Category: Swan Lake

Golden Cockerels

6/10/2016

Skylar Brandt, left, as the Golden Cockerel vs Beyonce

Thanks to a tardy diva, this week I saw Beyoncé’s Formation Tour at Citi Field and ABT’s new production of The Golden Cockerel at the Met Opera House within a fourteen hour time span. Who knew the leads in both productions would be sporting the same look? Who wore it better? Queen Bey, bien sûr.

After waiting around for hours for Beyonce’s set to begin on Tuesday night, there was no way I was going to be stuck sitting in my seat early for the Wednesday matinee. Alas, I overestimated the MTA, which was running as late as the diva during an afternoon thunderstorm, and I didn’t have any time to read the ballet’s synopsis before it began. Boy was I lost! The Golden Cockerel has a convoluted history as a politically banished opera (1909) and a one-act ballet (1914), with a literary provenance involving Pushkin (1834) rewriting Washington Irving (1832). This all sounded intriguing to me, unfortunately the results were not. ABT’s new production is a revival of Alexei Ratmansky’s 2012 resurrection of the piece for the Royal Danish Ballet. The original ballet for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo (which was Fokine’s last choreographic effort) was a one act, 45 minute affair. Ratmansky chose to flesh out the ballet using more of the score from Rimsky-Korsakov's 1909 opera so that it became a full-length vehicle, which was a problem.

The lavish sets and costumes, by Richard Hudson after Natalia Goncharova’s Ballet Russe designs, were wonderful: folksy, vivid, whimsical. But great sets and costumes alone are not enough to make a great ballet; they can make for a great fashion show, sure, but those usually last around 15 minutes tops. The ballet had enough set changes, giant puppets, swirling skirts, and elaborate scrims to fuel a 45 minute piece, certainly, but not more. I will not attempt to summarize the plot here, because I’m still a little confused even though I have the program open in front of me now. Also, it was so dumb I couldn’t really care. But I was baffled at intermission when I finally got to check out the program and realized that the man galumphing around in the grey wizard beard was James Whiteside. I thought he was supposed to be the male dancing lead? He must change into ballet shoes for the second act, I assumed. No such luck. Although James looked like he was enjoying the chance to play against type, this bit of casting did nothing for me.

Hee Seo danced the lead role of the seductress Queen Shemakhan with her usual loveliness. Her beautiful, melting port de bras was appropriately erotic but her character made absolutely no sense and was more of a placeholder. That was too bad, because I have seen her excel in Ratmanksy pieces before—particularly Seven Sonatas--and their pairing was one of the reasons I chose to see this production. Perhaps, since Ratmanksy went to the trouble of lengthening a thin premise anyway, her motives and storyline could have been elaborated to better effect.

As it was, the story revolved mainly around the doddering Tsar Dodon—a character role inhabited well enough by Roman Zhurbin—and his foibles as a ruler. His princely sons got the most dancing in the production and were therefore the highlight of the show, even though they died in battle at the beginning of the second act. Arron Scott and Alexandre Hammoudi danced these roles well, and their solos had some interesting circus-like aspects to them (like splits and cartwheels) that fit nicely into the cartoonish vibe of the production.

And what of the title role? Sarah Lane’s Golden Cockerel was technically strong and engaging, but the part felt too much like a cameo appearance. Her first entrance with James Whiteside in the Tsar’s palace was the most choreographically innovative section of the ballet and I had high hopes. She performed prickly bent leg toe-hops, and I liked how she repeatedly folded to a kneeling position on the floor like a mechanical doll. But that was basically her whole gig. Even as my mind wandered during the second act (I haven’t been that bored at the ballet in a long while) from which she was largely absent, I was excited for her to peck the Tsar to death in the finale. I thought that would be so cool, a sort of feminist vindication for all of the tragic-avian heroines in the history of ballet: Odette and her coterie, the Firebird, the Nightingale.

Sadly, in the brief, murderous scene, Lane was shuttled around by two men in cumbersome black cloaks (the dead princes doing double duty—maybe black or gold unitards would have been subtler?) so she could perch and peck on the Tsar’s shoulders for a second before being carried offstage. What a letdown—so much for ladybird empowerment! In general, there were far too many females being wheelbarrowed around the stage by two men in this production. Hee Seo and Sarah Lane were repeatedly dragged around by Zhurbin and Whiteside, or Scott and Hammoudi. In Act II Devon Teuscher was also shoveled along by Calvin Royal III and Jose Sebastien in a weird bit that felt tacked on. They seemed like they were there just to showcase very long, Pierrot-like sleeves.

At the end, the James Whiteside character explained—much like Puck in his “If we shadows have offended” passage at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (both the play and the Balanchine ballet)—that the whole thing had been made up. He walked past clock-like, tic-toc motion vignettes of the main characters in the story to prove his point. There was Craig Salstein as some sort of henchman, Tatiana Ratmansky as a busybody housekeeper, the long-sleeved trio, and the two princes stabbing each other in the stomach back and forth. Wait, what? Did they kill each other? The program said they died defending their father’s kingdom in battle. If they had a Cain and Abel backstory going on I’d definitely have been more interested in that!

The Golden Cockerel made me understand anew why Balanchine pared down so many of the old story ballets into dance-heavy one-acts: like his Swan Lake, and especially, his sumptuous, Chagall-designed Firebird (with which The Golden Cockerel shared many similarities, and which dates from roughly the same era). It was a shame that ABT spent so much money on the production, for the audience buzz was not favorable during intermission or afterwards. “Where was the dancing?” people kept asking. “What was going on?” was the main query on the bathroom line. At least it took me only half an hour to get home, instead of the two-hour odyssey I had back from Queens the night before! More on that experience next time…

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Swan Shots

9/24/2015

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My colleague Devin Alberda captured some beautiful shots of Teresa Reichlen and Russell Janzen in rehearsal for Swan Lake. They make their debut as a tragic couple in just a few hours!

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Swan Queen Q&A

9/20/2015

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Teresa Reichlen, photo by Henry Leutwyler

When someone asks me what I do, and I respond that I am a ballet dancer, invariably the first thing they want to know is, “have you seen Black Swan?” The answer is yes, yes I have. All dancers have. The second thing they ask is if the ballet world is like the movie. Not exactly. I think Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is a great horror movie, and I think Natalie Portman is fantastic in it. But it is a film that wraps every single ballet stereotype up in one woman, which is not very realistic. However, this inevitable line of inquiry with strangers does make plain that when most laypeople think about ballet they think of Swan Lake. Therefore, I think it is safe to conjecture that the dual role of Odette/Odile is probably the most famous in all of ballet.

The fame is justified. The role is incredibly difficult—both technically and emotionally. The Swan Queen dances throughout three of four acts of the ballet—the only one she gets off is the first, which isn’t very helpful! She must excel in the lyrical adagio passages of the White Swan—the plaintive backbends, the languorous passés and attitude balances. The she must tackle the brisk challenges in the third act Black Swan pas de deux, including its treacherous 32 fouetté turns—which come at the point when she is at her most tired.

The acting demands are no less daunting. She must convincingly act out a preposterous story: that she is the princess Odette trapped by the evil sorcerer Rothbart in half woman/half bird form who falls in love at first sight with a man who is trying to shoot her. Then she must become the villainous and seductive Odile (who is pretending to be Odette) who convinces the prince to swear his love to her instead. While she embodies Odile she must be enough like Odette so that the Prince is sold, but different enough so that the audience buys that she is a different woman entirely. Then she does another about-face and turns back into Odette, mourning her prince’s betrayal by the cold dark lake. In the finale she must not appear schizophrenic as she quickly reunites with her lover, forgives him, and pledges undying love to him which vanquishes her captor. For her efforts she is damned to an eternity of lonely swandom. To say that this is not the easiest of character studies would be an understatement. Natalie Portman rightfully won an Oscar for the task. Michael Keaton was nominated for an Oscar for a rather similar feat in Birdman.

My friend NYCB Principal Dancer Teresa Reichlen has been kind enough to answer a few questions about dancing such a demanding and storied role. Tess is one of those rare birds (sorry!) who is a perfect fit for the role. She has the height, length, and flexibility for the adagio work, as well as a sensational jump and the smooth turns requisite of the Black Swan. Next week Tess returns to the role of Odette/Odile in Peter Martins’s Swan Lake. She will be dancing with soloist Russell Janzen who is making his debut as Prince Siegfried. I’ve had a few glimpses and they are killing it in rehearsals. I cannot wait to see their shows!

Q: First of all Tess, have you ever seen Black Swan? If so, what did you think of it? (wink wink)

A: I have seen Black Swan. I think that it is a psychological thriller that happens to be based in the world of a ballet company and like any movie of that sort should not be accepted as a relevant representative of what happens in the real world.

Q: Great, moving on. Swan Lake is so iconic, but it is not exactly what the NYCB is known for. Did you dream of dancing Odette/Odile as a young dancer? Or was this something that came as a surprise in your career?

A: When I was younger I just wanted to be a dancer, I didn’t have any overarching dreams about specific companies or roles that I wanted to do. After I joined NYCB and started to do a few solos and began to realize how much I loved what I was doing there were specific things that I started to hope that I would one day get to do, including Swan Lake. I actually understudied the role for quite

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Le Lac des Cygnes

3/18/2015

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The Paris Opera Ballet in Le Lac des Cygnes

In Paris last week I had the pleasure of watching the pré-générale (the second-to-last dress rehearsal) of the Paris Opera Ballet’s Swan Lake. Their version—which was choreographed by Rudolf Nureyev and premiered in 1984—was new to me, but the most foreign aspect of the production was the idea of multiple dress rehearsals for a ballet! The Paris Opera dancers were in full costume and makeup and they performed to live orchestra. At the NYCB we never have a full-costumed rehearsal with an orchestra for an established production; it happens only for premieres and certain Robbins revivals. In fact, for my recent La Valse performance my cast of soloists didn’t even get a stage rehearsal or a rehearsal with the corps de ballet for traffic and spacing. And we had old practice tutus for rehearsals but not the real costumes with the slippery gloves. Clearly, the French don’t leave as much to chance as we do. But then, almost everything

about the French performance schedule is different from what I am used to in New York. The Paris Opera is a massive institution, with roughly 150 dancers who are often split into two camps with one group dancing one ballet at the Palais Garnier, and the other group dancing a different piece at the Bastille. (Le Lac des Cygnes was at the Bastille and John Neumeier’s Le Chant de la Terre was running at the Garnier during my visit.)

Nureyev’s Swan Lake was in some ways familiar. It is, like the Peter Martins version that we dance at NYCB, fashioned after the original 1895 production by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, so many of the steps were very similar to ours. A few portions of the choreography were fairly standard: the Act I pas de trois, and some of the divertissements in Act III. Yet this production, like many of Nureyev’s works, had a much richer role for the male lead than usual. I think Prince Siegfried had more solos than the Swan Queen! Nureyev had choreographed the ballet for himself (and Margot Fonteyn) back in 1964 and had the Paris Opera adopt it twenty years later when he became artistic director of the company. In Diane Solway’s biography of Nureyev, he candidly explains why he fleshed out the prince’s role: “[h]e sits on his ass for 35 minutes and then suddenly has to walk. Impossible.” He’s right. Typically, the prince is a bit of a blank and sits like a prop through most of Act I. He normally doesn’t begin his dancing until Act II, when Odette the Swan Queen first appears. In the Nureyev version, Odette also has an earlier entrance. She appears briefly in human form in a prologue in which she is kidnapped and spirited away by Rothbart on swan wings.

In Nureyev’s treatment, it is almost as if Siegfried and the evil sorcerer Rothbart have the deepest psychological connection, and indeed they may represent a mind divided. They even have a long, violent pas de deux together before Siegfried goes swan hunting in Act I. The Rothbart role is expanded here, and it is very much a dancing one. He has a technical solo in the ballroom scene in Act III and is a full partner in the Black Swan pas de deux—er, trois, I guess is more apt here. Nureyev was playing with Freudian id, ego, and super-ego concepts which make a lot of sense in the context of the story: Odette/Odile is a dual role so Siegfried and Rothbart may as well be psychological foils too. Although, so many fractured psyches threaten to make the plot hopelessly schizophrenic.

But even the traditional Swan Lake tale is none too rational. I have never understood, for example, why the prince is so easily deluded when the swan whom he believes is his lakeside love Odette (but who is really her evil twin, Odile) enters the Act III ballroom in new plumage and the completely opposite relationship with her captor from the close of the previous act. At their Act II parting, the virginal and reticent Odette tells Siegfried that only his true love can save her from her evil tormenter. But when “she” next appears with a coldly seductive attitude and Rothbart as her best friend, Siegfried buys it whole hog.

It is established early on in the ballet that the prince is a wistful daydreamer. But he knows that Rothbart is a sorcerer with bad intentions and freakish control issues; he should at least be a tad suspicious that the black swan in Act III could be a blatant trap—an evil duck decoy. To so quickly conflate the two women—Odette and Odile—exposes some terribly flawed logic on the prince’s part. What does he think? “Sweet, Rothbart and my swan girlfriend have made up and she is allowed to marry me without a problem and wow is she horny in this new black feather getup!” Perhaps Odette’s condemnation to an eternity of swandom is not so grave after all. Methinks Siegfried may not have proven to be a faithful husband (or a very intelligent companion) in the long run.

Actually, Nureyev’s conceit fixes this problem somewhat. Because Rothbart is involved with Siegfried from the beginning of the story as an intense mentor (lover?) figure, it makes a little more sense that Siegfried could be confused and taken by this man he has known for so long in so many mysterious guises. But Swan Lake is always better read as a series of metaphors: for the ideal woman, for the quest for meaning, for rebellion (the prince seeks life beyond a conventional marriage and societal expectations), for good and evil, for the damnable difference between action versus intent.

The dancers I saw in the lead roles were excellent. Héloîse Bourdon, a young sujet making a big debut, was Odette/Odile. She is surely poised for great things. The more experienced Josua Hoffalt, an étoile with long lean lines, was her Prince. And Florimond Lorieux, another sujet, was a dramatic and captivating Rothbart despite the challenges foisted upon him by the costume department. He battled with his onerous cape while trying to partner throughout the Black Swan pas, and when he removed it for his solo a sparkly black and green skintight suit was revealed that reminded me a lot of the Will Ferrell film Blades of Glory. Other than that, the costumes were done in sumptuous velvets and brocades and were very beautiful. The pastel palette of the Act I and III court scenes surprised me. I usually associate lilacs and pinks with Sleeping Beauty and darker hues with Swan Lake, but it was very pretty nonetheless. Another dancer who really stood out to me was Hannah O’Neill in the first act pas de trois.

As for the Nureyev choreography, I wasn’t a big fan of the Act I crowd dances which were a little clunky and relied too much on canon. The dance for the four little swans was not as intricate as it can sometimes be, so that was also a bit sleepy. But the swan corps was great. Aside from the four little swans number, the swan choreography was the most unusual and a lot of it was very cool. There was also a dance for four big swans which I liked very much. Best of all, the swans repeated a droopy motif in the mournful Act IV in which they bent over with one arm extended along their faces to the front as they did slow pas de chevals with their feet—rather like how little kids imitate elephants walking. It reminded me of the Salvador Dalí painting Cygnes reflétant des Éléphants which was neat since Nureyev’s production was so much about psychological doubling.

Musically, the production was very interesting. Siegfried had two solos to music I’d never heard before. Alas, some of my favorite music—the sighing violin score for the Russian divertissement—was cut. The Act III pas de quatre was also cut in this version but I didn’t miss it; I tend to find that it makes the ballroom scene drag on. The ending of the ballet was different from other versions I’d seen. In some productions the Prince and Odette end happily and break Rothbart’s spell with their true love against the odds (and the heretofore agreed-upon rules of Rothbart’s curse, hmm). Sometimes they commit suicide together by jumping into the lake (I guess they can’t swim? But she’s a swan…as I said, some plot issues). In our version the prince is left heartbroken as Odette is enveloped by her swan posse, trapped forever in avian form. I think it is a beautiful scene. In the Nureyev treatment the prologue was essentially repeated and Odette was whisked into the air by Rothbart and carried away as Siegfried died. I liked that in this production the beginning turned out to be a foreshadowing of the ending. There is something so inevitable about Swan Lake in the ballet world that it seemed appropriately circular—an eternal loop of princes and sorcerers and swans and their multiple dysfunctional selves.

It was such a treat to see the amazing Paris Opera dancers perform—ahem, rehearse. A big thank you to my friends Janie, Sébastien, and Ben for letting me have a sneak peek!

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Golden Cockerels

Swan Shots

Swan Queen Q&A

Le Lac des Cygnes

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