Archives de Tag: Pushkin

par | 3 mars 2014 · 10 h 45 min

Onegin: “Oh to love so, be so loved, yet so mistaken!” [Robert Browning, Epilogue to Asolando]

P1010032Onéguine at the Palais Garnier. At a Sunday matinee, February 23, 2014: Ciaravola, Moreau, Giezendanner, Heymann, Paquette.

I knew I would not be able to add to the comments of those who attended Ciaravola’s adieux this last Friday. So this will be about an earlier performance by the same cast, very different in its nuances because artists bring new colors to a character every time they step into the light.
Frankly, I didn’t want to talk about this penultimate performance either and procrastinated. Out of selfishness. I wanted to lock the memories away in a tiny, golden, silk-lined box that I, and only I, could peek into. I would inhale these varied and delicious fragrances during those dark moments when I’d forgotten that the technical demands of dance are only meant to enable dancers to embody poetry in motion, to distill song into drops of perfume, to free emotion from the bonds of words and technique itself. It’s been a long time since a performance made me remember all the ways it can feel like to be sixteen.

COUNTRYSIDE

“The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay/Chin upon hand, to see the game at play.” [Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came]

Right away, the complex loving bond between Isabelle Ciaravola –Tatiana (boy, does she make “chin in hand, reading” come alive!) and her utterly guileless and radiant little sister (Charline Giezendanner-Olga) warmed the heart. With her torso always just ever so slightly inclined forward as in a 19th century lithograph, fleet and buoyant, Giezendanner seemed to be humming to herself the opera’s teasing and guileless “when I hear those songs, all I want to do is dance.”

“She looked at him, as one who awakes:/The past was a sleep, and her life began.” [The Statue and the Bust]

Both sisters let us experience this. Giezendanner folds naturally and sweetly into Mathias Heymann-Lensky’s open chest. Their duet didn’t look like a series of steps, but as if Olga had added “to dance…with you” to her song and the tenor’s “I love you” could be heard whispered in the background at the same time. Their lines, musical attack, their innate feeling for spin and then drift in balance and then to gently de-accelerate always brought them together. Heymann achieves one of the hardest, yet simplest, things: on your very first day of ballet class, the teacher tells you to always use your upper body in 1st to 5th “as if you were holding the sun inside your arms.” Most of us never get there. Heymann does that, and carries that over into partnering too.

“For I say, this is death, and the sole death,/When a man’s loss comes to him from his gain,/Darkness from light, from knowledge ignorance./ And lack of love from love made manifest.” [De Gustibus]

Hervé Moreau’s instantly provided a man truly depressed who saw all of life in dull grey and could feel nothing deeply, high nor low. He seemed to add another – much less cynical — albeit efficiently cold– layer of backstory to Pushkin’s already dense Chapter One. Something in the eyes, a soft and sinuous attack added to a mysterious aura, where something seemed frozen inside. He distilled the essence of exactly the kind of man so many women feel they need to “help.” He gave a glimmer (through a shoulder or a hand) that even if life he believed life sucked he didn’t too much mind being touched on the shoulder by this young girl.

Moreau here gave us that Parisian purity of subtle technique and épaulement that American critics deem cold because they seem to want all dancers, like waiters, step out onstage and say “Hi, my name is Bob and I will be serving you ten pirouettes tonight.” Well, he certainly served up a haunted solo, where he sang only for himself, not us, and especially not for Tatiana. I had a hard time taking my eyes off of Ciaravola just watching him dance. Her delicate little movements, not in the least intended to upstage – a hand on the heart moving up to the neck and down to the solar plexus; a sigh, widened eyes; an arm starting to reach out but checked — responded to each moment of his soliloquy as if trying to turn it into a conversation. Indeed I have the oddest feeling that I was tricked into seeing him through her eyes: he is unhappy because he doesn’t understand himself.

DREAM

“At the midnight in the silence of the sleep-time,/ When you set your fancies free.” [Epiglogue to Asolando]

This is embarrassing, but here goes. Watching the dream scene with these two, I felt as shocked and defenseless as Anton Ego the food critic in “Ratatouille”  when a bite of food zapped him back into his mother’s kitchen. That’s it! At sixteen (were those the days?) imagining being kissed on the nape of your neck and then leaping into a big lift was as far as your fantasy could stretch. John Cranko understood us.

Pure romanticism, completely seen from Tatiana’s viewpoint, with the orchestra – for once playing coherently for this series under James Tuggle’s responsive direction – stretching and pausing the music to match and suspend in thin air the dreamlike floating ethereal innocent electricity that connected Ciaravola to Moreau. Of course I know the steps require her to jump and help her partner, the skill he needs to make her seem to swoop and hit the ground precisely, but I could forget all that and all I could see was a young girl suspended in thin air, the way you find it normal fly in your dreams.

DUEL

“White shall not neutralize the black, nor good/Compensate bad in man, absolve him so:/Life’s business being just the terrible choice.” [The Ring and the Book].

Because we all know about his horrible injury, how much do I read into Heymann’s steps now? Each time I see him, I cannot determine whether he uses his body to express love of life or to sing his love of dance for they seem completely intertwined. Heymann danced more than full out, using Cranko’s up and down, forward and backward, arching and aching steps to articulate every thought that might occur to a man who knows he has willingly brought on his own demise and needs to use this one last chance to feel every part of his body from the top of his head to the tips of his fingers to the ends of his toes. He filled space the way Sergei Lemeshev’s voice did in 1937:  I found Giezendanner and Ciaravola nuanced their pleas to him – no mistake, despite the confusing schmattes, which of them was the loved one and which one the fond older sister — doubling his trouble.

ONEGIN AT GREMIN’S

“For life, with all its yields of joy and woe,/ And hope and fear, – believe the aged friend – /Is just a chance o’ the prize of learning love.” [De Gustibus]

Moreau, slightly gray-powdered and thankfully without the moustache, gave tensile strength and more than a touch of despair to the “ghosts of women past” scene. Indeed, he reminded me of how the choreography here feeds on Albrecht’s encounter with the wilis.

Karl Paquette’s Gremin, who had proved most present and observant at Mme. Larina’s country ball, has clearly figured out what happened, and certainly knows that even if his radiant wife “adores” him — a Ciaravola too obviously smiling and relaxing into these much less taxing but, oh, so more reliable arms — she doesn’t really love him “that way.” His melancholy and reserved prince had a bit of Siegfried lurking around the edges. Courtly, properly proud to present his wife, here Paquette, in the way he touched and manipulated his wife’s body, fully expressed a complicated melancholy – an inner life and story – that proved compelling. I’ve not often wished Gremin to have a solo, as in the opera, before. Sunday’s Gremin would have deserved one.

FINAL SCENA

“Love, we are in God’s hand. How strange now looks the life he makes us lead. / So free we seem, so fettered fast we are.” [Andrea del Sarto].

I could hear his letters, I could swear I heard her monologue. And for the first time in a very long time I began to wonder about how it all would end and actually started hoping for them to run off together à la Karenina. No two combinations were the same, every look, every fall, added more words. A dense thicket of call and response. I don’t quite know how Moreau managed to grab Ciaravola’s shoulders in so many varied ways, to kiss her neck both as gently and as ravenously as if his life depended on it. He communicated (especially in the way he progressively opened up his catches after the lifts) how his eyes and chest had been forced open by this dazzling creature.

Pushkin leaves the reader dangling: “you’ve heard enough about our hero, I will leave him and you be.” This Onegin obviously heads out to leap into the Neva, and this Tatiana knows that. But in the moment before his body hits the icy river, Onegin will experience the happiness that had eluded him so far: he will forever remember how Ciaravola melted for a few seconds into his needy heart.
So will we.

Isabelle Ciaravola and Hervé Moreau. [Farewell performance, February 28th]

Isabelle Ciaravola and Hervé Moreau. [Farewell performance, February 28th]

Commentaires fermés sur Onegin: “Oh to love so, be so loved, yet so mistaken!” [Robert Browning, Epilogue to Asolando]

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par | 28 février 2014 · 9 h 15 min

Tragédie de la jeunesse

P1050181Onéguine, Ballet de l’Opéra national de paris. 26 février 2014 (Albisson, Hoffalt, Barbeau, Révillon).

Du personnage multiforme d’Onéguine tel que décrit par Pouchkine, Josua Hoffalt ne retient qu’un seul aspect : celui du jeune homme en colère. Dès sa première entrée, le visage fermé, la politesse froide, il exsude la détestation de la campagne, le mal-être de celui qui y a été conduit pour une retraite forcée. Sa variation de la première scène est précise, sans affèterie. Il ne s’y offre pas en spectacle à Tatiana, il l’exclut du champ des possibles. Dans le roman, pourtant, Onegin ne fait preuve qu’une seule fois de cruauté lorsque, agacé par un regard trop appuyé de Tatiana, il est pris de rage contre Lenski qui l’a, pense-t-il, entraîné dans ce guet-apens matrimonial. Mais doit-on s’en offusquer ? Sans doute pas. Le ballet de Cranko prend lui aussi des licences assez nombreuses avec le récit de Pouchkine et le personnage principal du ballet se dessine donc toujours d’une manière à la fois très personnelle mais également très partielle : prédateur ? narcissique ? produit de sa classe et de ses préjugés ? Toutes ces approches sont pertinentes car il s’agit de créer un personnage de théâtre et non de roman.

Et Josua Hoffalt a sans doute trouvé l’interprétation la plus en adéquation avec ses qualités du moment ; en particulier ici, sa jeunesse évidente.

Et cette jeunesse s’accordait à merveille avec le reste de la distribution. Amandine Albisson semble d’emblée une Tatiana selon notre cœur tant, dès les premières minutes, elle évoque naturellement la Tatiana de Pouchkine.

« Ni par les traits mignons, ni par la fraîcheur rosée de sa sœur, elle ne pouvait attirer les regards. Triste, solitaire, sauvage, timide comme une biche des bois, elle semblait, dans sa propre famille, une jeune fille étrangère. »

Melle Albisson a cette qualité des grands interprètes qui peuvent, s’ils le désirent, éteindre leur beauté physique et paraître « communs ». Ainsi, durant la première scène et la plus grande partie de l’acte 2, ses évolutions sont empreintes de noblesse, ses lignes sont étirées mais pas au point de suggérer un être complètement réalisé. En fait, sa Tatiana ne rayonne au début que par l’œil bienveillant qu’elle semble porter sur le monde. Et tout naturellement, elle interprète la moue boudeuse de son Onéguine comme le signe d’une blessure profonde dans un cœur romantique.

Se trompe-t-elle dans son attachement ? On pourrait le penser si l’on en restait à la ligne d’interprétation de Josua Hoffalt, mais le couple de scène qu’elle forme avec lui fonctionne d’emblée étonnamment bien. Dans le pas de deux du rêve, malgré un rapport de taille plutôt défavorable (Hoffalt n’est pas plus grand qu’Albisson quand elle est sur pointes, ce qui rend certains portés à l’épaule plus difficiles à négocier), les lignes et les énergies des deux danseurs s’accordent et se complètent. Hoffalt ne fait qu’infléchir légèrement son jeu pour nous faire comprendre ce que Tatiana a apprécié en lui. Il ne déploie pas nécessairement une grande palette de passions mais il assouplit son élégance très formelle de la première scène.

« Il avait l’heureux talent de tout effleurer dans une conversation ; de garder le silence, avec l’air profond d’un connaisseur, dans une discussion sérieuse, et d’exciter le sourire des dames par un feu roulant d’épigrammes inattendues. »

Tout cela est encore un peu vert, mais possède les charmes et les promesses du printemps.

On pourrait en dire autant du duo Olga-Lenski interprété par Marion Barbeau et Fabien Révillion. Les deux danseurs partagent tout d’abord une similitude physique ; au-delà de la blondeur, ils partagent le même sourire. Cette sorte de « gémellité » est très en accord avec la description du couple par Pouchkine. Les deux jeunes gens se sont promis l’un à l’autre dès l’enfance avec la bénédiction de leurs parents respectifs ; des voisins. Dans Olga, mademoiselle Barbeau, dont c’était la prise de rôle, a trouvé le ton juste. Elle se lance sans arrière-pensée dans les pas ainsi que dans les bras de son partenaire qui la rattrape toujours gracieusement. Cette spontanéité un peu brute semble néanmoins préfigurer la perte de contrôle du fiancé romantique à l’acte 2. Fabien Révillion, qui avait déjà interprété le rôle de Lenski en 2011 aux côtés de Mathilde Froustey, a indéniablement gagné en profondeur. Il y a deux ans, son premier acte était plein de promesses mais son deuxième était encore sur le métier. Pour cette reprise, il émeut profondément dans sa variation du duel. Les bras tendus vers le ciel, persuadé déjà de son sort funeste, il semblait écrire un dernier poème ; une imprécation à la lune. Son face à face final avec Onéguine-Hoffalt rappelait encore Pouchkine.

« L’eau et le rocher, les vers et la prose, la glace et le feu sont moins différents. »

À l’issue du deuxième acte, il faut avouer qu’on était à la fois ému, transporté même, mais inquiet. Comment allait bien pouvoir évoluer l’Onéguine juvénile et ombrageux de Josua Hoffalt ? Car enfin, être beau et désagréable n’est pas une fin en soi. Rester sur cette note c’était risquer de gâcher la représentation d’une des plus prometteuses Tatiana qu’il nous ait été donné de voir…

Eh bien, dans ce troisième acte, il a osé. Josua Hoffalt a osé rester fidèle à sa vision. Il a fait un total contre-sens sur son personnage en le transformant en héros romantique qui ouvre les yeux trop tard et devient ce que Tatiana avait cru percevoir en lui six ans auparavant. Mais au diable Pouchkine et son

« Les jours s’écoulaient rapidement. Dans l’air réchauffé, déjà l’hiver se dissolvait. Et il ne se fit pas poète, ne mourut pas, ne devint pas fou. »

Le dernier pas de deux avec sa tendresse à lui, ses pâmoisons à elle, valait bien une dernière entorse à l’esprit du poète. Tatiana-Albisson, touchante en princesse Grémine, à la fois modeste et rayonnante pendant le bal, devenait femme sous nos yeux en quelques courtes minutes.

Josua Hoffalt est l’un des rares Onéguine qu’on n’imagine pas essayer de faire une seconde tentative après cette ultime rebuffade. L’homme qui quitte le salon de Tatiana devient assurément poète. Ou alors, c’est qu’il s’est jeté dans la Néva.

La soirée du 26 février aura donc été, grâce à ce superbe quatuor de danseurs, sous le signe de la tragédie : celle de la vacuité de la jeunesse et de ses illusions.

Ce diaporama nécessite JavaScript.

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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…

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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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