Balanchine-Nureyev-Forsythe
Paris Opera Ballet
Opéra Bastille
Paris, France
5 April 2008
by Marc Haegeman
copyright 2008 Marc Haegeman
With its latest triple bill simply called ‘Balanchine/Nureev/Forsythe’ the Paris Opera Ballet invited us to rediscover the styles of three major figures of 20th century ballet, each in his own way expanding and transforming the classical legacy of Marius Petipa. To illustrate this, the company revived George Balanchine’s “The Four Temperaments”, a short suite of extracts from Rudolf Nureyev’s full-length “Raymonda”, created for the Opera in 1983, and “Artifact Suite” from William Forsythe, distilled from his evening length 1984 “Artifact.” Not the most balanced choice of works perhaps for such an ambitious programme, but one which had at least the merit to say something about the present state of the company itself, if not about the personalities and their respective styles it wanted us to compare.
The programme was preceded for the first two performances by the Défilé, one of the grandest moments in ballet anywhere. It’s the Paris Opera Ballet taking full conscience of its legacy and identity during 15 minutes of spotless pageantry, assembling the pupils of the Ecole de la danse with the full company, corps to étoiles, in a unique celebration and invitation to classical academic dance. The intimacy and time warp atmosphere of the smaller Palais Garnier ‘à l’italienne’, where the magnificent Foyer de la Danse behind the stage is opened for the occasion as the starting point of the Défilé, cannot be found in the icy vaults of the Opéra Bastille (the only other times the Défilé has been programmed there was in 1994), but it remains nonetheless a breathtaking spectacle.
Over the years the Paris Opera has performed some thirty ballets by Balanchine. About twenty of those were rehearsed by the choreographer himself, including his 1948 “The Four Temperaments” which he staged for Paris in 1963. The ballet still looks starkly modern for its age and as we were reminded by this performance not ready to disclose its colours and flavours that easily. At the outset of the current revival almost everybody seemed to be making a debut. Dancers, who had already performed in the previous run in 2003, were now cast in different sections. While regrettably not all the humours intended by Balanchine were fully recreated, we were treated to some unwonted new traits, including enthusiastic, careful, and diffident. Overall, the performance remained rather stiff and academic, as if the dancers approached the ballet too much with their minds and not enough with their guts. Moreover, the most convincing efforts were diminished by the vast stage of the Bastille. In short, pleasant memories of previous casts, marked by personalities on top of their game - like Aurélie Dupont, Nicolas Le Riche and Laurent Hilaire - could only make this viewer nostalgic.
After an indifferent opening with the exposition of the Theme, the most satisfying moments were to be found with the male soloists. Premier danseur Christophe Duquenne danced a promising Melancholic variation and hopefully will deepen his interpretation with time. Premier danseur Alessio Carbone seemed enthusiastic enough in Sanguinic yet his vivacity didn’t reflect on his partner Dorothée Gilbert. Etoile Mathieu Ganio, tall and elegant, was fluent and musical as Phlegmatic, but stern Stéphanie Romberg remained too reserved and cautious for Choleric. All of them will undoubtedly develop along the run, but for a premiere cast one is entitled to expect more.
I suppose someone wanted a chronological order by year of staging for the Opera, come what may, but it felt no less illogical that “Raymonda” came second, following without an interval directly after the Balanchine. “Raymonda” was Nureyev’s first Petipa for the Paris Opera in 1983 as he took up his position as artistic director. It proved to be his final statement in a series of stagings of Glazunov’s ballet for various companies which covered almost two decades and it’s definitely one of his Petipa transcriptions which make you wonder why he insisted on keeping the name of the heroine for its title. Not that it mattered much for this programme, though, since it was limited to twenty-five minutes of outtakes, erasing every possible trace of a narrative or dramatic sense.
The selection consisted of the czardas, the Grand pas classique hongrois followed by a pas de quatre, variations and coda, all from the 3rd act, with a Nureyev duo for Bernard and Béranger from the 1st act thrown in. With the extra pas de deux and apotheosis normally completing the 3rd act omitted and without Nicholas Georgiadis’s lush sets (only his suspended chandeliers were kept), the result looked far too much of the pure gala-divertissement type to give credit to this ballet as a prime example of the classical academic tradition inherited from Petipa. About Nureyev as choreographer it said - except that he needlessly overcomplicated a perfectly fine choreography - very little. As it was, it left the dancers without any chances to create characters, though it could be argued that “Raymonda”, downgraded this way to a plotless display of virtuoso dancing, was more in line with the two other ballets of the evening. Yet what uninformed members of the public were supposed to make out of it, I have no idea.
Unfortunately, the ensemble lacked éclat and demonstrated little more than deadening competence. Even étoile Delphine Moussin, who is an admirable ballerina now in the autumn of her career, in the title role didn’t manage to lift the spirits. Her dancing remained disappointingly small-scaled and lacklustre, while Nureyev’s insistence on the noisy hand claps in Raymonda’s variation, as well as the defeating slow tempo for the coda, are totally irredeemable anyway. Karl Paquette was her dutiful Jean de Brienne. Two more étoiles could be seen in the variations: Dorothée Gilbert, fresh from Sanguinic, as Henriette, Emilie Cozette as Clémence, both bright and beautiful instead of aristocratic. The full length “Raymonda” is scheduled for next season, but judging by this performance there’s still a long way to go.
The company seemed miraculously reinvigorated after the interval for “Artifact Suite.” It was as if all energy and responsiveness had been saved up for this moment. The corps breathed, moved, and ferociously semaphored as a single body, regimented in Forsythe’s visually stunning formations spread out over the immense, bare stage in characteristic sledgehammer chiaroscuro, punctuated by banging fire-curtain interruptions, and accompanied by the obligate shrieking recorded violin (Bach) or the repetitive chords bashed on the keyboard (courtesy of Eva Crossman-Hecht). It all smacked of Forsythe business as usual (and rest assured that pages of what one is supposed to experience are at hand in the programme-book), but the soloists Eleonora Abbagnato (bland and dull in “Temperaments” earlier that same evening), Benjamin Pech, Laure Muret and Stéphane Phavorin, enthusiastically plunged into the choreography as if their lives depended on it. They may not have found much affinity with Nureyev and only have sketched the outlines of Balanchine, Forsythe was given their all.
Forsythe has always enjoyed a fruitful relationship with the Paris Opera, especially since he staged “In The Middle, Somewhat Elevated” for the young soloists back in 1987. “Artifact Suite”, some forty minutes taken from his 1984 “Artifact”, entered the company’s repertory in 2006. Here again, the ideal encounter with rewarding results for both sides, dancers as well as choreographer, seems to have been realized. However, since this triple bill invites us to make comparisons, here is one as a final thought. Perhaps it was the just the effect of seeing it next to a ballet like “The Four Temperaments”, but in spite all its abrasive theatrics, and with the thrill of the new long gone, “Artifact Suite” looks now curiously unsurprising, suffering badly from the déjà-vu syndrome. Of course, the pure dance bits, craftily pushing the boundaries of classicism, can to a certain extent be thrilling to watch, especially when performed as dynamically and gutsy as by the Paris Opera dancers. Yet it’s Forsythe’s personal concept of the theatrical experience, perhaps intriguing and off-putting twenty-five years ago, which now increasingly turns against itself. Even if “Artifact Suite” mercifully saves us from the characteristic shouting matches which graced “Artifact”, it still comes down as a work that pretends to be oh so much smarter than its audience and the shine is eventually knocked off by its own posturing. As such it not only already acquired the patina of dated curiosity, compared with Balanchine’s seemingly inexhaustible neoclassical solution demonstrated in “The Four Temperaments”, it also appears very much like classical ballet impoverished and dragged into a dead-end street. Finally, it’s definitely great to see the Paris Opera dancers performing with such fervour and skill, but I sure wish they’d applied it to the rest of the programme as well.
Photo: "Artifact Suite", with Eleonora Abagnato and Benjamin Pech. Photo by Sébastien Mathé.
