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An Imaginative, Heartfelt "Swan Lake"

Tchaikovsky Perm Ballet & Orchestra
Swan Lake
A Ballet in Three Acts
Cal Performances, Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley
Friday, April 7, 2006, 8 PM

by Paul Parish
copyright ©2006, Paul Parish

The Tchaikovsky Perm Ballet has been performing all over the country, in mid-sized houses noticed by the big-city critics, to glowing reviews in most cases. Their appearances in Zellerbach Hall at UC Berkeley confirmed the advance news of a company that delivers an old-fashioned big-hearted experience. They put me poignantly in mind of how the Oakland Ballet, of sainted memory, could dance Giselle in Franklin’s Ballets-Russes-styled production more movingly than San Francisco Ballet in Helgi Tomasson’s much more polished but ultimately mannerist one. Perm’s Swan Lake was an extraordinarily satisfying evening in the theater, and everyone felt it — the applause was long, loud, and heart-felt.

Perm’s values are old-fashioned, as befits a provincial company which has better grasp of fundamentals than some big-city companies. Those values are sincerity, devotion, musicality, large-scale rhythmic power, belief in the Gesammtkunstwerk, and the dancers’ power to summon up their beauty and transfigure themselves in the act of dancing.

They performed Natalia Makarova’s adaptation of her own production, originally set on the English National Ballet that she made in consultation with Sir Frederick Ashton, and which still utilizes parts of his tragic fourth act, including the finest corps dance expressing collective grief I’ve ever seen, at least the equal of any of Ivanov’s deservedly famous “symphonic” dances for the corps in Act II. This makes it the first Russian production (at least that I’ve seen) which has the overall rhythm and tension of a tragedy. The optimistic requirements which Soviet ideology shoved onto "Swan Lake" distorted every part of it; we all deplored the “happy ending,” but in retrospect it’s possible to see the “hagiogrifying” of Act II as a counterweighting drag on the action, necessary to the unreasonable and unnatural refusal to go over the falls where the emotional currents were taking the action.*

Perm’s is a tighter production than the ENB’s, which was televised starring Peter Schaufuss and Evelyn Hart: this one omits Ashton’s first act pas de quatre (which was brilliantly performed for ENB, Leanne Benjamin’s performance sticking in my mind after all these years), and I think shortens the last act. But its drive is all the stronger for that. There are very few choreographic mistakes (the worst is dividing the dance of the would-be princesses into several entrees, with fanfares for each, and that’s no great matter). Makarova has moved the Act II dances from their usual order, so that the pas de deux comes last — but there’s no great loss there, either. The Prince’s sad dance happens not by his lonesome but at court; i.e, not at the end of the first scene but at the start of the ball, in front of the court and the throne. It is fascinatingly disturbing: as in Hamlet (to which Swan Lake owes a great deal for atmosphere and theme, and in all productions that derive from the Vic-Wells tradition, the Shakespearean tradition can be felt animating the overall sweep of the tragedy), this Prince is disturbed and disturbing and disturbs everybody. Like Hamlet, he enters reading, and he can not be talked out of his melancholy. The dread he shows at the beginning of this act anchors its affect in melancholy and prepares us not only for the exhilaration of the Black Swan (when he thinks he’s found transcendence) and for his sacrifice when he walks into the waves at the end.

For a traveling show, it’s well-designed: it fits well on the Zellerbach stage, which lacks depth: the swans’ entrance did not crowd the scene, but was magnificently full of swans. Their costumes are beautiful, including those of the black swans who rush in in the finale. Natalia Moiseyeva, the ballerina, was beautifully dressed in both white and black; she has the build of a Terekhova, muscularly lean, not particularly elongated, but beautifully rotated with expressive long attitudes and beautifully drawn out penchees, and her costumes made her look beautiful in all positions.

There are aspects of the production one could wish away, especially the medieval page-boy look: on all the brides, and all their consorts, the long-haired wigs were almost ugly. But the character costumes were very attractive, as was the dancing. In fact, I have never enjoyed the Mazurka more.

Only part of any ballet is spectacle. Nearly half is kinesthetic response, but a spectator can only access that through the eyes and ears, and the look of a dancer is fully as important as the kinesthetic impact s/he has. In terms of spectacle, there are two kinds of ballet dancers (assuming both move well): A) those whose bone-structure is ideal and who are stunning to look at before they ever do anything (e.g., Suzanne Farrell, Peter Martins, Muriel Maffre), whose dancing articulates aspects of them that were latent but not altogether hidden; and B) a class of more ordinarily-proportioned folk (e.g., Mikhail Baryshnikov, Desmond Richardson, Tina Le Blanc), who seem rather like the rest of us until they begin to move  — at which point the configurations, the lines that go on forever, the starburst pulses of energy that explode with each new step seem to come out of nowhere, which for me creates a kind of excitement of a higher order. The first category approach perfection, but the latter make me feel that the veil of illusion has been torn away and that I’m actually in contact with the ideal. My personal preference is for dancers of this kind: they let the dance itself transfigure them, the grace that transforms them awakens a hope in me that makes me open my heart to them.

I have to admit, it was not until the Prince (Sergei Mershin) began to leap that I found him in any way prepossessing. He’s about as handsome as the young Charles Laughton, and he lacks the latter’s invention as a mime. But from his first sight of the swan, which he saw on the horizon at the end of the first act, it became clear Mershin has imaginative power. And in the Black Swan, his exultation was as great as anything I’ve seen. He doesn’t turn spectacularly, and instead of tours a la seconde he circled the stage in coupe jetes of fabulous lightness and musicality. I was beside myself, but if I remember right he did these while Odile whipped off her fouettes, which were in the Russian style accented down and smiling and very fast, with that brutal jab straight to second, without the rond de jambe, like she’s stabbing something. It’s not pretty, but it is dramatically downright, like “Screw your courage to the sticking place,” and extremely poetic in its way. He’d made the wrong choice, like any of us might , in the heat of the moment, which could not have been hotter.

I admired Moiseyeva a great deal. She’s a natural Odile, very like Terekhova: fabulous turns, admirable placement, sailing around in a perfect attitude turn which then turns out to have been only the preparation for an even more beautiful releve in arabesque. Her phrasing is poetic and musical and full-bodied, with wonderful nuance in the collarbone and neck. She is not a natural Odette, by temperament or by body type, and in Makarova’s long-drawn-out White Swan she was visibly working, like a painter whose brush is getting too dry. But it was honest work, and I admired enormously the way she devoted herself to creating an Odette we would love; she let her work become the medium for conveying Odette’s suffering, and also of her gradual fight with herself to hope against hope and give in to the promise the Prince offered her. And when it came to the end, she bowed like Vishneva, with feeling, thanking us for caring, for “getting it,” giving her our poetic faith.

Of the many remarkable performers, Yara Araptanova, Natalia Makina, Alexey Tyukov  danced the first act pas de trois with marvelous accuracy and spaciousness. Tyukov was playing Benno, and on Saturday night gave his fine technique and elongated handsome looks to the role of the Prince, opposite Elena Kulagina, whom photographs show to have a more modern look than Moiseyeva, while common sense makes one wonder if she has the strength or stamina of Moiseyeva (who danced all three of the other performances). The conductor was Valery Platonov.

*There were probably two stages of this distortion – the first, under Vaganova’s influence, involved “heroicizing” the dancing and taking it to levels of technical clarity which distanced the fable into a kind of never-neverland where the comissars could not reproach it; the second, mannerist distortion began in the 70s, with the vast stretching out of both the adagio (both in time and in space) and of Odette’s variation promulgated in the West by Makarova herself, which made the act lugubriously reverential. It suited the time, when many of us believed that “the road of excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom”. But it set a standard that was actually a challenge, and those trying to top often it reached for more mechanical effects, and the imagination suffered. On the other hand, there must have been many who delivered great performances in this tradition — witness the magnificently intimate performance given by Mezentsova and Zaklinsky for the children in “The Children of Theatre Street.’

Production conceived and directed by Natalia Makarova
Music Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Choreography Natalia Makarova (after Marius Petipa and
Lev Ivanov)
Artistic Director of the Theatre George Isaakyan
Artistic Director of the Ballet Natalia Akhmarova
Principal Conductor Valery Platonov
Principal Guest Conductor Robert Cole
Additional Choreography Sir Frederick Ashton
Set Design Peter Farmer
Costume Design Galina Solovyeva

Photos by Eric Richmond.

Volume 4, No. 15
April 17, 2006

copyright ©2006 Paul Parish
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©2006 DanceView