‘Swan Lake’ Soviet-Style

Swan Lake
Mariinsky Ballet
Kennedy Center Opera House
Washington, D.C.
January 28, 2014

By Lisa Traiger

Mariinsky Ballet corps de ballet

Swan Lake, the very epitome of ballet, is both the apex and the aspiration of companies the world over. The 1895 Petipa/Ivanov version for St. Petersburg still lives on in structure and in oral tradition passed on from ballerina to ballerina, generation to generation. St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Ballet remains the ultimate exponent of this fairy tale of a white ballet.

For the Mariinsky’s now annual Kennedy Center visit, the company brought its “Stalinized” staging from 1950, in which Konstantin Sergeyev stripped out substantial passages of mime, “streamlining” and “Sovietizing” the first act. But this alteration is minor compared to the “Stalinized” happy ending, instead of the more poignantly satisfying one that unites the lovers in death – a finale Western audiences are far more accustomed to seeing.

The sheer scope and accumulated tradition that the Mariinsky maintains lends this production its richly lustrous look. Igor Ivanov’s sets – a gothic castle overlooking the action, balconies in the great hall for trumpeters to herald, a moody, moon-washed wooded lake – are beautifully painted and detailed. The action shifts from a warm afternoon glow in the castle grounds of act one to the frost-tinged forest lit in an icy blue in act two. Costumes, as well, by Galina Solovyova are richly decorated and detailed, as is the dancing, which is to be expected by this still illustrious company.

Bringing just one set of principles to Washington this year, left Odette/Odile and Siegfried open to soloists and second soloists save opening night. That evening’s principals, Alina Somova and Vladimir Shklyarov, are familiar to District audiences from their run in Alexei Ratmansky’s Cinderella in 2013. While they are a model attractive couple, the dramatic connection was simply not there, making it hard to believe the prince was love struck and pining for the Swan queen. Somova, lithe and flexible, willowy in that Mariinsky manner so suitable for Odette, was icily cold in her transformation to the black swan. She was so chilly it was hard to believe Siegfried could become transfixed by her standoffish demeanor. In whipping out the requisite fouettes – in single-double-triple combination – she wobbled and bobbled a bit, but pulled herself back steadying her whipping of that aggrandized the moment. She drew requisite applause even if she didn’t mesmerize.

One of Sergeyev’s unnecessary additions to the ballet is the role of the Joker. Clad in a black-and-white Harlequin unitard and with excessive mugging and leaping, he steals the spotlight from many of the act 1 divertissements and the prince’s introspective solo moments. By excising much of the mime, Sergeyev also bled the ballet of the essential core of this story-driven work. Instead, we are left with manege after manege, chock-full of barrel turns and grand jetes punctuated with pirouettes. Vladislav Shumakov had the forceful physicality to pull off his bag of balletic tricks, but the character is an unfortunate afterthought muddying the near-perfection crafted by Petipa-Ivanov.

Shunted aside is the role of Siegfried’s wonderful hunting buddy, Benno. And even the Prince’s mum, danced by the regal Elena Bazhenova, has lost much of her job in act one; she barely has an opportunity to tell her bachelor son he must choose a bride.

In Ivanov’s glorious white acts, the Mariinsky corps asserts itself as this production’s true star. Even looking slightly askew at times, the corps remains unsurpassed among ballet companies. Swaying, breathing, and bourre-ing as one, the Mariinsky corps is the epitome of Swan Lake. Alas, in the Sergeyev version instead of the purity of 24 white swans, the choreographer has clad eight in black, Rothbart’s hench-swans. They battle, and then in near-cartoon fashion, Siegfried and Rothbart spar unfurling grand jetes and chaines like a Bruce Lee flick. Siegfried tugs off Rothbart’s wing, doing in the sorcerer and breaking his spell over Odette and her swan sisters. Ending more like a Disney film than a classical ballet, the prince and former swan queen go off into the sunrise, presumably happily ever after.

Unfortunately, the soul of this ballet lives in the pairing of Odette and Siegfried. Somova and Shklyarov, however adequate were not transcendent, which is what a Swan Lake needs, particularly in a era when so little else in the world can lifts one’s spirits into a higher realm.

This review was originally published in the print-only Ballet Review, winter 2014-15 issue. What? You don’t subscribe? Learn more here.

(C) 2015 Lisa Traiger

A Year in Dance: 2014

By Lisa Traiger

My year 2014 in dance opened in January with the return of the now annually visiting Mariinsky Ballet to the Kennedy Center Opera House. Though the company brought Swan Lake, the company’s signature work – created on this most famous classical troupe by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov in 1895 – was not what we saw. Instead the “Sovietized” Konstantin Sergeyev 1950 version, filled with pomp and additions startling for Western audiences (a second corps of black swans, for example, in the “white” act), was on offer. Ultimately, the true star was the singular corps de ballet. Who can resist the Mariinsky’s 32 perfectly synchronized white swans in act two? The impeccable Vaganova training remains one of the Mariinsky’s most essential hallmarks. Even standing still, the corps breathes together as one body; in stillness they’re dancing. The result is simply stunning and awe-inspiring, ballet at its best.

Compagnie Kafig’s hip hop with a French accent and a circus flair rocked the Kennedy Center in February. Founded in 1996 by Mourad Merzouki in a suburb of Lyon, Kafig’s all-male troupe of athletic dancers flip and tumble, punching out percussive beats and floor work that toggle between their North African roots and b-boy street moves. Merzouki’s latest interest is capoeira, the Afro-Brazilian dance-cum-martial-art. His “Agwa” featured about 100 cups of water, arrayed in grids, poured and re-poured, along with plenty of circusy tricks and surprises. Hip hop dance has for a generation-plus moved beyond its inner-city, thug-life street demeanor; we see the results daily in popular culture, on television and in suburban dance studios. Kafig’s creative and expansive approach drawing from North African and Afro Brazilian rhythms and French circus opens up a whole new world for this home-grown vernacular form.

In April, Rockville’s forward-thinking American Dance Institute presented the legendary post modernist Yvonne Rainer. Now 79 and still making new work, Rainer is credited in the 1960s with coining the term post-modern for dance and as part of the experimental Judson Church movement taking dance into new, uncharted realms. She famously penned her “No” manifesto – “No to spectacle. No to virtuosity. No to transformations and magic and make-believe. No to the glamour and transcendency of the star image” – which has become a de rigueur short reading for any young modern dancer looking to develop a choreographic voice. In it Rainer encouraged a re-thinking of dance without virtuosity, technique, story and beauty. Dance could be the “found movement” we see on the streets every day. For her evening at ADI’s blackbox theater, Rainer didn’t dance, but her five dancers, whom she lovingly dubbed her Raindears, did. “Assisted Living: Good Sports 2” and “Assisted Living: Do You Have Any Money?” were recent, from 2011 and 2013 respectively. They were still steeped in Judsonian traits – lots of game-like patterns and structures as the Raindears jogged the stage like a ragged army of enlisted 5th graders on recess; a montage of unusual music and spoken sections, drawing from classics, opera, popular mid-20th century songs, readings and quotes on economics and more. A dancer drags a mattress, dancers hoist and carry other dancers like movers, Rainer reads and observes from a comfortable perch on an easy chair. First timers to this type of highly conceptual work might leave scratching their heads. But there’s a method to the madness and the accumulation of moments and movement quotes from ballet, tap and vaudeville at various points. Here we have the post-modern notion where everything counts: everything and the kitchen sink get thrown together to make a work. But there’s craft and method behind this madness, this everyone-in approach. Rainer, for me, built a structure that resonated deeply on an emotional level. This pair of works made me think of wrapping up a lifetime, and, more personally, of easing my own parents into their final years: packing up, putting away, remembering and forgetting, burying. This was post-modernism with a new level of poignancy. Though not narrative, it spoke to me in far-reaching ways. When I chatted with Rainer after, I told her how moved I was and how it made me think of my parents in their final years. She acknowledged that while in the studio creating, she was dealing with similar end-of-life issues with a dying brother. Even Rainer, the purest of post-modernists, has come to a place of remembrance and meaning in ways that were unforgettable.

One of the year’s most anticipated events was the re-opening of the region’s most prolific dance presenter, Dance Place, which has long been a mainstay of the now revitalizing Brookland neighborhood of northeast Washington. In June the site specific piece “INSERT [ ] HERE” inaugurated the newly renovated studio/theater. Sharon Mansur, a University of Maryland College Park dance professor, and collaborator Nick Bryson, an Ireland-based independent artist and improviser, fashioned a site-specific piece that took small groups through the space – introducing both the public areas like the studio/theater and spacious new lobby to never seen recesses like the dank underground basement, the artists’ new dressing rooms, rehearsal rooms and a long narrow corridor of open desks where most of the staff put in their hours. Audience members were allowed to meander and pause, take note of a moment beneath the bleachers where Baltimore choreographer Naoko Maeshiba was part girl-child zombie, part Japanese butoh post-apocalyptic figure. Upstairs in a rehearsal room, Mansur and Bryson parsed out parallel neatly improvised solos that reflected and spoke through movement to each other. In a dressing area former D.C. improviser/choreographer Dan Burkholder fashioned his movement phrases with silky directness amid a room of candles and found natural objects. The main stage filled with a wash of dancers sweeping in with celebratory bravado: An auspicious, memorable, and entirely perfect way to christen the space.

Long-time D.C. stalwart Liz Lerman, who decamped from her own Takoma Park-based company the Dance Exchange in 2011, returned to the area with another broadly encompassing work, Healing Wars, which had its world premiere at Arena Stage’s intimate Cradle in May. The audience was welcomed in through the stage door, where a “living museum” of characters – Clara Barton penning letters, a Civil War soldier splayed on a kitty corner hospital cot, a woman pouring water libation as a spirit of a runaway slave, and the very real veteran of the recent war in Afghanistan, Paul Hurley, a former U.S. Navy gunner’s mate and graduate of Duke Ellington School for the Arts in Washington, D.C., conversing with Hollywood actor Bill Pullman. Healing Wars examines war, injury, death, and recovery from multiple perspective spanning two centuries: the Civil War era and the 21st century. This was entirely and exactly Lerman’s wheelhouse. The piece was didactic, thought provoking, head scratching all at once. And it does what movement theater should: inspire and challenge. Lerman was determined with this project to bring the present day wars and their aftermaths home for America’s largest and most divisive war, the Civil War, touched nearly every household. By drawing together these disparate but not dissimilar historical moments, along with the science, medical advances, politics and, of course, personal experiences, Lerman has contemporary audiences reflect that as individually painful as war traumas are, the suffering that results is our nation’s burden to bear. Lerman, here, through her compelling dance theater underscored the gravity of that burden.

In September, Deviated Theatre returned to Dance Place with a steampunk quest story envisioned by choreographer Kimmie Dobbs Chan and director Enoch Chan. For the evening-length Creature, the costumes — wings, netting and accoutrements draped and shaped by Andy Christ with second act headpieces full of wire-y netting and fanciful shapes by Dobbs Chan — are astonishing. The dancing here was among the best technically of the locally based dance troupes this year. The primarily female cast stretches like Gumbies, soars from an aerial hoop, maneuvers on two legs or four limbs, crab walking, crawling, scooting, loping in bug-like, inhuman ways. Though the apocalyptic fairy tale meanders, the oddball weirdness – eerie, esoteric, eclectic – that Chan and Chan invent continues to endear.

October brought a troupe from Israel, where contemporary dance continues to be a hotbed of creativity. Vertigo Dance from Jerusalem brought choreographer Noa Wertheim’s Reshimo, with its company of nine unfettered dancers who take viewers on an emotional journey. “Reshimo,” a term from Kabbalah – Jewish mysticism – suggests the impression light makes, the afterimage. The 55-minute work presented an ever-evolving landscape of singular movement statements, accompanied by Ran Bagno’s rich and varied musical score, which modulates between violin, cello, synthesizers and kitschy retro-pop selections. Sexy trysts, playful romps, casual walks and a moment of frisson, explosive and shattering, fully animate the choreographic voice filling the work with resonant ideas.

My year in dance ended on a high note, another company from Israel: the country’s most intriguing, Batsheva Dance Company based in Tel Aviv, returned to the Kennedy Center’s Opera House in November with the area premiere of Sadeh21. The work, by the company’s prolific and long-time choreographic master Ohad Naharin, shows off the dancers’ distinctive abilities to inhabit and embody movement in all its capacities. “Sadeh,” Naharin told me, means field, as in field of study, and the work unspools in vignettes or scenes – some solos, some duets or small groups, some full the company – which are labeled by number on the half-high back wall, the set designed by Avi Yona Bueno. Moments funny and disturbing, sexy and silly include movement riffs that combine the refined and the repulsive, an extended sequence of screaming, another where the men in unison ape and stomp like fools in flouncy skirts. Naharin’s music, like his rangy movement, is erratic, shifting from classical to pop, severe to silly to sweet in game-like fashion. The set design, that imposing back wall, is freighted with multiple meanings. A wall in Israeli context recalls both the ancient Western Wall — the supporting wall of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. But in contemporary terms the wall suggests the one built by the Israeli government to separate Israel proper from the West Bank. Both a protection and a burden, it’s a constant reminder that peace remains an achingly elusive ideal. For Naharin, the on-stage wall literally became a jumping off point. Dancers scrambled up, stood atop the ledge and dove into the inky blackness. That ending is simply gorgeous. Again and again, dive after dive, were they leaping to their freedom, to their deaths, or were they doves, soaring skyward? Continuously, as the music faded and the lights rose, credits rolled like a movie on the wall, as dancers climbed and dove. A taste of infinity. From earth to heaven and back again. I could have watched those final moments forever, they felt so raw, yet whole, risky but real. Final but indefinite. Life as art. Art as life. Batsheva ended my year in dance on a soar.

Lisa Traiger writes frequently on dance, theater and the arts. You may read her work in the Washington Jewish Week, Dance magazine and other publications.

(c) 2015 Lisa Traiger