Kirov Ballet - Forsythe evening

The Works

Forsythe Masterworks
The Kirov Ballet of the Maryinsky Theatre
Opera House, John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
Washington, DC, USA
June 13 & 15, 2006

by George Jackson
copyright ©2006, George Jackson

Living backstage, as dancers do much of the time, means adapting to an alternate universe. Sunlight is in short supply and it is shadow that permeates the near and distant spaces. The ambient sound may be that of silence — unless a pulse of music or stray noise breaks the quiet. Posted signs are ambiguous, and objects that might be symbols stand like discarded scenery — out of context and emptied of meaning. People appear unexpectedly. Some seem purposefully busy while others wander at their own pace. They switch roles, randomly or sometimes regularly. Wondering who they really are is futile.

It is this behind-the-scenes side of theater that William Forsythe shows in his ballets. Often the action takes off from the preparatory regimens of warming up, taking class, improvising or rehearsing that consume the working hours of dancers. Only the fraction of the day they are actually in performance is familiar territory for the audience.

The four works on this program were made at different times for different companies but, for the Kirov’s all-Forsythe bill it seems to me that the choreographer-designer gave his separate pieces an overall form. He emphasizes different facets of the dancers’ daily schedule in the first three pieces and, in the last, takes on the foregoing aspects and then some. Prominent in “Steptext”, the opener, are tuning and placing the body. There’s just one woman with three men. She doesn’t have the men to herself, though. Sometimes two of the males work together and each also has semiprivate moments, as does she. They try individual steps and combinations. They test themselves, each other and position themselves in relation to the stage’s parameters. Some of the movement is ballet’s classical vocabulary, some is prelude to it, and some is mundane. “Steptext” provides a little of what might be the text of a performance, but out of context. It is a teaser that satisfies, for during the course of it we get hear the chaconne of a J.S. Bach partita and see the dancers interact professionally yet not impersonally.

The main focus of “Approximate Sonata” is the rehearsal process. This set of four female-male duos begins with a male solo. The dancer moves forward on the stage slowly, carefully. He is in communication with a director we hear but do not see. The dancer grimaces — not to make faces but to exercise his mimetic musculature. When his partner appears they launch into the first pas de deux. The four pairings are terse yet differ: pulse, line, lifts or balance is the aspect stressed more in one duo than in another. Throughout, Forsythe’s dance invention sustained my interest.

Worrisome is this series’ third ballet, “The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude”. It is the most conventional of the works with its continuous stream of movement (no splintering or gear shifting) and five bravura dancers who are in performance mode (full-out presentational behavior, not acting as if they were exercising or rehearsing back stage). Also, the piece has musically-aligned dynamics and what appears to be a robust, straight-forward score. With “Vertiginous” (or “Dizzy” as some people dub it) is Forsythe making good on the boast that he could choreograph a normal ballet if only he wanted to? Not quite. The showy steps come at a dizzying pace. There is no still point or pause from which the dancers’ virtuosity springs. This work takes classicism and almost reduces it to something absurd. What keeps us from laughing out loud is Forsythe’s apparent respect for tradition which he mingles with his disrespect. There is thrill in seeing so much dancing, as well as a numbing effect. The music’s bold, unadorned surface is mirrored in the dancing, even though Forsythe ignores the undertones in the score — the Beethovian finale of Franz Schubert’s 9th symphony. Forsythe’s insistence on using a particular recording, a brisk but tinny one, also reflects his mixed emotions about heritage. This ballet about performance and its traditions is the thorn in Forsyth’s side - and in our sensibilities.

“In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated” is the oldest (1987) of these four Forsythes and perhaps contains the seeds of the later works. Coming last, though, it serves as summary. What dancers do is both private and public and Forsythe’s narrative leaps allow us to see the profession whole. There is only one more dancer in “In the Middle” than the eight in “Approximate Sonata” but they are used first and last as a group, as a corps, and that makes this work seem not a chamber piece but more of an opera-house ballet. The Kirov’s version of this piece lessens the jarring effect of Forsythe’s leaps, shifts, and splinterings compared to productions by other companies, perhaps because of the type of dancing aimed for — balletic, big, strong, sculpted.

The Thursday performance, June 15, was high voltage. Tuesday, opening night, hadn’t been bad but the wiring didn’t hum — overall that is, for there were fine individual achievements: Daria Pavlenko as the sole woman in “Steptext” was adult, thoughtful and sensual; Elena Vostrotina flashed and fractured linearity fearlessly and Viktoria Tereskina fused it magnetically in, respectively, the second and fourth pas de deux of “Approximate Sonata”. The elegant Andrian Fadeyev, as one of the two male supertechnicians in “Vertiginous” seemed to tire towards the piece’s end. The other man, Leonid Sarafanov, was even more mercurial on Thursday, cast this time with Vladimir Shklyarov (familiar from last winter as a Kirov Ballet and Vaganova School representative at Kennedy Center’s Proteges festival). The snap as Schklyarov extends a leg in flight and the strength of his stretch were pleasures. He dances on a big scale, lands softly and resembles the great Andre Eglevsky. In “In the Middle”, Alexander Sergeev displayed male port de bras of rare plasticity on Thursday and Ekaterina Kondaurova’s attack was captivating both nights. The one musician we heard live was Liudmila Sveshnikova, the pianist for Thom Willems’s score for “Approximate Sonata”. Willems and Leslie Stuck composed the electronic music for “In the Middle”.

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The Works