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Review Journal, 10-10: Distortions & Expansions
Paris Opera Ballet Misses Balanchine; Larbi & Vandekeybus Extend Him
By Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2003 The Dance Insider
PARIS -- A recent issue
of an American magazine for ballet students treats the legacy of
George Balanchine, whose centennial is being celebrated this season,
by focusing on three young choreographers at the New York City Ballet,
which Balanchine co-founded with Lincoln Kirstein. But Balanchine's
legacy is so much broader, and not just as witnessed by the performance
of his work by companies around the world. Whether you like or don't
like his ballets -- this critic's opinion depends on the ballet
-- you can't deny his primary contribution, which was to take an
old language and give it new expression. All creators face this
challenge, and speaking as an author in one medium about authors
in another, I don't know how they do it. The combination possibilities
-- on one body and in tandem with others -- would seem to me limited.
And yet Balanchine, like Michel Fokine before him and Forsythe after
him -- working with, to borrow my colleague Gus Solomons jr's phrase
from his Forsythe review of today, pathologically
committed dancers -- managed to expand the creative potential of
the body and its rhythms. That exploration isn't confined to choreographers
working in the ballet idiom, as a recent concert by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui
in collaboration with Wim Vandekeybus reminded me -- but let's start
with Balanchine.
The first time I saw
the Paris Opera Ballet essay Balanchine, in a representation of
his early work created for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, "Apollo,
Leader of the Muses," I titled my review "From Paris, Avec Feeling." Having been previously
fed Balanchine for the most part on a strict New York City Ballet
diet, I was dazzled by the joyous demeanor of Agnes Letestu and
the other POB interpreters. Well, my French and my perception have
since improved. In fact, as I realized after seeing the POB's season-opening
all-Balanchine program Monday at the Palais Garnier, the acting
ability which is normally this company's strength becomes in Balanchine,
at least on the part of the premiere and etoile dancers, their weakness.
(Local color injection: As I write this, six floors below my balcony
on the rue de Paradis a street organ-grinder is playing "La Vie
en Rose," on this 40th anniversary of the death of Edith Piaf.)
I won't spend a lot
of time on "Symphony in C," but I've got to start by asking why
the Paris Opera has confusingly publicized this showing alternately
under that name and as "The Crystal Palace" -- the title under which
the ballet premiered at the Paris Opera in 1947, before assuming
its current title at its 1948 premiere on Ballet Society. Most notably,
it would have been a great opportunity to attempt to resurrect the
scenery and costumes of the surrealist painter Leonor Fini. That
would have at least given this production some claim to legitimacy,
which, with the exception of the irreproachable Aurelie Dupont in
the third section, the dancing did not. In a word -- or a phrase
-- I didn't see the music, a severe misrepresentation when seeking
to represent Balanchine. (And it wasn't the fault of the Opera's
orchestra, vividly conducted as always by Paul Connelly.) Clairemarie
Osta -- a favorite -- got things off to a bad start by deploying
her cloying, direct approach to the audience, endearing usually,
but a gross misapprehension for abstract Balanchine. There's nothing
wrong with letting the music animate you, but personality should
not be involved. Dupont, by contrast, simply gave herself over to
the Georges Bizet music, completely trusting it and her reliable
if wooden partner, Yann Saiz. Where Osta's eyes all but winked at
us, Dupont's were somewhere else, in the land of musical enchantment,
and she took us there too, right down to the finish, when she sloped
and a languid arm floated up.
The ethereal (when called
for -- she can also be real when the role so requires) Dupont notwithstanding,
the pattern of the evening was set by Osta, and it was to be one
of principals disappointing me by doing that with which they usually
charm me. Readers of this publication probably don't need to be
told that Balanchine did not mean for the four temperaments in his
1946 ballet of the same name to be enacted literally, but perhaps
someone should tell Patricia Neary, the Balanchine Trust supervisor
of this program, to re-read what Balanchine wrote on the ballet
in his 1954 "Stories of the Great Ballets," edited by Francis Mason
and published by Doubleday:
"Subtitled 'A Dance
Ballet without Plot," 'The Four Temperaments' is an expression in
dance and music of the ancient notion that the human organism is
made up of four different humors, or temperaments... melancholic,
sanguinic, phlegmatic, and choleric.... Although the (Paul Hindemith)
score is based on this idea of the four temperaments, neither the
music nor the ballet itself make specific or literal interpretation
of the idea. An understanding of the Greek and medieval notion of
the temperaments was merely the point of departure for both composer
and choreographer."
For Muriel Halle and
Christophe Duquenne, the first of three couples in the introductory
"Theme" section, the point of departure was indeed the music, outlined
with clean limbs and crystalline duet combinations. The rest of
the demi-soloists -- including Melanie Hurel, Nathalie Rique, Gil
Isoart and Herve Moreau -- confined themselves to elaborating the
musical theme. But Laurent Hilaire -- again, a personal favorite
-- tried a shortcut, simply using the music to go into his Melancholy
act. I've appreciated Hilaire's pathos in the past, but here it
really short-changed the music. Laetitia Pujol was "I'm happy really
happy!" in the Sanguinic section, albeit trotted about by the dour
Wilfried Romoli. Jose Martinez went into his plastic man schtick
for most of Phlegmatic, but did recover at the end for a sad lilting
of the head which, while not exactly phlegmatic, at least was true...
to the music. Karine Averty was acerbic, but that's my reaction
and it could have been an honest if brittle response to the music.
As I've previously written, Nicolas Le Riche's "Prodigal Son"
fails to catch the beautiful, almost biblical friezes en l'air of
NYCB's Damian Woetzel and Peter Boal, or Dance Theatre of Harlem's
Duncan Cooper. This was still the case Monday, but Le Riche's interpretation
has slackened in other ways too. His fascination with Marie-Agnes
Gillot's Siren is essentially sexless. Her demeanor towards him,
too, is anti-septic, a mistake in interpretation, I think; based
on what I've seen before -- for example, danced by DTH's Caroline
Rocher as instructed by Suzanne Farrell -- the Siren may be calculating,
but she's not cold. For her to attain her mercenary ends, she has
to emit some sexual appeal, and there's little of that here. 'Prodigal'
insiders will want to know how Gillot did with the cape: She handled
it for the most part unconsciously, until she got under it, where
it was apparent from the fumbling that she was trying to unfasten
the garment. And speaking of garments, what was Le Riche doing sporting
an earring? Perhaps Balanchine experts know different, but somehow
I can't imagine George Roualt having included this jewelry in his
original design, nor it flapping from Edward Villella's ear as it
did from Le Riche's until Gillot yanked it off.
"Prodigal Son" premiered on Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, where Balanchine
was the latest of a line of choreographers that included Nijinsky.
And watching the Belgian-Moroccan dancer-choreographer Sidi Larbi
Cherkaoui in the French premiere of his and Wim Vandekeybus's "It"
Tuesday at the Theatre aux Abbesses, that's who I thought I was
seeing the second coming of. The movement -- for "It," set to a
Paul Bowles text narrated by a husky-voiced French donkey while
eating its lunch, themule projected on a backdrop -- reflects Larbi's
largely self-taught cross-training in modern, hip-hop, and other
dance disciplines. But what caught my attention was not so much
any one set of phrases but the dancer's febrile aspect. In nature,
Larbi, adorned in white from his sneakers to his hair, was a faun,
wild, turning and crossing planes unpredictably (but not at random),
groaning at (well-chosen) junctures, and smearing his face and chest
(selectively) with paint.
As for the choreography,
well, I only realized about ten minutes into the 50-minute piece
that I'd just seen a fluid elaboration on B-boy spinning, upside
down and then balanced on one hand. Hip-hop has certainly been used
to craft concert dance before -- most successfully by Rennie Harris
-- but with Larbi, you don't realize he's doing it. He's not trying
to create a hip-hop ballet; rather, hip-hop is just one tool in
this (and Vandekeybus's) dancer-choreographer's bag, with the result
that its use is less self-conscious.
The article I referenced
above refers to a "third generation" in the Balanchine mode, apparently
qualified by the fact that they create for or came from Balanchine's
company. But I think Larbi better meets the tradition of Fokine,
Balanchine, and Forsythe; like them, he's generating new ways to
use the dancing body.
"It," a production of
Ultima Vez with Les Ballets C. de la B. and the Theatre de la Ville,
continues through tomorrow night at the Theater aux Abbesses of
the Theatre de la Ville.
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