Glimpses #9: Parisian Modern

July 21, 2012 by Tobi Tobias

The Paris Opera Ballet, in its determined non-classical guise, closed its New York visit with the late Pina Bausch’s 1975 Orpheus and Eurydice. In a post-modern, glossy-mag décor, Bausch’s take on the subject mingles the ravishing dancers with the solo singers, giving Terpsichore’s favorites little better to do than undulate their supple spines (ladies), run and jump (gentlemen), and (all) make the same gestures, many of them mindlessly co-opted from Martha Graham, again and again. And again. In the house program, Bausch assigned each element of the deeply touching myth her own “intellectual” meaning. Her most grievous act, however, was to chop up and rearrange Gluck’s sublime music. I did appreciate Stéphane Bullion’s physical endurance as a strangely sulky Orpheus and joined in the burst of acclaim that Marie-Agnès Gillot earned for her magnificent dancing as Eurydice.

The Paris Opera Ballet’s Marie-Agnès Gillot as Eurydice, in Pina Bausch’s Orpheus and Eurydice

Photo: Stephanie Berger

A Ballet Romance

July 18, 2012 by Tobi Tobias

Paris Opera Ballet / David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / June 11-22, 2012

Say that, as a dance fan, you happen to have a young child in your life who’s showing a burgeoning interest in—perhaps even an instinctive love for—dancing. If you take her or him to the ballet to see one of the venerable 19th-century classics, you want to be sure it’s a production that’s faithful to its tradition—not savagely cut, skewed, or “reimagined” beyond recognition. The very young, with their acute receptivity, deserve the very best.

The Paris Opera Ballet’s Aurélie Dupont in the title role of Giselle, with the corps de ballet as wilis

Photo: Stephanie Berger

I’ve had the pleasure and responsibility of fostering such a dance-avid child’s interest in ballet for a dozen years. (She’s 15 now—a scholar, a musician, and a runner.) We’ve had the luck of living in New York City, host to American Ballet Theatre, the New York City Ballet, and a plethora of ranking visiting troupes. As time went by, though, there was a diminishing number of satisfactory productions to be seen of touchstone works such as The Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake.

Happily, the current visit of the Paris Opera Ballet has brought us the most beautiful and satisfying staging of Giselle that I’ve ever witnessed—and I, too, fell in love with ballet very young (without the help of a fairy godmother). Created for the company in 1841, this is a Giselle that sets the ballet where it belongs—in a pastoral community glowing with sunshine and good will until a dallying prince invades it (his excuse, he claims, is love), then in a dank graveyard populated by vengeful ghosts who can be vanquished only by a devotion existing beyond death (even then it’s a damned close call).

Dupont as Giselle, Mathieu Ganio as Albrecht, and the corps de ballet

Photo: Stephanie Berger

Unusually, this production of Giselle is not entirely dependent on the ballerina playing the title role. Indeed, the work of the corps de ballet, 26 women, moving as one, creating one breathtaking sculptural image after another, is of equal—perhaps greater—importance. The interlacing lines of wilis (maidens who’ve died when their sweetheart betrayed them) crossing the stage in traveling arabesques made me gasp along with the neophyte viewers, though I’d seen the passage again and again. The stunning effect of the corps is no doubt due to the strict principles governing the dancers’ selection, their scrupulous training from childhood through adolescence (with many aspirants falling by the wayside) and, somehow, to their apparent communal dedication to animating the choreography at the highest level possible. It’s a zeal that never flags but is, instead, renewed night after night. I find all of this eerie and marvelous and feel privileged to witness it.

The costumes for the production, after those designed by the celebrated Alexandre Benois in 1924, are ravishing. The lower classes are modestly dressed. Then a procession of the aristocracy (to which the unreliable prince belongs), on its way to the hunt, brings rich color and magnificent detailing—in more or less medieval style—into the picture. The palette includes bright red, crimson, mulberry, violet, peach, cream, and deepest blue, the last offset with ermine trim. The complementary headgear is appropriately outré. Every last one of this 1% looks haughtily stunning.

In the second act, however, the wilis’ nearly surreal white costumes make the gorgeous worldly outfits we saw on the aristocracy look like mere gaudy outer skins of the earthly upper class. The wilis are clad in the uniform of their mystical if horrific rites. The ghostly women, veiled when we first see them, wear neat bodices above long tutus that flair out in quivering concentric circles when the women turn, as if creating a gently whirling cloud around their legs. From the back of their bodices sprout tiny translucent white wings. Where are they going to fly, I wondered, if they’re essentially dead and buried? No matter; once the second act is launched, susceptible observers will have entirely suspended their disbelief. They’ll see nothing but a stream of miracles.

Even the lighting of this Giselle is magical, most obviously in the slow coming of dawn, which robs the wilis of their power, saves the now-repentant prince’s life, and sends Giselle back to the sorrowful and lonely peace of her grave. It’s a peach-tinged light, a glow really, that increases as subtly as sleep finally arrives to an fretful insomniac.

As I write, I’ve seen three of the POB’s Giselles (and am signed up to see two more). By far the most gratifying was the first of them, Aurélie Dupont (whom I couldn’t resist visiting twice). The others were Clairemarie Osta and Isabelle Ciaravola.

Dupont is not the first ballerina you’d identify with Giselle. She has a devastating personal beauty (not necessary for the role, maybe even distracting) and an authoritative presence, no doubt encouraged by her years as an étoile–the A+ dancers of the company, according to its hierarchical system. Yet, as POB’s aesthetic dictates, she doesn’t “sell herself” but rather underplays and, in doing so, entices the viewer to join in the work of her imagination.

Dupont (center) as Giselle

Photo: Stephanie Berger

In the first act of the ballet, her work is initially impressive only in the fluency and correctness of her dancing. But she’s a master of calibration and when she arrives at the Mad Scene she takes fire. First she looks like a child betrayed, then sketches the history she’s recalling of Albrecht’s (as the two-timing prince is called) courtship of her—making each feeble, jagged gesture a stab to the spectator’s heart, then leaping wildly here and there, as if to escape her sorrow.

Her second act was beyond terrific, her personal glamour sacrificed to create an image that was all air and pathos. She danced and acted as if those two elements might, quite naturally, be tethered to each other. At the moment of her appearance at the command of Myrtha, queen of the wilis, whirling as if seized by some untamable force of nature, she seemed to be a dead soul. Then, gradually, she achieved a piercing half-life through her memory of a love that refused to acknowledge death. She reacted to the now penitent and sorrowing Albrecht as if she didn’t actually see him and couldn’t really touch or be touched by him, yet somehow, deep within her senses, recalled an attachment to him that she would never abandon.

Dupont and Ganio as Giselle and Albrecht

Photo: Stephanie Berger

In all this, she displayed two gifts essential to a ballerina: She makes you look at her (indeed refuses to let you look away) and she makes you believe in her.

Clairemarie Osta is a marvelous dancer—fresh, fleet, and buoyant. She’s no stranger to virtuoso feats where they’re appropriate. For one thing, she does the diagonal of hops on pointe traveling backwards—without in the least seeming to show off. Her Mad Scene has personal touches that are entirely apt. Overall she plays it as if she had slept while the prince-playing-peasant courted her and she responded with shy joy, and has now awakened to a nightmare. And yet Osta’s never entirely convincing as Giselle because she’s just not the type. She doesn’t come across as a fragile, vulnerable young woman to whom tragic things happen. She has the delicious personality of a soubrette; a born Lise in La Fille mal gardée.

Isabelle Ciaravola didn’t endear herself to me in L’Arlésienne and my lack of enthusiasm continued upon seeing her Giselle. Like her fellow étoiles she is amazingly capable. Still, the rank of étoile is supposed to be given for a charisma, a luminescence that is beyond technique. Instead I find Ciaravola dry, angular, even occasionally grotesque, as if she were activated by an unreliable puppet master maneuvering the strings. I’d prefer not to be so negative—especially about a dancer I’d never seen before now—but I understand, just from intermission talk, that she has many admirers, so if I can’t see what’s terrific about her, no matter. That’s the beauty inherent in having a diversity of dancers to interpret a role. The Parisians fielded four in New York and, with three of these close to retirement, no doubt have other candidates back home.

None of the Albrechts I saw seemed just right for the role, one too young and brash paired with a mature ballerina; another too mature to negotiate the technical challenges, though theatrically wise; a third who, with everything going for him, remained indifferent to the story the ballet means to tell. The men’s partnering, though, particularly in the second act, never faltered.

Marie-Agnès Gillot as Myrtha, Queen of the Wilis, in Giselle

Photo: Stephanie Berger

As Myrtha, I much preferred Marie-Agnès Gillot, who alone had the force the role demands and a rare range of emotion. Gillot is one of the most versatile and impressive dancers in the august French company, and her presence permeates the entire second act—until Giselle’s literally undying love for Albrecht defeats her. Emilie Cozette, the first-cast Myrtha, was sweet, small, and tender. What had Casting been thinking of?

Apart from the excellence of the dancing, the company’s style in mime is ideal. Even when it’s in the traditional code vocabulary (for example, tracing a circle around the face means “beautiful”), it’s very underplayed—conversational, as it were. The POB dancers behave as if dancing were their poetry, mime their prose, and the two were intimately related. Think of the relationship between aria and recitative in opera.

The corps de ballet as wilis

Photo: Stephanie Berger

A minor but telling detail (one of many, the Parisians being well-nigh obsessive about detail): Just as in the lithographs of Romantic Age ballerinas, the wilis carry their heads inclined slightly forward, drawing attention to the back of the neck (la nuque, in French)—a part of the body that, according to Japanese culture, is considered particularly beautiful and erotic. Evidently, the Japanese are right.

Led by the Belgian conductor Koen Kessels, the orchestra of the New York City Opera delivered Adolphe Adam’s score sensitively and vibrantly. Ballet music is rarely so well treated in New York. It was a pleasure to hear what’s possible, given care and financial support.

Made in France

July 15, 2012 by Tobi Tobias

Paris Opera Ballet / David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / July 11-22, 2012

The Paris Opera Ballet, playing at the David H. Koch through July 22, gets the prize for vintage achievement. Formed in 1669, it has the distinction of being the world’s oldest classical ballet troupe. The academy that produces most of its dancers dates from 1713. Naturally, this legendary institution, absent from New York for 16 years, had to re-introduce itself.

The Paris Opera Ballet’s Aurélie Dupont (center, held aloft) with fellow artists of the company in Serge Lifar’s Suite en Blanc

Photo: Stephanie Berger

The first of the three ballets it performed on its opening night in New York declared that exquisite technique rules the company’s aesthetic. Serge Lifar’s Suite en Blanc, set to Édouard Lalo’s score for Namouna, is essentially a compendium of steps, steps immaculately executed by the dancers—almost all trained at the company’s school from early childhood—so that they seem to be the definitive, textbook, version of that step. The goal is, quite simply, perfection. Onlookers will find this sublime, curious, or off-putting, according to their taste. As for its being a ballet about ballet, it’s a distant cousin of Harald Lander’s Études, often performed by American Ballet Theatre, but neither gaudy nor wild. Suite en Blanc is completely confined within the parameters of good taste.

Some, almost random, particulars:

The women’s feet—in their spanking clean, neatly tied pink satin pointe shoes—seem to caress the stage floor and, incredibly, make no sound on the landings from jumps and leaps or on gentle pitter-pattering runs.

The women’s arms are graceful and ornamental, tracing filigreed patterns on the air. The head, neck, and shoulders harmonize scrupulously to produce an effect called épaulement, something Balanchine ignored, because it interfered with the speed he wanted and, perhaps, because it looked old-fashioned.

There are women who can balance forever on one foot—en pointe, of course—turning themselves into an unwavering middle-weight piece of sculpture, apparently through sheer will or perhaps a code of honor.

Everyone in the company, it seems, can turn like mad, some even like gyroscopes. Among the men the finishes—always the telling part of a turn—are sometimes uneven.

The men bend their knees slightly and shoot their bodies directly up into the air, beating their feet together, clearly and firmly, then landing neatly. Missteps, even on a first performance in an unfamiliar theater, are few and clearly destined for eradication.

The men are not only adept partners, but also infinitely polite and respectful cavaliers as well. And they manage to pull off impressive athletic feats without looking like cavemen. True this unremitting chivalry and control may exasperate the New York spectator. We’re simply not used to it.

Throughout, there’s not much variation in the weight of a step. Even in the air, the dancers don’t create the illusion of being ethereal—or, on the ground, impressively forceful. What they’re aiming for, I guess, is sublimity.

Aurélie Dupont and Benjamin Pech in Suite en Blanc

Photo: Stephanie Berger

The high point of Suite en Blanc is a duet in which I saw Aurélie Dupont, a ravishing dancer nearing the company’s compulsory retirement age of 42, sveltely partnered one evening by Benjamin Pech and the next by Mathieu Ganio. Dupont is undeniably a beauty—in both face and figure, a superb dancer with the lush quality of a Suzanne Farrell or a Sara Mearns, and a role model of calm, confident serenity. She exemplifies the rank of étoile (star)—which the company awards to those artists who have a luminous quality that draws viewers’ attention like a magnet and makes them rejoice in what they see. There’s a marvelous moment in the duet where the man walks forward holding her body above the floor and she “walks” too—on air. And another in which she lifts her arms over her head and intertwines her fingers as if to indicate at once the crown of a regent and the halo of an angel. If I had known about her earlier, I would have traveled to Paris more often.

Isabelle Ciaravola and Jérémie Bélingard in Roland Petit’s L’Arlésienne

Photo: Stephanie Berger

It took me a second viewing to figure out the tale Roland Petit’s 1974 L’Arlésienne was trying to tell and even then the story felt wrong-headed. The title itself, The Woman from Arles, appropriated from the Bizet score to which it’s set, is a red herring because the central figure of the ballet is a young man. He and the woman his fellow villagers—a 16-member corps—assume he will marry and settle down with, can’t make their relationship work because the youth has visions—visions of a love that’s utterly beyond earthly reach. Think of La Sylphide, in which James, slated to marry the charming, down-to-earth Effie, feels trapped in the ordinariness of his bride-to-be and the domestic life their community expects them to lead together, and so dreams of a love that’s literally unearthly. You know how that one ends.

The woman, played paper-doll style (is this how Our Hero thinks of her?) by Isabelle Ciaravola and more humanly and sweetly by Nolwenn Daniel, approaches her intended again and again—this is a tediously long ballet—and the two do try to connect, to no avail. He grows more and more possessed by his visions and allergic to her overtures and at last jumps out of a suddenly and conveniently appearing window to his death.

Jérémie Bélingard in Petit’s L’Arlésienne

Photo: Stephanie Berger

The dancers I preferred in the leading roles were Jérémie Bélingard in the opening night cast—his acting was so convincing I almost believed in the goings on–and Nolwenn Daniel (who played a sweetheart any man would be proud to win) in the second performance.

Bolero: You know that Ravel music. And it’s still just as long as you remember. It belabors a simple melody, assuming that repetition, hand in hand with escalating volume and augmenting instrumentation, will hypnotize the hearer. The composer, it’s said, told a friend that he found the little phrase itself “insistent.” Apparently Bronislava Nijinska thought so too and was the first to choreograph the score, in 1928.

Nicolas Le Riche in the central role of Maurice Béjart’s Bolero

Photo: Stephanie Berger

The Paris Opera Ballet does Maurice Béjart’s 1961 version. It’s an audience pleaser, god knows; I find it unbearable. The choreography features a man or a woman (I saw Nicolas Le Riche on opening night, Marie-Agnès Gillot the following evening), discreetly wearing as little as possible under the circumstances, standing on a red oval table to pulsate, gyrate, and gesticulate nonstop with increasing fervor. He (or she) is bordered on all three sides of the stage by a row of dancers who become drawn into the rite until, at the finish, they close in and lunge at the figure on the table, suggesting a synchronized orgasm.

Nicolas Le Riche and the male ensemble in Bolero

Photo: Stephanie Berger

My guest for the opening night program, with which Bolero concluded—with a bang, you might say–condemned the piece, which she was seeing for the first time, as incredibly vulgar. I was bored by the trite choreography, but deeply impressed by the sensuous power and selfless dedication to the enterprise of the two dancers I saw in the leading role. It was definitely a case in which maturity counted. The audience as a whole went crazy for it. Standing ovation and all that. Yelps of delight.

The POB’s mixed repertory program will be followed by Giselle, created for the company in 1841. I can’t wait.

Swans

June 30, 2012 by Tobi Tobias

American Ballet Theatre / Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, NYC / through July 7, 2012

In the past week American Ballet Theatre has been offering a handsome array of dancers to play Odette/Odile and Prince Siegfried in Kevin McKenzie’s version of Swan Lake. Steeling myself against the choreography—as mistaken and misshapen as Peter Martins’ Lake for the New York City Ballet—I chose to see three pairs: Paloma Herrera and Ángel Corella (in his farewell performance with the company); Polina Semionova and David Hallberg (currently dancers in transit); and Isabella Boylston and Daniil Simkin (making their debuts in the roles).

Angel Corella, in his farewell performance with American Ballet Theatre, as Prince Siegfried in Kevin McKenzie’s version of Swan Lake

Photo: Rosalie O’Connor

Onstage, Ángel Corella has always seemed to be the happiest of men, radiating good cheer and sheer delight. He’s one of those people for whom the glass is neither half full nor full, but eternally brimming over. These qualities—along with an only partly muted version of the masterly dancing that made him a star—were evident in his official farewell performance with the company on June 28th.

He was given the usual send-off: One by one, the artists who have been his colleagues, all known by sight to committed dance fans, appeared to offer flowers and embraces, until the stage was crowded with well wishers, its floor a carpet of blossoms and laurel leaves, the air shot though with glittering confetti. In Corella’s case the routine goodbye ritual was vibrant with the affection his peers feel for him. The audience clapped and cheered wildly, as have so many of Corella’s audiences before, and, for an inordinately long time, even after the house lights went up, steadfastly refused to go home.

Nevertheless, the amazing part of the evening was Corella’s demonstration of his artistry in playing Siegfried. He remains as compelling as ever—you might say even more now that his physical virtuosity is diminished—in sheer theatrical know-how (timing and tone, for instance), and especially in creating a character who is alive at every moment. When his mother, the monarch of the realm in which their story takes place, tells him that, having reached his majority, he’s obliged to marry, he makes it clear and keeps it clear that she has sounded his death knell. He doesn’t go back to the upbeat company of his friends but continues to be shrouded in a dark cloud of gloom. He’s not angry or sulky but rather in what the medicine men of the 20th century would have called a chronic depression.

Corella partnering Paloma Herrera as Odette in Swan Lake

Photo: Gene Schiavone

Corella appears to be completely convinced by the story the ballet tells. When he does the interpolated solo about being alone in a world that finds companionship easy, he seems to be thinking and moving at the same time. Armed with his crossbow, hunting alone, he encounters Odette and is all amazement. At one point in his pas de deux with her, he leans back as if swooning because he has met sheer loveliness. He seems to believe that a creature so sublime could exist only in the imagination. (As perhaps Odette does, but that’s another interpretation of the tale.) When he climbs the rocky promontory to commit suicide in the wake of Odette’s desperate plunge, he stands poised at the top for a moment, as if getting his emotional bearings, then simply drops into the space below as if there were nothing that could hold him any longer on earth.

As for the technical side of the performance Corella did what he could do without showing strain. It was a lovely “sunset” performance like those of Kyra Nichols in her last seasons with City Ballet, the wise opposite of Nureyev’s in the last decade—or more—of his life. This farewell was one of the greatest performances I’ve seen Corella give and I’ve seen many that were glorious.

Corella’s partner as Odette/Odile, Paloma Herrera, is most gratifying in ebullient roles that show off high spirits and a rock-solid virtuoso technique. She makes a delicious Kitri in Don Quixote, but she’s clearly not a born Odette. She knows exactly what to do in the role but she’s just not fully convincing doing it. She’s a robust creature of the earth, not a figure of enchantment. And, alas, her own technique has begun to erode—just slightly but discernably nevertheless. Oddly enough, she was no more convincing as Odile, even though dynamic divas used to be hers by birthright. In truth, the most touching element in her performance was her devotion to Corella, her long-time colleague and friend.

Corella will continue to dance, he’s announced, with the Barcelona Ballet, still a very green troupe, which he founded and runs because, as he’s said, Spain didn’t have a classical company and should have one.

*

Polina Semionova as Odette, partnered by David Hallberg as Prince Siegfried

Photo: Rosalie O’Connor

I think of them as the Commuter Couple: Russian-born, Polina Semionova trained in Moscow at the Bolshoi Ballet School. Upon graduation, laden with prizes, she joined the Berlin State Ballet as a principal dancer. She danced with ABT last year and this as a guest artist and has now been invited to join the company full-time as a principal, beginning with its fall season. David Hallberg, an American, trained at the Arizona Ballet School, the Paris Opera Ballet School, and ABT. He became a principal dancer at ABT in 2005 and now divides his time between ABT and the Bolshoi Ballet. The legendary Russian company, jealous of its own importance, is hardly in the habit of adopting foreign artists, yet it took Hallberg on as a star and enhanced the power of his gifts.

The narrative arrangement of Swan Lake lets us find out a lot about Prince Siegfried long before he encounters his enchanted, fatal swan. We meet him enjoying the company of the aristocrats and the peasantry of his long-ago-and-far-away kingdom in the run-up to his coming of age party. There we see immediately that Hallberg’s execution of the classical ballet vocabulary is so flawless that every step he executes looks like a Platonic version of that move.

When Siegfried’s mother presents him with the handsome crossbow for hunting—apparently just what he craved—she also takes him aside to remind him that, upon his coming of age, he’s obliged to marry, although a bride seems to be the last thing he wants. Hallberg makes Siegfried’s feelings apparent and then gets to do, poignantly, the interpolated solo of longing and loneliness. And then he meets his swan, if not the gift of Fate, at least what the casting department has selected for him.

Hallberg as Prince Siegfried partnering Semionova as Odette

Photo: Rosalie O’Connor

Semionova and Hallberg are well-matched in height—she’s tall for a ballerina—although it can be argued that they otherwise make a poorly mated couple. She is all force and unwavering control, while he is lyrical by nature and disposition, and beautifully fluid in both action and in the feelings that lie behind that action. Semionova is an Odette in the line of Cynthia Gregory: technically assured and majestic. She differs from Gregory, alas, in that there’s no plaintive quality in her dancing—no sorrow, no pathos, no feeling of any kind. Even her mime is governed by exactitude. She’s a dancer who is all about control—and perfection within that severe realm. This is not good news.

The pair offered a white swan pas de deux that a dance notator might dream of seeing in the studio to facilitate her job of recording every move in scrupulous detail. The tempo was so clear, careful, and slow—slower even than Makarova famously preferred—that it often felt like stasis. It helped Hallberg look like a better partner than he’s shown himself to be elsewhere, but not an eloquent one.

And what about the Odile part of Semionova’s role, you may well ask. It was just like the Odette part, adorned with a few purportedly wicked grimaces. Semionova’s crackerjack technique serves her well here but, just as she didn’t exude the purity of Odette, she fails to embody Odile’s glittering evil. The multiple fouettés, well seasoned with doubles, were spectacular, though Hallberg outdid her in his gyroscopic response.

*

Isabella Boylston as Odette, with Daniil Simkin as Prince Siegfried

Photo: Gene Schiavone

Hope and promise were very much in the air, when Isabella Boylston and Daniil Simkin jointly made their debuts in the leading roles at a matinee of Swan Lake. Their technical prowess and professional acumen alone were worth a shower of gold stars.

Because of the way ABT has, quite reasonably, cast him in the past, Simkin—small, swift, strong, and seemingly fearless—has made his mark as a virtuoso. If the McKenzie version of Swan Lake had a jester—as many takes on this ballet do—the role would automatically become Simkin’s. He’d steal the show. Instead, he was given a chance to play Prince Siegfried—though he lacks the height, the looks (he resembles a sweetly appealing child), and the air of command the role calls for. He earned that chance, as was evident in his impeccable rendition of the ballet’s classical-dance passages. Indeed, his perfection of line and the seamless flow of his dancing are very much like David Hallberg’s, but his type—and type remains obdurately significant in yesteryear’s dances, no matter what liberties today’s artistic directors take—still refuses him the keys to the kingdom.

As for acting, he simply doesn’t do it yet and, in general, ABT seems to be oblivious to its importance. This is a self-defeating policy. The absence of drama in the performance of a story ballet means that, beautiful as the dancing may be, nothing about it will feel urgent.

Boylston as Odette

Photo: Gene Schiavone

Isabella Boylston, doesn’t act either, relying on a slight change of how she does the steps to show the difference between Odette (all purity and longing, a role she was born to own) and Odile (an evil seductress, a role that might well contribute to her development). No matter—at least for the moment. Boylston is a consistently lovely dancer, a fact that the company has been slow to recognize fully. Her rendering of the two ladies of the lake was executed admirably, lacking only the kind of magnetism that rivets the attention of a huge audience. This quality is bound to grow with time and experience.

Boylston is petite, with a beautifully proportioned body. Her technique is perfection itself—strong, clear, fluent, and musical to boot. She has only to shed the look of Prize Pupil and take over the territory that is hers by rights. Surely it’s time for ABT to nurture a nascent ballerina of its own making.

Troika

June 22, 2012 by Tobi Tobias

American Ballet Theatre: Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet, with Natalia Osipova, David Hallberg, and Herman Cornejo / Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, NYC / June 18, 2012

The near-hysterical joy of the audience at the Metropolitan Opera House on June 18—in response to American Ballet Theatre’s pairing of Natalia Osipova and David Hallberg as the leads in Romeo and Juliet—was a theatrical phenomenon in itself. The star-struck approach to ballet is hardly the only one to take; it may even be thought frivolous. But it can certainly make a performance vivid and powerful, all the while doing the essential job of selling tickets. (The house was packed.)

Natalia Osipova and David Hallberg in American Ballet Theatre’s production of Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet

Photo: Gene Schiavone

On this occasion the casting in Kenneth MacMillan’s 1965 three-acter—to the Prokofiev score that, mood by mood, almost tells the story borrowed from Shakespeare in itself—was made super-effective by the inclusion of Herman Cornejo as Mercutio. Depleted as the company is of stars who’ve emerged from its ranks or are, at least, a full-time part of its roster, the abiding presence of Cornejo is something for which ballet lovers should be down-on-their-knees thankful. Is he still present because of loyalty? Dancing is such a precarious trade that its practitioners can’t afford too much loyalty. More likely is the fact that the fates have made this extraordinary artist a couple of inches shorter than is customary in a danseur noble.

Herman Cornejo as Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet

Photo: MIRA

Cornejo’s dancing is phenomenal partly because of its correctness, to be sure. Everything he does is immaculately shaped and harmoniously placed, resulting in a succession of images—each with its particular texture—that you can envision days after the performance. But while you’re watching him, you don’t much dwell on that aspect of his work even though he makes the individual steps link together, forming rhythm-blessed phrases. The miracle of Cornejo’s dancing is that he makes what he’s doing look natural, like something an ordinary young man who goes in for sports might do. No matter what the challenges of strength, form, or sheer coordination, even when the choreography is charged with near-impossible feats, Cornejo’s dancing remains utterly human.

The team of Hallberg and Osipova is especially potent because each of them fuels the other, though they don’t even have fluency in a spoken language in common. Their communication seems to be intuitive and, when they play against each other, they’re able to fill the stage with feeling that seems spontaneous. One acts, the other reacts, and everything—including the narrative that begins in sudden rapture and ends in a desperate dual suicide—is activated as if for the first time. Without this factor, the superlative technique each of them possesses wouldn’t be entirely satisfying. (In the arts, technique alone never is.)

Osipova as Juliet

Photo: Gene Schiavone

Osipova seems to have thought out her motivation for each phrase of her role and renders it clearly. Even if you disagree with her interpretation at moments, you see what she means. And the details are many: When Juliet’s nurse tells the barely nubile girlchild that she must stop playing with her doll and cups the girl’s budding breasts, Osipova’s Juliet is one second in denial and in the next shyly pleased by this sign of burgeoning womanhood. From then on, we see Juliet discover, step by step, what love is—a supreme joy, yet capable of ruling over one’s entire existence and, in her case, possibly fatal. Osipova is haunting as well in conveying how bereft of human support Juliet has become by the time she accepts Friar Laurence’s potion for a death-like sleep, terrified that she make never wake again. That state of being alone has a very contemporary significance and Osipova makes it ring all too true. This was an eye-opener for me since, before this performance, I’d never thought of this dancer as a ballerina, the figure who can give a ballet a heartbeat. Albeit belatedly, now I do.

Hallberg begins the ballet as a dreamy youth in love with love. He runs after the sleek beauty Rosaline as if he were a puppy, or an infatuated teenager, which is just what he is. When he sneaks into Juliet’s coming-out party with his two best buddies, he’s simply a young guy having fun by breaking society’s rules and courting danger. Scene by scene, though, he matures; by the time the ballet ends, he has attained a grave and touching manhood. In the final scene, he evokes a very plausible agony, displaying a visceral as well as an emotional reaction to his belief that the perfect love he’d yearned for, and found, was now dead.

Hallberg as Romeo

Photo: Gene Schiavone

As for the pure dancing aspect of his role, Hallberg is surely the most exquisite danseur noble on the stage today. In the balcony pas de deux, he dances with a princely perfection, almost entirely confident that Juliet is as smitten as he.

He turns Osipova’s incomparable lightness into something far more than a breathtaking physical phenomenon; it looks like a statement of how he makes her feel. Working together, if these two don’t convince you of the validity and power of teenage love, I can’t imagine who or what might.

What the couple fails to do is cope with MacMillan’s impossible lifts. (In another R & J cast this season, I saw the Royal Ballet’s infinitely appealing Alina Cojocaru and Johan Kobborg bring off each one perfectly, so now I know it can be done. They’re both with the Royal Ballet, so maybe they get a lot of practice.) Nevertheless, what I’ve seen in several ballets recently is that Hallberg is still, physically, a mediocre partner. He has a rich and persuasive imagination, but it comes across best when he’s dancing (and dreaming) alone. Dancing as the suitor of a woman his character yearns for, he’ll get the emotional tone of a relationship just right, but he hasn’t yet perfected the mechanics of it.

Still, there was so much in this performance to marvel at, the peculiar latter half of the third act came as a rueful surprise. What went wrong? Well, in the first two acts, there were a lot of subtle adjustments to the choreography that could be explained away as “interpretation.” In the third act the Osipova/Hallberg dream-team was enjoying a kind of emotional free-play that reduced the audience to the status of voyeurs. The two dancers rely for much of their effect on an instinctive emotional and theatrical communication. This state of affairs can result in glorious performances—the kind you expect to tell your grandkids about. (Fonteyn and Nureyev come to mind. Sorella Englund playing the witch in La Sylphide to Nikolaj Hübbe’s James.) But who is to say where the line should be drawn? In this case I drew it when the dancing moved out of the realm of classical ballet.

Osipova and Hallberg in the title roles of Romeo and Juliet

Photo: Rosalie O’Connor

Enormously gifted, both Osipova and Hallberg have been trained to the highest degree in present-day classical dancing. Nevertheless they’re innocents when it comes to the kind of modern-dance vocabulary they seemed to be co-opting as the lives of the young lovers they played disintegrated. Suddenly the dancers’ bodies were reaching with frantic arms; writhing from the gut; flinging themselves, uncontrolled it seemed, into space; hunkering down as if to crawl their way to their terrible ending. Nearly inchoate, they were unconvincing. They resembled nothing so much as a bunch of preteens in a “creative dance” class, the dubious purpose of which was translating emotion into a graceless form of “animal behavior” (an ironic expression, since animals are naturally graceful). In the final scene, in the tomb, when Juliet awakened from Friar Laurence’s sleeping draught and contorted her face into a Munch-like scream, I decided that matters had definitely gone awry. This is nothing to complain about, really. As Blake wrote, “You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough.”

Several of the ballet’s character roles were beautifully conceived. Susan Jones has long made a memorable impression as Juliet’s nurse, all motherly love tempered with down-to-earth practicality. Every bit of her behavior enlarges the portrait—the slow, rhythmical beating of her fists against the floor, for example, when Juliet, about to be married against her will to Paris, is discovered in her bed, seemingly dead.

Kristi Boone a smart, strong dancer with a flair for creating a character, continues to be an important—though not sufficiently recognized—asset to ABT. As Lady Capulet, Juliet’s mother, she accounts boldly for every feeling the woman has: pride in her social position; a claim to authority over her daughter, mercifully undermined, after all, by a mother’s love; unbridled passion for her lover.

Victor Barbee, whose dramatic-dance performances are packed with significant detail, played a steely Lord Capulet. As early as Juliet’s coming-out ball, he was shooting his gaze here and there, rightly suspicious that his wife was betraying him with Tybalt, his young daughter’s fiery cousin.

No one will ever replace the veteran artist Frederic Franklin as Friar Laurence but, having recently reached the age of 98, he has relinquished the part. The choice of Alexei Agoudine as his successor is a sound one. Agoudine has the perfect face—sober with belief—of a monk with only good intentions.

Five-Alarm “Firebird”

June 14, 2012 by Tobi Tobias

American Ballet Theatre: Alexei Ratmansky’s new Firebird / Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, NYC / season runs through July 7, 2012

I can’t imagine what Alexei Ratmansky was thinking of in creating his New Look Firebird. To begin with—and this is the first thing you notice–it‘s dressed for Las Vegas by Galina Solovyeva, with complementary décor (including a sci-fi forest with hints of porn) by Simon Pastukh. It wrests the fairy-tale narrative that Michel Fokine created for his 1910 L’Oiseau de Feu (in which good, abetted by generosity, duly conquers evil and is rewarded with love) into a tale that is sardonic at best, sleazy at worst.

Marcelo Gomes as Ivan and Natalia Osipova as the Firebird in Alexei Ratmansky’s re-imagination of Firebird for American Ballet Theatre

Photo: Gene Schiavone

Am I prejudiced by past experience? I first saw the Fokine version back in the day with Margot Fonteyn and can still remember her entrance and her boldly plucking a golden apple from a painted tree. The one civilized thing Ratmansky accomplished with his version was to use the full Stravinsky score instead of the customary suite. Of course that only lengthened the discomfort of the naysayers.

Judging from all I’ve seen of his earlier work, I’m convinced that Ratmansky is a humanist at heart. His ballets exude a wide and deep sympathy for the flawed human race; call it love, if you will, or, rather, love leavened with humor. As an artist—and he’s a major one, the very best we have in ballet—he has every right to see the world as loathsome, but he’ll have to make his case better than he does here.

Osipova with part of the Firebird ensemble

Photo: Gene Schiavone

Just so you know, the Firebird in this version comes as a multiple. There’s a whole flock of this rara avis, available in both genders. In real-life birdland—with the cardinal, for example—there’s a color distinction or other marking of the genders. Not here. Male and female alike, they’re poured into screaming-red unitards and sport headpieces ornamented with sheaves of feathers that reach into the air like flames, threatening to consume its oxygen.

Of course there’s a main Firebird, as well (her get-up includes a feathery bustle at the rump). I saw her danced by Natalia Osipova. Ratmansky has chosen to ignore this ballerina’s remarkable buoyancy and, with his enormous insight into who and what an individual dancer is, concentrated on another aspect of her dancing persona—a toughness that she seems eager to discard. It’s shown off very well, though, in her battle with Ivan—a tsarevich type played by Marcelo Gomes, who’s the curiosity-driven hero of the ballet—when he tries to capture her. He releases her finally and she rewards him with a red feather that he can use to summon her when he’s in need. Just as everything in the ballet is “too big,” so is the feather.

David Hallberg as the monster Kaschei with the Maidens under his spell

Photo: Gene Schiavone

The Maidens (lovely, gentle, and presumably virginal according to Fokine) whom the monster Kaschei holds in his thrall are, chez Ratmansky, plain and simple sex slaves. The choreographer makes this clear by, for instance, having them assemble, packed body to body in a horizontal line, so that he can slide his lips onto each mouth with a single kiss. There’s a main Maiden, intended in the end as Ivan’s reward, who not only shares a grotesqueness (and a turquoise wardrobe) with her sisters but is, as played by Simone Messmer, also wittier.

As Kaschei, David Hallberg (the incomparable classicist who, half an hour earlier, had been dancing the title role in Balanchine’s Apollo) was clearly having the time of his life being a campy Essence of Evil. But Ivan, after wielding the Emergency Feather, discovers the egg that harbors K’s soul and smashes it, leading to an unearned, unconvincing, and dumbly inept Happy Ending.

The Maidens, free at last

Photo: Gene Schiavone

I should add that there’s almost no distinctive dancing in the piece but this, given the circumstances Ratmansky set up or succumbed to, was inevitable.

Glimpses #8: Tiler Peck

June 8, 2012 by Tobi Tobias

Like Patricia McBride’s, Tiler Peck’s stunning face registers intensely—once seen, never forgotten. Her dancing alone makes a visit to the New York City Ballet heartening. Her technical acumen never falters, only commands, having grown in confidence and in an athletic prowess that’s increasingly managed with subtlety. Yet even viewers who adore her—as well they might—may modify their praise by the worried observation that she seems to have no soul. Peck entered the company as a performer in the show-biz style, vividly “selling” her material. She’s never entirely lost that enthusiasm but, as she has matured (with wonderfully even persistence), it has taken an appropriate place in her skill-set. Surely she’s in her prime now. Just watch her in Liebeslieder Walzer, where she has allowed the steps themselves to teach her the varied moods of her role. Perhaps it’s time to appreciate her without the least reservation.

Wunderkinder

June 7, 2012 by Tobi Tobias

The School of American Ballet’s Workshop Performances / Peter Jay Sharp Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / June 2 matinee and evening; June 5, 2012

School of American Ballet’s Workshop Performances: Austin Bachman in Peter Martins’ Les Petits Riens

Photo: Paul Kolnik

Students at the School of American Ballet and the in-group that cares about it call it, simply, The School, as if it had no equals. So far it doesn’t, at least in the States. It’s the training academy of the New York City Ballet, which skims off the cream—according to its particular needs and taste, of course—and releases the others to companies across the United States and sometimes around the world. Every spring it presents three of what it calls Workshop Performances (same program, alternating casts in the principal roles) so those interested can get a good look at the teen-age pre-professionals, for many of whom the very next step is to find a job.

Silas Farley in George Balanchine’s Cortège Hongrois

Photo: Paul Kolnik

As usual, once a spectator recovers from the shock of seeing these painstakingly trained and lavishly accomplished late adolescents, he or she will recognize—or at least sense—the particular qualities of an SAB “product.” At SAB, some of them shepherded from childhood as well as through adolescence, the students learn what the celebrated 18th-century dance artist Jean-Georges Noverre itemized as the basics of dancing: to bend, to stretch, to rise, to leap, to dart, to glide, to turn. They learn to perform infinite elaborations of these basics with exactitude, profound musicality, grace, style, and assurance—all effort concealed. (George Balanchine, who established the school even before forming his first company, understood dancing as the work of angels, anonymous and transcendent.)

This year’s Workshop offered two challenging ballets, Balanchine’s Cortège Hongrois and Les Petits Riens (Little Nothings) by Peter Martins, who heads the school as well as the parent company. I saw two performances—the matinee and evening shows on July 2.

Cortège Hongrois was created for the New York City Ballet in 1973 to honor the veteran ballerina Melissa Hayden on the occasion of her retirement. Juxtaposing the classical- and character-dance veins, it was the choreographer’s most extended take on Marius Petipa’s 1898 Raymonda, set to a Glazounov score that, once heard, has you humming its high points for weeks, often against your will. Petipa’s ballet was an imaginary account of a highborn young woman in the Middle Ages—lovely, proud, and emotionally susceptible—who can’t decide which of her two suitors to favor: the pure Christian knight (good guy) or the sexy Saracen (bad guy).

Silas Farley and members of the character- and classical-dance ensembles in Balanchine’s Cortège Hongrois

Photo: Paul Kolnik

Balanchine had already dealt with the material better, notably in his brisk, all-classical Pas de Dix. Cortège, however, was a vehicle eminently suited for Workshop because it provided roles to three dozen dancers in the two contrasting styles. And, defying all expectations of tedium, the ballet was ignited by the young dancers’ verve. Responsibility for staging the piece was split between Suki Schorer (classical) and Susan Pilarre (character); both, former dancers with City Ballet, are stalwarts in the development of SAB’s advanced students.

The classical segments of the ballet were performed by students working far beyond their years (no one in the whole program yet qualified as a twentysomething). The technical requirements were very well mastered; the aplomb was continuously amazing.

Claire von Enck and Austin Bachman as the leading classical-dance pair in Balanchine’s Cortège Hongrois

Photo: Paul Kolnik

Balanchine chose to keep his Cortège choreography abstract, avoiding any reference to narrative and character. Still, both the women I saw in the leading role gave her interpretation a subtext, which presumably taught the many little girls in the audience how a princess-type—especially one with “issues”—should behave. Claire von Enck and Austin Bachman, who led the evening’s cast, topped the matinee pair (Mikayla Lambert and the wonderful Silas Farley) but when I’d only seen the matinee cast, I didn’t think anything was missing.

As for Bachman, I’ve been watching him and marveling since he arrived at SAB as a boy. He’s blessedly capable all round: jumps, leaps, turns—the whole vocabulary. Clear in every step, he’s soft and airy as well. His skill as a partner is still minimal, but that’s probably due to inexperience. He has the most beautiful and elastic feet, which shoot him into the air and, even more important, enable neat, cushioned landings. He has the face of a shy country boy unaware of his charm, and the good manners that prevent him from over-estimating his importance. If he continues to be diligent and lucky, he’s likely to go down in the history books.

Elinor Hitt, leading the character-dance segment in Balanchine’s Cortège Hongrois

Photo: Paul Kolnik

Although dancers usually prefer to play royalty than peasantry, the character work in this production of Cortège glowed with vehemence and joy. The booted dancers in their preposterously fringed costumes looked as if they were participating in a lusty ritual they believed in wholeheartedly. Dancing the female lead in the character dances at the matinee, Elinor Hitt, a rail-thin blonde who doesn’t look as if she grew up in America, was a standout. (The house program insists that her home town is Arlington, Virginia.)

Peter Martins’ Les Petits Riens (Little Nothings) uses its title ironically. Named for its score (Mozart’s only music intended for ballet) and given its premiere by City Ballet in 1987, it’s a pretty big deal, which SAB’s young cast brought off deftly. Though a chamber work in scale (four couples), it poses a slew of technical challenges as Martins, typically, explores how far he can take the academic vocabulary—along with his specific gift for men’s work and special fascination with partnering—without flouting tradition entirely. The verdict proves to be “pretty damned far.” That doesn’t mean, though, that the spectator is having a good time, let alone undergoing a transformative experience. For those small miracles you have to go to Balanchine.

The full cast of Martins’ Les Petits Riens

Photo: Paul Kolnik

The craft Martins displays is refreshing—until the craftiness becomes annoying or, simply, a bore. The fact that, as in several Martins works, there is no main couple, adds to the loss of affect; ballet is, by its very nature, a hierarchical world. Worse, Martins seems not to have been in the studio back when Mr. B. declared for the umpteenth time, “Put a man and a girl on the stage and there is already a story.” For all his invention and his understanding of what a male dancer might accomplish, Martins appears to lack the human-interest gene.

The ambitious Workshop program had a curtain raiser, Sean Lavery’s 1990 Twinkliana, set to Mozart’s Twelve Variations on Ah! vous dirai-je, maman (the tune to which Americans sing the “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” lullaby). The ballet is both an entertainment and a lesson, illustrating the various stages of a dancing youngster’s development. Its revival just now is a bow to Lavery’s long, varied, and significant service to City Ballet and its school. Of course I remember him best as a classical dancer, in particular in Balanchine’s Tschaikovsky Concerto No. 2 (formerly Ballet Imperial). I can still envision him at a particular moment in that work, when he deploys two strings of women, one from each hand, and maneuvers both chains of pliable beauties so that they curl softly this way and that at his ever-gentle yet compelling demand. I’ve always thought of this passage as “Balanchine’s Dream.”

Books Remembered: Noel Streatfeild’s “Ballet Shoes”

May 29, 2012 by Tobi Tobias

This essay, commissioned by the Children’s Book Council, first appeared in CBC Features, Vol. 46, No. 1, Winter-Spring 1993.

Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes was published in 1936. It is still in print.

We were in London, my daughter and I, walking down the Cromwell Road. Anne was an exquisitely ingenuous fourteen-year-old, a pupil in George Balanchine’s revered School of American Ballet, and the one of my two offspring who’d given me the magical gift of reading and loving the books that had been my own childhood favorites. Pale and willowy, her fair, waist-length hair streaming down her back, she strolled dreamily along, running her hand across the tall iron railings that separated the sidewalk from private domains.

“Why are you doing that?” I asked, thinking, as mothers will, of jagged metal edges, germ-ridden dirt, and emergency tetanus shots.

“Posy must have done this on her walks,” Anne replied blissfully, referring, as I immediately recognized, to the young heroine of Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes, shepherded down this street on daily constitutionals that ended—as our own jaunt would—with an inspection of the dollhouses at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Instantly, I was flooded with delight over Anne’s identification with that child artist-in-the-making and, beyond that, over this evidence that the flesh of my flesh was so susceptible to the influences of fiction. But then the illogic of the situation struck me, and I blurted out, “But that never happened; Posy wasn’t a real little girl; she was never actually here.”

“Oh, yes, she was; it was all true,” Anne said confidently. At the same time, she eyed me warily to see if I had suddenly, tragically, lost my familiar ability to dissolve the barriers between the humdrum objective world and the ardent realm of the imagination.

I hadn’t. I haven’t. Nothing—neither long experience of life itself nor the encounter with more adult and exalted literary works—can diminish the power that books like Ballet Shoes still exercise over me. Today, to be sure, I can see clearly the discrete elements of its magic, yet no amount of analysis lessens its appeal. Like many beloved books for the young, it offers a scrupulously crafted, self-enclosed world. Though not without sorrow or danger, it’s ultimately a world in which events and characters make sense and one in which there is a place that can be defined as home (a metaphor for safety and self-definition). At the same time, counter-balancing the prosaic and potentially stifling element of security, there is an equally forceful suggestion of infinite possibility, of wild dreams just about to come true.

These, of course, are generalities. In Ballet Shoes, as in the “Shoes” books that followed upon its success, Streatfeild fruitfully indulges her obsession with a few specific themes. For benighted souls who have neglected to read the work, I should say that it is set in London in the twenties and early thirties and that its narrative centers on three foundlings joined into a makeshift family. Overseen by a well-meaning, ineffectual guardian and a reassuring, no-nonsense nurse, Pauline, Petrova, and Posy Fossil (this is the surname they adopt) are trained, out of economic necessity, to earn their living on the stage, something they can do from the tender age of twelve. Their extended family consists of a handful of people who fall into their lives by sheer luck and volunteer to teach these “chosen ones”—without pay—what they need to know.

The most insistent and affecting of Streatfeild’s themes is that of vocation. From the outset, it is clear that Pauline will make a gifted actress while Posy is a nascent Pavlova, destined to become a ballerina of genius. (Even Petrova, a hopeless misfit in the theatrical world, is recognized early on as having her own special future—flying planes.) Posy, imprinted by the fairy’s kiss, is matter-of-factly single-minded, ruthless in a strangely egoless way, utterly dedicated to dancing. She is irresistible to the reader because she never has to face the two questions that haunt most ordinary mortals—often, sadly, for an entire lifetime: What do I want to be when I grow up? and its corollary, Who am I?

According to Streatfeild’s world picture, which has a great deal of literal and poetic truth in it, being an orphan is the ideal condition for the budding artist. It leaves the field clear of encumbrances of all kinds. Such a creature doesn’t have to follow in anyone’s footsteps, waste chunks of her adolescence rebelling against the ancestors, or conform to familial expectations. She’s free to become self-made. In a simple fantasy, Streatfeild embodied the concept of self-actualization—the artist’s essential task, after all—decades before New Age types made so much ado about its importance. Revealingly, the sisters’ “family” disbands in the book’s whirlwind denouement. Once the support system is no longer needed and would, indeed, be confining, it splits open like a cocoon to permit the fledgling performers and their aeronautically inclined sister to embark upon their careers.

Rereading Ballet Shoes as an adult, you see that Streatfeild’s creation has it, unfairly, both ways. Posy and Pauline have none of the problems that plague artists-to-be in real life: They’re never fundamentally at odds with the world. At no time are these characters required to grapple with the truth the film critic Pauline Kael summed up thusly: “A good-girl artist is a contradiction in terms.”

No matter how special their circumstances, all three sisters remain “nice.” They’re simply not permitted to be otherwise. Set against their encounter with the radiance and glamour of the stage is the grueling, endless work behind it and, even more tellingly, the cozy rigor of an upbringing that combines gentility with poverty. Between them, Nana and Garnie see that their wards never get above themselves. Schedules are enforced; behavior is monitored. Peripheral authority figures join in the discipline to ensure that the youngsters remain modest, obedient, diligent, and polite.

For Pauline and Posy, the plainness and high standard of conduct in their home life, along with the rigor of their training for the stage, serve as a corrective to the recognition of their special talents and the witchery of the theater, where their gifts will be exercised. For the reader, the documentation of what is required of the girls offers the comfort of orderliness: The reader can escape from the uncertainties and chaos that characterize daily existence in normal life to the idealized picture of the Fossils’ situation, in which one knows exactly where one stands and what to expect. Even the poverty is attractive—the beauty of making do and doing without. The same perverse magic is at work in Ballet Shoes as in Little Women and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” series: The periods in the characters’ existence in which they have the least in the way of material resources are the most vividly and lovingly remembered.

My daughter returned home briefly after college and, since she would be moving to a minuscule apartment of her own, I offered to store some of her books on my shelves. Organizing them with a tidiness of which Nana would have thoroughly approved, we found that we each owned a copy of Ballet Shoes, with a third to spare. This we handed on to another writer-mother/imaginative-daughter team, inscribing in it our fondest wishes.

Armchair Travel

May 25, 2012 by Tobi Tobias

American Ballet Theatre / Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, NYC / through July 7, 2012

We are in India, a long and mythical time ago. A Brahmin priest lusts after Nikiya, the loveliest of the temple dancers, a situation acceptable neither to his gods nor to the young woman. She loves the warrior Solor, who returns her feelings. Solor, however, has been promised to the rajah’s daughter, Gamzatti, who, in desperation (or an access of evil), finishes off her rival with a poisonous viper embedded in a basket of flowers. Nikiya has a busy time of it in her afterlife—beginning with the sublime Kingdom of the Shades scene and ending in cataclysm, after which she and her beloved are finally joined for keeps in a luminous apotheosis. American Ballet Theatre takes us on this tour with Natalia Makarova’s staging of Marius Petipa’s La Bayadère, a combination of colorful hokum and classicism at its purest.

In a single week ABT fielded no fewer than seven ballerinas in the role of Nikiya. Of those I saw, the one that ignited my imagination was Veronika Part. Shedding her long uncertainty about her technical capability, she has come into her own to the point that her rendition of the role extinguished my desire to see any other.

Veronika Part (as Nikiya) and Marcelo Gomes (as Solor) in Natalia Makarova’s production (after Petipa) of La Bayadère for American Ballet Theatre

Photo: Gene Schiavone

Possessing extraordinary personal beauty in face and figure (tall, exquisitely proportioned, with just enough flesh to give her a voluptuous air), Part is, just physically, a perfect object of desire. Strangely enough, though, In the world of classical ballet, good looks don’t count all that much; dancing is unquestionably the key factor. Galina Ulanova, among the greatest of the 20th century’s ballerinas, was plain-faced and stocky, but the eloquence of her dancing—which I saw only at the end of her career and then only briefly—remains one of my touchstones.

At least half of the ravishing dancing Part did in Bayadère was predictable. For some time now audiences have reveled in her softness and liquidity. Her Nikiya seems to be dancing on plush and moving, as people once said of Margot Fonteyn, like honey poured from a jar. Her line has always been magnificent—an ever-shifting picture of grace, harmony, and royal breeding—but only now does she display it with full confidence, giving her audience example after example of what classical dance (that strange, exacting art) makes possible. What’s more, nothing she does looks forced; she doesn’t appear to be making any effort at all. (Needless to say, this is an illusion.)

Other elements in Part’s evolution—the strength, the control, the precision—are probably the last thing her admirers expected. In the past, although she offered her fans enough for them to consider her unique and wonderful, she’d hold back in her attack on a step, a phrase, a balance, or a lift, apparently through anxiety about her ability to execute it securely. Her hesitation was frequently so evident that her spectators grew nervous too. Now she trusts herself more and the audience can trust her in turn.

Part and Gomes in La Bayadère

Photo: Gene Schiavone

Part’s interpretation of Nikiya has a distinct through-line logic. Her Nikiya personifies the powerful innocence of a child; she’s a creature who knows exactly what she wants (Solor, forever). Single-minded, she pursues her goal, dangerously loath to recognize evil—shocked time and again by its manifestations—or even opposition. Confronting Gamzatti to insist upon her claim to Solor, she’s completely unaware of the conniving familiar to the world of wealth and power.

At the same time she’s impulsive—ready, literally, to plunge a dagger into Gamzatti if her rival insists on co-opting the man she loves. When the priest offers her an antidote to the viper’s poison (as I’ve suggested, the narrative of Bayadère requires utter suspension of disbelief), she sees Solor leaving the scene with Gamzatti and opts for death. Part’s Nikiya is also, tragically, incapable of realizing that people can be of two minds about an issue of utmost importance, Solor being the poster boy for that state.

Of course I doubt that Petipa was concerned about subtle motivations for his characters. It’s the people who subsequently staged Bayadère who tried to make the narrative acceptable for their own time, so that Petipa’s choreography, similarly adjusted, would be remain available.

Part and Gomes in the apotheosis of La Bayadère

Photo: Gene Schiavone

Part was matched with the Solor perfect for her—Marcelo Gomes, who is not merely an imposing dancer, but also an intuitively supportive partner; no ballerina could do better than to be in his care.

Gillian Murphy, who plays Nikiya on other occasions, here gave the role of Gamzatti a sympathetic psychological dimension. At first she’s the rajah’s daughter, assuming her entitlement to Solor. Then, in an affectingly developed solo, she realizes that her beauty, her regal status, and its accompanying stupendous wealth are not enough to possess him. Rightly, she doesn’t go so far as to realize the unpredictable, irrational (or at least inexplicable) nature of love, because that would make the ballet a tragedy when it was surely first conceived of as an entertainment—albeit an entertainment created by genius.

The quality of the dancing throughout the ranks was excellent; the female corps de ballet in the Kingdom of the Shades scene was superb. Throughout, from its reaction, the audience, ensconced in its red velvet chairs, seemed to know what was good enough, what was really good, and what was beyond belief wonderful. Without question Veronika Part’s dancing fell into that final, sparsely populated, category.