Wood engraving by Raoul Dufy from my namesake's bestiary poems, subtitled "Procession of Orpheus" (1911)
Notes on ballet events long past
William Forsythe's "Impressing the Czar," performed by the Royal Ballet of Flanders at the Lincoln Center Festival in the company's U.S. debut, late July. I was particularly struck by the choreographer's deftness at fomenting spectacle. The guy's a theater animal! a genius showman!--whatever his avant-garde ambitions. Why does no one talk about this?
The royal court, an Olympian, and bongo teen spirit mashed together in "Impressing the Czar"
Europeans and Europhiles tend to focus on Forsythe's deep meanings--his subversions of ballet convention, of theatrical convention, of narrative, of capitalism, of what have you-- and applaud him for his wisdom. Not finding much wisdom, his fellow Americans (the guy's from Manhasset) deem him a fake. (His ponderous program notes don't help.) They especially take issue with his torquing of the ballet torso, contending that it's not an evolution of classical symmetries so much as their destruction.
But with the slippery, smooth Royal Flanders dancers, you can see his love of ballet--of its flight, in particular. The Belgians' arms extend from their backs like wings, evoking the infinity lines of tiled Eastern arabesques.
And the way Forsythe keeps the action moving--his masterful, cinematic capacity to get us to follow the frames of action he has envisioned, no matter how much action is transpiring at once--is exciting throughout.
Act 1 (pictured above) recalls Balanchine's "Nutcracker" party scene--our gaze somehow lured first to the naughty boys, then to the docile girls, then to the serving maids and the grandparents, even though he has none of the focusing advantage of a camera, only a magician's knack for attracting the eye or letting it wander--except Forsythe's configurations are more unruly and the clans more motley.
In dancey Act 2, titled "In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated" and regularly presented by American troupes as a stand-alone piece, dancers on the stage's shadowy margins evoke the action at centerstage like an echo fading into silence recalls the instigating shout. The eerie effect is to soften the proscenium's hard edges so you imagine feathery versions of this beautiful, hypermute dance floating out into the city like deja-vus.
The final scene effectively takes the piss out of Nijinsky-Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring," with men and women--dressed alike as dumb, disobedient Catholic school girls--doing a funky circle dance (aptly dubbed Bongo Bongo Nageela) around the prone figure of one mythical Greek figure you probably haven't heard of, Mr. Pnut.
Of course, the program notes make huge claims for Forsythe--that he's resurrecting and simultaneously dismantling the history of Western dance. But for me, "Impressing the Czar" doesn't stand up under much analysis. Except for "In the Middle," the evening's piece de resistance, in which the effulgent stream of movement hides vortexes of invisibility (just as in Thom Willems's Sound of Noisey score there are moments when the sound gets sucked into a vacuum), the main virtue of the evening-length work is how fun it is: no mean feat.
Veronika Part in "La Bayadere," American Ballet Theatre, Monday June 23. I'll get in trouble for this--especially after ballet fans praised Part so highly--but when someone (a colleague I am friendly with, Laura Jacobs) puts out the critic's equivalent of a fatwa --"Part is a tautology: If you can't see what makes her great you're not really fit to judge her," from a New Criterion essay excerpted here on husband James Wolcott's Vanity Fair blog -- how can I resist?
I think I understand why critics are so divided, with Jacobs and Joel Lobenthal of the New York Sun loving Part, Alastair Macaulay of the New York Times and Robert Gottlieb of the New York Observer despising her, and many of us somewhere in between. It's because she is being divided. She's a lyrical, non-actorly dancer in a company that specializes in story ballets.
She's got one texture, one setting--a very lovely legato--whether she's playing a doomed temple dancer or a teenage princess. Part is always more herself than she is a vessel for the role. That's not a fault in itself--Nureyev was like that too--but I do think it's why critics object to her. (People objected to him too, and he was greater.)
You could divide people--and among them, critics--into those who are impressed with artists who make us conscious of their style and those who are not: those who love the verbal acrobatics of a Nabokov and those who prefer the self-effacements of a Willa Cather.
Me, I'm probably closer to the Cather side--convinced that personality and style per se (it probably never is per se, but people speak of it as if it were) are overrated, in art as in everything else. Still, Part has impressed me in lyrical roles, where no acting is required. Though she dances Balanchine's "Symphonie Concertante" and "Mozartiana" slowly, she's musical enough to justify the tempo, and the texture this leisurely pace enables is delicious.
American Ballet Theatre's "Giselle," Monday July 7 at the Metropolitan Opera House, with Nina Ananiashvili as Giselle, Angel Corella as Albrecht, and Gillian Murphy as chief Wili, Myrta. I've seen "Giselle"--and especially ABT's stirring version--many times, but only on this sultry summer night did it occur to me that Giselle is making a double sacrifice when she rescues Albrecht from the clutches of the Wilis--the tribe of once jilted maidens, now spirits, who dance to death any man wandering into their woods after dark. (How does Giselle save him? She gets him to dance with her until dawn.)
The choreography for the corps is so strong and was so well delivered July 7 (led by Melissa Thomas and an astounding Zhong-Jing Fang, whose arching back created a maelstrom of conflicting feelings with every arabesque) that they became a sisterhood: a positive thing in itself, whatever its purpose. Once she's finished saving her lover, Giselle won't ever belong. For a ghostly eternity, she will be a pariah to the women and apart from the man. That she will always be in his heart hardly matters since it won't be within reach.
Notes on ballet events long past
William Forsythe's "Impressing the Czar," performed by the Royal Ballet of Flanders at the Lincoln Center Festival in the company's U.S. debut, late July. I was particularly struck by the choreographer's deftness at fomenting spectacle. The guy's a theater animal! a genius showman!--whatever his avant-garde ambitions. Why does no one talk about this?
The royal court, an Olympian, and bongo teen spirit mashed together in "Impressing the Czar"
Europeans and Europhiles tend to focus on Forsythe's deep meanings--his subversions of ballet convention, of theatrical convention, of narrative, of capitalism, of what have you-- and applaud him for his wisdom. Not finding much wisdom, his fellow Americans (the guy's from Manhasset) deem him a fake. (His ponderous program notes don't help.) They especially take issue with his torquing of the ballet torso, contending that it's not an evolution of classical symmetries so much as their destruction.
But with the slippery, smooth Royal Flanders dancers, you can see his love of ballet--of its flight, in particular. The Belgians' arms extend from their backs like wings, evoking the infinity lines of tiled Eastern arabesques.
And the way Forsythe keeps the action moving--his masterful, cinematic capacity to get us to follow the frames of action he has envisioned, no matter how much action is transpiring at once--is exciting throughout.
Act 1 (pictured above) recalls Balanchine's "Nutcracker" party scene--our gaze somehow lured first to the naughty boys, then to the docile girls, then to the serving maids and the grandparents, even though he has none of the focusing advantage of a camera, only a magician's knack for attracting the eye or letting it wander--except Forsythe's configurations are more unruly and the clans more motley.
In dancey Act 2, titled "In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated" and regularly presented by American troupes as a stand-alone piece, dancers on the stage's shadowy margins evoke the action at centerstage like an echo fading into silence recalls the instigating shout. The eerie effect is to soften the proscenium's hard edges so you imagine feathery versions of this beautiful, hypermute dance floating out into the city like deja-vus.
The final scene effectively takes the piss out of Nijinsky-Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring," with men and women--dressed alike as dumb, disobedient Catholic school girls--doing a funky circle dance (aptly dubbed Bongo Bongo Nageela) around the prone figure of one mythical Greek figure you probably haven't heard of, Mr. Pnut.
Of course, the program notes make huge claims for Forsythe--that he's resurrecting and simultaneously dismantling the history of Western dance. But for me, "Impressing the Czar" doesn't stand up under much analysis. Except for "In the Middle," the evening's piece de resistance, in which the effulgent stream of movement hides vortexes of invisibility (just as in Thom Willems's Sound of Noisey score there are moments when the sound gets sucked into a vacuum), the main virtue of the evening-length work is how fun it is: no mean feat.
Veronika Part in "La Bayadere," American Ballet Theatre, Monday June 23. I'll get in trouble for this--especially after ballet fans praised Part so highly--but when someone (a colleague I am friendly with, Laura Jacobs) puts out the critic's equivalent of a fatwa --"Part is a tautology: If you can't see what makes her great you're not really fit to judge her," from a New Criterion essay excerpted here on husband James Wolcott's Vanity Fair blog -- how can I resist?
I think I understand why critics are so divided, with Jacobs and Joel Lobenthal of the New York Sun loving Part, Alastair Macaulay of the New York Times and Robert Gottlieb of the New York Observer despising her, and many of us somewhere in between. It's because she is being divided. She's a lyrical, non-actorly dancer in a company that specializes in story ballets.
She's got one texture, one setting--a very lovely legato--whether she's playing a doomed temple dancer or a teenage princess. Part is always more herself than she is a vessel for the role. That's not a fault in itself--Nureyev was like that too--but I do think it's why critics object to her. (People objected to him too, and he was greater.)
You could divide people--and among them, critics--into those who are impressed with artists who make us conscious of their style and those who are not: those who love the verbal acrobatics of a Nabokov and those who prefer the self-effacements of a Willa Cather.
Me, I'm probably closer to the Cather side--convinced that personality and style per se (it probably never is per se, but people speak of it as if it were) are overrated, in art as in everything else. Still, Part has impressed me in lyrical roles, where no acting is required. Though she dances Balanchine's "Symphonie Concertante" and "Mozartiana" slowly, she's musical enough to justify the tempo, and the texture this leisurely pace enables is delicious.
American Ballet Theatre's "Giselle," Monday July 7 at the Metropolitan Opera House, with Nina Ananiashvili as Giselle, Angel Corella as Albrecht, and Gillian Murphy as chief Wili, Myrta. I've seen "Giselle"--and especially ABT's stirring version--many times, but only on this sultry summer night did it occur to me that Giselle is making a double sacrifice when she rescues Albrecht from the clutches of the Wilis--the tribe of once jilted maidens, now spirits, who dance to death any man wandering into their woods after dark. (How does Giselle save him? She gets him to dance with her until dawn.)
The choreography for the corps is so strong and was so well delivered July 7 (led by Melissa Thomas and an astounding Zhong-Jing Fang, whose arching back created a maelstrom of conflicting feelings with every arabesque) that they became a sisterhood: a positive thing in itself, whatever its purpose. Once she's finished saving her lover, Giselle won't ever belong. For a ghostly eternity, she will be a pariah to the women and apart from the man. That she will always be in his heart hardly matters since it won't be within reach.
The sisterhood, with deputies Melissa Thomas and Zhong-Jing Fang in front
As lead Wili Myrta, Gillian Murphy underscored how much these women had lost. In her opening solo, she introduced the tribe with a steely chill: after bourreeing in and out of view like the wraith she is, she stopped dead in a perfect 90 degree arabesque, sharp and fine like a sword. But the bourrees, and the arms she wreathed around her torso, were so soft and sensual that you heard the music's pathos. Murphy brought into focus how Myrta's lethal resolve arises out of great disappointment. (This is what an actor-dancer can do: illuminate the story.)
I was also struck by the symmetry of Giselle and Albrecht's romanceful dancing in Act I. It's rare that a ballerina and her cavalier perform the same steps. He's usually consigned to the heavy lifting that allows her to float, plus some big jumps and turns. But in this 1841 ballet they leap and hop together. It's such a nice Romantic touch, that despite the unevenness of their stations (he a prince, she a peasant), in love they dance alike. Forward to the Revolution!
Even in the tag-team endurance test that makes up most of Act II, Albrecht and Giselle do versions (inversions, really) of each other's steps: her ghostly two-footed hops (up and up and up and up!) and backward-moving ronde de jamb hops echo his cabriole beats and forward slides into assemble-entrechats. In the final moments, when they have come full circle, they return to mirroring each other. They once played together without a shadow of doubt. Now again there are no doubts, but many shadows.
Nina Ananiashvili came into her own in the second act. She was bright, soft, determined, and a bit frightened by her own ghostly shell. Angel Corella has always been spectacular in the final scenes, but it was hard not to giggle when he'd throw himself recklessly into a turn and still manage a kabillion revolutions before the bar of music was out. You weren't watching Albrecht, desperate for his life. You were watching cocksure Corella. Now when he's closing in on dawn, he doesn't look like he could get up and run through the whole trial again. And when Giselle leaves him to make his way back to life, it's not a moment of triumph or defeat but of acquiescence: he's alive, but the woman he's finally convinced he loves is gone. As the curtain falls, Corella looks out at us without relief or hope and walks with a steady, slow gait toward the lip of the stage.
American Ballet Theatre should do "Giselle" every summer. Though surely the ballet has survived because it is better than most from the Romantic era, it makes me want to see some others, even ones in at least irregular rotation, such as "La Fille Mal Gardee" (how is the version by Nijinska, that latter-day revolutionary?) and "La Sylphide" (which I've never seen ABT do, though know they have not long ago. Perhaps if their latest version isn't up to snuff, they could work out some sort of exchange with Nikolaj Hubbe, new Royal Danish Ballet head: you can have our best Fokine --"Petrushka" and "Les Sylphides"--for your "La Sylphide.")
I'm grateful for how much dance matters to the "Giselle" libretto and how the ballet spares us the divertissements of the late 19th century that neither advance the story nor its themes, as well as the rickety remains of imperial thinking, such as those balletified folk numbers that invite us to play kings, queens, dukes, and duchesses and imagine the world as our precious oyster. However much "Giselle" is a fairytale, the core of the drama is real--not just that an aristocratic cad takes advantage of a woman and a peasant, but also that desire isn't predictable, that he thought she wouldn't matter but she did; that he thought he knew what joy was, but he didn't, not until she showed up.
And it complements the other emancipations that Romantics wrote about, rallied for, or at least sympathized with: the idea of elective affinities--a wonder about the phenomenology of desire; the notion that feeling is inherently uncapturable and even unabatable, like the Sylphide whose dancing her lover James can't control without destroying her; the terror and triumph of the mob, the clan, the folk, the nation (a new idea, nationhood); the yearnings for nature, for natural man, for exchanging places with creatures (nightingales, sylphs, women and peasants [oops!]) who have no idea about this "I think, therefore I am" credo of the Enlightenment (without which there would have been no Rights of Man, sure, and the Romantics knew it): the Romantics believed in extending dignity even to those who didn't think, or at least not like them.
Granted, Petipa-Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake," from the late 19th century, has all the supernatural elements of "La Sylphide" or "Giselle." There's a swan-woman, fickle royalty, the unpredictability of love. But this lady swan is a queen from the start. She's like Cinderella, who may look like a char girl but at heart is an aristocrat, while her wicked stepsisters are hopelessly bourgeois--gauche because striving. Odette the swan queen's evil double, Odile, is also ambitious. She has no idea how to be demure: she is a brazen hussy. Plus, those ballroom interludes of ethnic dances had long lost whatever sense they once had of celebrating nations budding out of fragmented former empires and became a memento to a Czarist audience who were voyeurs of the world.
I don't think it's an accident that you can trace the most glorious moments of the late 19th century ballets back to Romantic precedent: the morbid Kingdom of the Shades in Petipa's "La Bayadere," where the fickle warrior Solor dreams of an infinite peace far outside any kingdom's grasp (like Keats' anguished poet, De Quincey's opium eater, and the dejected Coleridge, seeing in the moon a "cloudless, starless lake of blue," Solor is half in love with death); or Lev Ivanov's chorus of swans in "Swan Lake" or snowflakes in "Nutcracker," who embody the grace where swan and dancer meet, where nature and culture merge; or the fairy solos at the birthday party in Petipa's "The Sleeping Beauty," in which each fairy bestows on baby Aurora her own unique gift--as unique as each of our pursuits of happiness. Together the fairies' gifts make up a whole that is greater, even, than the sum of its marvelously idiosyncratic parts.
For your viewing pleasure, here are the final moments of ABT's 1977 "Giselle," with Baryshnikov as Albrecht, Natalia Makarova as Giselle, and Martine Van Hamel (who performs character roles with the company these days--and she's terrific) as Myrta. Baryshnikov interprets the ending very differently than Corella. He piles petals in his arms only to shed them like tears: life and happiness don't last is the tragic fact he can't get out from under as the ballet comes to a close.
Here's a minute of the audience going crazy at the July 7 curtain calls.
MORE on Foot: For more on the "terror and triumph of the mob," see Paul Parish's incredible post from spring 2007, in which he discusses ballets by Eugene Loring, Bournonville, Forsythe, and several other choreographers. Related is a multipart discussion between Paul, Brian Seibert, and me on the corps in Balanchine's "Serenade" (and the effect of the ensemble size in his "Liebeslieder Walzer")
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment