Near-Death Experiences_And Others

by Robert Gottlieb

  The New York Observer

  OCTOBER 31, 2005

  Peter Martins’s Efficient Swan Lake

  PETER MARTINS’S Swan Lake does its job—it gets people into the theater (all Swan Lakes get people into the theater), and then it gets them out of the theater in only two and a half hours. In other words, it’s efficient, and if efficiency is what you look for in ballet, this is the production for you. If your taste runs to beauty, feeling, resonance, stay home and listen to your favorite recording of Tchaikovsky’s great score. At least you won’t be distracted from it.

  What to make of Act I? In traditional Swan Lakes, it’s Prince Siegfried’s twenty-first-birthday celebration, his coming-of-age. The entire court, from his mother the Queen on down, is on hand. We see the formal world he inhabits—his old, affectionate tutor; the courtiers and peasants who dance to amuse him; his friend Benno, who leads a charming pas de trois for his pleasure; the Queen, who presents him with a crossbow and reminds him that it’s now time for him to marry, as a prince must. There are pretty girls who would be happy to dance with him, if only he wanted to dance with them.

  But we sense that despite the happiness of the occasion, Siegfried is not content or at peace—he’s restless, he’s disaffected, he’s yearning for something beyond all this formality; he’s yearning for a profound love, not one commanded by his mother. And when he hears the first strains of the famous swan theme, he’s off to meet his fate, and his doom.

  For Martins, all this is reduced to a mere divertissement—a series of dances, ably staged, with no content whatsoever. The party, if that’s what it is, is populated by eight couples—“villagers,” the program tells us, though if they’re villagers, why are the men’s costumes in the same style as the Prince’s? And where’s the court? And why are sixteen horribly self-conscious and smirking children trotted on, other than to elicit oohs and aahs from the audience? The indescribably ugly set—dreary colors leaking down a charmless beige background—and the corrosively bilious costumes in rancid greens and oranges add to the general gloom. I think we’re meant to be in some kind of arcade. To cheer things up, there’s a single dark-brown wooden chair for Siegfried. And how to tell that he’s restless, disaffected, yearning? He has absolutely nothing to do or to respond to. The central figure in this act is a totally irrelevant jester, endlessly leaping and cavorting, leeching all possible seriousness from the enterprise.

  And so Act II, the first lakeside act—with more Danish expressionist décor, which as it happens doesn’t really show the lake—comes out of nowhere. There’s been a moment back at the arcade when Siegfried vaguely senses something out there calling, calling. We’re given a quick, untraditional glimpse of the villain, Von Rotbart, luring him on, so that it’s not Siegfried’s own longings that lead to the tragedy but something out of a monster melodrama. Then clunk, clunk, clunk, the arcade dismantles itself and we’re ready for the hunters, the swans, and Odette herself. But since she doesn’t answer to any internal urgency in Siegfried, there’s no emotional content to their meeting, nor is there any mime to explain why she’s there, who she is, or, for that matter, who that nasty creature is, darting around getting in the way. He’s Mr. Orange Cape, that’s who he is, and that’s what Von Rotbart’s entire performance is reduced to.

  Act III, the “black act,” is set in what half a dozen years ago I described as a look-alike for the waiting room of the Poughkeepsie train station—I’ve been back to check, and I got it right. Again, there’s not much of a court to welcome the six princesses on display for the Prince to choose among, and the courtiers on hand are no more interested in them than Siegfried is. On comes Odile, she and Siegfried hurry off, and we’re into the endless divertissement, beginning with a very effective Martins pas de quatre: He’s always good at this kind of classical pastiche, and we soak it up like parched earth. Then the national dances: Hungarian, Russian, Spanish, Neapolitan—it’s like the “Small World” boat ride at Disneyland. They’re mostly standard and well crafted, except for the studiedly “sexy” Russian one, which is endlessly long and tedious and features the unforgettable male costume of little black bolero over bare chest, brocaded tea cozy on the head, and violet skirt above the knee. Who will join me in a class-action suit to rescue the poor guys who have to appear in this ludicrous getup?

  The Black Swan pas de deux rolls in, climaxed by the famous fouettés that everyone’s counting on (and counting): Some ballerinas get through all thirty-two of them, others stop (wisely) at twelve or so. There’s a strange little moment when Rotbart keeps patting and stroking his daughter’s arms and shoulders. What are we meant to think? And then the deed is done: Siegfried pledges himself to the wrong swan, Odile’s perfidy is revealed, and the wicked pair make their (botched) exit. Despair.

  The final act is the closest Martins comes to an imaginative approach to Swan Lake. Siegfried rushes to the lake after Odette, but she makes it clear that they can never be together. Yet somehow their love, though doomed, is enough to destroy Rotbart, and he collapses in a puddle of orange cloak. (I found myself whispering, “What did he die of?” A colleague nearby muttered: “Boredom.”) There’s no struggle between good and evil, there’s no apotheosis, but there’s an exciting mass exit of swans, enveloping Odette and leaving Siegfried behind. It’s far closer to the end of Giselle than of Swan Lake, but the lovers’ being thwarted and the sentencing of Odette to eternal swanness suits Peter Martins’s cynical vision of a Swan Lake that values a jester and an orange cape above the profound claims and dangers of romantic love.

  Is the Martins Swan Lake worth seeing? No. But it’s worth performing, because it gives so many chances to so many demi-soloists, and there’s a big new crop of very capable young girls—and even a few potentially good boys. And in fairness to Peter Martins, I should report that the audience whooped it up for all the jesters. Never underestimate the power of cute.

  The New York Observer

  JANUARY 23, 2006

  A New Sleeping Beauty, a Great Aurora

  A NEW GISELLE? A new Swan Lake? Another day, another dollar. But a new Sleeping Beauty is always an event, and for many reasons. Its score is Tchaikovsky’s greatest, which means ballet’s greatest. Its demands on a ballet company are enormous: huge cast, opulent sets and costumes, a special brand of ballerina, a rigorous and exposed style, a complicated and demanding tradition … and imagination.

  Beauty isn’t like any other ballet. It isn’t, of course, a tragedy or a melodrama, but it’s also not a boy-meets-girl comedy—a Coppélia, a Fille Mal Gardée; those works present their heroines with simple domestic problems, which get predictably resolved. And it’s not a wish-fulfillment fantasy like Cinderella. The Sleeping Beauty, rather, looks at the cycle of life, involves a brush with malignity and death, and gives us a heroine who must awaken to love and sexual experience, and whose trajectory to emotional fulfillment implies the restoration of the entire world to harmony.

  This is no small order, and many—most—productions falter on their way to achieving it. How many great Beautys can we recall? Hardly a man is still alive (can there be any?) who remembers Diaghilev’s extravagant London production of 1921—the production that more or less bankrupted him. Balanchine never attempted a complete Sleeping Beauty, much as he loved it (and referred to it constantly in his work); no Ballet Theater Beauty has ever done the trick; Peter Martins’s compact version misses the glory. There were lovely Kirov performances in the 1960s (with Kolpakova), but the Kirov is now giving us its painstaking and glacial reconstruction of the 1890 original. And the two most recent Royal Ballet attempts have been failures.

  It was the Sadler’s Wells/Royal staging—conceived in 1946 for the post-war reopening of Covent Garden—that became the benchmark for Beautys in the West. In a new book celebrating the Royal’s seventy-fifth anniversary, the British dance critic Zoë Anderson describes it: “The production, designed by Oliver Messel, was a vision of splendour at a time of bitter austerity. Paint and canvas were scarce
, rationing was still in force, coupons had to be found for fabrics, gloves and boots. The Queen’s train was made from somebody’s velvet curtains.… Messel’s sets combined airy architectural fantasy with a sense of place. The soft colours set the dancers off, surrounding them with light and space.… Groupings looked marvelous…” And, of course, it starred Margot Fonteyn in her greatest role.

  It was this same production that three years later, in 1949, opened the famous Sadler’s Wells season in New York, earned the company its international reputation, crowned Fonteyn as a prima ballerina assoluta, and—to be a touch fanciful—kissed classical ballet back to life in America. It’s not only memory, often so treacherous, that keeps it so dear to us; what we have on film confirms its beauty, its style, its musicality, and Fonteyn’s greatness. For years the company toured it in America, until finally it was gone. And nothing on its level has come along to replace it. The Royal’s style eroded; the company’s focus was more and more on the far-from-classical dance-dramas of Kenneth MacMillan; even Frederick Ashton, the company’s great choreographer, was neglected—a pattern that has been reversed in recent years, first under Anthony Dowell, now under Monica Mason.

  As for Beauty, there was a new production in 1968; another (by MacMillan) in 1973; another in 1977; another (by Dowell) in 1994; another (by Makarova) in 2003. Now, only three years later, Monica Mason has brought to America the company’s latest attempt to restore its signature work to its former resplendence.

  Here’s how the credits run: “Choreography by Marius Petipa. Additional Choreography by Frederick Ashton, Anthony Dowell, Christopher Wheeldon. Production by Monica Mason, Christopher Newton after Ninette de Valois and Nicholas Sergeyev. Original Designs by Oliver Messel. Realization and Additional Designs by Peter Farmer…” What does all that mean? That Mason has decided to go backwards in order to progress. The key decision was to “realize” the Messel sets and costumes—to restore to Beauty the lovely atmosphere it once exemplified.

  I saw this new Beauty at the Kennedy Center in Washington, and it was immediately apparent that it was too big for the stage—or the stage was too small for it. Everything looked cramped. There should have been more room in the Prologue for the wicked fairy Carabosse and her scampering rats to wheel about in. Aurora’s thrilling first entrance through the arcade upstage was partially blocked by the courtiers; they had nowhere else to stand. The Lilac Fairy’s boat, by which she conveys the Prince to the sleeping castle, was not only especially ugly but also too big in this context. One would have to see the production on a stage suited to it to know whether it’s a keeper.

  Some questionable decisions have been made. Why has Ashton’s “Garland Dance” been thrown out and replaced by a fussy mishmash by Wheeldon? Why do we have a sketchy and feeble drop curtain at the start, in such contrast to the regal Messel look? Why, if you’re out to preserve and conserve, do you have to put your personal and irrelevant stamp on things?

  But none of that constitutes the main issue. Alas, for all its earnestness and prettiness (and the costumes, at least, are very pretty), this Beauty is strangely wan: The “Realized” sets seem dutiful (the third act looks positively skimpy), and there’s far more here of Farmer himself, and less Messel, than we’ve been led to believe. The classical approach to the fairy variations appeared to have been carefully learned for the occasion, not an expression of an inbred company style. The Carabosse (I saw Genesia Rosato) was less than menacing, at her best when emitting a soundless shriek of laughter. (You may prefer Carabosse en travesti, as I do, but we don’t have to go back further than Merrill Ashley or Lourdes Lopez in the Martins version to recall chilling performances by women; Mason herself was a superb Carabosse.) The Bluebird pas de deux was underpowered. The fairy-tale characters were game but limp. The Lilac Fairy was strongly danced by the talented Lauren Cuthbertson, but she lacked the magical womanly grace and authority with which Lilac rights the wrongs of the world.

  And yet … the crucial element was there. Makarova once said, “Sleeping Beauty is a triumph of academic virtuosity, permeated with a youthful charm which a ballerina has to radiate.” The Aurora of Alina Cojocaru radiated youth, natural charm, and—so important—ease. And her technique is solid. But there’s nothing solid about the way she dances: She’s light, quick, confident, both delicate and strong. Like Fonteyn, she’s instantly lovable—you see at once why her parents, the suitors, her friends, the courtiers, the fairies all care about her. And because you love her, it’s unbearable when Carabosse poisons her, even though you know that rescue, in the form of the Lilac Fairy, is on the way. Her Rose Adagio started wonderfully—the first turn relaxed and sure. There were one or two shaky moments, but they didn’t detract from the serene glow of happiness that she emanated. This, after all, is the moment when she’s taking her place in the world—it’s a birthday party, it’s an engagement party, it’s a celebration of the first step of a girl into womanhood. If the Rose Adagio is only a technical triumph, it’s empty, and The Sleeping Beauty is dead; Cojocaru makes us experience it as a burst of joy, not a challenge.

  Her variation was pure and unforced, her danse vertige moving, her Vision Scene romantic and alluring: Of course the Prince would fall instantly in love. And in the profound third-act pas de deux she was assured and brilliant, flinging herself into the famous fish-dives with gleeful abandon. What she lacks, for me, in this climax to the entire ballet is a new gravity and depth. A century has gone by, and she’s been wakened by the man she loves—she is a woman now. And she’s not only being married, she’s being crowned. Her world—our world—has been through an ordeal and survived, and she is the emblem of that survival. But she’s been reawakened to a new life, not her old one. If her “death” and rebirth don’t lead to a new understanding, a new maturity, it’s been a waste of a hundred-year sleep.

  I don’t as yet sense in Cojocaru an understanding of all this, but it will surely come. She is, with Diana Vishneva, one of the two most satisfying classical ballerinas in the world today. She has the looks, the talent, and the opportunity—the company knew what it had from the start. We know that envy is one of the deadliest of the sins, but how can we not envy the Royal this enchanting Beauty?

  The New York Observer

  JULY 17, 2006

  Romeo + Juliet Stripped Clean

  PETER MARTINS’S Romeo + Juliet is now in the midst of a two-week run at the State Theater. Let’s look first at one of its pluses: the plus sign in the title that replaces Shakespeare’s unwieldy “and.” What can it mean? Is it an advance warning that Martins is going to trim all excess fat from this weighty drama? Certainly, his take on the tragic goings-on in old Verona is thin. Consider some of the things that are missing.

  1) Verona. This town is seriously underpopulated. In the big public scenes—those meant to show us how the ugly feud between the Montagues and the Capulets is tearing the city apart—there’s no one to be seen except six Montague couples (in green) and six Capulet couples (in red). And, of course, the three young lads—Mercutio, Benvolio, and Romeo—and their mortal foe, Tybalt. I take it back: At one point, five little harlequin boys wander over from the School of American Ballet to provide a touch of the cutes.

  2) Sex. The main innovation of this production, we’ve been hearing, is that everyone’s young, young, young. Romeo plus Juliet are meant to be real teenagers—in fact, the original first-cast Juliet (she dropped out) is still in the school. But unlike the teenagers in the famous Zeffirelli movie, City Ballet’s teenagers are boyish and girlish but not sexish. They yearn, they hug; Juliet flings back her head in ecstasy, Romeo billows his cloak around the stage when he isn’t straining to hold her aloft in every conventional swooning lift you’ve ever seen; but they just don’t seem to have the hots for each other. Maybe they’re meant to be so young they’re prepubescent?

  3) Inventive choreography. The story of Romeo and Juliet is an easy one to tell, since it’s linear and since everyone in the world knows it already. Martins, who’s
always had a gift for narrative, has the bones of the story sturdily in place, ready and waiting for a resonant dance approach. It doesn’t come. There are several effective dramatic scenes—for instance, the final confrontation between Juliet and her parents. And the interminable dueling is well handled (although the fatal thrust to Mercutio is awkwardly blurred). But the actual dance passages are purely generic. The quarreling factions, the guests at the Capulet ball, the antics of the lads, are all flavorless, except for some amusing virtuoso stuff for Mercutio; the duets between Romeo and Juliet are flat and derivative. This is the great disappointment: I had hoped that Shakespeare’s heart-tugging story together with the ballet’s swelling Prokofiev score might bring out a more expressive side of Martins’s temperament, but no. The choreography, although always professional, is just slapped on to keep the plot going, not to evoke a world or a tragedy.

  4) Taste. Martins’s commitment to his compatriot the Danish artist Per Kirkeby is beyond my understanding. His notoriously inappropriate designs helped to wreck Martins’s Swan Lake, and his R + J is just as counterproductive. The curtain goes up on a stubby construction that looks like cinder block, against a violent backdrop of abstract reds, blacks, and ochers. Is this Romeo or is it Le Sacre du Printemps? The cinder block structure opens up and moves about to become Juliet’s bedroom, Friar Laurence’s cell, the ballroom, the tomb, et cetera—at its most ridiculous when the balcony scene becomes the battlement scene. (Are the two Danes confusing Verona with Elsinore?) And the costumes are equally off-putting. Tybalt’s canary-yellow outfit may be the most egregious, but Paris’s lavender tights are in the running. The ball costumes are fussy and cheap, and in rancid colors. Yet for all the in-your-face visuals, the overall effect is ultra-minimal. There’s no physical surround for the action to inhabit.