Near-Death Experiences_And Others

by Robert Gottlieb

  1) Who is in charge of this great St. Petersburg company? The program lists the famous conductor Valery Gergiev—the Putin of Russian culture—as general and artistic director of the Mariinsky Theatre, but no one at all is listed as being specifically in charge of ballet. Someone must be making the day-to-day decisions about casting, promotions, commissions, but who?

  2) So who, then, decided to bring us the 1950 Sergeyev version of Swan Lake? Was it a political decision? Let’s face it—this iteration of the world’s most famous ballet doesn’t make a lot of sense. Alas, that’s true of many other Swan Lake productions, but they err on the side of trendiness: They’re Oedipal, all-male, soulless.

  This one errs on the side of dogma. There’s no mime, so we never understand Odette’s predicament; in the first act, the “Reigning Princess” doesn’t instruct her son, Siegfried, to get married; Siegfried himself doesn’t seem particularly moody or psychologically different from any of the other boys, so why is he drawn away from the castle to the mystical lake? There are no hunters, so Odette and her swans are never in real danger. And in the end, no tragedy—Siegfried just gets pissed off with Rothbart and yanks off one of his wings: curtains for Rothbart. Why didn’t Siegfried do it earlier, since it took so little effort? And why—for God’s sake, why—the endless exhibitionism of The Joker in Acts I and III? I suppose the Russians can’t help themselves—they have these specialty dancers with comical leaps and splits and nonstop high jinks, and they unleash them mercilessly.

  And why give the first performance to a dancer—Viktoria Tereshkina—so utterly unsuited to Odette? She’s a powerhouse of technique, but she has no Romantic or lyrical impulse, and she has a stolid face. As Odile her pyrotechnics work wonders, but it’s too late to save the ballet. (When you’re actually grateful for the national dances in Act III you know you’re in trouble.) The superb corps and the beautiful, evocative sets are the most distinguished things about this production, but if you find yourself more interested in the Lake than in the Swan, it’s curtains for Swan Lake, too.

  3) Why is Cinderella so hard to get right? As its second full-evening offering, the Mariinsky brought us Alexei Ratmansky’s 2002 version, which he has since heavily revised (for the Australians). It has strong virtues, even though it’s updated to some unspecified Soviet period—the ballroom girls are in inter-war mode, and there’s a sketchy big apartment building on a curtain at the start. But even a choreographer as inventive as Ratmansky has trouble filling the endless Prokofiev score, which is as intense as his Romeo music, although here it’s at the service of a relatively light fairy tale. The ballroom scene is large-scale and pleasing, and Cinderella herself has a variety of interesting passages, but here’s what we don’t get: the fairy godmother (here she’s called the “Fairy-Tramp” and looks like a bag lady); the glass carriage, with or without mice, that magically transports Cinderella to the ball; and the famous climax of the story: the fitting of the slipper on Cinderella’s foot. Instead, the slipper is tossed aside, because True Love does the job instead. Yes, this is a new take, but what a disappointment to the little girls (and some bigger ones) who grew up on that slipper!

  First-cast Cinderella was that superlative ballerina Diana Vishneva, who did her best to seem youthful and innocent. But that’s not what she is at this stage of her illustrious career. As with Swan Lake, seniority rules at the Mariinsky. Gorgeous Ekaterina Kondaurova was the manic stepmother, stealing the show at her all too many opportunities. The young Ratmansky was obviously trying to give us an exciting new consideration of this venerable and rather thin story, but there isn’t really enough narrative for three long acts, and he’s stuck with a score that goes on and on. A lot here is fresh and amusing, but I’m eager to see what he’s done with Cinderella and Prokofiev a dozen years later.

  4) Can Les Sylphides (here in its original 1908 Chopiniana version) still thrill the way it did for most of the twentieth century? Not this boy. The revolutionary Fokine today seems outdated, thin, precious. The Trocks’ tongue-in-cheek take on it seems more robust and alive.

  5) Who can explain why Benjamin Millepied has been given so many choice opportunities to choreograph? And why he’s been given the Paris Opéra Ballet to run? In 2011, he created Without for the Mariinsky, and here it was—smaller than life, but an audience hit, with its nonstop artificial turbulence in the near-dark. Chopin piano music, five color-coded couples, lifts and more lifts—does it sound familiar? Yes, and it looked familiar. This is a shameless rip-off of Jerome Robbins’s masterpiece Dances at a Gathering. And don’t let anyone tell you it’s an homage. The closest it came to outright theft was in the “cute” episode, the only one not almost totally obscured in darkness—when the “orange” couple do all the Robbins adorable things, down to the girl’s final smirky shrug at the end.

  Dances at a Gathering is about something—about community, love of dance, love of love. No Millepied ballet I’ve ever seen is about anything at all except putting together a workable piece. The dancers clearly loved dancing Without, though, and they gave it their estimable all. Maybe they believe it’s avant-garde? Dances wasn’t even avant-garde when it first saw the light of day, back in 1969.

  6) How come the highlight of the Mariinsky’s all-Chopin piano music program was Robbins’s In the Night? At its premiere—in 1970, a year after Dances—it looked to me like outtakes from its predecessor (though with only three couples, not five). No longer, at least not in this ravishing performance. The three ballerinas—the lovely young Anastasia Matvienko, also an Odette-Odile and a Cinderella; the magnificent Kondaurova; and the commanding star Ulyana Lopatkina—had all the high Romantic glamour this crowd-pleaser demands, and they were clearly helped by Ben Huys’s sensitive staging. But it’s Robbins who should get the credit here. In the Night is not his finest work, but it’s head and shoulders above what we saw of Millepied, Ratmansky, Fokine, and Sergeyev these past weeks. The Mariinsky, like the Bolshoi, always sells out in New York, thanks to that part of the dance audience that thinks being Russian is the ultimate stamp of excellence. Here, in the last performance of the season, they finally got their money’s worth—from our own, very American, Jerry Robbins.

  The New York Observer

  JANUARY 29, 2015

  Alice in Love

  WITH GREAT FANFARE (and nine tractor-trailers to ferry in its notoriously elaborate production), Christopher Wheeldon’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland finally wheeled into New York under the banners of the National Ballet of Canada and the Joyce Foundation (performing at the Koch). This Alice is a co-production of the Canadians and England’s Royal Ballet, which premiered it in 2011, and it’s been making the rounds ever since—Toronto, Japan, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C.—with mixed critical results. But, always, I’m sure, with happy box offices: Alice is many things, and potential cash cow is one of them.

  How to consider this mammoth undertaking? I can think of three approaches: as a version of Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece; as a ballet in itself; as a spectacle. The first is the easiest. Although the incidents of the book are slavishly checked off one by one—as though audiences would picket if anything famous were left out—its essence is instantly obliterated by the decision to turn Carroll’s tough-minded, inquisitive, no-bullshit child into a love-smitten teen. There is no dishy gardener-turned-Knave-of-Hearts in what may well be the least romantic novel in English literature—the one most dependent on wordplay rather than love-play. So what we have here is Alice in Wonderland without Alice.

  As a ballet, Wheeldon’s creation reflects his entire career as a choreographer. I can’t think of anyone working today whose results veer so drastically from original and persuasive to slack and vacuous. Because he’s giving us a love story, his main artillery is reserved for lyrical pas de deux—and we get them again and again. Or, rather, we get it: The same swoony passages turn up in the various lovey-dovey encounters that punctuate the three long acts. Wheeldon’s idea of romantic love is the rapturous lift—up goes Alice, a
gain and again, hoisted above by the otherwise gratuitous Jack and arcing through the air. I hope she has her Dramamine with her. Wheeldon was doing exactly this same thing a dozen years ago in Carousel (A Dance), but Carousel has romance at its heart.

  The choreography for Alice is purely generic throughout, but so is this conception of Alice. First-cast Jillian Vanstone is an attractive, appealing girl, and she’s a strong dancer—the entire Canadian company is strong—but she has nothing challenging to do: When she’s not overhead she just rushes around, smiling. Of Carroll’s wary, skeptical girl she shows not a trace.

  The opportunities for the character dancers are somewhat greater. The Queen of Hearts (in the Prologue she’s Alice’s mean mom) gets to do a comic take on Carmen as well as a parody of the Rose Adagio from The Sleeping Beauty that would have been a lot funnier if it hadn’t been so vulgarly broad. But at least it was inventive. The Queen is a dance-up-a-storm role, and Greta Hodgkinson let herself rip. The White Rabbit (Carroll himself as a photographer in the Prologue and Epilogue) twitched and wiggled his way through the piece with just the right amount of camp from Dylan Tedaldi. The Duchess, the Cook, the Fish, the Frog, the tapping Mad Hatter, the bizarre March Hare, the pathetic Dormouse (“Collar that Dormouse!… Suppress him!” cries the Queen in the book, and he’s duly suppressed)—they’re all recognizable, and some of them are fun.

  The group choreography—never a Wheeldon strong point—is without surprises, ranging from a real mess of a Caucus Race (think of what Jerome Robbins might have done with it) to a modestly witty romp for all concerned in the climactic trial scene. The ballet as a whole, though, simply isn’t a ballet: It’s a spectacle that’s been produced, not choreographed.

  With spectacle, luckily, Wheeldon and Co. are on surer ground. The sets, the costumes, the special effects—these are the elements that come to life. I don’t much like the commissioned score by Joby Talbot—it’s large-scale, insistent, literal; danceable, but without any playfulness or delicacy to it. The designs are by Bob Crowley, a seven-time Tony Award winner, and they’re consistently ingenious and fun, although the first-scene set—a beautiful painted vision of a stately country home—looks more like Downton Abbey than an Oxford deanery. Alice is sweetly pretty in her lavender dress and the de rigueur Alice headband. There are touches of real brilliance: the flamingos at the croquet game, each of them with one wing melting persuasively into a mallet; the huge red heart—it looks like vinyl—on which the Queen rides in triumphantly; an endless caterpillar whose segments are prancing girls. And finest of all—a wonderful conceit—the Cheshire Cat, who keeps coming apart and re-forming itself, its many parts maneuvered by people in black in the mode of Japan’s Bunraku puppets. His climactic appearance as a gigantic head swaying above the multitude is a fabulous coup de théâtre, just as, in Wheeldon’s Cinderella last year, the transformation of the tree (a Basil Twist inspiration) was by far the most memorable moment—the only memorable moment.

  Beggars can’t be choosers, and in the spirit of charity I think back over the countless ballets I’ve seen that have no memorable moments. But this Alice is two hours and forty-five minutes long. I gather that in London it was divided into two acts, the first running for seventy minutes or so, too long for the tot population to hang in there without a break. So it’s been restructured into three acts—which means two long intermissions—and it seems interminable. It’s just not strong enough to sustain that much audience time. Wheeldon, or the Royal, or the Canadians, should have eliminated some dreary scenes (like the Rajah/Caterpillar number) and shortened the whole thing by twenty minutes while restoring the two-act structure. If they had, I could even imagine seeing it a second time … someday.

  One of the oddities of the current fashion for retelling children’s stories in dance is the echoes from one work to another. In the Prologue to this Alice, the heroine is romancing a young gardener—a definite no-no in the pre–World War I world of Downton Abbey. (I mean the Deanery.) Jack is thereupon expelled from paradise. In the Prologue to Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty, which opened in New York last year in the same week as Wheeldon’s Cinderella, royal Aurora is having it off with a young gamekeeper. And both ballets end with brief epilogues in which the class-crossed lovers are now modern kids, with no thought of social rank or status. Not only has love prevailed, but so has democracy. Two trendy choreographic minds with but a single formulaic thought?

  Are Wheeldon and Bourne the same person? No, but they share the same easy values. Wheeldon is more sophisticated, Bourne more upfront with his populist concepts, yet they reveal a similar emptiness. Bourne wandered, late, into ballet. Wheeldon has less of an excuse—he’s had the benefit of the Ashton aesthetic at the Royal, where he grew up (think of Ashton’s entrancing Tales of Beatrix Potter), and of Balanchine at City Ballet, where he danced and choreographed for fifteen years. For him to prefer orchestrating blockbuster spectacle over advancing the art his talent suggests he was capable of leading is a sad story. We need choreographers, not entrepreneurs.

  The New York Observer

  SEPTEMBER 16, 2014

  The Red Army Assaults Lincoln Center

  WHO WOULD HAVE SUSPECTED that right here in New York we’re harboring a big cadre of Maoist dance fans, mostly young, full of pep and patriotism, happy to be singing along, tapping their feet, cheering, applauding, as nearly a billion and a half Chinese “artists”—oh no, sorry, that’s the entire population of China—rush around the stage, striking poses, crouching, clenching fists, and waving a gigantic Red Army flag while a corps of cute women soldiers with bare knees fire bravely away at … well, it’s not exactly clear who the enemy actually is. He’s called Nan Batian, the Lord of the South, and he’s definitely Bad, because he’s cruel to peasants—especially to our heroine, Qionghua, whom we first encounter in a dank dungeon, bound to a pillar (in a stylish bright-red outfit), as she awaits being sold into slavery.

  But Nan Batian hasn’t counted on Qionghua’s spunk. She gets away, she’s recaptured, she’s beaten and left for dead, she’s revived in a thrilling rainstorm, and she’s rescued by the hero, Hong Changqing, and sent off to the Red Area to join the Red Detachment of Women. All this, and we’re only two scenes in.

  Spoiler: After numerous battles and frolics (we’re by the sea; think “Bali H’ai”), and having observed grateful peasants picking lychees and making bamboo hats for the style-conscious soldierettes, and having mourned the heroic death of Changqing and been buoyed by Qionghua’s rise through the ranks, we see her rewarded by being named the Detachment’s Party Representative, while (according to the program) “the whole community joins the Red Army and the sound of their combat songs rings out: ‘March, march, march, forward for victory!’” If you were hoping for romance, forget it—what’s on everybody’s mind is liberating the coconut grove. But don’t think all is gloom and oppression. Except for the girl soldiers in their snappy gray uniforms, and the dull though well-groomed peasants, everyone’s in pinks, turquoises, and scarlets, and very jolly except when dying.

  The Red Detachment of Women is the most famous and successful of the propaganda spectacles (aka “ballets”) staged by the National Ballet of China, anointed as a masterpiece by Madame Mao in 1964 when the Gang of Four was rampant, and performed to date nearly four thousand times, including the time it was put on for President Nixon when he was in China on his famous 1972 mission. What can Richard and Pat have made of it? You have to feel sorry for them—at least official visitors to Moscow got Plisetskaya in Swan Lake.

  In fact, what can we make of it? What does it spring from? Certainly not from traditional Chinese theater—all that was swept away in the Cultural Revolution. Its roots clearly lie in the propaganda ballets that flourished for decades in the Soviet Union, but those at least were recognizably dance works, however blatant. Red Detachment makes Spartacus look like La Sylphide. The company’s dancers are well trained—prima ballerina Zhang Jian has elegantly pointed feet, a punchy arabesque, a good jump.
She’s won the big competitions, has performed everywhere from Seoul to Copenhagen to Houston, has done all the classics, including Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty, plus Carmen, Onegin, Sylvia, and “many Balanchine ballets,” but here she’s more like a James Bond sidekick than a classical dancer. The art of ballet as we know it is very thinly pasted onto the whole goofy enterprise. We get a little burst of fouettés here, a sort of tour en l’air there, but no one’s fooled—this is animated poster art, not ballet.

  So why are young Chinese-Americans turned on by this ridiculous propaganda kitsch from a bygone China they presumably deplore? Don’t ask me.

  And then the National Ballet gave us The Peony Pavilion, a much more recent success for the company, based on a late-sixteenth-century play that can take up to twenty hours to perform but here is compressed into two. (You don’t have to tell me to count my blessings.) Whereas Red Detachment is terminally ludicrous, Peony is terminally boring. We’re told that in China it’s often compared to Romeo and Juliet, but you wouldn’t know it from the stage action. It’s all about dream lovers—that much I was able to grasp, with the help of the program notes. “Du Liniang awakes from a deep sleep in which her subconscious has been playing with her emotions” and is joined by two alter egos “who guide her to learn the truth about her body and to enjoy her restless desire.” So far, so good, but that’s as far as I can take you.

  Du Liniang is dressed in beautiful white, the alter egos in bright red and bright blue, there’s a platform that goes up and down and tilts, there’s a scene in hell, there’s death and ghosts and a lovely snowfall. There’s a portrait and several intense passages in which a pointe shoe is clutched by the hero. And there’s a big wedding. Not exactly Romeo and Juliet as I recall it, but maybe the weird caterwauling of the Kunqu opera singing explains everything. The rest of the score is made up of music by Guo Wenjing, relieved by long passages from Debussy (Afternoon of a Faun, La Mer), Ravel, Respighi, Holst, and Prokofiev. (The music for Red Detachment was by five composers, all in a sub-sub-sub-Khachatourian mode, as if Khachatourian weren’t sub enough to begin with.)