"100 Years Ballets Russes"
Mikhail Fokine, "Shéhérazade”, Bronislava Nijinska, “Les Biches”, Terence Kohler, “Once Upon An Ever After”
Bavarian State Ballet
National Theatre
Munich, Germany
December 11, 2008
by Horst Koegler
copyright @2008 by Horst Koegler
Of the four opera-house based German Ivy League ballet-companies in Berlin, Hamburg, Munich and Stuttgart, the Bavarian State Ballet, for ten years now led by Ivan Liska as artistic director, ranks as the most traditionally minded one. No wonder as it boasts no less than seven full-length Petipas (the three Tchaikovskys plus “La Bayadère”, “Don Q”, “Raymonda” and “Le Corsaire” – maybe even eight, if one adds the Petipa-derived “Giselle”). Thus solidly anchored, Liska decided to celebrate the Diaghilev anniversary by a programme entitled “100 Years Ballets Russes”, offering Fokine´s “Shéhérazade” and Nijinska´s “Les Biches” – both in new productions, plus, in the best of Diaghilev tradition, a creation, “Once Upon An Ever After” by the 24 years old Australian newcomer Terence Kohler. It turned out a huge success, showing the company in festive fettle, with all performances sold out.
Of the three, the Fokine, reconstructed and produced by Isabella, the choreographer´s granddaughter, to be adequately appreciated needs today to be filtered through one´s historic consciousness. While the original Bakst décor and costumes, newly painted and tailored, still fill the huge stage of the Munich National Theatre with their explosive colour power and Rimsky-Korsakov´s langurous and sensuous melodies flatter our ears – especially if they are played with such honeyed liquidity from the Bavarian State Orchestra under Valery Ovsianikov, with Markus Wolf as their melting solo-violinist – the choreography impresses today more through its professionalism and craft than through its exotic charms to titillate our senses. It must have been very different when the Diaghilev company first performed the original version in November 1912 at the same house (or its site, for the theatre was destroyed during the second world war) – but then, of course it was danced by the charismatic Ida Rubinstein and Nijinsky, while today Lucia Lacarra and Lukas Slavicky, excellent and highly qualified dancers as they are, communicate little of the sensual magic of their predecessors, with her exhibiting the perfect proportions of her body like a model queen, while he rotates around the stage like one of those Olympic champions – with their colleagues, Cyril Pierre as Shahriar and Norbert Graf as his brother Shah Zeman performing their rites – well, actually as rites rather than as spontaneous actions, and Vincent Loermans his pompuous duties as Chief Eunuch with gleeful zealousness. A whiff of inner shaking of their heads hangs over the performance, which, though properly coached and executed like a rosary, looks like a newly polished museum piece, - more period than charm.
After which Nijinska´s “Les Biches” fills the house like a fresh breeze. Produced by Diana Curry, with the original décor and costumes by Marie Laurencin, it was far more than a nostalgic remembrance of Scott Fitzgerald times at the Cote d´Azur during Diaghilev´s cocktail period, with its flock of pubescent girls suggesting a quivering horde of pre-Lolitas. And if it was a Diaghilev mixed cocktail, it was, James Bond like, shaken and not stirred. With its saucy Poulenc tunes tickling the feet the whole atmosphere seemed filled with expectant joy, and especially after the boys join them, strolling in from their body building exercises or, maybe, their basket-ball frolics at the beach. Now the rather innocent atmosphere changes and sexy sparks ignite their flirtations. The piece is brilliantly danced – having not seen it for quite a while, I became aware that it was created in Monte Carlo in 1924, four years before the official declaration of neo-classicism in “Apollon musagète”! The feet of the girls on point seem like arrows aimed at the hearts, if not to the more southern regions in their bulging bathing trunks of the boys. As the Girl in Blue, Séverine Ferrolier rolls her shoulders irresistibly, suggesting pleasures too daring to be worded in her Adagietto, while Lisa-Marie Cullum as the Hostess toys with the pearls of her necklace like setting a trap, with the other hand flourishing her long cigarette-holder. She is personalized sophisticated elegance, even when she flirts with the boys in the Rag Mazurka. The boys parade their double tours like in a casting show for the sexiest man in town competition, they are Cyril Pierre, Javier Arno Gonzales and Maxim Chashchegorov (what a name – with my neighbour referring to him just as Mr. Cashew), finishing their turns exactly on the point like an accent aigu). If Nijinska herself called “Les Biches” the “Sylphide of our [her] roaring ´twenties – time”, I would rather prefer to brand it the cleanest of vicious ballets, performed by the Bavarian State dancers with crystal-clear sparks. Wish that all our State servants were possessed of such grace. Superb!
And so to Terence Kohler, the 1984 vintage boy from Sydney. At the ripe age of 24 he is no longer a nonentity on the German ballet scene, having come to our country in 2002 on a fellowship to Birgit Keil´s Mannheim Academy of Dance to finish his studies - already choreographing for workshop performances. With Keil as ballet-directress he went for the 2004/5 season to Karlsruhe (a German State Theatre near Stuttgart) as a dancer and choreographer. He seems a born dance maker, who danced less and less to concentrate on creating ballets, and so he did already in 2006 a promising full-length “Anna Karenina” and in the following year the ballet “The Temple Dancer”, a somewhat slimmed down version of “La Bayadère” for the limited number of dancers available at Karlsruhe (for the bigger productions they get bolstered up by advanced students from the Mannheim Academy ). Already in 2007 he was awarded the “Future” price, the junior category of the German Dance Price. He has since worked for several companies and institutions, among them Karlsruhe´s Academy of advanced technology, and prefers now to follow a freelancing career. As a Birgit Keil protégé, he seems to me to resemble a bit what Ashton and Tudor meant for Rambert and de Valois during the early ´twenties. Hopefully he will turn out as successfully as they did eighty years ago – anyway he looks like a born classicist, an extremely rare bird nowadays when all his contemporaries have migrated to ´tanztheater´ pastures.
He has called his ballet “Once Upon An Ever After”. Not at all shy of thinking big, he has cast it for over thirty dancers, among them half a dozen principals, headed by Munich´s prima ballerina Lucia Lacarra. And he keeps them moving for 45 minutes, i.e. the whole duration of Tchaikovsky´s Symphonie pathétique, which fits the piece as if it were tailor made, such is his musicality. He has concocted it with a lady who prefers just to call herself rosalie – and she can afford it, as she belongs to the front rank of German theatre designers (who has designed a recent complete “Ring des Nibelungen” in Bayreuth), here listed as responsible for space, costumes and light installation. She has a very lively imagination and works preferably with plastic material which she paints or lights up in blazing colours. As the title suggests, it is a fairy tale phantasmagoria in six scenes, entitled ´Eternity´, ´The Broken Heart´, ´Phantoms of the Night´, ´The Awakening´, ´The Unavoidable Waltz´, ´Symphonic Classicism´, ´The Eternal Swan´ returning full circle in the finale to the begin of ´Eternity´. The ballet doesn´t tell a concrete story, but is more a sort of pasticcio yet with recognizable characters, concentrating on what might have happened after their death – with special emphasis on Giselle (Lisa-Maree Cullum). Odette (Lacarra) and Aurora (Séverine Fernandez). Albrecht (Alen Bottaini) is punished by Myrtha -- and the Wilis change into revue-girls. It is very amusing, and Kohler is very clever in condensing the individual stories (for instance the awakening of Aurora, who after her hundred years sleep has great difficulties to move her legs), with the military episode used by Kohler for a brilliant display of the men´s virtuosity, led by the irrepressible Armenian Tigran Mikayelyan. Nor are Siegfried (Marlon Dino) and Rotbart (Vincent Loermans) spared from suffering what is their due. It offers Kohler occasions in abandon to show how he knows the tools of his classical craft, and one gets involved in the unstoppable snowballing drive until all ends with the Dying Swan of Lacarra. Which left me completely exhausted, but not without the wish that he had added a supplement of showing us Nikiya and Solor bringing up their happy family in Nirwana, while Gamzatti and the High Brahmin are sizzling in the Inferno.
Photos, from top:
Shéhérazade: Lucia Lacarra and Lukas Slavicky
Les Biches: Lisa-Maree Cullum
Once Upon An Ever After: Ensemble
All photos by Wilfried Hösl
