{"id":71,"date":"2011-07-26T14:55:16","date_gmt":"2011-07-26T18:55:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/?p=71"},"modified":"2011-07-27T17:23:59","modified_gmt":"2011-07-27T21:23:59","slug":"sharing-the-wealth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/2011\/07\/sharing-the-wealth\/","title":{"rendered":"Sharing the Wealth"},"content":{"rendered":"
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David Hallberg in American Ballet Theatre\u2019s The Bright Stream Photo: Rosalie O\u2019Connor<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Of late, I\u2019ve been having a recurring daydream\u2014probably prompted by the Mariinsky Ballet\u2019s recent season at the Metropolitan Opera House (July 11 through 16), as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. Ballet companies square off like kids on the playground. \u201cNyah, nyah! I\u2019ve got more Ratmanskys than you do!\u201d \u201cYou do not!\u201d \u201cDo so!\u201d \u201cWell I\u2019ve got the best Ratmanskys.\u201d \u201cTake that back or I won\u2019t share my candy bar with you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ballets by Alexei Ratmansky have become hot commodities. Not only does he deliver beautifully crafted, imaginative, warm-hearted works; his range is surprising. If a ballet company orders up a piece by Jorma Elo, it can count on spectacularly odd dislocations and knotty tangles of dancerly limbs. Ratmansky may deliver a surprise. Who\u2019d have imagined that last year he\u2019d give the New York City Ballet\u2014a company that rarely goes in for storytelling\u2014a stupendous remake of the 1882 Paris Opera Ballet extravaganza, Namouna? Or that, in 2009, he\u2019d take the score and scenario that Prokofiev developed for Serge Lifar\u2019s obscure 1932 Sur le Borysth\u00e8ne and give American Ballet Theatre On the Dnieper?<\/p>\n

Ratmansky signed on as ABT\u2019s resident choreographer in 2008 and recently extended his contract until 2023. He premiered a delicious Nutcracker for the company in 2010, and, for the 2011 spring season, created a lovely pure-dance work, Dumbarton\u2014 set to Stravinsky\u2019s Concerto in E-flat, (Dumbarton Oaks), and mounted a production of The Bright Stream (created for the Moscow\u2019s Bolshoi Ballet, which Ratmansky directed from 2004 to 2008). This light-hearted tale of an important occasion on a soviet-era collective farm offers smart comedy and surprising performing opportunities (David Hallberg disguising himself as a sylph? Unforgettable). Nevertheless, NYCB, already possessed of the ravishing Russian Seasons (2006) and Concerto DSCH (2008), got Namouna in 2010. And Ratmansky still jobs around.<\/p>\n

Few choreographers are as skillful as he at devising steps that weave about the music the way vines accommodate to a tree\u2014understanding its contour while seeking adventurous new directions. Watching and listening to his choices, you cannot imagine the music-dance relationships any other way. He also shows us dancers as members of a particular society (in this he resembles Jerome Robbins). Even in the most formal and plotless of his ballets, people watch one another and respond to what\u2019s happening. One might imagine that, during his seven years as a dancer with the Royal Danish Ballet, Ratmansky learned something from August Bournonville\u2019s great 19th-century ballets about the importance of what\u2019s happening in the background, as well as in the foreground.<\/p>\n

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Ulyana Lopatkina and Yuri Smekalov in Alexei Ratmansky\u2019s Anna Karenina Photo: Natasha Razina<\/p><\/div>\n

If it were not for that attention to detail, I wouldn\u2019t have recognized the Mariinsky Ballet\u2019s Anna Karenina \u2014one of two Ratmansky works the company brought to the Lincoln Center Festival\u2014as being his. In fact, the conversational groups gathering far upstage in dim light or the excited crowd at a racetrack struck me as much more interesting than the anguished ecstasies of Anna and Count Vronsky.<\/p>\n

Both of these ballets are set to scores composed by Rodion Shchedrin. Shchedrin interests Valery Gergiev, now artistic director and general director of the Mariinsky Theatre, and Gergiev conducts the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra with a power that brings out the music\u2019s lyrical moments as well as its furiously emotional bombast.<\/p>\n

Shchedrin wrote the music of Anna Karenina for his wife, ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, who choreographed the 1972 version and starred in it. To my mind, a ballet based on Leo Tolstoy\u2019s great novel is a mistake to begin with. The book\u2019s characters ponder their feelings, doubts, and hesitations more often than they express them. The ballet\u2019s scenario leaves out two major plot elements that touch upon Tolstoy\u2019s theme of infidelity. We don\u2019t learn of Anna\u2019s brother\u2019s extramarital dalliances (lust simmers in this family) or of the on-again-off-again love between his wife\u2019s sister, Kitty, and Konstantin Levin. All these people are onstage at various times, along with Anna\u2019s friend Princess Shcherbatskaya (\u201cBetsy\u201d), Vronsky\u2019s mother, and Kitty and Dolly\u2019s parents, but their stories and, for the most part, their identities have been peeled away. Anna\u2019s almost near-death experience bearing Vronsky\u2019s child is reduced to her simply being very, very sick for unknown reasons.<\/p>\n

Given the music and the nature of ballet, you could hardly expect a choreographer\u2014even one as adroit as Ratmansky\u2014to restore Tolstoy\u2019s subtleties. Still, you watch the scenes at gatherings, balls, and racetracks thinking, \u201cIs that Anna? No, it\u2019s probably Kitty; so the man she\u2019s doing a delighted pas de deux with must be Levin.\u201d \u201cSo which is Betsy and which is Dolly?\u201d \u201cAnd is Anna\u2019s husband, Alexei Karenin, the only gray-haired man, or. . . .?\u201d So these characters buzz around in the background, meet and greet, dance, and watch events, and we focus primarily on Anna, Vronsky, Karenin, and her little son Seryosha. And trains.<\/p>\n

Wendall Harrington\u2019s video projections augment Mikael Melbye\u2019s settings to great effect, whisking us from the Oblonsky\u2019s palace to the Shcherbatsky\u2019s salon to Karenin\u2019s book-filled study. Projections of horse\u2019s thundering hooves clue us in to the fact that all those handsome, leaping cadets (a clever number) are stand-ins for jockeys. Shots of a train speeding along a track lead up to the mock onstage train that bears down on Anna and in front of which she, ever so gracefully, throws herself.<\/p>\n

There are effective moments and devices, like the revolving train car that carries a group of passengers including Anna and (at the last minute) the smitten Vronsky from Moscow to St. Petersburg. When it stops at a deserted snowy platform and Anna and Vronsky\u2014emerging from opposite ends to get a breath of air\u2014suddenly see each other, you feel a sense of forbidden passion far more than you do during the ensuing pas de deux.<\/p>\n

Oddly, much of the dancing for the principals seems inorganic, full of ballet clich\u00e9s. Whipping off a pirouette and unfolding one leg into an arabesque or a despairing developp\u00e9 can\u2019t be trusted to express a character\u2019s entire rich gamut of emotions. And those reservations that war with passion are designed and projected in the SimpleText of push-pull-evade. Sometimes, too, the disconnect between plot elements and dancing is jarring. Although we expect dance steps to stand for feelings, when Anna enters her husband\u2019s study and, after a bit of realistic mime, they do a little side-by-side dancing, I find myself thinking, \u201cWhy do that now? Sit down and talk.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no faulting the expertise of the performers. It took me most of the ballet, however, to warm to Ulyana Lopatkina, the Anna I saw. She\u2019s a strong, bold, expressive dancer, but conveys little of the fragile reasoning and erotic longings associated with the character. Wearing a plain dark gray dress that made her look like an outsider from the start, she gave the impression that she could eat Vronsky for a late night supper. Later, as Anna\u2019s situation grew more dire, Lopatkina became more believably vulnerable. Yuri Smekalov played Vronsky as both arrogant and\u2014in his several solos\u2014 driven to maddened assaults on the air. Islom Baimuradov made Karenin into a convincing character, and Svetlana Ivanova was a charmingly effervescent Kitty in her one moment to shine \u2014a sweet duet with Levin (Alexei Timofeyev), before she sent him packing, thinking Vronsky might propose.<\/p>\n

I wished that I\u2019d seen Anna Karenina at the Wednesday matin\u00e9e and Ratmansky\u2019s The Little Humpbacked Horse that evening, instead of the other way around. That way, I\u2019d have gone out dancing into the hot city night.<\/p>\n

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Ivan the Fool and the Humpbacked Horse Meet the Princess of the Sea Photo: Stephanie Berger<\/p><\/div>\n

The story of that magical horse began as fairy tale in verse by Pyotr Yershov (1815 \u2013 1869). The author was still alive when choreographer Arthur Saint-L\u00e9on arrived in St. Petersburg from Paris in 1859 and, five years later, made Yershov\u2019s story the subject of his first ballet on a Russian theme. Since the tale was banned for two decades because of its satirical characterization of a tsar, Saint-L\u00e9on made the ruler a Middle Eastern khan. Four choreographers re-worked Saint-L\u00e9on\u2019s ballet before Ratmansky took it on. Shchedrin\u2019s score replaced Cesare Pugni\u2019s in 1960.<\/p>\n

The basic plot has variants in other fairy tales. Three brothers\u2014two well-set-up, arrogant, lazy fellows\u2014are preferred by their father to the puny, gentle, not-so-smart youngest son. Guess who turns out to be the bravest and the smartest and wins the princess and the loot. This Ivan\u2019s adventures include meeting a whole flock of firebirds and getting a very large magic feather (Yershov\u2019s story incorporated elements of the tale on which Fokine\u2019s ballet The Firebird was based) and visiting an under-the-sea ballet of the sort popular in 19th-century Paris and Copenhagen. Also he encounters three dancing horses, including two handsome ones that his brothers steal; he gets them back and gives them to the Tsar in exchange for a top position at the palace. The little humpbacked horse aids Ivan with his future assignments like finding the Tsar Maiden (who lives with the firebirds\u2014don\u2019t ask) whom the Tsar craves and diving for the ring that she demands (and which the Princess of the Sea helps him find).<\/p>\n

Maxim Isayev\u2019s costumes and set for this entrancing ballet hint that he may have been influenced by the geometric shapes favored by the Russian Suprematist artists. Positions, groupings, and other elements of the Ratmansky\u2019s staging suggest carved folk figures or the illustrations in a children\u2019s book, and Isayev\u2019s palette makes the dancers look as bright as dolls. The naivet\u00e9 of the story animates the performances too. Ivan isn\u2019t the only innocent. The Tsar and the Tsar Maiden are wide-eyed and childlike, Ivan\u2019s brothers are schoolyard bullies, and the Gentleman of the Bedchamber is an ineptly slimy villain. Shchedrin\u2019s lusty music matches the many colorful sequences with cinematic shifts of texture and tone.<\/p>\n

Ratmansky sets up the family in broad strokes. The brothers (Suslan Kulaev and Maxim Zyuzin) flank their bearded, bent-over father (the Mariinsky\u2019s great character dancer, Vladmir Ponomarev). They barely move from their spot in front of a tiny red house, and many of their gestures and big, clunky, spraddle-legged steps are aimed at shoving Ivan (Vladimir Shklyarov in the cast I saw) out of the family triad or not letting him get a step in edgewise.<\/p>\n

To add to the bedtime-story atmosphere, Ivan occasionally points out things to the audience with a gesture and an endearing grin (\u201cSee that funny little horse? What do you think?\u201d). During the final pas de deux, after he\u2019s not only won the Tsar Maiden but replaced the Tsar, Shklyarov tempers his quite amazing displays of elevation by muffing the ending of a diagonal of leaps and twice gesturing to the orchestra\u2014and us\u2014that he needs to try it again. (Shklyarov portrays Ivan with a marvelously believable mix of shyness and eagerness). After he has wowed the court and the audience with his jumping, he doesn\u2019t leave the stage, but gestures to his beloved, \u201cNow you dance, dearest,\u201d which she does\u2014ever so quick-footed. As the Tsar Maiden, Yevgenia Obraztsova is a charming fellow na\u00eff\u2014fiddling with her long pigtail (when she\u2019s not coming onto Ivan with a bold kiss), bounding nimbly about, and queening it over the friendly firebirds like a decoration on a wedding cake. Obraztsova is wonderfully pliant in her dancing, suspending her balances as if she were half bird herself.<\/p>\n

Vasily Tkachenko is frisky and agile in the title role. (I like the way he sits and massages his calves after the last long journey and magical denouement he has masterminded.) Andrei Ivanov\u2019s bearded Tsar comes across as comically infantile, especially compared to the huge, block-like throne on which he is wheeled around by the Gentleman of the Bedchamber (Baimuradov) and later by that court official\u2019s successor, Ivan. Six identically clad young \u201cWet-Nurses\u201d hover over the ruler\u2014one spooning soup into his mouth and all of them tickling him before putting him to bed (on a small block-like structure that doubles as a bench). He loves the Tsar Maiden brought to him by Ivan, but it\u2019s clear whom she adores.<\/p>\n

Ratmansky has created fine, fluttery, clustering dances for the firebirds; robust ones for a band of village gypsies; and ebbing and flowing ones for the sea creatures. These last wear upside-down images of their faces on the bodices of their costumes, and as the lights fade on their scene, they\u2019re kneeling in tiers, forming one big cresting and subsiding wave. The pretty Princess of the Sea (Anastasia Petushkova) is herself a study in undulation.<\/p>\n

The Met audience was peppered with children, but Ratmansky\u2019s The Little Humpbacked Horse made people of all ages giddy with joy. Splendid dancing, magic adventures, a happy ending\u2014all delivered without phoniness, flim-flam, or condescension.<\/p>\n

Forget arguing. We\u2019re lucky there are enough Ratmansky ballets to go around. And there\u2019s rarely a dud among them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Of late, I\u2019ve been having a recurring daydream\u2014probably prompted by the Mariinsky Ballet\u2019s recent season at the Metropolitan Opera House (July 11 through 16), as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. Ballet companies square off like kids on the playground. \u201cNyah, nyah! I\u2019ve got more Ratmanskys than you do!\u201d \u201cYou do not!\u201d \u201cDo so!\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":79,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[65,74,87,77,81],"class_list":{"0":"post-71","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ballet","8":"tag-american-ballet-theatre","9":"tag-the-bright-stream","10":"tag-the-little-humpbacked-horse","11":"tag-valery-gergiev","12":"tag-wendall-harrington","13":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/79"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}