A Beloved Spanish Gypsy Returns to France’s Arms
<First published online in the New York Times on December 13, 2007>
PARIS. Although the Paris Opera is the place where Romantic ballets like “La Sylphide” (1832) and “Giselle” (1841) had their world premieres, it isn’t where they survived. When Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes brought “Giselle” to Paris in 1910, the French had to be reminded that this ballet was a chunk of their own cultural history.
But, as the Paris Opera Ballet’s current production of the complete “Paquita” demonstrates, how things have changed! This company, which now dances as many 19th-century ballets as most other international companies, even performs a number of modern reconstructions of ballets whose premieres it once gave, as if now admitting it was a butterfingers ever to have let them go. In the early 1970s the French choreographer Pierre Lacotte staged his version of the original 1832 “Sylphide,” and he has subsequently made quite a career out of reinventing the 19th century, most notably in 2000, when he remounted the Russian ballet “The Pharaoh’s Daughter” for the Bolshoi (which has taken it to London and New York).
Like “The Pharaoh’s Daughter,” the full-length “Paquita” - originally staged for the Opera in 1846 by the composer Édouard-Marie-Ernest Delvedez and the choreographer Joseph Mazilier - is one of those old works whose story balletomanes used to be able to read in Cyril Beaumont’s “Complete Book of Ballets” without ever expecting to see it danced. Yet Mr. Lacotte brought it back to the stage in 2001, and the Parisians love it. The current revival at the Palais Garnier will enjoy no fewer than 14 performances (while the company concurrently does the Nureyev “Casse-Noisette” - “Nutcracker” - at the Bastille).
Whereas the best-known Romantic ballets rely on supernatural elements to a degree that becomes formulaic, “Paquita” occurs in the real world: It’s set in Napoleonic Spain. The plot is something you’d expect Gilbert and Sullivan to have spoofed or Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy to have taken seriously. The dastardly Iñigo, wanting the lovely Paquita (who was brought up by Gypsies) for himself, and his nasty friend Don Lopez de Mendoza try to crush her affair with the dashing French officer Lucien d’Hervilly by means of poison. Not only does she foil the plot, but she then also finds that she (having been abducted in childhood) is actually Lucien’s relative - not his sister, fortunately - which, of course, makes their marriage eminently desirable.
Like “Giselle,” the Russians kept this frolic going in St. Petersburg into the 20th century; as with “Giselle,” this salvage involved an extensive overhaul. Just as the choreography for the “Giselle” now seen around the world is the late-19th-century St. Petersburg work of Marius Petipa, some of it is set to music added to its original score by his long-term musical colleague Ludwig Minkus, so even bigger changes were made to “Paquita” by the Petipa-Minkus team. And when even the Kirov-Maryinsky Ballet dropped the complete ballet from repertory after the Bolshevik Revolution, the company kept some pure-dance Petipa-Minkus chunks glowingly alive, some of which have entered international ballet repertory since the 1970s.
Mr. Lacotte, no authenticist, includes those Russian chunks. Many balletgoers will know the “Spanish” final grand pas classique for Paquita, Lucien and female corps de ballet; some will know the classical pas de trois for one man and two women; but few will know the handsome ensemble polonaise. It’s good to see them all. Though Mr. Lacotte makes certain nods to the early 19th-century ballet style of the first act of “Giselle” and August Bournonville’s ballets, he asks all his female dancers to do the sustained pointwork known to be late-19th-century in style.
Though there is no kind of inspiration in Mr. Lacotte’s choreography, one crucial element of his staging is nothing less than glorious: the designs, by Luisa Spinatelli. It is decades since I have seen any décor for a 19th-century ballet more beautiful than the black-pillared Spanish ballroom for the final act here. The female classical ensemble wears ravishing tutus that, while suggesting Spanish lace on the skirts, have bodices of either midnight blue or burgundy, while another female group wears full, beautifully cut calf-length dresses, each in an individual shade selected from a particular spectrum of pink, gray and brown.
If I were a Parisian and/or an even more obsessive balletomane, I suppose I would go back to see various casts tackle this. Though the plot never becomes serious, it is largely lucid and sometimes funny. The Delvedez-Minkus score, never less than agreeable, has irresistible sections in the last act, delivered with brio by the Orchestre Colonne as conducted by Paul Connelly.
My problem is with the Paris Opera dancing. No company is more elegant in presentation, and the level of technique is exceptionally efficient in academic terms. Yet I know no company that more completely illustrates the difference between academicism and classicism. The Paris dancers respond to the music without apparently finding any pleasure from, or point in, doing so. They exhibit line, placement and épaulement (shouldering) as if these points of ballet style were matters for point-scoring correctness rather than individual inflection.
In the late 1980s Manuel Legris, an étoile (the company’s special designation above principal dancer) who is now 43, used to transcend the company style better than anybody. On Tuesday he danced Lucien with remarkable skill and panache; no Paris dancer I have seen phrases better or shows a more serious response to music. His style is still virile and handsome, but no longer spontaneous. As for his Paquita, Dorothée Gilbert, it is awkward to say that a dancer so skillful and elegant is also bland, but in that respect she epitomizes the Paris dance manner. How can three-dimensional dancing be impressive to see and yet impossible to feel? The Parisians, going through the motions without ever demonstrating how perfection turns into real dancing, show just how.
@New York Times, 2007