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November 15, 2005
TT: All over the place (cont'd)
- On Saturday I flew down to Winston-Salem, where Carolina Ballet was giving three performances of Robert Weiss' Swan Lake (it was premiered last season in Raleigh, but I was too busy covering Broadway openings to come see it).The standard four-act version of Swan Lake, choreographed in 1895 by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, is too large in scale to be performed by medium-smallish companies. Weiss had long taken for granted that it was beyond the reach of Carolina Ballet, which employs only thirty-two dancers, until he ran across a children's-book version of Swan Lake by the Viennese author-illustrator Lisbeth Zwerger in which the story of the ballet is turned into a fairy tale. Reading the book showed him how Swan Lake could be reconceived on an intimate, organically smaller scale. Zwerger gave him permission to use her Schwanensee as the basis for his production, and now Carolina Ballet has its very own two-act Swan Lake, one with just eight swan maidens instead of the usual twenty-four.
Weiss' Swan Lake is forty-five minutes shorter than the Petipa-Ivanov version and has been altered in a variety of other ways, some small and some significant (among other things, it has a happy ending, Tchaikovsky's original intention). Above all, it's been completely rechoreographed in the fast-moving manner of Weiss' other full-evening story ballets. As I explained a couple of years ago in a Washington Post review of his dance version of Carmen:
If you hadn't seen any full-length ballets other than, say, "Giselle," you probably wouldn't notice anything unusual about it, except that there aren't any boring parts--and that's the point.
Having squirmed through far too many three-act kitschfests such as Ben Stevenson's "Dracula" (which the Houston Ballet inflicted on innocent Washingtonians earlier this month), I've lost patience with choreographers who cram the stage with high-priced scenery and costumes, then forget to add steps and serve hot. The emphasis in their faux-romantic pseudo-ballets is placed squarely on pantomime and pageantry, while the dancing, such as it is, must fend for itself. The results invariably end up looking static, the opposite of what a good ballet should be.
Weiss has chosen a different model for "Carmen," as well as the similarly conceived, equally successful "Romeo and Juliet" that Carolina Ballet premiered last year. Both ballets are choreographed in the manner of Balanchine's 1962 adaptation of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," in which the plot is propelled, and the characters defined, through movement rather than mime. "I don't like seeing a lot of people standing around on stage doing nothing," Weiss says. Instead, he builds each scene around a carefully organized dance sequence, just as Balanchine did in his great Shakespeare ballet....He uses the standard steps and combinations of neoclassical ballet, but always to make specific narrative points.
As a result, Weiss' Swan Lake, though related to the standard Petipa-Ivanov version, doesn't feel anything like a slimmed-down alternative. It's different not only in scale but also in shape and tone, and to my mind is wholly successful on its own terms. I saw it twice and couldn't have been more impressed. Aside from the obvious artistic merits of Weiss' version, it strikes me that he's found a solution to the Swan Lake problem that other regional companies with similarly limited resources would do well to embrace.
- I took Ms. Pratie Place to the Sunday matinee, about which she blogged at length last week, complete with illustrations. It was a heart-stoppingly beautiful day, so we had brunch at an outdoor café next to the theater in Winston-Salem and chatted about everything under the sun. (We'd been in touch via e-mail for some time, but this was our first meeting.) Ms. Pratie, a folk musician who lives in Chapel Hill and looks a bit like Emmylou Harris, is a peach, spunky and smart and wonderfully receptive, and had I not been planning to fly back to New York that same evening, I would have been more than happy to dine with her after the ballet as well.
- Alas, the weather in New York caught me flat-footed. Late-breaking thunderstorms rendered LaGuardia inoperative, forcing me to spend the night in a grouchy little airport hotel in Greenboro. By then the accumulated stress of the week just past had rendered me inoperative, too, so I dined unmemorably in a nearby sports bar and spent the night sitting up in bed watching TV. (Warning: The Matrix is not suitable for viewing by the severely underslept.)
- The skies finally righted themselves on Monday, and I flew back to New York that morning. No sooner did I unlock the door of the Teachout Museum than I plunged into four hellish days of work, none of which I'd be willing to repeat save at gunpoint. I wrote four tough pieces back to back: two columns for The Wall Street Journal, a review of Marion Rodgers' Mencken: The American Iconoclast for The New Criterion, and an essay for the fiftieth-anniversary issue of National Review. In between deadlines, I chewed up a ton of snail mail, went to previews of Souvenir and Classic Stage Company's Hamlet, and blogged about how I was either too tired or too wired to sleep--I forget which.
- My frenzied activity finally came to a halt on Friday night when I fell into bed and slept as though drugged. The next morning I tidied up the apartment and went out to meet Ms. In the Wings, who was visiting New York for the first time and had put her itinerary in my hands. In case you're wondering, she's just like her blog: fey, funny, and forever saying slightly off-center things that make earthbound types like me feel hopelessly wonkish and unfanciful.
I gave her a tour of the Teachout Museum, after which we went to the Neue Galerie to have a snack in the oh-so-Viennese café and look over the Egon Schiele retrospective (very impressive, but that man was one way sick cookie). Then we strolled back across Central Park, dined at Kitchen 82, and went down to Broadway to catch the new revival of Sweeney Todd, she for the first time, I for the second. All I'd told her in advance was that we'd be seeing something cool, and when the cab pulled up in front of the Eugene O'Neill Theatre, she agreed--not calmly--that I hadn't been exaggerating.
(To be continued)
Posted November 15, 2005 12:04 PM
