On Dance
JACOBS, LAURA
On Dance DYING SWANS BY LAURA JACOBS "I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh; it is my spirit that addresses your spirit;...
...Dowell and his designer have pushed up the date to turnof-the-century Tsarist Russia...
...With the Bolshoi's Swan Lake, performed here last summer, the ballet hit bottom...
...A great deal has been made of her "American" cool, her Balanchine body and linear attack...
...Who could blame the swan queen for hanging back...
...That bit of dialogue might be a paraphrase of any Romantic ballet—La Sylphide, Giselle, Swan Lake—love stories in which a man and woman are divided until death by class or corporeal nature...
...What all the material strain and richness here veils is a company that cannot command a bare stage because of faulty technique, incoherent collective style and lack of charm...
...The ballerina can lead us to this point, but to do so she must pass, in the words of Jane Eyre, "through the grave...
...the lake was merely a projection of Monet water lilies on the castle wall...
...Assuming the audience knew the story, he opted for alarge-scale look short on narrative detail that, like Nureyev's vision, wound up overly abstract...
...Much of the choreography uses the Marius Petipa-Lev Ivanov text of 1895, and the story is told clearly and with brio...
...Compared to an elf, a fairy and, in moments of passion, a "wild frantic bird," she delivers soliloquys that correspond in explanatory gravity to the Act II pas de deux of Swan Lake or the graveyard scene of Giselle...
...There were intimations of meaning in her Odette, moments that found and communicated fantasy despite her stiff demeanor...
...Despite the composer's different outward situation—his liberty and fame—he too was drawn to the supernatural and the subconscious...
...Neither danced what could be called an interpretation of the dual role Odette/Odile, nor did either dance in the English mode, for that matter...
...Of course, a grossly sentimental production would not deepen anyone's faith in the relevance of Romanticism...
...As for Odile, the black swan who is Odette's negative, in the Rocky Horror ballroom she is superfluous...
...Sadly, however, recent productions have tended to diminish, if not distort, the principal roles...
...Decadence is the message...
...Thus shifting his sittingroom tale to an era marked by the bloody massacre of royal daughters, imbuing it with a sense of the modern rather than the Brontes' romanticism, makes for a lurid perspective...
...Bussell dances on a larger—indeed, a titanic—scale...
...Have we forgotten how more than equal the Romantic heroine really was...
...In his human-size ballets, like Manon and the recent Winter Dreams (based on Chekhov's Three Sisters), contemporary response need not be plumed with epiphany...
...His Odette was a figment of Prince Siegfried's imagination...
...That was illustrated again during the Royal Ballet's engagement at the Metropolitan Opera this past July, its first in 10 years, with its big Swan Lake on the bill...
...Three decades later, in 1877, Swan Lake was born to thedreamprone Tchaikovsky, who was as cloistered in spirit as the Brontes were in circumstance...
...The casualty was Odette...
...The extreme metaphors common to the Romantic ballets continue to fascinate...
...the resulting Odette was impersonal and labored...
...She has skyscraper legs and an arabesque that seems to span eras...
...English (read Ashton) placement was something fragile yet invulnerable—the upper body lifted from the hips, poised like a porcelain teacup in its saucer...
...Should Bussell ever dance a true Swan Lake, her story might be called "Darcey Through the Glass Ceiling...
...Yuri Grigorovich's treatment was so convoluted even the critics could not follow it...
...The lakeside acts (II and IV) suggest a dream on Freud's couch, an Art Nouveau doodle of evocative swirls and blots...
...just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal—as we are...
...For that, a dancer must convey a spirit now in danger of extinction, and an observer must be fully awake to ballet's inherent challenge: to transmit the deep vibrato of pathos through the body's sublime physical movements—love, loss and liberty understood in terms of weight, tempo and phrase...
...Nevertheless, this was small change, nothing like the spectacular psychic embrace of dancers from previous generations...
...The Swan Lake that opened the Royal's season at the Met was created by Anthony Dowell in 1987...
...Madonna, unafraid of good old sex and death, is more willing and able to make existential connections than ballet's current high-brow hothouse flowers...
...Never known for epic effects, its decorum, integrity and drawing-room ardor had once been constants...
...Kenneth MacMülan's repertory suits her better...
...The locale of Swan Lake is normally medieval Europe...
...But the question remains: What is the nature of that ballerina...
...Unfortunately, they are overwhelmed by Yolanda Sonnabend's highly conceptual sets and costumes, her apparent determination to "renew" the ballet...
...Some of the Royal touches are there: delicate characterizations that project to the balcony, emotional connections between the dancers...
...Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and her sister Emily's Wuthering Heights were both published in 1847, five years after Giselle premiered in London and 15 years after the appearance of La Sylphide in Paris...
...For example, the way she performed Odette's repeated chaîné turns on the diagonal—resolute and uniform—came to seem a solemn refrain in a strange language, deep-toned and ominous...
...Both incline toward what is becoming an international style: accentless, highly technical, emotionally neutral athleticism...
...Though she has yet to achieve glitchless virtuosity, performances that transcend technique, her physical power is arresting...
...While the swan corps wears ecru chiffon with sea shell headpieces, Odette keeps her quaint, classic, short white tutu...
...Surveying today's aspiring dancers, one can only reiterate that technique is no substitute for sensibility...
...Each new staging of late has made the swan queen more remote...
...Although caught in the talons of fate, she comments on every emotional nuance with clarity and wit...
...The court of Act III is a firetrap of cut steel platforms, smoke and mirrors...
...It was his first major statement as the company's new artistic director, and was heralded at the time as a return to tradition...
...The whole enterprise is a flamboyant misstep that wrests the ballet away from Odette, whose isolation is made the more poignant by her costume...
...Overblown ballet productions compensate as well for an absence of quality at the top of the roster...
...Diminutive but dogged, Durante strove for correctness...
...The rising and falling lakeside scrims, suggestive of a watery death, lent the whole affair a submerged inertia...
...Is feminist correctness constricting the female imagination...
...Giselle, remember, does so literally...
...Having Odette obscured in a knee-length tutu, instead of the usual short one, did not help...
...And in one instance her clichéd, birdlike port de bras broke through to something better, giving us aglimpse of the spellbound swan's inner struggle against her outer wings...
...In sheer presence alone, she could be the prototype of our 21st-century ballerina...
...In his 1989 version for American Ballet Theater, Mikhail Baryshnikov attempted a more conventional approach by borrowing ideas from a bevy of old presentations, but failed to develop any of hisown...
...The two young women the Royal put forward as its star ballerinas, Darcey Bussell and Viviana Durante, are mere fledglings...
...Act I is a lush park, hung with silver globes and girdled in wrought iron...
...Actually, the words are spoken by the eponymous heroine of Jane Eyre to the novel's leading male...
...Imagination is the one aspect of Bussell that is slight...
...Rudolf Nureyev initiated the pattern in 1984, when he did an abstract Swan Lake for the Paris Opera Ballet...
...Tchaikovsky is said to have invented at least one of Swan Lake's musical themes as parlor entertainment for his young nieces...
...Their symbols and settings enable the weak to speak to the strong, or rather, woman to speak to man—equal, as they are...
...The cut of the men's coats and the bustled women's gowns evoke the Romanovs at high noon, and Sonnabend offers whispered allusions throughout to the Royal's production of Anastasia...
...The entire production was indoors and airless, distorted by the Tutor's homoerotic advances toward Siegfried...
...And she teases like a sylph...
...The Royal Ballet, slowly coming back from a 15year slump, still suffers those deficiencies...
Vol. 74 • October 1991 • No. 11
