Plenty of Flash. But Drama? And Poetry?
<First published online in the New York Times on July 15, 2007>
The flashy aspect of “Swan Lake” could elude nobody who watched Kevin McKenzie’s production at Ballet Theater this season. When some ballerinas at the Met this spring embellished their fouetté turns with extra spins, parts of the audience didn’t just applaud through the music but screamed through it too, leaping to their feet long before the turns had finished.
In this respect “Swan Lake” became the climax of a season that had included several special events. At the end of the May 26 performance the Met stage was crowded with dozens of the company’s past and present dancers. I wish only that they had been given proper entrances so that the audience could have greeted them in style, but enough of those faces were identifiable to make the occasion historic. Alessandra Ferri’s farewell performance (in “Romeo and Juliet”) on June 23 became another great outpouring of Ballet Theater sentiment, with dancers past and present coming onto the stage to pay homage. With veterans like Frederic Franklin, 93, and Georgina Parkinson onstage in character roles in “Romeo” and “Swan Lake,” and with such great ballerinas of the past as Irina Kolpakova and Natalia Makarova in the audience observing the repertory they coach, one couldn’t help feeling history in the air.
Yet this was not an impressive season over all. Seeking to explain this, I return to “Swan Lake.” Mr. McKenzie, Ballet Theater’s artistic director, isn’t insensible to the ballet’s dramatic poetry. Yet we can’t help seeing that he doesn’t want to dwell on its large-spirited or sublime aspects. At the end of Act I he omits the scene where the Prince feels the call to go hunting, like the call of destiny. And at the start of Act IV he omits the episode where Odette, in anguish, returns to the lakeside before Siegfried and is stopped from suicide only by her swan maidens.
Cuts likewise abounded in his new production of “The Sleeping Beauty,” with Gelsey Kirkland and Michael Chernov as Mr. McKenzie’s colleagues in the staging. This is a ballet that can easily be overlong. But this “Beauty” wasn’t just cut; it was retold, Disney style, and adjusted into a walloping series of theatrically effective moments, with no sense of this choreography as classical architecture.
How is a sane person supposed to handle an eight-week, eight-performances-a-week season like this? If you are to make the most of who’s dancing, you have to catch cast changes — to be a balletomane. This spring Ballet Theater scheduled each of its seven full-length ballets and its two one-act ballets in solid blocks of performances, usually a week long, each billed with choices of star leads. Kenneth MacMillan’s “Manon” and “Romeo and Juliet” are vehicles I can rewatch when the leading interpreters take their characters, as great actors do, on vast psychological arcs during the space of the evening, but neither in these performances nor in those of the 19th-century standards “La Bayadère,” “The Sleeping Beauty” and “Swan Lake” did I see much evidence of this. Wild horses could not drag me to see multiple casts of Lar Lubovitch’s “Othello” or James Kudelka’s “Cinderella.”
So, more than halfway through the season I steeled myself to see four separate casts of “Swan Lake” in one week. Here goes. Diana Vishneva’s dancing is the most sheerly beautiful of any Ballet Theater principal’s. Her delicacy, both lyrical and luminous, kept starting to make me see the phrasing of the old choreography anew. She does not, however, show the inner conflict or heroic scale of a true Swan Queen. As Odile she deployed the worst mannerism of her native Russian training: forever adjusting the angle of her head and chin, now looking down her nose at the audience and now under her brows. Paloma Herrera was stronger but less interesting; there’s a tension in her upper body that deprives her of eloquence and makes her neck seem shorter than it is. Irina Dvorovenko’s performance was wholly unspontaneous. These were performances in which “Swan Lake” itself didn’t really happen.
The surprise came when Michele Wiles, a strong technician who lacks the kind of stage manner that immediately involves an audience, revealed the divided natures of both Odette and Odile. She was a grand, aloof Swan Queen who gradually disclosed her vulnerability. In the ballroom she was an enchantress who found fun in impersonating her rival. At one point as Odile she stood stock-still and looked across the stage at the Prince, as if demanding that he acknowledge how irresistible she was. David Hallberg, apart from his extraordinary dance gifts, was a Prince who made each scene larger by the quality of attention he paid to everyone around him.
Yet even with a surprisingly fine central couple like this one, the rest of Mr. McKenzie’s “Swan Lake” doesn’t repay multiple viewings. Though the corps de ballet of swan maidens is elegant and excellently rehearsed, there isn’t the full involvement of the torso that can make their dances the stuff of choral tragedy.
By contrast, it was balm and bliss to catch the cast changes in Frederick Ashton’s one-act ballet “The Dream.” Everyone was so committed to it that even though none of the Oberons were letter-perfect in the taxing choreography, the ballet itself was alive throughout. The liquidity and radiance of Ms. Vishneva’s dancing as Titania took wing, while in another cast Gillian Murphy made an expressive breakthrough in the choreography’s intense bendings-down and openings-out. Angel Corella, partnering Ms. Vishneva, found the exultance as well as the glamour of Oberon’s dances.
Surely Ashton himself never saw a Puck so miraculous as Herman Cornejo, electrifying in the élan of his jumps, the ease of his turns and the velocity of his spins across the stage, and disarming in the sheer modesty whereby he applied all that technique to characterization. Here the corps de ballet, deeply absorbed in dance detail, made me notice choreographic features I had never seen, despite the dozens of times I’ve watched this work. The same is true of Balanchine’s “Symphonie Concertante” in the same program. Thanks to the alertness of the dancing, especially at corps level, new features became apparent at every performance. This double bill, however, didn’t sell well.
Mr. Corella, Mr. Cornejo, Ms. Hallberg, Ms. Murphy, Ms. Vishneva, Ms. Wiles et al. in “La Bayadère,” “Swan Lake,” “The Sleeping Beauty,” “Romeo and Juliet,” etc.: American Ballet Theater is mainly about stars in war horses. The fans are not wrong to enjoy the circusy side of “Swan Lake.” But even the screamers must hope that it and other full-length ballets will also wring them out dramatically. At present, at least in a spring season like this one, Mr. McKenzie’s Ballet Theater plays it emotionally safe. Its form of ballet has more fun than feeling.
@New York Times, 2007