A Slow, Winding Descent Through a Hallucinatory World Befogged by Opium
<First published online in the New York Times in January 29, 2008>
WASHINGTON. “La Bayadère” is, above all, about transcendence, which is just as well, for there is much to transcend. No matter which production of this full-length ballet you see, at least 60 percent of it is trash. I write specifically of the Kirov Ballet production, which last week played the Kennedy Center Opera House here.
This transcendence comes through opium. Distraught at the death of his beloved Nikiya, the bayadère (temple dancer) of the ballet’s title, the hero, Solor, takes refuge in drugs, which enable him not just to see her again but also to rejoin her in a classical-ballet dream world. The ballet’s most tremendous image is not of heroine or hero, but of the corps de ballet of feminine Shades, descending a slope in slow zigzagging single file, one entering after another, in a unison accumulation. Each woman first stretches forward in a long arabesque line, then arches back with her arms framing her head like a halo, again and again: a prolonged tick-tock dance full of stillnesses, out of time.
The two supreme exponents of this choreography used to be the Kirov, or Maryinsky, Ballet of St. Petersburg, Russia (for which Marius Petipa created the ballet in 1877), and the Royal Ballet of London (for which Rudolf Nureyev staged the Shades scene in 1963). The Royal’s arabesques were a beautifully calm line through which infinity seemed to pass; the Kirov’s, grander but less Elysian, stretched forward ardently into infinity with so much energy pouring from the torso that the front arm seemed like a searchlight. The Royal corps, however, began to crumble in 1978, and its quality was obliterated when the one-act Nureyev production was replaced in 1989 by Natalia Makarova’s three-act version. But the Kirov?
Because the St. Petersburg company, over the decades, has given us ballerinas from Anna Pavlova to Diana Vishneva, male dancers from Vaslav Nijinsky to Mikhail Baryshnikov, and choreographers from Michel Fokine to George Balanchine, the company and its school have often seemed like the mother source of modern-ballet classicism, repeatedly fertilizing the whole ballet world rather as the Nile did Egypt. Yet in the 25 years I have been intermittently watching it, it has kept revising several key features of its style: wrists, knees, chins, basic stance, turnout, phrasing.
Likewise it has made several changes, some short-lived, to the dance texts of its 19th-century classics. Merely the most obvious of these were its 1999 “Sleeping Beauty” and 2002 “Bayadère.” These two, featuring designs from Petipa’s day, also revived (far more patchily than has been generally acknowledged) features of his choreography. The late-Soviet version of the entrance of the Shades, which had become somewhat stale by the 1990s, was replaced by a pseudo-Romantic look. Dressed in longer tarlatans, the Shades of 2002 stretched that front arm no longer ahead but, daintily, slightly downward.
That 2002 “Bayadère,” apparently too great an affront to sensibilities steeped in the company’s Soviet practice, didn’t last. Its current production is more or less the same as the 1942 one that the West first saw full-length in a 1978 BBC broadcast and that New York saw at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1992. But the corps de ballet, as I saw it in three performances last weekend, no longer has any single conception of how to point that front arm in arabesque, and the old unison phrasing of the entrance is eroded too.
Once all the Shades are down their two ramps and have finished that two-dimensional entrance, a gauze lifts. Now they dance three-dimensionally and at length, in an adagio that features many more stillnesses and remains beyond time. Here today’s Kirov is admirably drilled, and the women’s schooling gleams through. Still, a certain poetry especially in moving from one position to another, above all in the upper body has been lost.
When the corps de ballet is joined by three soloists (the same at every performance last week: Olesya Novikova, Nadejda Gonchar and Ekaterina Kondaurova), and the scene starts to lighten with a new speed, the same super-elegant but near-meaningless style prevails. One of the supreme scenes of choreography has become ossified.
This production ends with that plotless drug-dream. It gives you less transcendence than you need after the two previous acts, which are alternately entertaining and pompous, invariably spectacular, generally formulaic, musically trite and (the setting is India) an anthropologist’s nightmare.
The Kirov production features eight women wearing bikini-tutus, nothing remotely resembling any of the several forms of Indian classical dance that I have seen, and the following bestiary: an elephant, a dead tiger, 2 snakes and 30 parrots. (Monty Python would have a field day.) Only the elephant - the hero makes an entrance riding it - is good.
The one ingredient that can sustain me through a full-length “Bayadère” is an important account of the title role. But current Kirov style allows for little if any spontaneity. As a result the differences among Uliana Lopatkina (a Kirov prima who has pared away most of her chin-hoisting mannerisms to become an admirably focused dramatic artist), Alina Somova (with her undulating arms but also with more of the Kirov chin-up emphasis that can so disfigure its classical deportment) and Viktoria Tereshkina (the most quietly absorbed of the three, and the least mannered) counted for far less than I would have liked. The balletomane in me could not help but notice how Leonid Sarafanov, the boyish-looking fair-haired Solor beside Ms. Somova, effortlessly bounced through three double airs in rapid succession after his grande pirouette, and both Ivan Kozlov (partnering Lopatkina) and Anton Korsakov (with Ms. Tereshkina) showed various signs of stylistic and technical distinction.
But not one person onstage displayed the kind of artistry that seizes the audience and says, “Believe in this.” The Kirov will come to New York City Center in April for three weeks, bringing a range of one-act repertory, ancient and modern, and including the Shades scene. I have loved and been awestruck by this company in the past and await its return with hope that is too strongly mixed with frustration.
@New York Times, 2008