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Flash Review 1, 1-2:
Orgy at the Opera
Petrouchka is Dead, Long Live Petrouchka
By Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2002 The Dance Insider
PARIS -- From the heartbreaking
performance of Laurent Hilaire in Mikhail Fokine's "Petrouchka"
to the heartbreaking -- for different reasons -- new Blanca Li,
ballet as MTV pageant take on "Scheherazade" -- everything that
could be right, and everything that is oh so wrong with ballet today
was on parade at the Garnier Friday night on the Paris Opera Ballet.
The answer to the ongoing question, "How can we make ballet relevant?"
is NOT "by bringing in bad girls like Blanca Li to re-cast all our
classics through the vogue sensibility of Madonna." It lies rather
in valuing the traditions we have by presenting them with vitality.
As seen in her "Scheherazade," anyway, Blanca Li is a poseur who
would present a voguing Scheherazade (complete with ballet dancer
stiff undulations) and an orgy denuded of any lurking threat of
death as Modern. Fokine, on the other hand, was a true ballet and
dance revolutionary who took a perhaps tired vocabulary and revitalized
it, re-inventing it for each and every ballet he made, wringing
everything out of the human body and out of the map of movement
possibilities, particularly in mime, as Hilaire wrung every possibility
out of what Fokine left him. As seen Friday, anyway, the Opera's
current Diaghilev tribute program -- also including Nijinksky's
"L'Apres-Midi d'un Faune" and Jerome Robbins's "Afternoon of a Faun"
-- was entirely a split decision.
Like the David
Parsons-American Ballet Theatre "Pied Piper," the Li - Paris
Opera collaboration on a new ballet to the rocking Rimski-Korsakov
score most famously choreographed to by Fokine is a good idea gone
bad. Across Europe -- and even in the States, where her
solo show "Zap! Zap! Zap!" was a hit of last Spring's NYC France
Moves festival -- Li is the current choreographic It girl. At 37,
she's already opened her own nightclub in Spain, her own studios
in Paris, choreographed and acted in a film by Pedro Almodovar,
sung risque back-up for Malcolm McLaren, and mounted shows in Paris's
Red Light district. Receiving little public funding in a climate
where there really is no infrastructure for private donations, Li
has nonetheless triumphed, establishing herself and her company
as a major contemporary dance presence in France. She begins a tenure
this year as dance director of the Berlin Comic Opera, is currently
finishing a film, and had previously worked with POB etoile Monique
Loudieres. In short, POB dance director Brigitte Lefevre could hardly
NOT have invited Li to work with the Opera if she didn't want to
be accused of being hopelessly out of date with the contemporary
scene!
With that preamble, then
-- that there are no bad actors here -- what the finished product
reveals is a dreadful lack of understanding of what makes a ballet
like "Scheherazade" tick, an appalling disregard for the intent
of Rimski-Korsakov's music, a confusing of drama with pageantry,
and, on a program with such a well-preserved Fokine masterpiece
as "Petrouchka," an embarrassment to the Opera as well as to Li.
Of course, a decision
to abandon the original Alexander Benois libretto is artistically
valid. But what Li has done, perversely, is retain the orgiastic
elements of Benois's book for the original Fokine production, and
jettison the tragic denouement which makes what comes before more
than just a gratuitous orgy. And even a gratuitous orgy, if played
to the hilt (a la Mark Dendy in "The Wild Party" ) would have been
a game try, but the orgy to which Li pretty much reduces the plot
is a tepid one, more like a chaste slumber party.
But let's back up. What
Benois and Fokine came up with, as recounted by Balanchine in his
"Stories of the Great Ballets" (Doubleday, 1954, edited by Francis
Mason), is this: Scheherazade is of course the spinner of tales
who spins them to avoid being killed by the King or Sultan. "Scheherazade"
the ballet, the original, takes one of her tales and runs with it.
To reduce it to the essential plot points: Zobeide, the favorite
concubine of King Shahriar, cheats on him as soon as he goes off
(supposedly) to a hunt. She and the other harem women convince the
chief eunuch to admit the slaves to their chamber, including the
Favorite Slave, Zobeide's lover. A ribald orgy ensues. But the king
isn't really away; it's all a ruse devised by his scheming brother
to catch Zobeide in the act of cheating on him. This they do, returning
unexpectedly. Everybody is killed -- most vividly the Favorite Slave
-- until only Zobeide remains. The king waivers as she pleads; finally,
as the king's soldiers move towards her, she pulls out a dagger
and stabs herself in the belly. As Balanchine writes: "Her body
doubles up over her arm. She is dead. The men drop their swords.
Shahriar raises his arms in despair and weeps over her. His pride
seems as nothing compared to his lost love."
In other words -- it's
a tragedy. Li totally misses this. As she re-envisions the story,
after some silly business with, alternately, group dances by the
women and then the men, and a brief moment of Zabeide moping in
what looks like a lavish cell, we get your basic orgy. It's not
particularly clear if the male protagonist, played last Friday by
Jose Martinez, is the king or the Favorite Slave. Martinez's bonhommie
and Delphine Moussin's incredible, soft liquidity as Zobeide save
their prolonged duet from seeming like just so much gymnastics.
The intertwining of limbs (Moussin stretching a leg up to rest on
Martinez's shoulder, for example) and Herculean lifts (he on the
ground lifting her up fully) might seem, if seen on paper, just
tricks. But both these dancers -- particularly Moussin -- have a
way of making the physically impossible seem natural. LIke Helene
Alexopoulos of New York City Ballet, Moussin makes the stage seem
her natural element, and even the most extenuated moves seem human.
Yet even the charm of
these two stars can't stave off annoyance and perplexity when the
music arches to sinister crescendos and you can almost see the king
or some dangerous force rushing in, and instead there's just more
romping around on the 50 or so pastel pillows strewn about the stage.
I'd have been ready to surrender myself to a full-scale romp --
combining the heat of flamenco, the psychological intensity of Graham,
and the emotional pull of ballet, all of which Li supposedly has
at her disposal -- but instead we get a g-rated high school dance.
It's an orgy that doesn't want to be one -- even to the point of
Moussin's flesh-colored leotard. (Let's see the real thing or, let's
see a more suggestive or enticing costume.) Even as orgy, in other
words, it doesn't deliver.
In other words, there's
no pay-off -- dramatically or spectacularly. This seems so basic
that I shouldn't have to say it, but what makes love and romance
and sex thrilling on an operatic stage is either it's scale or it's
cost. The only cost here is that associated with Christian Lacroix's
bright costumes. (Red and mostly a success for the women, despite
the bizarre antennae-feathers projecting from their turbans; rather
gay for the men, in corsets with their meaty thighs revealed.)
But the costumes, at
least, are in the spirit of the Leon Bakst originals, which set
off a fashion trend in the Paris of 1910. Not so Li's choreography
or libretto. In 1904, proposing a set of reforms to the Imperial
Theatre in Moscow (and as recounted by Balanchine), Fokine wrote
that "Dancing should be interpretative. It should not degenerate
into mere gymnastics. The dance should explain the spirit of the
action in the spectacle.... It should express the whole epoch to
which the subject of the ballet belongs. For such interpretative
dancing, the music must be equally inspired. In place of the old-time
waltzes, polkas, pizzicati and gallops, it is necessary to create
a form of music which expresses the same emotion as that which inspires
the movements of the dancer. The ballet must no longer be made up
of 'numbers,' 'entries,' and so on. It must show artistic unity
of conception..... Ballet must have complete unity of expression,
a unity which is made up of a harmonious blending of the three elements
-- music, painting, and plastic art."
If Li's "Scheherazade"
doesn't quite degenerate into gymnastics, it does degenerate into
spectacle for its own sake -- and not very shocking spectacle at
that. It is loud without making a statement. Perhaps it does explain
a disturbing if not yet dominant trend in our epoch, where celebrity
is mistaken for achievement. While the music is of course inspired,
Li's fealty to it is only of the most generalized sort; both music
and movement are rapid and florid. There is little artistic unity,
either of plot or choreography. Much of the pre-show hype was about
the range of Li's influences, she hailing from the flamenco-land
of Andalusia, and then having studied at the Graham and Ailey schools.
But with all three of these caches, she uses only the most obvious
gestures. The men, lead by Martinez in their section, stomp, with
Martinez assuming an authentic flamenco glower as he raises his
hands above his head in a flourish; the woman and Moussin in particular
weave their hands; I suppose there are some contractions, but solely
for attempted erotic effect; the costumes are bright as we might
see in an Ailey company production, but the dancers, with the exception
of the supple Moussin, don't have any of the sinuousness that is
at the heart of the Ailey style. (Particularly embarrassing Friday
was Laure Muret's Scheherazade, constantly called on to undulate
her bare belly and hips, only to reinforce the stereotype of the
stiff-torsoed ballet dancer.)
I still think that Lefevre
has artistic vision to spare; but the real test of whether she has
artistic taste will be whether this "Scheherazade" remains in the
repertoire, or is quietly retired to the Old Concubines Home....
While we're speaking
of Fokine, he also wrote that his so-called New Ballet, "in developing
the principle of expressiveness, advances from the expressiveness
of face to the expressiveness of the whole body, and from the expressiveness
of the individual body to the expressiveness of a group of bodies
and the expressiveness of the combined dancing of a crowd."
At some of our prominent
ballet companies -- most notoriously American Ballet Theatre --
crowd expressivness has been replaced by milling about. What a joy,
then, it was to see how every single dancer Friday -- from the corps
member playing a drunken cossack to star Laurent Hilaire -- embodied
and gave life to Fokine's chestnut "Petrouchka," to Stravinsky's
music. My eyes watered and my chin dropped and my mouth opened in
wonder as I beheld it all, post-Christmas, from the third row, center.
Compressed by flats suggesting a large puppet stage (like the costumes
and rest of the decor, after Benois's in 1948 from his designs for
the 1911 original, for which he co-wrote the libretto with Stravinsky)
into a pretty small area, and that sloping downward because of the
raked Garnier stage, the entire cast conjured a festive public square,
circa winter 1830, in St. Petersburg.
Fokine talked about developing
specific choreographies for each ballet, rather than just working
with a set classical vocabulary, and his ingeniousness was well
explained by the POB dancers. For example, the cossack dance is
given as if not by virile, toned 20-year-old ballet dancers, but
by fat, truly drunk, even middle-aged soldiers. They appear randomly,
arms linked, sliding across the stage, one occasionally breaking
ranks to pinch and chase a townswoman. As the head of the cossacks,
Yong Geol Kim embodied this spontaneity. And as a leading townswoman
who is left alone on the stage swooning and overcome by a simple
tune at one moment, and later flirts with the cossack, Beatrice
Martel could give a schooling in how to play these soubrettes naturally
and honestly, without panning or indicating; not just miming characteristics,
but becoming a character. In the brio department, Muriel Kamionka
and Cecile Sciaux set the tone early on as rival dancers vying for
scarce coins from the spectators. In more "character" parts, Bruno
Bouche as "Le Diable," in devil creature costume, and a whole menagerie
of "Parade"-scale large animals also gave fresh readings to what
could have devolved to stereotypes.
But it was Hilaire, as
Petrouchka, who in one dancer embodied everything that is dance's
potential to transport us and touch us and move us to empathy, and
how a dancer can use his body to effect this. Petrouchka, of course,
is the puppet with a human spirt who seems to come to life, only
long enough to be killed by a human-puppet rival, the Moor or Le
Maure, in a fight over another human puppet, the Ballerina. This
story requires the actor-dancer who plays him to be able at once
to embody the physical attributes and limits of a puppet, and, to
an elevated extreme, the spirit of a human, a man, trying to break
through those limits. We see this in the way that, for instance,
crumpled and collapsed on the floor after pleading with a picture
of his master the charlatan, first his fingers start to flex, and
that ripple shoots through his whole body, as if a motor hand been
turned on and a machine slowly sprung to life. We see it again when,
not knowing his own strength, throwing himself instinctively (but
without really a plan) against the wall of his chamber, he suddenly
breaks through, his head is stuck there, the rest of his body behind,
and the expression in his pausing corps is "Um, okay, what now?"
He can't think ahead because, well, he can't think.
But he can act, and later,
he interrupts a tryst between the Moor and the Ballerina (Elisabeth
Maurin, in a rote performance) when his body, from head to waist,
suddenly bursts, at what seems an impossible, sideways jack in the
box angle, through the Moor's doorway upstage, leaning towards the
other couple at a right angle to his offstage waist, his mouth in
a silent scream, his arm jutting towards thems with their fingers
splayed.
Then finally -- and,
damned if he isn't on those chilling final Stravinsky shrill horn
notes -- we see it when, after he's apparently been macheted by
the Moor, replaced by a (dead) truly stuffed puppet, he suddenly
appears on the roof of the puppet stage, first wildly, spastically
straining his arms to the moon before he collapses over the ledge,
his arms dangling and twitching as the curtain falls.
This is tragedy, brought
to us by a choreographer who knew what it meant and how to summon
it in the bodies of dancers, and enacted by one of our few dancers
who knows that mime is but a tool for the human spirit, not just
an acting device. That, indeed, mime movements should be invested
with as much spirit and energy and physical force and conviction
is the most difficult, "impressive" "pure dance" move.
There can't be more than
a handful of these dancers around, at least on the ballet stage,
and at least that I've seen. Another is David Justin of the Birmingham
Royal Balllet, still another Robert La Fosse at the NYC Ballet.
Joanna Berman, too, at San Francisco Ballet, understands this. But
all of these dancers are close to retirement age. However, there
is some hope for the future, principally (that I'm aware of() in
Wilfried Romoli. Having already turned in one career-making turn
as Quasimoto in the POB's production of Roland Petit's "Notre Dame
de Paris," Romoli turned in another Friday s the Moor. His dance
with the coconut in his chamber -- first, bored, rolling it down
his legs, then trying to figure out what it is, then trying to figure
how to open it -- was deliciously prolongued. And it set up the
moment when he pauses, tempted by the visiting Ballerina, to consider
which fruit he'd rather taste. This is a dancer who knows what stylization
means, and who, unafraid to make a fool of himself, gives over his
entire body and spirit to the attempt. In our age, where "character
dancer" is often a euphemism for "he/she's past their prime, but
we have to give them something to do," Romoli, like Justin, reminds
us of the dramatic power wielded by a character dancer who can still,
um, dance, and with verve.
Less verve-a-licious,
to say the least, is Karl Paquette. I really thought that the vacuity
which left a valiant Moussin all alone when he partnered her in
"La Bayadere" would serve him in Robbins's "Faun," concerned as
it is with two ballet dancers infatuated with their own images in
the mirror of a dance studio. But Paquette appears not to have the
capacity to get this; his one expression to the mirror was one of
perplexity, i.e. "What is it?" Like Moussin, Paquette's partner
this time, Juliette Gernez, persevered despite being more alone
than even the choreographer intended. She not only got the narcissistic
fascination Robbins intended, but also revealed to me -- I love
when this happens! -- something I hadn't seen before, despite seeing
some top flight dancers (Kyra Nichols, Darcie Kistler) in this role.
When the man broke through his self-absorption and turned away from
the mirror, to her, planting a kiss on her cheek, Gernez registered
not just puzzlement, but a change. It was this kiss that prompted
her to leave, that turned her away from the mirror, and that she
held on to, her hand to the cheek as she walks delicately on pointe
offstage, until even her image from behind the scrim was gone.
As for the original --
Nijinksy's "L'Apres-midi d'un Faune," choreographed in 1912 to the
same Debussy music -- oy lah lah. Done right -- as in the Joffrey's
contemporary revival -- this piece can still be seen as what it
was intended (visually): a frieze, or series of friezes. While the
friezes are two-dimensional, though, the encounter between the faune
and the nymphs shouldn't be. Yann Bridard played the faune as the
most lightweight, superficial queen. When he took the main Nymph's
scarve and nuzzled it, what I thought of most was a cross-dressing
teenager sniffing his mother's underwear. Queenie is an appropriate
choice for this role, but it's got to be played to the hilt. The
lack of conviction brought to the assignment by Bridard left both
Amelie Lamoureux's Nymph -- she looked the part, but the lack of
electricity with Bridard left up in the air -- and, more importantly,
the ballet dangling. In his hands, it was reduced to a triteness
which, contrary to the otherwise laudable aim of this program, is
more a disservice than a tribute to the memories of both Diaghilev
and Nijinsky.
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