{"id":885,"date":"2012-06-28T18:04:41","date_gmt":"2012-06-28T22:04:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/?p=885"},"modified":"2012-06-29T17:12:52","modified_gmt":"2012-06-29T21:12:52","slug":"astray-in-summer-dreams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/2012\/06\/astray-in-summer-dreams\/","title":{"rendered":"Astray in Summer Dreams"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Daniel Ulbricht as Puck in George Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream<\/em>. Photo: Paul Kolnik<\/p><\/div>\n

If you can\u2019t see a production of Shakespeare\u2019s play A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream <\/em>in a woodland setting during a long June twilight, as I once did, you can be enthralled by a different sort of magic conjured up by the Bard\u2019s plot. George Balanchine\u2019s 1962 ballet of the same name ended its week in the New York City Ballet\u2019s season before American Ballet Theatre hit the solstice dead on with Frederick Ashton\u2019s 1964 The Dream.<\/em> These are two such beautiful ballets that I wish I could have crossed Lincoln Center Plaza from an NYCB matinee in the former New York State Theater to an evening ABT performance at the Metropolitan Opera\u2014maybe with a long, cool drink on the way<\/p>\n

Balletomanes may debate which of the two ballets they prefer. Each presents, with comic flair, the ruckus accidentally stirred up by Oberon, King of the Fairies, and his sprightly elf servant, Puck (they were, after all, only trying to make everything turn out happily for two pairs of troubled lovers wandering in the forest). Each ballet boasts a sweetly comical pas de deux for Titania and Bottom the Weaver, whom the angry Oberon, to teach his queen a lesson, has transformed into an ass. Each work ends with glorious pas de deux.<\/p>\n

Both ballets are wondrously designed. In David Hays\u2019s set for Balanchine, the forest acquires giant leaves when a change from the human world to the domain of the fairies is indicated. David Walker\u2019s design for Ashton remains the same throughout, with a root-girded stairway descending to the stage and a moon glimpsed through trees. The comparative length of the two ballets dictates some of their differences. Balanchine created a full-evening work, making use not just of Felix Mendelssohn\u2019s overture and incidental music, but music drawn from other works by the composer. The audience hears the full overture before the curtain goes up and then hears it all over again in the ballet\u2019s opening scene. Ashton\u2019s work is more compact and shares a program with another ballet or two (in this case, Alexei Ratmansky\u2019s new Firebird<\/em>).<\/p>\n

Balanchine, who as a little boy played a forest sprite in the Mariinsky Ballet\u2019s production of A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream<\/em>, introduces a bevy of tiny children, adorably costumed (by Karinska) as various woodland insects and butterflies. He also observes certain 19th<\/sup>-century ballet conventions\u2014wrapping up the story in Act I and constructing Act II as a wedding celebration at court, with all the characters re-appearing, plus group after group of sprightly courtiers in various pastel shades, and a couple with no roles in the story, who dance the final pas de deux.\u00a0 He also introduces in the first act, a \u201ccavalier\u201d who has no purpose but to support Titania in a duet (you\u2019d think Oberon would be jealous, but, no, he\u2019s more concerned with getting Titania\u2019s little page for his own).<\/p>\n

One of the delights of Ashton\u2019s ballet is that the fairies, with enchanting costumes by Walker, evoke the lithographs of 1830\u2019s Romantic ballet. Led by Shakespeare\u2019s Cobweb, Peaseblossom, Moth, and Mustard Seed, they tilt their bodies and wreath their arms like latter-day Taglionis. They\u2019re picture-perfect at the hand-to-ear gesture that says, \u201cHark, I hear someone coming.\u201d But they\u2019re not just pretty and airy, given to flying jumps; when they run in and spot their mistress, Titania, amorously involved with a donkey, they turn dumbstruck faces to the audience.<\/p>\n

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Teresa Reichlen as NYCB’s Hippolyta. Photo: Paul Kolnik<\/p><\/div>\n

In addition to dispensing with Hermia\u2019s irate father (it\u2019s complicated), Ashton eliminates Theseus, Duke of Athens, and his bride-to-be, Hippolyta. Balanchine doesn\u2019t; Hippolyta (I saw Teresa Reichlen) leaps through the clearing, a huntress, her bow drawn, accompanied by a cadre of masked hounds, while a thick fog obscures the floor, and Puck copes with getting Lysander and Demetrius to stop staggering around having at each other with swords. Needless to say, both choreographers create ingenious and comical tangles for the lovers, whose saga goes like this: Hermia loves Lysander, and he loves her. Helena loves Demetrius, but he loves Hermia. In Balanchine\u2019s ballet, Demetrius (Amar Ramasar, in the June 5th<\/sup> cast) grabs the persistent Helena\u00a0 (Janie Taylor) by the hand \u00a0and spins her around him as if he\u2019s winding up to toss her as far as he can. Balanchine also gives Helena a touching moment alone.<\/p>\n

After Puck\u2019s inadvertent mischief with the magic floral elixir that Oberon ordered, both Lysander and Demetrius pursue Helena and spurn Hermia. They fight. Both ballets feature a threesome, in which the two men have a tug of war with Helena as the prize in the middle.The cast members of the squabbling foursome performed excellently in both productions.\u00a0 Robert Fairchild and Abi Stafford took on Balanchine\u2019s Lysander and Hermia, while the lovers in Ashton\u2019s forest were danced by Stella Abrera (Hermia), Jared Matthews (Lysander), Maria Riccetto (Helena), and Sascha Radetsky (Demetrius).\u00a0 Abrera and Matthews played to perfection their little scene in which his ardency meets her firmly expressed virgin propriety, and he reluctantly beds down at some distance from her patch of grass.<\/p>\n

One aspect of Shakespeare\u2019s tale that\u2019s amplified in any ballet on which it\u2019s based: the humans can\u2019t see the fairies, no matter how much the latter flutter and leap around them. Puck\u2019s invisibility makes for some good jokes. And, as a meddler in destinies, he has a lot to accomplish. Daniel Ulbricht is an obvious choice for NYCB\u2019s Puck; he has a terrific jump and projects an impish, naughty-boy charm. When he\u2019s hoisted by invisible ropes over the Act II celebration in lieu of Puck\u2019s final \u201cGive me your hands if we be friends. . .\u201d speech, you can imagine a victorious soccer hero being carried on his teammates\u2019 shoulders.<\/p>\n

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Herman Cornejo as Puck in Frederick Ashton’s The Dream<\/em>. Photo: Gene Schiavone<\/p><\/div>\n

Herman Cornejo as Ashton\u2019s Puck tells a different story; he truly seems to be a creature from another world. When he crouches to await Oberon\u2019s command, you sense a more primal side to his nature, but Cornjeo also ignores gravity\u2014soaring into leaps and jumps without apparent effort. He spins off an impossible number of perfectly centered pirouettes and stops with one foot still off the ground. Fond but fearful with Oberon, head-scratchingly confused about which lover is which, and a whirlwind in pursuit of his goals\u2014Cornejo gets under Puck\u2019s mischievous skin, as he does with every role or style he essays.<\/p>\n

Balanchine\u2019s Rustics come on with props prepared to rehearse the play-within-a-play we never see, while Ashton creates a short, rambunctious dance for his, at the end of which Puck turns Bottom into as ass and sprinkles the sleeping Titania\u2019s eyes with the flower juice so she\u2019ll love the first living thing she lays eyes on. Both these duets are delicious. ABT\u2019s Bottom (Alexei Agoudine\u2014excellent) trots about on black pointe shoes, a fine simulacrum of hooves. NYCB\u2019s (Adrian Danchig-Waring\u2014also excellent) has a much better donkey head. The lovely Titanias (NYCB\u2019s Maria Kowroski and ABT\u2019s Xiomara Reyes) adore their puzzled but happy suitor, supply him with fodder, ride him, or stroke his soft ears before bedding down with him. Instead of the seductive melody Ashton uses, Balanchine sets his comic duet to Mendelssohn\u2019s heart-swelling Nocturne.<\/p>\n

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Titania and Bottom transformed (ABT’s Alexei Agoudine and Xiomara Reyes). Photo: Gene Schiavone<\/p><\/div>\n

Ashton and Balanchine conceived the fairy rulers differently. Ashton created his Oberon on the Royal Ballet\u2019s Antony Dowell with Antoinette Sibley as his Titania. ABT\u2019s Cory Stearns, is a danseur noble (as Dowell was), tall and imperious, while Reyes is a defiant queen but a delicious flirt, tossing her curls impetuously. Balanchine was seduced by sources that portrayed Oberon as a dwarf or elf and although his original Titania, played by Melissa Hayden, wasn\u2019t taller than her partner, Edward Villella, subsequent casts have always had a smallish Oberon and a tall Titania. At the performance I attended, Kowroski was paired with Joaquin de Luz, who performs wonderfully in an amazing solo that bounds high and is full of quicksilver foot trickery.\u00a0 As Ashton\u2019s Oberon, Stearns also has splendid solo passages, with elegant spins and jackknifing jumps that he looks magnificent performing.<\/p>\n

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Joaquin De Luz and Maria Kowroski in Balanchine’s fairyland. Photo: Paul Kolnik<\/p><\/div>\n

Balanchine\u2019s royal pair do more arguing than dancing together. The pas de deux than crowns Act II is performed by two people who haven\u2019t appeared before. Hermia and Lysander, Helena and Demetrius, Hippolyta and Theseus are joined in marriage amid a spree of\u00a0 festive courtly dancing that goes on for rather a long time. The unnamed man and woman appear, like summoned entertainers. They are anything but that. Everyone leaves the stage, as if dinner is being served elsewhere, and these two (I saw Wendy Whelan and Jared Angle) are left alone to dance a magnificent pas de deux that expresses in complex ways the ideal love that has, until now, eluded Shakespeare\u2019s three couples. The two begin companionably with swift, buoyant steps, and gradually move into more rapturous, intimate comings together, yet they never lose the courtliness that a classical pas de deux requires. Within this structure, Whelan is all gossamer, spooling out her steps in response to her ardent partner.<\/p>\n

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Cory Stearns as Oberon and Xiomra Reyes as Titania in ABT’s The Dream<\/em>. Photo: Gene Schiavone<\/p><\/div>\n

Ashton preferred to have Oberon and Titania perform the final duet\u2014she chastened and in love with him all over again, Oberon gentle but masterful, now that their differences have faded away and the night edges toward dawn. The choreographer saved the Nocturne for them and turned their reunion into a seduction pervaded by a sweet and compelling eroticism. Titania\u2019s little frissons of delight in her mate\u2019s embrace gradually subside; you feel her limbs getting heavy with desire as Oberon slowly walks her along, sliding her into splits that seem to get deeper and deeper.<\/p>\n

I love Balanchine\u2019s ballet. I\u2019m in love with Ashton\u2019s.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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