013 · 9 h 10 min

Sleeping Beauty: Golden Hours on Angel Wings.

P1060221La Belle aux bois dormant by the Paris Opera Ballet: December 10th ,  21st (matinee), and 25th.

 O’ my luve’s like a red red rose:

Not at all: three casts have provided very different shades of that flower’s perfume.

PROLOGUE/CARABOSSE: Where sits our silky sullen dame,/Gathering her brows like gathering storm,/Nursing her wrath to keep it warm. [Robert Burns, “Tam o’Shanter”].

Every time I see the prologue, I can’t wait until the evilest fairy in balletdom bursts into view. Here each interpretation of Carabosse intrigued me.

On my first evening Nolwenn Daniel reminded me of the teacher who, when I met her again years later, seemed nothing like the witch who had so terrified me as a small child.  This made the role sadder: proper, strict, full of regret of having until now always played by the rules. Rather than channeling some inner diva, her sullen Carabosse seemed to beseech the court: “why do you hate me so much?”

Sabrina Mallem  banged her walking-stick loud enough to awaken even the grumpy Jean-Baptiste Lully. Anger arched through the nape of her neck.   Her Cruella must have been always driven to destroy the young and the beautiful.  When she set her minions upon the fairies, she seemed to be calling upon wolves to eat helpless puppies.  No melancholy here, pure gleaming wrath.

But, I must admit, Stéphanie Romberg gave me a witch the way I best like ‘em: haughty and full of fun inflections.  She played within the music, slowing down and accelerating her gestures at will, thus punctuating every morsel of mime.  She made “the words dripped with sarcasm” physically, silkily, palpable.

ACT I: AURORA DAWNS But to see her was to love her,/ Love but her, and love for ever. [Burns “Ae Fond Kiss”]

From the get-go, Ludmila Pagliero clearly had been dreaming of a Prince for a while now.  Perhaps Juliet’s nurse had already told her the facts of life, for she was ready, unafraid of her future as a wife. When her father presented her with the four Princes, and the way she responded to them, signaled “these guys are kind of cute! Ooh, but which one to choose?”  She attacked the Rose Adagio with flair and no fear of mistakes (she has the gift: when she “goes off,” she knows how to cover in a way most of the audience assumes are intended steps). This fearlessness translated into an unusual and refreshing take on the Second Act.  Indeed her entire interpretation worked back from Aurora’s exclamation when she is awakened: “I had a dream! Of a handsome prince! Who must be the man I love! And look! Here he is again!”  So Act Two turned into Aurora’s dream, not the Prince’s. She was checking out this umpteenth suitor and really liked what she saw.

Amandine Albisson’s more innocent Aurora seemed to exhale health and made me think she smelled of pure soap and fresh-mown grass. She incarnated the first breath of spring that knows not sorrow nor want nor winter nor desire.  She brought out the waltzing spaciousness of all the First Act music, and seemed to breathe her way through her balances and lush penchés.  The Second Act, all legato and lines, allowed her to suffuse the stage with an even more delicate and serene fragrance.  I prefer Albisson when she gets slowed down and can luxuriate in the moment and the movement.

My third cast, Myriam Ould-Braham, proved both the most experienced in the role (2004!) and the youngest at heart.  She’s managed to hold on to her fresh precision and natural expansiveness: she’s like Makarova, a tiny dancer for whom the stage always seems too small.  Her Aurora waves at her friends, adores her mother – the regal and warmly expressive Christine Peltzer — and probably not only still has a bedroom full of stuffed toys but probably live mice, hamsters, and a bunny rabbit.  She met her suitors in slight disbelief, like the young girl who suddenly feels a man’s arm about her waist at her first ball.

A small but telling detail. Each time – in many companies’ versions — I cringe when during the “Rose Adagio” Aurora, after handing her first set of roses to her mother, dumps the second clump somewhere downstage left kind of near someone’s feet. What kind of well-bred girl throws away gifts in the presence of the men who offer them?  Finally, Ould-Braham’s didn’t.  She handed them gently to mom again, but with less energy, as if she had begun to understand that her situation was serious, that this second time she got what the flowers meant but couldn’t quite pick one man quite yet.  Of course, then, this Aurora blossomed during her slow variation: she was thinking about what had just happened to her. And the way she responded to the sweet music gave us time to enjoy Ould-Braham’s natural finesse, delicate lines.

Another detail: the way each “died.”  Pagliero, utterly shocked and disbelieving, attempting to keep up the facade.  Albisson reacting as if the needle had been poisoned and striving desperately in big gulps to seek help (I look forward to a Giselle one day). Ould-Braham , whose tiny rushing steps expressed how deeply she couldn’t understand why anyone could want to hurt her. Each actress made this moment her own and I wouldn’t want to choose between them.

ACT TWO: Princes and lords are but the breath of kings, /’An honest man’s the noblest work of God” [Burns, “The Cotter’s Saturday Night”]

There’s the rub.  Princes. A bore. Not much to do except be handsome and noble and elegant and do the usual barrel turns…but is that true?  Nureyev’s version adds a bloody exhausting 8-minute solo for Desiré, where our prince keeps shifting intention, feet, direction, and energy, to one of Tchaikovsky’s most heartbreaking violin solos (originally written as an interlude, not meant to be danceable).  All tension and yearning, full of abrupt hesitations – this is where a dancer could establish a Wagnerian Siegfried-like character, bereft, in desperate need of a reason to live.  The choreography establishes that this prince…thinks. When a dancer commits to this solo, you understand why this generic prince could in fact be just the man worth waiting a hundred years for.

Pagliero’s suitor, Josua Hoffalt,  rushed through the solo with more impatience than melancholy.  Nominated  étoile a bit early, he still often seems too raw, and didn’t really seem to get the point of this pièce de résistance.  It’s up to you to bring a character alive, even if you think princes are all dimwits.  This lack of commitment translated into his dancing.  In particular, his forward energy kept getting blocked in his manèges: during one sequence in Act Three, his chainé turns into grand jetés seemed to stay rooted in place. He was no match for Pagliero’s splendid energy and aplomb.

Albisson and Florian Magnenet are matched because they are both tall, I guess, but they don’t fit together. Not only did they seem too polite and distant during the Wedding, from the first their lines and attack just didn’t align. Whereas Albisson uses her body full out all the time, Magnenet seems to fade in and out. His sleepy feet and loosely-controlled landings surprised me.  He’s handsome and well-built and he gave more energy and phrasing to the searching aspect of his big solo than Hoffalt, at least, but he really needs a coach to clean up the details. Talent does not suffice. In the ballet’s finale, the prince’s sisonnes should be at least as pretty and assured as that of Silver (Cyril Mitilan) and the Bluebird (Marc Moreau).

But, ah, Mathias Heymann.  Of the three, only he didn’t get a round of applause upon his entrance: he’s enough of a prince not to have to play the prince.  Then time stopped during his solo. He brought the line, the tension, the perfect soft landings, and clearly-delineated sweet agony inherent to the counter-intuitive changes of direction, that are there for the taking.

One of my favorite moments where Nureyev fits the action to the word occurs near the end of the dream scene. The corps de ballet, in interlaced groups of four, fold back into a long line that slices across the stage in a diagonal as the music gets more and more nervous. Suddenly, Desiré bursts into view and launches into a series of brisés/sauts de chat that fly across the ground, followed a split-second later by Aurora in travelling coupé-jetés.  What these steps should mean: our hero is promising to lead our heroine out of her limbo and she will follow him to the ends of the earth.  What it can look like: Aurora chases after her prey.  Manuel Legris knew how to make this moment count, and now with Heymann I felt a happy shiver go down my spine, as I delighted in Ould-Braham’s effervescence as she effortlessly followed his bravura lead.

ACT THREE: Go fetch to me a pint o’ wine,/An’ fill it in a silver tassle.

In Paris, we don’t get Little Red Riding Hood, alas. My favorite cast of “Gold and Silver:” Heloïse Bourdon and Pierre-Arthur Raveau, juicy and full, brought this oft dull interlude needed rigor and panache.

Despite having been promoted première danseuse, Valentine Colosante  — technically by-the-book, perfectly-proportioned yet too deliberate, a quality Anglos criticize the company for – never delighted my eye until this Florine.  Perhaps she needs a partner and François Alu’s high-flying yet earthy Bluebird finally brought out a kind of sweet personality in her dance. They both gave the audience a gloriously danced interlude.  Again, though, I wouldn’t give up having seen Charline Giezendanner (still only a soloist?!) shimmer next to Marc Moreau, or Eve Grinsztajn with Axel Ibot.  Grinsztajn, too often cast in the “sexy” roles (Manon in “La Dame aux Camelias” or the Street Dancer in “Don Q,”) reminded me of her lovely proportions, purity of line, and of the power of her unadorned classical technique.

THE CORPS DE BALLET: Green grow the rashes O;/The sweetest hours that e’er I spend/Are spent among the lasses O!

P1060340

The cast bows on December 25

And I tip my hat to Julianne Mathis, ever stuck in the corps but always buoyant and fine-tuned, who somehow still radiates joy in dancing.  I’ve always enjoyed following one dancer of the corps in his or her patterns – feels kind of like cheering on a football player – and Mathis seems to have been promoted into the incredibly vital yet thankless role of locomotive for the corps, a position Nathalie Aubin used to play to both my delight and sadness.  The corps de ballet makes enchanted kingdoms come to life.  Princes and princesses can’t live without them. Then gently scan your brother man, /Still gentler sister woman…

Commentaires fermés sur Sleeping Beauty: Golden Hours on Angel Wings.

Classé dans Retours de la Grande boutique

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par | 12 décembre 2013 · 20 h 13 min

Le Parc. Paris. Plot summary.

La Carte du Tendre. Illustration pour la « Clélie » de Madeleine de Scudéry (1654)

Choreography: Angelin Preljocaj (1994, created for the Paris Opera Ballet)

Music: Mozart and Goran Vejvoda.
At the Palais Garnier.

You are in Paris now, a perilous yet exhilarating place. Surely, you expect to find romance. Maybe in a park, under the shade of a tree? But what do you really want? Love or sex? Reason or emotion? Are they mutually exclusive? A meeting of the minds or…And just how much of yourself are you willing to surrender? These are ageless questions.
Fascinated by the great early novels of 17th and 18th century French literature, Angelin Preljocaj tried to see whether such a verbal genre could survive translation into the language of movement. Les Liaisons dangereuses, La Princesse de Clèves, Mlle de Scudéry’s Clélia, and the plays of Marivaux, all charted the treacherous journey which might connect your heart through your brain to the rest of your body. At the time, artists even drew maps of this untamed wilderness: relationships depicted as a landscape littered with land mines. When trapped between the dangerous Sea of Passion and the Lake of Indifference, are trust and tenderness even possible? Do lovers ever truly know or understand each other?

While the ballet is danced in one blow – 1:40 minutes and no intermission – conceptually, the ballet is set up into three sections:

PART ONE:

Each section begins with a weird, stiffly-moving, coven of Gardeners. Are they fate? Are they the rigid rules of society? Wearing welder’s glasses and butcher’s aprons, are they hiding from the light of day or does this indicate that love is blind, scalding, fatal? Their music will sound like a train wreck or the repetitive grind of a factory assembly line: are we ever in control of such events? In a harsh and stiff way, they map out the very gestures and movements that will follow. Notice that the “garden” is carved out of steel and wood beams. This “park,” this “landscape of love,” will have sharp and painful edges.
Suspicion/Flirtation. The company assembles around a game (is it only a game?) of one-upmanship and musical chairs. He checks out the available women (en travesti, a wink at Marivaux) while She feigns indifference. But He has noticed Her. Despite the ordered surface, the disorienting game of seduction has begun.
The first meeting/Temptations (Pas de deux/duet #1). He is ardent, She apprehensive; but both quickly realize that they are in synch. The two of them “talk” but hesitate to touch…until she faints. They struggle to remain true to – and break out of – polite society’s rules.

PART TWO:

Gardeners again.
Delicious bait. The women, having discarded some clothing, cheerfully anticipate being loved some more. She, in a bright red gown, is curious but apprehensive.
Desire. Four men arrive on hands and knees as if desperate. He is one of them, yet soon happily finds another woman to flirt with. Those men who don’t get so lucky dance out their frustrations.
The second meeting/Resisting (Pas de deux #2). The gardeners bring Her to a grove in the park. As hard as He tries to impress her, She resists. While he seems to be offering his body and soul, she fears the consequences. Perhaps she could surrender only her body but not her soul ?

PART THREE:

She is trapped in a nightmare, manipulated by the ice-cold gardeners.
Regrets. Late at night, the women lament lost (or dead) lovers/loves.
Passion. He, aflame with desire, goads the other men on.
Weakness. A second too late, some of the men realize just how much women can/will depend upon them. While seduction may on occasion result in a man acquiring a “ball and chain,” for all women all the possible results – including childbirth or death thereby —  leave a deeper mark on their bodies.
The Third Meeting/ Surrender (Pas de deux #3) In French, the title is “abandon.” As  They dance, the steps they once did side by side merge into one. This is truly one of the most magnificent statements about love — that flying kiss! — but do any of us really believe that love can last forever?
EPILOGUE: As the sky blackens (the storm approaches?) the gardeners have the last word.

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par | 7 octobre 2013 · 17 h 04 min

Ballet in Red, White, and Black. The National Ballet of China visits the Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris.

Photo IPHONESwan Lake, September 26
The Red Detachment of Women, October 1

Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies, for instance.  [John Ruskin, “The Stones of Venice”]

Many would add ballet to Ruskin’s example. As an artifact of “aristocratic times,” while beautiful, has this art form outlived its usefulness?

Yet “aristos” means not only “most excellent” but also most…”useful.”  The ancient god Aristaeus watched over the shepherds, bee-keepers, cheese-makers, olive-growers, herb-gatherers, and sent the soft Elysian winds to waft over them and us as well.

With its double bill, this dual purpose is exactly what the National Ballet of China set out to prove during its two-week stay.  Urgent, honest, disarming, these dancers tried to convince the audience that even the modern chestnut that is The Red Detachment deserved viewing.

I fear that with all the brouhaha over the season opener of a series of La Dame aux camellias at the Palais Garnier…some of us may have forgotten that a lovely company with utterly appealing dancers was appearing only a few metro stops away.

Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and heart of man go together [Ruskin, “The Two Paths”]

Cao Shuci (Odette/Odile) and Ma Xiaodong (Siegfried), two of the youngest principals in the company, certainly go together perfectly. Cao Shuci frightened me at first.  So thin and fragile (the young man sitting on my right muttered, “she’s thin as a stick!”), so broken, she projected the aura of a kitten that had been abused. Ma Xiaodong is not only blessed with the kind of lush plié that results in plush jumps, his partnering is warm, attentive, and nuanced:  at first his Siegfried seemed to fear to break his drooping lily of an Odette but soon realized to his delight that she was a most supple flower.

Odile brought out the peacock in both their souls.  Cao has marvelous eyes (downcast, sidelong, bold stare, as she wills) and a marvelous command of effect:  even if it’s choreographically the same step, she gives each pose a different energy, each time turning each arabesque into a different-looking one.  By the end of the evening, my neighbor [“that was her, too?”] sighed, “Oh, no, she’s perfect. I’m in love.”

Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours [“Sesame and Lilies”]

When I espied Ma Xiaodong among the vaguely folkloric quintet of boys during The Red Detachment, I felt grateful for an anchor. He reminded me of a lost world.

What on earth can an American in Paris (or the pampered gala group in the orchestra seats) today make of the “brighten the presence” stares directed at the audience, the constant beat and repeat of clenched and raised fists and brisk nods of the head, the flag-waving, and – worst of all — the stereotyped characters?  Just in case you didn’t get it, one of the Evil Landlord’s minions actually picks his nose. [No supertitle translation of the words on banners waved, of blackboard texts pointed to, or of song lyrics was probably a blessing. The recorded music, after conductor Zhang Yi’s tempestuous reading of the Swan Lake score, was not].

I just cannot embrace this ballet.  I get its meaning and historical import (bring ballet to the people, save ballet from attacks by party philistines by any means, any means, possible), but for all the masterfully danced enchainements and acrobatics (including an audience-pleasing citation of the serial grand-jétés from Harald Lander’s 1948 Etudes) I kept wondering: bring what ballet to which “people?” Had I been forced to dance this thing for an entire career, where almost every combination seems to be danced to the right, I would have shot myself and not the evil landlord.

Weirdly, swans and princes and fairies or even firebirds prove easier to identify with.  Yet Zhang Jian brought utter conviction to her role as the rebel-in-training, Wu Qionghua, as if she could flatten the enemy simply by arching her back, arching her eyebrows, and dancing beyond full out all the time (even so, she gave off hints of her inner Swan, incapable of gracelessness).  But her role – and that of her comrades, including Zhou Zhaohui’s emphatically brave and emphatically handsome Commander – pointedly leaves little room for much nuance or individual interpretation.

An evening of danced archetypes turns out to be most exhausting. I left the theater sagging under the weight of history. I had so wanted to get into the (collective) authors’ meaning, not mine. But – as with Spartacus or Les Miz – as hard as the performers try, I just cannot suspend belief the way I always can when confronted by a couple of swans wearing make-up.  As the victorious unit advanced en masse towards us, weapons in hand, I felt…nothing.

When we build, let us think that we build for ever [“The Seven Lamps of Architecture”]

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par | 1 octobre 2013 · 18 h 26 min

China’s glorious red detachment of women (Plot Summary)

RDoWYou’ve seen the poster umpteen times in the Paris metro by now:  the Swan Queen and a uniformed Passionaria facing off, their respective hindlegs raised up and delicately curved (a pose inspired by Giambologna’s Renaissance bronze of Hermes…the figure’s attitude was then adopted by Louis XIV’s dancing court at Versailles as the epitome of an elegantly poised position).

But the young woman on the right-hand side of the poster, the one wearing the rebel cap, stares at the world of ballet with steely eyes.  From her, and Madame Mao’s, point of view swans and ballerinas – from Leda to Odette/Odile – have always been silly geese, an easy metaphor for eligible/available/pliable young women. Why are artists perpetually fixated upon our bourgeois obsession with love? Why can’t we reshape dance to serve the revolution? Why can’t dance – even in toe shoes — be about brotherhood instead?

This ballet IS a face-off.  Collectively constructed and composed in Mao’s China of 1964, the Red Detachment of Women is supposed to provide answers to these questions.  It challenges the conventional way we have structured and told stories again and again and again in epics, cinema, poems, novels, opera, ballet – all media, indeed — since the beginning of time.  This ballet means to enlighten us to the fact that class issues, not personal romantic distractions, are what really matter in life.  How long has it been since you read a book or watched a movie that didn’t talk about love?

Unfortunately, this particular ballet is now about as “mod” as the Beatles. But we should take a look before we lade it onto the trash-heap of totalitarian-era kitsch. This period-piece documents an attempt by brilliant dancers trained in the classical tradition to keep the “decadent” art they loved alive during an era when the powers that be had deemed ballet pointless and worthy of extinction.

In the 1960’s and 1970’s, Swan Lake and the rest disappeared from the national repertoire in China, and only a handful of radical ballets, including this one, got to be performed unto exhaustion.  But this ballet (and it certainly is one) has evolved into a nostalgic totem for an older generation for a rather poignant reason.  The uniform of the Red Detachment – hot pants, bare legs, bobby-socks thrust into pointe shoes – while certainly intended as macha, provided a rare moment of regime-sanctioned cheesecake in most serious times.  Sous les pavés, la plage!

 

The action takes place during the Chinese Civil War.  Everyone in the audience knows that the People’s Republic of China is about to prevail. Beware, evil landlords everywhere, especially on the first of the month…

 

PROLOGUE, night:

Our reluctant heroine/Wu Qionghua, tied to a pillar, struggles furiously to free herself.  A poor peasant girl, she has been singled out by the Evil Landlord/Nan Batian as one juicy and strong enough to be sold into slavery at a good price.

When the Evil Landlord’s Henchman/Lao Si tries to ready her for market…she escapes.

SCENE ONE, later that night:

She doesn’t get that far into the forest and the Evil Landlord Nan’s henchmen knock her out.  When the skies open and a violent storm erupts, the Evil Landlord and his minions flee, convinced the girl is dead.

Two innocent-looking men cross the stage.  But they are RED ARMY WARRIORS in disguise.  Hong Changqing/the Officer and Xiao Pang/the Messenger stumble upon the shattered Wu Qionghua.  She mimes/tells them about her miserable life.  They can only offer one solution:  to join in their crusade.

SCENE TWO, morning, a few days later:

The people and the rebel soldiers rejoice: a women’s revolutionary cell – the Red Detachment – has been created.  Their stylized training exercises remind us that ballet requires as much rigorous discipline as any “masculine” endeavor.  [The original cast actually underwent weeks of military training in order to lose their “SwanLake-y” softness).

Wu Qionghua arrives and denounces the crimes of her evil landlord.  Hong verifies her account.  As newly appointed commissar of her unit, Hong welcomes our fervent heroine to the “Detachment” and gives her a gun.

SCENE THREE, nightfall, at the Evil Landlord’s estate:

Hong, disguised as a rich merchant, has crashed Nan Batian’s birthday festivities.  Nothing could possibly go wrong.  At the sound of a gunshot at midnight, the women’s brigade will strike and annihilate the landlord and all his kind.

But Wu, unfortunately, totally messes up.  When she stumbles upon her former tormentor she cannot resist this chance to try out her new gun.  Not only does she miss her mark and thus allow the evil landlord to flee, but by letting her gun go off she has prematurely given the signal to attack.

While evil has not been wiped off of the face of the earth tonight, at least the rebels manage to seize the landlord’s hoard of grain. They redistribute it immediately to the poor.

Hong critiques Wu Qionghua for her ridiculously emotional behavior, unworthy of the warrior she must strive to become.

SCENE FOUR, dawn at the rebel camp:

Hong lectures the female division about the importance of discipline, of self-control, a lesson our ever less reluctant heroine takes to heart.  She now understands that she must fight not against HER landlord, but against ALL landlords.  She must leave her ego, her past, and her pains aside. Only then can she become an effective instrument of “the people.”

She has transformed herself into Hong’s best comrade-in-arms. This, then, is what true love is about: community. 

As one big happy family, the peasants and the Red Army Soldiers, share their joy.

When the Evil Landlord’s minions attack a recently liberated zone, the entire village heeds the call to arms and heads off to fight for everyone’s freedom.

SCENE FIVE, in the mountains:

The Red Army tries to squeeze the enemy and cut off its supply lines.  Hong, trying to protect his unit, is wounded and captured.

SCENE SIX, dawn, at the landlord’s estate:

Hong dies, heroically.

But so does the Evil Landlord (much less heroically).

Blue skies chase the clouds away.

Qionghua takes over for Hong and humbly agrees to become Party Commissar.

Peasants and soldiers and audience now must join in singing “The March to Victory.”

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par | 2 août 2013 · 23 h 25 min

La Sylphide: A phantom of delight

 “Surprised by joy – impatient as the wind/I turned to share the transport.” (Wordsworth, “To Sleep”)

P1050181La Sylphide at the Palais Garnier on closing night.

Just getting to see just one of Amandine Albisson’s first Sylphides [bless your pointy little head, director of sales at the Opéra de Paris, for NEVER letting us know who will dance when tickets go on sale] occurred by chance.  A Balleto d’or for “best led game of bait and switch” should go to management for trying to prevent the core audience from seeing the casts they wish to see.

“Though nothing can bring back the hour/Of splendour in the grass, or glory in the flower.” [“Ode, Intimations of Immortality.”]

P1050222On almost all these nights of the Paris Opéra’s run of La Sylphide, I have had the privilege (nuanced with regret, for he could still dance James) of enjoying the splendid stage presence, timing, and almost inhuman musicality of Stéphane Phavorin’s inexorable Madge.  He’s always been a one-man-band (what the French call more aptly un homme-orchestre), ever able to create glorious music out of the crap which the completely undisciplined Paris Opera orchestra constantly throws out into the auditorium, seeming to think nobody will notice. [Note to the orchestra: we don’t just hear your flubs. Those in the front box seats get to admire your sophomoric antics as well].  The entire quacking wind section should be retired, not this verray parfit gentil knight.

Phavorin is only dancer I’ve ever witnessed who to managed turn the role of Paris into a most elegant and dignified model of masculinity – rather than the embarrassed post-it of a man you always get.  I do not understand why he retires — obviously in great shape — stuck in character roles, having never been given a stab at Romeo.  During his adorably diffident curtain calls on the night of his forced retirement [age 42.5 according to law], Phavorin seemed as encumbered by his bouquet (bringing them on proves a rarity on the Paris stage) as an unwilling bridesmaid.  He kept trying to hand them off to Albisson, perhaps hoping that she will never get her wings clipped like so many others have.

“A lovely apparition, sent/To be a moment’s ornament/ […]I saw her upon nearer view,/A spirit, yet a woman too! […]And now I see with eye serene/The very pulse of the machine;/A being breathing thoughtful breath,/A traveler between life and death”  [ “She Was A Phantom of Delight.”]

P1050231Amandine Albisson, my Sylphide on the closing night of the season, is one of the few dancers at the Paris Opera who seems to be on the way to having a normal career. So far. She’s steadily been given roles, freed to catch the light and our attention. Her regal yet lithe and emotionally fragile Venus proves the only thing (besides the appalling sets and costumes) I remember about Ratmansky’s forgettable “Psyché” last year. [Scheduled to be paired with “Dances at a Gathering” next year.  Don’t get me started on the management’s choices for mixed bills].  Juicy and tart in Roland Petit, too, especially as the vicious gypsy in “Le Loup.”

Skinny as any other dancer, she projects an unusually plush physical centeredness.  A tallish one, she can sometimes seem a bit languorous.  For these very reasons some disliked her calm aplomb in the recent revival of Forsythe’s “In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated.”  While I’ve enjoyed these qualities each time I’ve seen her dance I had started to worry that she getting ready to be typecast unimaginatively as “always a Myrtha but never a Giselle.”   Certainly, she has proven she can do queen or goddess.  Princess? Not a far stretch.  And now…

On July 15th, Albisson still chomped at the bit at first like a young racehorse, anticipating the music.  But once she settled down, she harnessed her qualities and tweaked them: yes, a woman who dances, yet sprightly too. Neither cloyingly feminine nor overtly carnal, her Sylphide – while definitely female and seductive – emanated the oddest aura of…old soul.  I’ve never seen a Sylphide have such pity infuse the looks cast at her Effie: “poor child, you are very pretty for a humanoid. But you really don’t have the slightest chance, my dear.”

“I have felt/A presence that disturbs me with the joy/Of elevated thoughts ;a sense sublime/Of something far more deeply interfused,/Whose dwelling is he light of setting suns […]and dwelling is in the mind of man.” [from “Tinturn Abbey.”]

Imagine the imperious yet vulnerable Maria Casarès using her velvety voice to lure Orphée away from his life/wife and to his death in Cocteau’s film.  Albisson seemed to galvanize Florian Magnenet’s James.  Never have I seen a James fuss so much about his engagement ring, and never has that ring made more sense as an anchor, a lifeboat, a magnet.  Magnenet/James wasn’t an impetuous lad like Chaillet, nor a Byronic  and dreamy poet like Heymann.  His James could have been narrated by Alexandre Dumas, Jr.  This hot-blooded Scot has just returned to his native village after quite a disappointing time in the big city.  He’s vowed to give up fast women and big ambitions. He’s hoping Effie can save him from all his addictions.  But it quickly becomes clear to us that even without Albisson’s witchcraft, soon Magnenet/James would be cheating on his virtuous and virginal wife in any case.

I could just hear Wordsworth natter on:

“O’er rough and smooth she trips along,/And never looks behind;/And sings a solitary song/That whistles in the wind.” [“Lucy Gray”]

Now, honestly, how could any man resist the allure of the yet-unbroken spirit of a ballerina like Albisson?

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par | 1 Mai 2013 · 8 h 01 min

As Diaghilev may have said: “ASTONISH ME!”

diaghilev CocteauA triple-bill : “Béjart / Nijinski / Robbins / Cherkaoui-Jalet” and the others (Igor, Claude, Maurice) begins May 2nd at the Palais Garnier in Paris.  

Probably the most famous words spoken in dance (and probably the most apocryphal – mà, si no è vero è molto ben trovato), the impresario Serge Diaghilev’s roar quoted above can also be interpreted as “I want the best of everything.”  In 1908, this Russian aesthete began flooding Paris and beyond with the best musicians, the best dancers, the best designers, all obsessed by ceaselessly exploring the now and the new.  Until his death in 1929, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes company continued this obstinate pursuit of the cutting edge: rich evenings of one-act ballets harnessing season after season the best talents of his time (some of them in embryo, as in a neophyte Coco Chanel for costumes):  Balanchine, Nijinsky and his sister Nijinska, Massine, Lifar/ Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Goncharova/ Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Debussy, Ravel…

Here the Paris Opera Ballet pays tribute in a manner Diaghilev might have endorsed: one revival, two re-mixes, and something so utterly new that the current management hopes it will make you jump out of your seat.

L’OISEAU DE FEU (FIREBIRD

Choreography:  Maurice Béjart (1970)

Music:  Igor Stravinsky (1910)

The original choreography for this ballet as set by Michel Fokine in 1910 continues to be produced in companies around the world.  Inspired by Russian fairytales, the classic version tells a linear story:  a rather dim prince encounters a big red bird wearing a tutu and toe shoes.  To the prince’s astonishment this one, unlike most ballet heroines, is not hanging around waiting to be loved or rescued, she wants to be rid of him.  She buys her freedom with a feather that will bring her back if called, promising to help him if need be.  And he will need it, once he encounters an evil sorcerer who seems to patronize the same beauty parlor as Edward Scissorhands.  In the end, the prince will end up freeing a passel of knights who had been uncomfortably turned into stone and a multitude of enchanted princesses for them to marry.

Maurice Béjart kept the redness of the “firebird’s” costume, but little else of the story when he remade it.  Or did he?  For the essence of the story remains the same:  we yearn for freedom, for liberation, at any price.

Here the bird –the free spirit, the catalyst — is danced by a man. For Béjart, totally ‘60’s in his instincts, a “firebird” could only mean a “phoenix:” a creature willing to be consumed and destroyed if that brings us a greater good.  Unlike the bird of 1910, this one will try to fire up the masses, rather than simply shake up a spoiled and naive princeling.

Honestly, I find the 1910 version, rooted in ancient Russian myth, eternally satisfying in the way it responds to and is rooted in the music. This 1970’s “partisan” version – inspired by emotions burning deeply right then due to the Vietnam War – can seem somewhat dated.  On the other hand, while it remains rather easy to locate women sporting tutus and feathers, being able to gape at a buff guy dancing his head off in tight vintage red spandex remains a relatively rare, and a most pleasant, experience.

 L’APRES-MIDI D’UN FAUNE (AFTERNOON OF A FAUN)

Choreography:  Vaslav Nijinsky (1912)

Music: Claude Debussy

Ode to a Grecian Urn goes somewhat 3-D.  Dance stiff and stylized in profile with bent knees and legs in parallel (as unnatural and uncomfortable for ballet dancers as skiing).

In this re-creation of the original choreography, a half-man/half-animal meets some females with anacreontic hair.  Not quite sure what to do with his feelings and the signals these women seem to send, the Faun ends up frightening them away. Like men in most bars today, he just doesn’t get it.

Left alone to figure out just what to do with the scarf one of the nymphs dropped when she fled, the Faun’s final gesture will still, 101 years later, astonish – even offend — some in the audience.

L’APRES-MIDI D’UN FAUNE (AFTERNOON OF A FAUN)

Choreography:  Jerome Robbins (1953)

Music: Claude Debussy

The same music again, but completely different…or maybe not. Consider how a ballet dancer his/her self could seem to be the most exotic and mysterious figure out there for many of us flat-footed ones.  They are fauns, fauna.  Outside the studio, they glide yet walk like ducks, hold their heads as if they had antlers balanced atop, take dragonfly leaps over puddles in a delicate manner frogs would envy, do weird catlike stretches in airplanes…but inside the studio, freed from our gaze, they become human again.

Jerome Robbins (choreographer of Gypsy, West Side Story, Dances at a Gathering) created a ménage-a-trois to the same score as Nijnsky:  only here the almost lovers turn out to be 1) a boy 2) a girl 3) the studio mirror.  We, the audience, get to play the “mirror.”   If the 1910 version made you gasp, think about how here you get seduced into becoming peeping toms.

BOLERO

Choreography: Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui/Damien Jalet( 2013)

Sets (and probably explosive ideas): Marina Abramovic

Music: Maurice Ravel (1928)

Invented in 18th century Spain, the “bolero” is a slow dance where two simple melodies are repeated again and again over a stuttering triple rhythm (one, a-a-a, and three, and one…). The Franco-Basque composer Maurice Ravel’s version differs from its model in that it builds to a cathartic orchestral crescendo.  Think Andalucia meets Phillip Glass.

In a medium difficult to write down and for long rarely deemed worth filming, Bronislava Nijinska’s original choreography – for the pickup company of a former Diaghilev diva who dared to set up a rival company, Ida Rubinstein — died with those who had experienced its few performances in 1928. Apparently her creation didn’t astonish the audience enough.

In Maurice Béjart’s 1961 version – the one most performed since — he appropriated part of Nijinska’s original story: a man/woman dancing alone on a table in a tavern.  But Béjart added how he/she slowly arouses his/her spectators on-stage and out-front to a rather melodic orgasm. His version remains enormously popular, if always rather embarrassing to witness.

As the première of a new conceptualization of this same music will take place May 2nd, I cannot tell you more than the pedigrees of the three commissioned to astonish us:

Cherkaoui/Jalet, both born in 1976, have collaborated for years on performance pieces, all over the world.  Cherkaoui started dance late – but is a very hip grasshopper — Jalet started his drama and ethnographic music studies earlier.  Both grew into and from the wild Belgian modern dance scene, which continues to sprout all over. Both men love exploring the limits of music and dance and stagecraft: from Björk to flamenco, from Florence and the Machine to Shaolin monks, from the potential physically and mentally disabled performers can bring to life to the banality of our everyday gestures.  These two share a quest to explore and explode categories of identity.

Adjoining them to the Grande Dame of Terrifying Performance Art – Marina Abramovic – makes me a bit nervous. Dare I say she explores and explodes too much in protest against our flat lives? Even if her most recent piece, which played at the MOMA in New York, seemed mild (only sharing a moment of silence per person during 736 hours with hordes who lined up for the emotionally exhausting experience), she has built a reputation since the 1970’s as someone inspired by quite extreme quests: almost burning to death, passing out from lack of oxygen, taking pills in order to have seizures or catatonia in front of an audience, letting it bleed…

Because they have pushed their bodies to the limit since childhood, self-induced pain brings nothing exciting and new to dancers. All that I hope is that this creative trio agrees that their cast has already been tortured enough. On the other hand, since I couldn’t attend the last time a ballet provoked a riot by furious spectators – the Diaghilev-provoked Rite of Spring one hundred years ago – I’d be tickled to actually be present at one…

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par | 29 mars 2013 · 22 h 41 min

Roland Petit bill : “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee”

P1010032While the big news of the evening of March 27th, has of course become Eleonora Abbagnato’s late-career elevation to the rank of étoile/prima ballerina during the final curtain calls, I’d like to start by mentioning other dancers, those young talents and strong soloists who gave masterful performances earlier in this evening devoted to Roland Petit’s ballets.

Dancers, athletes, choreographers.  The self-proclaimed greatest boxer Muhamed Ali once said “Champions aren’t made in the gyms.  Champions are made from something they have deep inside of them: a desire, a dream, a vision.”

Many criticize Petit as merely a “dance maker.” Or even worse, a vulgarian. However I like the fact that, by being somewhat obvious at times, his desire, his dream, his vision, was to make the audience feel smart and included. His are ballets to be engaged with directly, without afterwards feeling forced  — because you feel stupid and confused — to purchase and read an expensive program with all its extensive rhetorical flourishes.  What his works will always need – and don’t all ballets? – is to continue to be fed by the imaginations of great dancers, younger and older. They can give any package of steps and gestures new life and, by melting into the music, provide the “oomph” that make ballet continue to come alive again night after night.

“It’s a lack of faith that makes people afraid of meeting challenges, and I believe in myself.” (M.Ali)

Le Rendez-vous distills, somewhat awkwardly, the perfume of post-liberation Paris.  That somehow magical moment of Juliette Greco, of Sartre, of Montand and smoke-filled dance halls. While “of the moment” in 1945, it’s now up to the performers to make this dusty relic sing to us.

Alexandre Gasse, a youthful demi-soloist, got his chance to embody the archetypical “young man about to be eaten alive during sex by a praying mantis” (Petit’s ballets can unfortunately, I must admit, too often resort to the virgin/whore and man vs. female bloodsucker dichotomy pushed to center stage during the Romantic Era but which wears thin these days).

Most of the ballet actually revolves around his gentle relationship with a crippled beggar – to set up that he’s a nice guy — only in the last scene does he have to deal with the femme fatale in high heels (crippling for her).  Throughout, Gasse floated like a butterfly, landing after all kinds of double-tours softly onto one knee.  His performance was free, emotionally fresh, danced with flair and thoughtfullness, his chest and back open and ready to take on almost any challenge.

I’d begun to hope that he’d just go off with the beggar and, as they say in the  French variation on “happily ever after:  “et ils eurent beaucoup d’enfants.” But then another young soloist arrived for her date with the audience, Amandine Albisson.

Albisson, in her Louise Brooks wig, at first made me think of Arielle Dombasle during her recent Crazy Horse phase.  But she only resembled a frozen monument to pulchritude at first glance.   Albisson has already demonstrated – in Psyché or in In the Middle, for example –  that she is endowed with a fearless stage persona and spotlight-attracting cool. Even if she hasn’t yet quite mastered the scarily humorous and sensual way that Ciaravola and Cyd Charisse unfurl their gams in extensions, her dance already has its own weight and authority.  For two seasons now, she’s been testing her wings.  I hope she won’t try to imitate Ciaravola or Guillem  and continues to believe in herself.

“George can’t hit was his hands cant see/Now you see me, now you don’t/George thinks he will, but I know he won’t.” [M. Ali]

Le Loup is a cruel parable of mistaken identities and identity confusion.  Sabrina Mallem, in the supporting role of the gypsy, grasped the chance to have the time of her life: she created a character ferocious and cruel by using sharply stabbing feet,  no, chiseled, no, it wasn’t about the feet, the legs, the arms, at all in fact.  It was about the full-bodied, blood-rich, completely disarming sensuality she managed to express at every swerve of every part of her superbly-controlled body.  Mallem radiated life like a great boxer high on adrenaline. She’s hit that “sweet spot” where honed technique and learned stagecraft make even a mere soloist a great performer.

And so to Carmen, a highlight during an evening of highlights.  Where Abbagnato seemed to be telling us and them:

“If you ever dream of beating me…you better wake up and apologize.” [yes, Ali again]

Petit structured a couture gown around his beloved Zizi Jeanmaire with this ballet, designed to highlight all of her multiple attributes… in 1949. And ever since, the specter of its two creators has haunted each ballerina who dares try to tame this ballet while trapped in yet another black wig.

Most fall into two categories: those Carmens who overdo the bent-index-finger biting “ergo me sexy” category, and the others who overdo the “ I gotta pretend I be ze flamenco queen “ category.  In each case, they all forget that the original French text, even music, is filled with bitter irony and a raised eyebrow.

Petit’s Carmen does not need to be overcooked.  She needs to hum, not scream.   She’s the only fully human character in the whole piece.  The rest certainly move about, but they – especially the men — are in essence cardboard cutouts.

Abbagnato’s Carmen fluttered like a butterfly and brawled like a bee. She sandpapered away all the clear edges one would expect, and spared us any “olé, olé” hispanitude. More than that, she gave a dragonfly aspect to the character.  Never at rest, always buzzing, ever alert to threat, proud of her delicately nervy wings.  Indeed, she was probably unphotographable this night, for she rarely paused to pose for a six o’clock standard snapshot. She was too busy dancing.  And by really dancing, not just steps but ideas, she kept making the interstices in between the usual photo-ops come alive.

I found myself completely absorbed by the final duel between this elusive heroine and her Don José: for once it seemed as if this Carmen suddenly had decided that there was no way the choreographer would let her down and not let her go free. Her movement reflected less the shivering angry  pride of Zizi Jeanmaire when confronted by Don José’s knife, but a kind of shock  at this man’s betrayal. By wielding a knife, he was cheating and breaking the rules of the game. Dragonflies, butterflies, bees never expect to face a pesticide.

So when Abbagnato launched herself at her lover’s knife with the fervor of the character she’d sculpted in 40 minutes flat… the entire house heard another patron near me “lose it.”  A loud gasp of “Mais ça alors!” [American translation: “Jesus H. Christ.”]  That’s the kind of comment yelled out at a boxing match where the one you root for gets hammered.

While some of you may find Petit awfully corny, I like the fact that he always tried to make the dances where dancers could convince even one member of the audience thinks this dream, this vision….is real.  And never want to wake up.

Commentaires fermés sur Roland Petit bill : “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee”

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par | 9 mars 2013 · 9 h 19 min

The Nureyev “Gala” in Paris: I was there, but Nureyev definitely wasn’t.

P1010033What a stunningly lukewarm tribute to a glorious past. If, quite often, some piece turned out to be cleverly — even beautifully — danced, what the evening consistently denied the audience was a sense of how Nureyev had touched the lives of the dancers in this company.

The evening began with a 4-minute slide-show of photos set to Swan Lake’s polonaise. And then, as they say in Italy, è basta. No films of rehearsals, no other reminders during the evening, no tributes at the end, no nothing.

Craning my neck around from my seat even before the evening started, I had been delighted to spot many who once served to inspire Nureyev’s obsessively revisited stagings of remembered worlds of choreography during his tenure in Paris. All of these retired but far-from-dead dancers continue to speak eloquently and openly at other venues about how Nureyev’s passion for dancing inspired their own. Yet not a single one had been drafted to pass along to us this night what they knew of Nureyev, to say a few words, (even on video) before each piece. How I wish that at least they had all been invited onstage at the very end to take a group révérence.

Nureyev’s inventiveness as a choreographer remained equally unacknowledged due to the choice of excerpts.

Why present so many warhorse standards that only shed dim light on what Nureyev had once wrought? We just went through 24 “Don Quichotte’s” two months ago: so did we really have to revisit the entire pas de deux which is the least “Nureyev-y” part of the production, to then only be offered a taste — the entrada and adagio — of the Black Swan pas de deux which he’d idiosyncratically expanded into a pas de trois with that unusual solo for Rothbart/himself?

After Raymonda’s “clapping variation” my mind drifted to how many dancers in the audience had been directly involved in the enormous adventure of “Raymonda.” Nureyev had filled out the life of this ballet by bringing each character to the fore. He transformed the small mime-y roles of Henriette and Clémence, of Bernard and Béranger, into fully and deftly danced ones. Where was the pas de six? Where was the great big waltz for a full corps of boys and girls? And where did they hide that beautiful and exotic and manly creation, Abderahm, with his – for its time — devastating synthesis of classic and modern impulses?

Most of all, I wondered what had happened to the male corps de ballet which Nureyev was purported to have re-energized? It must have been dancing outside the house during those first four minutes of slides when the orchestra had attacked the polonaise and then gone home. Our one moment with more than a four men at a time — Don Q’s fandango — while certainly inventive and stylish, doesn’t really bring any of the technical and expressive abilities of the male corps to the forefront.

An “homage” to Nureyev where men hardly dance at all? Is that possible? In peevish response, I will not mention a single ballerina in this summary.

Almost all of the leading men got stuck being wallpaper. We caught glimpses of: Hervé Moreau, Benjamin Pech, Mathieu Ganio, Stéphane Phavorin, Audric Bézard, Vincent Chaillet, Yann Saiz : all relegated to supporting females  in pirouettes or penchées, The men got to do their moves as if the pre-Nureyev, no, the pre–Nijinsky ukaze against male dancers daring to be other than moving-men was still in force. As in: we do our best, but nobody wants to look at us anyway.

Duquenne tried, stretching out the energy of his arabesques as Nureyev would have liked in the Nutcracker Snow Scene. Magnenet brought energy and delight to “Cendrillon.” Le Riche shrugged off this atmosphere  and charmed his way into Juliet’s heart during the balcony scene from « Roméo ». Each time: a female partner. What about Nureyev’s  many duets and trios for guys?

The only masculine solo saved the evening for me. Nureyev would have relished the way Matthias Heymann returned to the stage after a major injury. Nureyev had always loved beautiful movement full-out, had loved honesty in the moment, had used his eye to pick out those dancers who come fully alive on stage, who need and want to have us out there in the dark. Heymann’s ecstatic resurrection as Byron’s/Nureyev’s ill-begotten “Manfred” provided a rare moment of grace.  Perhaps the only true homage all night.

The evening ended with bits of the last act of “La Bayadère,” including the languorous descent of 32 ballerinas, lovely, albeit no longer an unusual feat for most companies. Why not the devilishly complex fugue for the boys and girls from the first act of his “Swan Lake?” Or the many other moments from Nureyev’s “Bayadère” when male dancers do take part? Or, or… (As Solor, Stéphane Bullion mostly provided wallpaper too).

Perhaps that is why none of Nureyev’s dancers took to the stage at the end of the evening. This provincial gala had had nothing to do with what Nureyev had taught them – and us – about ballet.

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