Two Dying Swans and a Dud
GUREWITSCH, M. ANATOLE
On Dance TWO DYING SWANS AND A DUD BY M. ANATOLE GUREWITSCH At Saint Petersburg in 1907, where Mikhail Fokine hatched The Dying Swan, choreographic bird imagery was not precisely le dernier cri....
...Makarova's bearing and the commanding arc of her arms immediately conveyed a sublimity on which the rest of her dance was to be the elaboration and the gloss...
...Her peregrinations would be of no interest if they did not bear on her dancing...
...There is, but none of it is agreeable, so I will be brief...
...Such an image Fokine's Dying Swan afforded, albeit in a form too abstract, brief and distilled to establish itself in the routine traffic of the common repertoire...
...Since then, she has accepted guest engagements in out-of-the-way locations without invariably honoring them...
...Fokine's Swan is simply a swan...
...Kirkland wore her unpli-ant bodice like a cuirass, froze her veiled lids and pouting mouth into a sensual mask of anguish and drove her arms too deeply into their molded phrases...
...Her Dying Swan was exquisitely controlled, original in detail-And at heart misconceived...
...Last year, Makarova's ethereal Bayadere for Ballet Theater prompted critic (and drag ballerina) Peter Anas-tos to observe that her transformation to Giselle was now complete...
...The latest chapter of the ongoing Kirkland saga finds our heroine, for the moment, back in the fold of the ABT for the current New York season...
...The Swan, her arms undulating, first appears with her back to the audience...
...It is true that Fokine borrowed his vocabulary from Lev Ivanov, but his vignette is no microfantasia on themes from Act 2 of Swan Lake...
...upon returning, her dancing seemed by turns tentative and forced...
...Yet the derivative conceit at once took its place in the gallery of imperishable ballet icons...
...The shipwreck in Act 1, with the travelers battling the silken billows, is nevertheless brilliant, as is the instant when the sea collects and is swallowed by the prompter's pit...
...Ariel himself, got up like a powder-blue Mercury in a flower commercial, is danced by the supremely gracious David McNaughton (beyond question the company's finest dancer...
...But Gelsey Kirkland and Natalia Makarova glided melodiously to their deaths in the kind of showcases that do not attract swan-watchers: each appeared in one of those shapeless flummery fests known as galas that have everything to do with raising money and nothing to do with art...
...A greater choreographer than Smuin may come along one day and demonstrate that there is something of Shakespeare's Prospero that can be captured in dance...
...Kirkland overlaid the lyric, expiring de-crescendo with a sense of drama that it could not sustain...
...It was an astonishing performance, not for an instant merely decorative...
...Balan-chine beat him to the punch with the wholly original story ballet A Midsummer Night's Dream and the plotless Jewels...
...For the shortcomings of this Tempest, generic pretensions are no excuse...
...Like a flame bursting from the glow of a spent torch, Makarova's chiseled phrases figured forth the last surges of an ebbing life...
...Disturbed...
...She fairly embodied mannerism...
...It had its proper value, as did every single movement of her dance from the time she floated into view to the moment her hand sculpted its last whispering curve...
...With her on-again-of f-again performing schedule, her projection (to say nothing of her stamina) is subject to violent swings...
...performances have been an endangered species...
...Gelsey Kirkland, now in her mid 20s, was celebrated from the earliest days of her career with the New York City Ballet for the strength, clarity, speed, and refinement of her technique in the Bal-anchine and Robbins repertoire...
...her back must be immediately expressive...
...In Makarova's seamless cantilena, the bending-of-the-knee pose so overemphasized by Kirkland was struck with restraint, a precise and moving grace note...
...Still, she might have been persuasive had it not been for a pivotal miscalculation...
...Kirkland was seen, gloriously accompanied by Isaac Stern, in the festive setting of Channel 13's(predominantly musical) fundraiser Gala of Stars, at Carnegie Hall-A thing of bits and patches, several of them splendid, coaly presided over by Beverly Sills...
...While her gifts remain prodigious, her command of them is uncertain...
...In a happy conjunction that went nearly unremarked, however, Kirkland's and Makarova's portrayals were broadcast to television audiences several weeks ago (Kirkland's on PBS, Makarova's on NBC) in the space of only four days...
...In Act 2 of Swan Lake, Makarova exits in the same fashion...
...In at least once case, she canceled after the audience was already in their seats...
...That she consented to appear in Stars'Salute to the President suggested that she had progressed further down the primrose path of Pavarotti into the land of fluff and tinsel entertainments...
...To cast her spell she required a poetic image, not steps...
...Her subsequent season on Broadway proved him wrong, but her choice of repertoire raised a suspicion that we had seen the last of Makarova as a serious and important artist...
...Clocking in somewhere in the neighborhood of three minutes, the setting-A violin and harp duet by Camille Saint-Saens—unfolds in a single breath of melody that left Fokine no scope for extended invention and display...
...Then for close to a year, illness and physical depletion kept her off the stage...
...The island magus works in argument and metaphor, not action...
...While she danced, the theater simply ceased to be...
...They were lone votaresses of dance at conclaves devoted to other worship...
...Smuin casts him as an older, brawnier Ariel in the person of Attila Ficzere...
...The choreographic melody of The Dying Swan is assigned predominantly to the upper body...
...There is no prelude...
...But they do...
...Today, it lives chiefly in time-faded photographs...
...Odette in the Tchaikovsky ballet is an enchanted princess whose transformation into a swan is the emblem of her tragic destiny...
...Lately two of our most admired and mesmerizing ballerinas put their art to the test of Fokine's deceptive simplicity, and it seems no one was paying attention...
...The odds, though, are against it...
...Given how infrequently The Dying Swan is sighted in our parts, the double was a singularity...
...But even if the setting could not have been less atmospheric (the stage floor was decorated with the Presidential Seal), and even if no one in her live audience would have cared or could have told the difference, Makarova gave a performance that may be counted among her most austere, classical, pure, and heroic...
...Makarova, whose no less glorious accompanist was Itzhak Perlman, showed up at Ford's Theater in Washington amid the brouhaha of a circus (complete with clowns and magicians) called Stars' Salute to the President...
...It is a daring entrance, postponing the view of the ballerina's face until she has crossed the full width of the stage...
...It is a supreme coup de theatre, although it does not carry the weight of setting the mood...
...It is entirely conceivable that not a single member of the public saw both of these shows-months apart, in different cities, for different crowds-in live performance...
...Pavlova's shade has met a worthy rival...
...Invited to join American Ballet Theater as the partner of the newly arrived Mikhail Baryshnikov, she moved into the great classical and romantic parts with breathtaking ease, triumphing especially as Giselle and La Sylphide...
...Speaking of dance on television, I had hoped there would be something worth commenting on in Michael Smu-in's evening-length ballet of The Tempest, aired live from San Francisco on March 30...
...The perfect simplicity of every step amplified the initial impression...
...In so minimal a dance as The Dying Swan, justness hinges on the merest accent...
...As Kirkland carved out the detail-slowly, defiantly-the line was shattered...
...All these-the arms, the mask, the dress -made the stage around her droop with inappropriate gloom...
...Of the long list of later ballerinas who have as sayed it, only two have offered interpretations (both preserved on film) of enduring fame: the Kirov Ballet's ele-gaic Galina Ulanova, and the Bolshoi's flamboyant Maya Plisetskaya...
...The irresistible temptation to rival the shade of Pavlova, though, has kept her signature piece from vanishing...
...And for good reason: The little solo is hardly a dance at all...
...From that instant on, she seemed to be trailing a fractured wing...
...Never mind San Francisco Ballet Co-Director Smu-in's false claim that his travesty of Shakespeare is the first full-length ballet created in the New World...
...The comedy is tiresome, the young lovers bland, the divertissement a floor show, the music (way after Henry Purcell) an outrage...
...Last summer she took London by storm as Juliet, and according to report was riding a new crest of artistry and assurance when last December she was dismissed from ABT (on the eve of the company's debut under the artistic directorship of Baryshnikov) for skipping rehearsals...
...Her appearances may be tragic charades of ruin, or they may usher in revelation...
...Your coin-of-the-realm balletomanes are more hopeless in their addiction to their goddesses than the opera crowd (if such a thing can be imagined), and will cheerfully bear any inconvenience and expense rather than miss a single glimpse of their idols in glory...
...the legs carry the movement seaward on the simplest of traveling steps, the pas de bourse...
...Until the end, when the Swan folds her limbs and gathers the darkness like a cloak about her, the image of brokenness resides in the torso, arms and head alone-except for two fleeting moments, when the stretch of the legs is suddenly disturbed by a bent knee...
...A pity the flood does not take Smuin's misbegotten island with it...
...His ballerina on the occasion of the piece's charity-concert premiere was the legendary Anna Pavlova, who by all accounts possessed an unmatched expressive radiance...
Vol. 64 • June 1981 • No. 12
