Oakland Ballet
by Paul Parish
copyright 2007 by Paul Parish
The glass is half-full.
So far as the audience is concerned, Oakland Ballet is back and they're thrilled. The huge Art Deco Paramount Theater was as full as I’ve ever seen it last Saturday night for the first repertory program of the "Oakland Ballet Company" -- a re-start-up group headed by former Oakland Ballet director Ronn Guidi. Some came in tails and full evening regalia, some came in jeans, but nearly everybody was standing and cheering at the end. They'd been given solid fare, a well-designed program with good bones, and if the dancers were not quite back on form, the promise was unmistakable --and they'd liked it.
The Midwest begins at Oakland. The railroads ended here. It’s a manufacturing and trucking town now, working-class. A political scientist who moved here from North Carolina once asked me in all seriousness, "What does Oakland need with a ballet company?" He was an economist at the Institute for Governmental studies, and his question was not rhetorical. On the other hand, he had not SEEN Oakland's ballet company. If he had, he might have understood how wrong he was-- for its ballet company was a real civic institution, one that could not only make the community proud but itself could create community values, in the peculiarly heightened, poetic form that ballet alone can make, which can show certain human hopes and fears more directly than even Shakespeare can.
That answer is of course theoretically naive, and wouldn’t apply to a lot of dance companies, but in fact it IS what Oakland Ballet is about. They specialized in old-fashioned ballets full of conflict, passion, heroic gestures, where actions and posture tell the story without words. Mythic tragedies like that of Billy the Kid (American outlaw), Lizzie Borden (axe-murderess), or Giselle (in the Ballets Russes version staged by Freddie Franklin) can perhaps be told more sympathetically through pure movement than they ever could be in dialogue – and back in the 80s Oakland's Lizzie Borden was better than ABT's (and de Mille had created the ballet for ABT), their Billy, Eugene Loring himself said, the best in the world. The company was the creation of a working-class Italian-American man, Ronn Guidi, born in Oakland, who worked in the tradition of Verdi and Puccini, for whom this kind of total musical theater was for everybody, not just the rich. Indeed, the poor might need it more than the rich.
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There was a live orchestra in the pit, with a harpist sitting beside the proscenium, when the Theater’s art-deco curtain went up on Debussy's famous music and Bakst’s famous painting of l’Apres-midi dun Faun: the central character reclined center-stage, in the middle, somewhat elevated, with his flute raised to his lips, and you realized this was going to be a moving picture. It was already near-about perfect. The stage picture was painted in that slightly-greyed tone that belong to the Art-Deco period and not the garish oranges one usually sees. The brilliant spotlight that picked out the faun, who lay luxuriantly stretched out in his nest, showed us a creature who was the spirit of the place, who owned the stage; this towering escarpment was his, and so was the valley.
The Oakland East Bay Symphony played Debussy's ravishing score with great simplicity, adn the dancing was in the same key. As Walter Terry said of Oakland’s triumphant presentation of Nijinska’s Les Noces at the Spoleto Festival in the early 80s, the simplicity and sincerity of this old-fashioned Ballets Russes-style company can give a more exciting, truer-feeling experience of these famous ballets, with weight in the right places, all the accents in place and a thrilling attack but nothing too much, than the grander companies often do. So it was again with this gentle Faun. The ballet showed an encounter between a fabulous but tender beast and a nymph who is not afraid of him. Oakland performs Ann Hutchinson Guest’s reconstruction, which is very different from the version performed by most companies (the Joffrey and the Paris Opera Ballet come to mind). Check out the YouTube clip, from the movie Nijinsky, which shows the standard version, in a slightly exaggerated form.
Oakland’s is in every way softer, less self-conscious, less pricked-up; and in several crucial places the steps are different. At the climax of the encounter between the nymph and faun, she does a grand plié in archaic fourth (as in the other versions), but she does not switch her knees to face the other direction and begin to attempt her escape. She remains facing him, and he continues to present himself to her, but gallantly, without insistence, and she remains on the brink of swooning but without losing her presence of mind and without giving herself to him. She DOES give him her scarf – and in this exchange, she is not buying her freedom, but giving him something she wants him to have. They do link elbows, and unlock them again – but without making a big drama of it – each lets the other go, for now, maybe forever, as in a dream – as suits the music. It’s indeed more like a real dream than a masturbation fantasy.
The other nymphs make a few sharp small gestures of disapproval with their hands at many stages, but the agitation inheres in them, not in the principals.
At the end, as the faun mounts to his lair, his steps lack the deliberate insistent
portentousness
of the usual closing action. He does not rise onto half-toe after
straightening the knee, as all the other fauns do, in that uncanny way
which heightens the sense of impending climax. Since the faun’s
staircase is hidden behind a painted-canvas outcropping of rock which
hides his feet, the effect of his body rising a few more inches just
before he takes the next step (in the better-known version) gives a
little frisson -- precisely because you can’t see his foot do the
releve. Can Hutchinson Guest’s version really be accurate? Don’t we
want the genius of Nijinsky to have come up with this fabulous effect,
so in keeping with the logic of his strict silhouetting? Well, in
Saturday’s performances – I saw both – I was happy to do without them,
happy to have the phrasing soft, unbroken by all the “soft startles” I
was so used to in the more familiar version. The Oakland dancers make
the case for Hutchinson Guest’s reading as being simpler, more
monumental, more musical, and more moving.
Both casts danced it the same, and both fauns had a natural
sensuality and considerable personal beauty, which is of course a
prerequisite. David Bertlin reminded me of the young Hugh Grant in
Maurice: a richly muscled guy, he had a sweet surprising gentleness,
like that of a big friendly cat, and his nymph Denise Roman, who’s tiny
compared to him, had that strength one sometimes sees in small Flamenco
dancers who you know if they wanted to could totally silence a houseful
of drunken sailors, a power she kept in reserve.
The afternoon
faun, Ethan White (who appears courtesy of Smuin Ballets/SF, of which
company he is a star performer) has a finer musicality and much
stronger technique but a more delicate physique – which nonetheless he
deployed to gorgeous effect. His biceps found the light in the very
first pose, in a way that put me in mind of the way a great movie star
takes the light. (And the Paramount has famously meager possibilities
for lighting.) Jenna McClintock, the finest, most natural dancer in the
company, was his nymph.
It was McClintock who delivered the finest argument for the Oakland Ballet’s comeback in Guidi’s version of Trois Gymnopédies It’s hard to believe that his version actually predates Ashton’s, as Guidi claims. It did premiere in 1961, though how much has he changed it? If it were true, it wouldn’t’ really matter – both are ballets that are more beautiful than they can be danced. Very exposed, physically (they’re all in white unitards; though to such Rosicrucian music, it would have to be a white ballet). It’s even more exposed spiritually. The combinations unfold like fate.
You feel the mazurka underlying the dance in Guidi’s version, as it underlies the poet’s solo in "Les Sylphides" or in so many of the "Dances at a Gathering," with a strong pulse on the second beat; in Satie’s music, many factors create the sense of floating mysterious sadness, a kind of adolescent melancholy that’s simultaneously frozen in time, and hovering on the brink of revelation. The play of two against three creates an endlessly rocking, mysteriously buoyant, radiant unfillfulment; two will not become one: it feels inevitable that this will be a dance of two against three.
In Guidi’s version this is expressed as two pas de deux: same guy, new girl, with the last dance a pas de trois for all three of them. (The second pas de deux is weaker, as is its music.) Perhaps any musical choreographer, or any choreographer influenced by Isadora Duncan’s “Dance of the Blessed spirits,” would have used simple temps liés in the finale of this piece – everything about it is legato, and a winding-down. Guidi’s temps liés are almost as eloquent as Ashton’s, and his dancers end in a ritual like the dying swan’s, sitting down onto the back foot, stretching forward over the outstretched leg in reverence, then rising up to the knee, then folding up completely into the fetal position as the music comes to an end. In their final moment, they look like pillows of stone, like children kowtowing to the almighty, like ancient monuments with all their features weathered away, bearing cryptic witness in a cemetery.
The piece has enormous popular appeal and was cheered to the skies – if it’s not as eye-peelingly regal as Ashton’s, it nevertheless works as well as “Nessun dorma” to enthrall an audience. It’s both haunting and sincere and very difficult to dance, for it leaves you feeling very exposed, there is no moment where you can let anything go, and at every moment the flow of movement must be maintained. The partnering is intimate -- a slow pirouette will be stopped palm-to-palm, “in holy palmer’s kiss.” The phrases are very long and involve turning in as well as turning out, with sparing use of grand rond de jambe. And they’re periodic – that is, as with a sentence of Cicero’s, we don’t know where it’s going until it approaches the end, when it surprises us by going to the usual place, which is attitude croisé.
Both Gianna Davie (with David Bertlin) and Jenna McClintock (with Ethan White) handled the adagio requirements convincingly, with never a break in the flow and consistently beautiful line. But only McClintock brought the kind of modulation to the phrasing that made it mysterious and wonderful. White may have had a lot to do with this, as the partnering is very close, and he is the more musical of the men. But it looks like the woman initiates the movement a lot: for example, the allemande pirouettes beginning from fourth position on pointe, where it looks like her back foot pushes off and sets everything in motion and he just provided the pivot that holds her axis steady. Still, there was something about him that seemed ideally simpatico. Working with Smuin, Smith was trained by one of the best in the art of sensitive partnering. Guidi told me before the show that he had wanted to have dancers from Smuin’s company perform Smuin’s probable masterpiece, “The Eternal Idol,” (which Smuin made for Cynthia Gregory back in 1969), but unfortunately at this point nobody knew it. The evening was dedicated to Smuin.
The evening was framed in "audience-favorite" Oakland Ballet works, Guidi's strong curtain raiser "Carnival d’Aix," and the sure-fire finale "Bolero" by Mark Wilde, which has been in the repertory for decades and serves the double purpose of demonstrating ballet technique of the most exposed, heroic difficulty and showing the versatility and personality of the individual performers. "Bolero" has been used over the years so much, the audience could stage it. Any child can see how difficult it is and can assess how well they’ve met the challenges – "that fouette has to end en face, and then you kick STRAIGHT front." But the ballet has also a wonderful relation to the rhythms, to the heady weighted quality of the sound, and works in a variety of folk steps, thigh-slaps, hand-claps, tumbles, hand-stands, walk-overs, falls head-first from arabesque so that the accent is just as strongly down as it is up. By the ballet’s ecstatic climax it feels like they’ve gotten drunk on the beat and have done about all it’s possible to do on a bare stage to show you the power of dance to enlarge and clarify a body and make you feel magnificent, and the audience always jumps to their feet and shrieks and hollers. As Leigh Witchell (who sat next to me) said, that ballet is HARD—it exposes everything, it’s good medicine. Wilde made the piece in 1974 for Pacific Ballet, the remarkable institution (which in those days was in the eyes of many cognoscenti a more significant company than San Francisco Ballet) which he had founded with Alan Howard and which had starred Grace Doty and Sally Streets (and briefly, Kyra Nichols) as ballerinas. But "Bolero" was immediately taken up by Guidi’s company and has been a signature piece ever since.
