Ecstasy & Death

English National Ballet, 19 April 2013

Marie-Agnès Gillot and Nicolas Le Riche performing Le Jeune Homme et la Mort,  Paris Opera Ballet (2005). 

A shrewd marketing ploy undermined by the dispiriting Etudes.

This triple bill of modern classical ballet addressed three options for the form. The first an abstract piece, the second narrative and the third self-referential.

Jirí Kylián's Petite Mort is set to two adagios from Mozart piano concertos, and is sequence of  female-male couplings, interspersed with solo work involving fencing foils. Movements are elegant and fluid, as befits the music, tinged with eros and melancholy.

The standout work, though, is Roland Petit's short Le Jeune Homme et la Mort, to a setting by Jean Cocteau, and thoroughly part of the latter artist's style. 

As a piece of late symbolism, depicting a hysterical young man effectively in love with death, the work is not overlong, and is extremely effective. Watching it, I felt it wouldn't be possible to find a better medium for expressing this simple yet powerful tale. 

Nicolas Le Riche's movements immediately conveyed the young man's disposition. Words would have been superfluous, and might have leadened the ambiguity of the girl/death figure.

We might question whether the story is hackneyed, but this treatment must be the definitive version of the fable. 

Harald Lander's Etudes, a company warhorse, is a frustrating, vapid affair, as sometimes happens when virtuosity is displayed. 

The dancers were magnificent in this evidently demanding set of studies in dance, involving many twirls, leaps, and other exhausting activities, all performed gracefully. 

It reminded me of a recent description of classical ballet dancers: Apollo's Angels, hinting that ballet attempts to squeeze the most dionysiac, wildest of artforms (dance) into something ordered and cool. The repetitions were increasingly depressing, as the regimented soulless nature of the piece became obvious.

Perhaps even greater virtuosity, on a godlike level, might have saved Etudes, but its unlikely given the consistently vulgar orchestration of Czerny's drab piano music. It's as if Knudåge Riisager overcompensated for the poor source material in the worst way imaginable. Musically things only worsened, climaxing, as it were, in some of the ugliest music I've experienced.

Astonishingly, the ENB have danced Etudes 749 times, while they are on their eighth performance of the contemporaneous Le Jeune Homme et la Mort. If only it were the other way round!

Triple bill: Kenneth MacMillan

Royal Opera House, 27 November 2012

 

Requiem (1976), Richard Cragun. Photo © Leslie E. Spatt. From here.

Three ballets illustrating what can be done with dance, though camp is an unpleasant companion in each, whatever its other strengths and weaknesses.

This tribute to the Royal Ballet's former choreographer comprised Concerto, Las Hermanas and Requiem, the last itself a tribute to choreographer John Cranko.
 
The pieces were well chosen to show the range of modern choreography. The first was abstract and undramatic, the second dramatic and tragic, the third abstract yet dramatic and poignant.
 
Concerto, to Shostakovich's second piano concerto, seemed to me the least successful work, though this may have been due to being placed first in the bill. It stressed the delightful aspect of the concerto, with perky ensembles in bright colours, much leaping and prancing and some forced smiles from the straining dancers.
 
Choosing this concerto in the first place was a great idea, given its relentlessly tuneful nature. But the finale was taken much slower than it would have been in a normal concert, and while this is an understandable concession to dancing, the effect further reduced the presence of intoxicating dionysus in favour of serene apollo.
 
The piece also highlighted what seems a common problem with dancing to anything other than a minimilist score. There is at least one moment in the slow movement where the emotional involvement deepens, and this wasn't reflected by the dancing.
 
Emotional intensity was if anything a little overdone in Las Hermanas, a short tale of repression, lust, sibling rivalry and finally suicide. The dancing was extremely expressive, but the result was more hothouse melodrama than proper tragedy. I think this must be because the timeframe was so compressed. We didn't receive a full impression of each of the relevant characters.
 
A striking aspect of this work is its negative portrayal of men, or at least, the only male character, who is so priapic that at one point he rests on his haunches like a sexually frustrated ape. MacMillan is deft at portraying his obvious appeal to the sisters, but given his one-dimensional sexualised nature, without even courage, so that he runs when threatened by the aged mother, he is a weak point in the drama. Can these women really be so passionate over such a trivial figure?
 
I don't want to be too negative. If it is a weakness to portray the man as one-dimensional, this at least inverts the usual situation of the one-dimensional sexpot woman.
 
Requiem is clearly intended to be a Major Statement. Any audience member applauding during the scene changes was shushed by the conductor, ballet veteran Barry Wordsworth.
 
It's extremely impressive, though the effect on me ranged from mild disgust to sorrow, a range probably not intended by MacMillan, and certainly not by composer Faure, though his mass for the dead normally affects me in this way.
 
I suspect that having chosen this particular piece of music, there was little chance MacMillan could have effectively subverted its sentimental, candles-and-incense catholicism. He certainly tries, and the result is surprisingly moving, a series of tableaux representing the the masculine and feminine parts of a soul presumably passing into the afterlife, and its effect on the community they leave behind.
 
Camp was not wholly avoided: pastel lighting, noble expressions and, in particular the shuffling company at the very beginning. But the overall effect was the best interpretation of this music I've experienced.

The distancing, belittling effect of camp seemed close to the surface in each of these pieces, what with the bright prancing of Concerto, the impression of drag-queen hysteria in Las Hermanas, and the pastels of Requiem. On reflection, I don't feel any of these pieces needed a camp element for their efectivenesss, so conclude it is either intrinsic to MacMillan or to the current production of these works.

Performances were exceptional, and it would be unfair to single any out, though I can't resist praising Zenaida Yanowsky in Las Hermanas if only because of her elongated frame and her commitment to exploiting this oddity to the full in her interpretation. Inspired casting and brave acting.

Rodin Project

Sadler's Wells, 29 October 2012

Erebus, a film of parts of the Rodin Project (available online at the space) 

Interesting ideas and arresting images, some of them loosely Rodin-related, but stretched too thinly over a full evening of dance.

What might it mean for a dance work to be inspired by the work of a great sculptor? Statues are still and silent, dance is fluid and musical. Neither artform employs language, so that communication is direct to the spectator, though this needn’t mean that everything is communicated immediately.

The principal way in which Russell Maliphant (choreographer) and Michael Hulls (lighting designer) have been influenced by Rodin is in the way light falls on the human body, and the suggestiveness of shadows. They succeed in making Rodin seem as if he were trying to capture the light on dancers, rather than the other way round – linking him with the sculpted dancers of Degas.

Although this is an impressive achievement, I didn’t feel it was worth exploring over a full evening. Maliphant and his team make other allusions to Rodin but these seem spurious, such as some neoclassical cavorting, or some musical resonances with Massenet; but while these ideas are contemporary with Rodin, they are very separate from his cragged nobility.

Thankfully these superfluous touches do not dominate, and the work as a whole seems self-contained and might as well refer to anyone else with as much justification as Rodin.

The highlight of Maliphant’s scuttling choreography is a scene involving two men and a wall. The low points are anything involving women. On the one hand, this suggests the weakness of the ensembles, where everyone seems to be doing something similar, though not identically, but in any case nothing is very memorable. On the other, when the women are on their own, the result is sickly. This may reflect Rodin’s women accurately, but it can’t have been a good idea to display the sculptor’s weaknesses. 

Among the dancers, all heroic, Dickson Mbi deserves special mention for a solo scene that came closest to giving the impression that one of Rodin’s sculptures had come to life. Somehow, popping combined with angular poses conveys Rodin in movement. It was astonishing.