No, no—Bournonville can’t be reporting from Petersburg one hundred thirty years ago; he must have been at the Met these past couple of weeks, watching the Bolshoi’s current versions of two of those ballets, Don Quixote and La Fille du Pharaon (The Pharaoh’s Daughter). True, the corps didn’t have two hundred members. It didn’t even have the seventy-two dancers in Pharaoh who, the historian Krasovskaya tells us, “bore flower baskets on their heads from which small children emerged in the finale.” But it had everything else, from a prancing monkey to a dead lion to a giant killer asp to coffins that suddenly tilted up, revealing the mummies inside, as in a Dracula movie. And it certainly had the same applauding audience, presumably transported intact across time and space to cheer the same feats of “bravura.”
Pharaoh was the turning point in Petipa’s career—it stayed in the repertory for more than half a century after its triumphant premiere in 1862. But who knows what such great dancers as Kschessinska and Pavlova were actually dancing when they appeared in it? The original ballet has been more or less lost, and the version we’ve just been exposed to is the recent creation of Pierre Lacotte, who has performed the same disservice for Paquita and La Sylphide. Ignoring the few existing clues to what Petipa actually did, he has started from scratch, or rather (as the program puts it) has based his work on “motifs from the ballet of the same name by Marius Petipa,” one of those motifs being the story itself: English explorer in Egypt falls into an opium trance and finds himself back in Ancient Times transformed into Ta-Hor, in love with Aspicia, the Pharaoh’s Daughter. And then—hours later—he wakes up and, guess what, it was all a dream!
I would state categorically that Lacotte’s Pharaoh’s Daughter is the dopiest classical ballet I’ve ever seen, but it’s possible I’ve wiped potential rivals from my memory, the way we’re told (though I don’t believe it) women forget labor pains.
Monsieur Lacotte, imported from Paris, would seem to believe he’s improved on Petipa, but all he’s got going for him is his chutzpah. He can’t choreograph for the corps—everything’s confused and clichéd; important action is blocked (could anyone actually see Ta-Hor shooting that mangy lion?); he’s completely lacking in dance invention; he doesn’t characterize—Aspicia and Ta-Hor are the blandest couple in all balletdom; there’s no urgency (or coherence) to the narrative—it’s just endless stretches of generic dance, with constant changes of costumes. And speaking of costumes, they (as well as the pathetic sets) are also by M. Lacotte, and they make the dancers look like those imitation-Erté figurines that live in the windows of going-out-of-business stores.
At the first performance, the beautiful Svetlana Zakharova, newly defected from the Kirov, was Aspicia—as beautiful as ever, with those amazingly arched feet, those endless limbs, that small, perfect head, that strong technique. Luckily, she couldn’t sneak her outrageous hyper-extended kicks into ancient Egypt, but she made up for it with her relentless smile, her calculated wooing of the audience (this tendency was even more pronounced in Don Quixote). Her best moments came in the underwater vision scene, in a simple, lyrical solo, with no Ta-Hor to get in the way. As for poor Ta-Hor, the role lacks any defining characteristic other than a bare chest, but Nikolai Tsiskaridze’s touchingly naive effeminacy gave him (and us) something to hold on to.
What can the Bolshoi have been thinking? On top of the rest, the ghastly score, by Pugni, only pointed up the vast superiority of Ludwig Minkus’s Don Quixote. (Those who deride Minkus got what they deserved.) I suppose the powers-that-be were thinking box office, and they were right: There was standing room only at the Met and the usual bravos, bravas, and bravis from a largely Russian-émigré audience.
It’s to the credit of the Bolshoi’s new artistic director, Alexei Ratmansky, that this ersatz resurrection of The Pharaoh’s Daughter was taken aboard before he was. Far more important: Ratmansky himself choreographed the one unclouded artistic success of the company’s season, a brand-new version of an ill-fated ballet from the 1930s, The Bright Stream. It sounded ominous—fun and romance on a Soviet collective farm—but it turned out to be sunny, funny, modest, pleasing.
The heroine is young Zina, “the Bright Stream Collective’s morale officer,” living contentedly among the wheat sheaves with her husband, Pyotr. A troupe of performers arrives from Moscow to entertain The Workers (you see their little train passing by, puffing smoke). Among the performers is The Ballerina, and it turns out that she and Zina were at ballet school together! What’s more, Zina—not even her husband knows she was a dancer—is just as good as she ever was, whipping off fouettés and matching The Ballerina jeté for jeté. (So much for dancers having to keep in shape.) Pyotr is quickly flirting with his wife’s old friend, and the rest of the plot deals with his mild comeuppance—there’s a touch of La Fille Mal Gardée, a touch of Coppélia, a touch of The Marriage of Figaro, yet it adds up to its own charmingly realized world.
You’d have to know more than I do about the Soviet Union in the mid-1930s to understand why Stalin shut down this ballet, with its amiable Shostakovich score. Perhaps collective farms were too serious a matter to be made into comic ballets. But Stalin’s loss is our gain. With its generous array of character roles—the schoolgirl, the milkmaid (who jauntily milks the five fingers of the faux-cow), the “Anxious-To-Appear-Younger-Than-She-Is Wife” and her put-upon husband, the tractor driver (who doubles as a doggy), the accordion player, et al.—The Bright Stream rushes along on its merry way, its individual bits of schtick perhaps too extended, but all of them cleverly carried out and amusing.
I won’t try to explain why The Ballerina’s partner gets himself up like a Sylphide, or why The Ballerina turns up in male drag—the important thing is that Ratmansky has made a cohesive whole out of drag and cow and ballerina and the Toonerville Trolley. And unlike Lacotte, he understands his corps and knits it joyously into the fabric of the ballet. Although there’s nothing Bournonville-like about the manner of The Bright Stream, Bournonville might well have approved: Like his own ballets, it creates a real world with real people who are believable as lovers, friends, and members of a community.
The first Zina was the ravishingly charming, fragile-seeming Svetlana Lunkina, whom Ratmansky promoted to principal dancer during the curtain calls—a highly popular move. But the second Zina, Anastasia Yatsenko, was also entrancing—the company’s depth is formidable. The two guys who took the drag role were both brilliant on pointe and wildly funny—our old friend Tsiskaridze could melt into the Trocks at a moment’s notice. The Bright Stream isn’t in the same league as Ashton’s La Fille Mal Gardée, but arriving unheralded in the middle of the Bolshoi’s boom-boom season, it was precious balm, particularly coming, as it did, after the unspeakable Spartacus, a very different kettle of Soviet kitsch.
Spartacus has always been a smash success, with its unspeakably vulgar Khachaturian score, its agitprop posings and posturings, its noble slaves and wicked Romans, its endless opportunities for the most blatant kind of heroics: Stalwart men leap and leap and leap, brandishing swords and muscles. There’s a loving, long-suffering heroine, a vicious vamp of a villainess, a nasty Roman general, and, of course, the quintessential Stalinist hero, Spartacus, who manages to destroy all his followers as well as himself. The Kremlin has always liked this one, New York has always cheered its pyrotechnics, and the fans from Brighton Beach were in seventh heaven.
As for the Don Q, it made almost no sense, but there were so many terrific character dancers flaunting their fans and swirling their ruffled skirts that it hardly mattered. So what if you couldn’t tell who was who, or why all those gypsies were carrying on, or why Kitri, the innkeeper’s daughter, and Basil, the barber, were getting married in a palace, or why the ballet had no big climax but ended with the famous pas de deux. You were looking, maybe, for narrative integrity? We did get Petipa’s beautiful vision scene, replete with dryads and a thrilling short variation by a very young new girl, Natalia Osipova, whose body is problematic but whose open, flying jump
s and eager spirit were electrifying. Zakharova, in the lead, did all the right things—her technique doesn’t falter, except (like that of most of her colleagues) in supported turns—but she’s really not a Kitri; her flamboyance is pasted on, not natural to her: She’s at her best in more lyrical ballets like La Bayadère and Swan Lake. Far better suited to the role is the company’s splendid workhorse, Maria Alexandrova, who has the necessary push and thrust and—yes—bravura, tearing through space with her tremendous jeté.
You can’t really familiarize yourself with a major company by watching half a dozen performances of four ballets—you only get a superficial sense of who’s who and what’s what. On the basis of the Bolshoi’s two-week visit, I see a company with a split aesthetic, trying to decide what it wants to be. How many more obscure Petipa ballets can be exhumed and tarted up? How much Soviet-period stuff is worth reviving? Can Ratmansky build on his success with The Bright Stream? (His Cinderella has had a mixed reception abroad.)
There’s a basic problem here. With the exception of the sublime Ulanova (like Zakharova, imported from the Kirov), the Bolshoi’s stock in trade has long been its explosive Übermensch, with ballerinas to match—the consummately flamboyant Maya Plisetskaya, after all, was for years its emblematic dancer (and the greatest of all Kitris). Now, in a post-Soviet world, the company has begun catching up—to Balanchine, in particular. What will happen if good taste, long its missing ingredient, begins to manifest itself? Will the company lose its innocence—and its doggedly retro-Soviet audience? Cautiously, Ratmansky is feeling his way. Who would have believed that the Bolshoi would ever be giving us guys got up as Sylphides? Meanwhile, despite its schizophrenic repertory, it’s in excellent shape and well worth looking at: It’s got strong dancers, conviction, pizzazz—and lots of beautiful girls.
The New York Observer
AUGUST 8, 2005
The French on a Vivaldi Spree
Question: What’s an hour and a half long (without intermission), driven by Concept, and set to Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons?
Answer: Either of two ballets that have just had their Paris premieres.
NICOLAS LE RICHE’S Caligula, in fact, has just had its world premiere—though I doubt it’s going to see much of the world beyond the Paris Opéra.
You might think it was either a daring idea or a crackpot idea to set a ballet about Caligula to Vivaldi, but it’s neither: We’re just too accustomed, in our post-Balanchine world, to ballets that are motored by their music. As it turns out, The Four Seasons is there for a historical reason. You see, Caligula reigned for almost four years, and each year gets a Season of its own—his inevitable death coincides with darkest winter. Otherwise, the music is of minor relevance: Yes, it keeps things going, but like the set and the costumes, it’s an extra—subordinate to the Big Idea.
And what is that Big Idea? It’s that Caligula was not just your ordinary young psychopathic tyrant, murderous, treacherous, caring only for the great mime Mnester and the horse Incitatus (who had his own palace and may even have been made a Senator); no, he was a kind of poet. “The Caligula who interests me,” says M. Le Riche, “is the creator who pursues his dream to its utmost limit.” In other words, he’s a French intellectual.
The very extensive, informative program notes bear this out. Suetonius is on hand to provide a few hard facts, but the big guns are Roland Barthes and Nietzsche. And Racine: Guillaume Gallienne, the dramaturge, explains that Caligula is structured like a Racinian tragedy, obeying the fundamental rules of the classical stage: the unities of time, place, and action. Caligula, you see, is a tragic hero—“He is fundamentally alone.”
There’s no disputing the intelligence at work in all this, but it’s all in the head. On the stage is an ordinary, thin spectacle, undistinguished by any choreographic originality and conveying nothing. There are eight Senators in Planet of the Apes getup (two of them are women, a touch that doesn’t come from Suetonius), and eight female “followers,” two of whom are men. When Caligula comes slowly, slowly down a giant set of stairs in his tight, brief red costume with white markings on the front, you can tell there’s something wrong. Everyone’s scared, and you would be, too, if your Emperor were making horrible faces at you and pushing you around.
Caligula was performed by a handsome young dancer named Jérémie Bélingard, and he’s as delicious a Roman tidbit as we’ve encountered since Tony Curtis in Kubrick’s Spartacus. (He should be careful, though: Hunky can quickly turn to chunky.) Most of his long role is taken up with gesturing, posturing, and emoting, punctuated by extended off-center balances, a few bursts of explosive movement, and several intimate pas de deux with La Lune (The Moon, to you), who invades Caligula’s imagination and “stands for his vision of inaccessible love.” She’s danced convincingly by Clairemarie Osta, but there’s not much for her to do except tangle with him on the floor and be wafted on high in a few ballet lifts that are so standard they’re beyond banal. Steps are not M. Le Riche’s strong point.
The scene with the horse (Gil Isoart) has some charm, as Caligula tenderly leads him around the stage at the end of a long ribbon (there’s a metal bit in his mouth). At one point, the young emperor drags the two female Senators up the stairs and out of sight, and when he brings them back, they’re much the worse for wear—now we understand why Le Riche has planted women in the Senate. One of the Senators is casually murdered and left lying on the stage for quite a while. You don’t know why until you read in the program notes that Caligula, when he killed people, liked to smell the odors of their decaying bodies—he’d only let them be carted off when the air around them grew suffocating. Oh, those poets!
Eventually, the Emperor himself is assassinated, though even here the drama is dissipated. A lot of people stab him upstage and run away, and after standing there apparently unscathed, he staggers downstage and collapses. Blackout. Curtain.
The group dances are dance-by-numbers; the solos are oy vey. Most interesting are the extended passages for Mnester, all in white, who comes on with other mysterious figures in the breaks between the four seasons (to some “création électroacoustique” by Louis Dandrel) and performs very deliberate and slow gestures, interrupted by a single, sudden double air turn—who knows why?
Because Mnester is performed by the Opéra’s finest dancer, Laurent Hilaire, your attention is held. This is an artist of the first rank—slim, elegant, focused, intense; there’s a little Anthony Dowell in him, a little Peter Boal, but the sharp mind is his own. Under the inexplicable rules of the Opéra, Hilaire has “officially” retired now that he’s forty-two. Luckily, he’s already working as a ballet master, and we can hope that he’ll be able to pass along to the next generation his exemplary dedication and comportment.
It’s easy to poke fun at all this overthink and underdance, but credit should be given where it’s due. Caligula is without value, but it’s not vulgar Eurotrash; its creators just mistake intelligence for talent and concepts for ballets. But where would someone like Le Riche—he’s a popular young star of the company, and this is his first work of substance—have learned otherwise? There’s no recent choreographic tradition here to build on—no Balanchine, no Ashton, not even a Robbins, a Tudor, or a MacMillan. And so the Opéra alternates between this kind of expensive, efficient, meaningless story-concept ballet and the predictable imports: Forsythe, Trisha Brown, and, like just about every serious ballet company in the world today, Balanchine. A revival of Jewels premieres this week.
As for the second new ballet to The Four Seasons, at the Théâtre de la Ville, it’s by Angelin Preljocaj, and it’s actually called The Four Seasons. It’s also far more interesting and alive than its rival. Preljocaj is an experienced choreographer, and although he also lives and dies by The Concept, his current work doesn’t rest on an intellectual concept but a visual one. For more than ninety minutes, a succession of outré costumes and objects comes into view—most of them surprising and many of them witty. There’s a hail of sponges from above,
and a weird pair of dancers got up as porcupines—or are they hedgehogs? There are two fellows in cellophane, and a group covered from head to toe in Kermit green. (“Hi, Greenie,” one of them says—in English, “it’s me.” “Oh, you’re so green! You’re the greenest!”) There’s a pair of black stiletto pumps that falls to earth, and Spongeman, and a couple in white masks that are attached to each other at the nose, and a girl in a bikini—you get the picture.
None of this would be more than decoration if Preljocaj wasn’t also demonstrating a certain gift for actual choreography, for meaningful encounter through expressive movement. Again and again, people confront each other, sometimes in naked antagonism, plucking at each other’s flesh, sometimes in amity. The dancers have strong, individual looks and personalities—like Mark Morris’s, say. You get interested in them. There’s not much sense of structure to this Four Seasons, but even when things get complicated, they don’t get confused. And good old Vivaldi seems to be on hand for a reason: Preljocaj isn’t the most musical choreographer of our day, but he’s listening. As for his chief collaborator, Fabrice Hyber, who provides the “chaosgraphie” as well as the décor and most of the costumes and props, he has an inventive mind and a goofy sense of fun.
Preljocaj, at least in this work, and in the context of French ballet as a whole, is a solid plus. And he’s come a long way. The Opéra has just been showing his well-known piece from the early nineties, Le Parc (it’s been seen in New York), and it’s in the Caligula tradition: no rotting corpses or Senatorial horses, no Vivaldi (it was Mozart’s turn), but intellectual concept all the way. It’s handsome, it’s suggestive, but it’s dull, dull, dull—again, Laurent Hilaire saved the day, to the extent that it was savable. The fact that Preljocaj has grown more interested in movement and less in thinking is the healthiest thing I can tell you about the state of ballet in Paris today.
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