A FUGITIVE FRAGRANCE

American Ballet Theatre / Metropolitan Opera House, NYC / October 20 – November 7, 2004

Le Spectre de la Rose is a nine-minute ballet choreographed by Michel Fokine in 1911 for Vaslav Nijinsky and Tamara Karsavina. It is set to Carl Maria von Weber’s Invitation to the Dance and based on a poem by Gautier that opens “I am the spirit of the rose / That you wore last night at the ball.” A young woman, having danced in society, comes home to her Biedermeier boudoir. The ecstatic dreams of young romance surround her like a perfume. She draws a full-blown rose from her décolletage and holds it to her face, absorbing its fragrance, then falls, languid, into her easy chair and drowses. A male spirit, costumed as the embodiment of the rose, leaps through her open French doors and dances—all voluptuous virtuosity. The incarnation of nature and its intransigent impulses, he induces the virginal dreamer to join him, then releases her to sleep and vanishes with a faun-like leap that, when Nijinsky performed it, made history.

Everything mitigates against American Ballet Theatre’s achieving a production of this piece that will be viable today, though it has, in Herman Cornejo, a dancer clearly born for the leading role. Our contemporary culture scorns the innocence and ecstatic vision of the subject. The lyrical dancing style Fokine requires in his neo-Romantic vein is almost a foreign language to dancers bred to thrill audiences with their dazzling technical accomplishment, not to beguile the public by means of subtle evocation. The combination of traditionally masculine and feminine elements in the main role makes a good chunk of the current audience uneasy, while an even larger chunk has trouble believing that anything created nearly a century ago can have the force, the significance, and the power to persuade the emotions as do the products of the present.

At best, it would seem, the company can offer a viable reproduction—a dutiful, intelligent rendering that sacrifices inspiration to caution—just as it is doing this season with Fokine’s Les Sylphides. Even this—and it is no mean feat—is worth the effort. I think. Who knows? If the piece is kept active in the repertory, continuing performance might allow it to spring back to life and provide the kind of ecstasy for which we addicts used to flock to the ballet.

Postscript: At press time, ABT announced that it has slated a full program of Fokine ballets for its spring season at the Metropolitan Opera House, May 23 – July 16—the two mentioned here plus the tragic Petrouchka (created for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and, once upon a time, an ABT staple) as well as the lusty Polovtsian Dances from Borodin’s opera Prince Igor. This brave, admirable venture, clearly not driven by the commercial concerns that dominate arts management nowadays, looks like the impulse of an institution trying to retrieve its soul.

Photo credit: Marty Sohl: Herman Cornejo in Michel Fokine’s Le Spectre de la Rose

© 2004 Tobi Tobias