From Tokyo, a ‘Raymonda’ Hints of the Romance of the Middle Ages

<First published online in the New York Times on February 19, 2008>

WASHINGTON. Romanticism was so called because artists seemed to be harking back to the pre-Renaissance spirit of romance, to the original era of chivalry, of Arthurian ideals and of legends in which knights encountered the supernatural. In that neo-medievalist era of “Ivanhoe,” “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and “Lohengrin,” ballet came into its own - nowhere more evidently than in “Raymonda,” choreographed in 1898 by Marius Petipa toward the end of his long and prodigious career (he was 80) to a commissioned score by Alexander Glazunov. Its setting is medieval Provence, its hero a Crusader.

The New National Theater Ballet of Tokyo brought Maki Asami’s production of “Raymonda” to Washington on Saturday and Sunday, concluding the Kennedy Center’s festival “Japan! Culture + Hyper Culture.” You had to laugh: a ballet about the French Middle Ages planned in Imperial Russia presented by an 11-year-old Japanese company on its first visit to the United States.

“Raymonda” has always had its problems. Though it is set somewhere around the 12th century (the era of Crusades and troubadours), its Provençal court is invaded in Act II by the Saracen prince Abderachman (an occurrence more probable in the era of Charlemagne, four centuries earlier). What King Andrew of Hungary and his Crusader nephew Jean de Brienne are doing in Provence has never been sensibly explained.

Though various one-act anthologies of “Raymonda” material can be more successful, the full-length ballet has features that cannot be excerpted and are romance incarnate. In a little episode in Act I called, appropriately, the Romanesca, Raymonda sits and plays a small harp; her friends Henriette and Clémence and Bernard and Bérenger step to the music in a measured walk forward that was Petipa’s consciously anachronistic reconception of a medieval dance. The gentle idyll of the scene can have, with the delicacy of the music, immense charm.

Another reason to see a complete “Raymonda” is as a vehicle for a ballerina. In dramatic terms, Raymonda is entirely passive, yet Petipa’s choreography makes her a queen bee, dancing three supported adagios and at least six classical solo variations.

Petipa planned the ballet for the prima ballerina assoluta Pierina Legnani, and though she is forever famous for the 32 fouetté turns she introduced to Russia, “Raymonda” (which has no fouetté turns at all) is glorious testimony to the complex diversity of her style. Among other things, she seems to have been the first ballerina famous for her bourrées, those small, glistening, traveling steps on point that were likened with her (as they have often been with later ballerinas) to strings of pearls. Her final and most famous variation of all, characterized by Hungarian czardas gestures and hand claps, consists largely of bourrées, electrifyingly set by Glazunov to one-note sequences on a piano.

In the young Tokyo company’s staging, most of “Raymonda” - attractively designed by Luisa Spinatelli, although her backdrops tended to be flat fragments of medieval images - was present only in embryo. The dancers are elegantly trained, often along old Royal Ballet lines (leg extensions tend to be at 90 degrees), appealingly unforced, but dynamically too even and texturally too monochrome.

The Romanesca, though performed with bright smiles, had too little of the juice or glow that can make it so redolent of courtly beauty. It is a structural mistake to interpolate an extra supported adagio for Raymonda with Jean into the third-act “grand pas hongrois.”

Saturday night’s performance, plainly conducted by Ormsby Wilkins, was led by the accomplished Terashima Hiromi as Raymonda. There were passages when her kind of quiet ease had real radiance, as when in her Act II variation she danced a serenely sparkling diagonal of changements on point, and she brought off the bourrées and hand claps of the “Hungarian” variation with cool authority. But this is a role in which a ballerina must play with her music, now dictating it, now tugged by it; Ms. Terashima’s style is too discreet.

The guest artist Denys Matvienko (from Kiev) partnered her smoothly, but as a dancer he seemed happiest in the most clichéd moments, as when knocking off circuits of jumps, though without any particular refinement.

On Friday night similar qualities were evident in a Tchaikovsky-Ravel-Debussy triple bill. The centerpiece, “And Waltz,” by Ms. Maki, the company’s artistic director, was set to Ravel’s “Valses nobles et sentimentales,” an inoffensive and forgettable series of moods for different dancers. Nacho Duato’s “Duende,” to various taped Debussy scores for flute and orchestra (notably “Syrinx”), succeeded in making impressive effects from contrived shapes and partnering figures, but it proved inept at creating any sustained dancing, let alone making a stage world.

The program began with Balanchine’s “Serenade,” staged by Patricia Neary and conducted (as was the Ravel) by Mr. Wilkins. No Balanchine ballet is more loved, and I marveled again here at the way, again and again, it makes its dancers lose themselves in the moment.

Ms. Terashima performed the “Russian” dance, with Kawamura Maki as the latecomer who becomes the ballet’s tragic heroine. Balanchine’s choreography, like Petipa’s in “Raymonda,” shows how this Tokyo company lacks stylistic amplitude; the ballet’s many arabesques all showed lines that were correct without ever radiating into the beyond. But the ballet’s rush and speed, especially in ensembles, kept them fresh, spontaneous, objective.

@New York Times, 2008