Strong on Top, Weak at the Bottom

State Ballet of Georgia
“Chaconne,” “Duo Concertant,” “Bizet Variations” and “Sagalobeli”
Cal Performances, Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley
February 14, 2008

by Rita Felciano
Copyright © Rita Felciano 2008

Watching the State Ballet of Georgia, under the directorship of Nina Ananiashvili since 2004, it was difficult to believe that the dancers who so seemed so befuddled in Balanchine’s “Chaconne” shone as brightly as they did in Yuri Possokhov’s “Sagalobeli.” The fact that Possokhov based his work on indigenous traditions probably helped while Balanchine’s, despite his being Georgian, basically still felt like a foreign language to much of this troupe. It made you wonder whether an ambitious seven-city American tour was not premature.   

Problems in the opening “Chaconne” were as basic as coordination; flopped unisons, sloppy line-ups. Tempi (Robert Cole with the Berkeley Symphony) were pulled liked taffy; the lighting design never did jell.  Perhaps some of these all to obvious missteps could be blamed on jetlag. But you couldn’t help noticing other weaknesses. Supported pirouettes in plié wobbled more often than not. Epaulements flopped all over the place. Most fundamentally—though they now have ten Balanchine ballets in their repertoire—these dancers lack fluidity in the torso and equated stillness with posing. The men much more so than the women. Holding a low port de bras in fifth, they looked as if heroically planted on pedestals; arms encased in granite, chins jutted towards the gods. And walking is not the same as parading.

Fortunately, moving up the ranks and through the evening, the outlook improved. Secure in their comportment handsomely articulate dancers Anna Muradeli and Vasil Akhmeteli’s Pas de Deux projected confidence and ease though their rapport could have been more musical. The Pas de Cinq for the women was fluidly detailed and spirited.

“Duo Concertant” received a admirably convincing interpretation from Nino Gogua and Lasha Khozashvili. They brought out the work’s quasi-narrative implications more clearly than some other performances that I remember. The subtle trajectory from the studio to some place more exalted grew like a slow crescendo as they moved through the music and towards each other. Unfortunately, a badly botched lighting job ruined the ending.

Instead of the more common still reverence for Stravinsky while listening at the piano, little shifts of weight and exchanged glances suggested an eagerness to get started. The initially “tentative” reaching of arms and circling steps had an exploratory nature to them in which the dancers were very much equals. Gradually, differences opened. She moved like a race horse at the gate while his jazzy shifts became more ardent but also more reserved. Lovely to see was how the return to pure listening, whether going back to the musicians or mid-stage, pulled them closer to each other. The intimacy ran deep even with her just sitting on his knee.

Intimacy of a different kind was to be found in Ratmansky’s “Bizet Variations.” While the work was conventionally structured as a sextet for three couples, Ratmansky employed one of Bizet more atypical scores. Full of odd chromaticisms, it was played live by pianist John Parr who in “Concertant” had been partnered by Franklyn D’Antonio.

An outsider (Akhmeteli) disturbed the relationship of two pairs of lovers (Nino Ochiauri and Maya Dolidze with David Khozashvili and Irakli Bakhtadze) that threatened to break into violence when the men defended their positions. Just in time, in flew Nina Ananiashvili, an intruder herself.

If you are so inclined, you could see this little ballet also as a metaphor for Ananiahsvili’s return to Georgia. A touch of forlorn soul searching, with her crouched center floor, at least suggested the possibility.

Though a simple enough story Ratmansky filled it withfor contrasting duets full of skippy little beats but also more athletic swinging turns. He set these off against Akhmeteli’s powerful and control-asserting physicality. Ananiashvili’s lyricism and her ability to phrase seem little diminished. Something as simple as lifting an arm while inclining her head was breathtaking. In the finale, watching her abandoning herself into a cambre in her partner’s arms, I almost choked up.

Maybe most surprising and optimistic for the future was watching the Georgians—or at least fourteen of them--come alive as an ensemble in Possokhov’s “Sagalobeli.” Named after the musicians who perform the area’s indigenous music, the work fit the dancers like a second skin. Smartly, Possokhov looked at the strong local dance history and distilled from it the gliding steps of the women’s line dances and the men’s exuberantly bounding competitiveness into a piece in which the dancers felt so clearly comfortable.

“Sagalobeli” started as a male duet of leaping and yanking with a small rope that looked like it could have come up out of an arm wrestling contest. It set the tone for the male dancing.  The women never seemed to come off point from the moment they entered in silhouettes, arms low to the side held back, floating across the field of vision. Elegance and reserve was to be their domain.

From these building blocks Possokhov created a suite of nicely varied sequences in which a male’s dramatic corkscrew turns could  be followed by a gentle circle dance. Seated on the floor with legs tucked underneath, the women’s pliant backs actually recalled swans’ necks. The structural challenge of a work in which pieces follow each other like marbles rolling down a chute is to nevertheless create a trajectory which leads somewhere. Possokhov’s didn’t quite succeed here. “Sagalobeli” simply stopped. Some rethinking might be in order.

Photo: Ananiashivili in "Bizet Variations"
by Lado Vachnadze

copyright 2008 by Rita Felciano