"La Sylphide"/"Celts"
The Washington Ballet
Eisenhower Theater
John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
Washington, D.C.
February 12, 2009
by Alexandra Tomalonis
copyright 2009 by Alexandra Tomalonis
The Sylph has proved to be one of the most durable of Romantic ballet heroines, as well as the most elusive. Who would have predicted in 1836, the year August Bournonville choreographed his version of the ballet that had rocked Paris four years earlier, that "La Sylphide" would be flying in Washington in 2009, and that the Washington Ballet, a company that has specialized in contemporary choreography, would capture so much of the ballet's atmosphere? One thing that probably linked last Thursday's opening night with the first performance in Copenhagen so long ago was the audience's reaction to its first sight of the sylphs in the second act: it gasped. All of those beautiful women dancing together in the moonlight bewitched audiences then and still bewitches them today.
The production was staged by two of the Royal Danish Ballet's finest artists — Sorella Englund and Thomas Lund — and it's hard to imagine anyone alive today who could have done a better job. This is the production they both grew up in (Englund was a noted Sylph of the 1970s and Lund, the RDB's leading Bournonville stylist, is a fine James today). "La Sylphide" is made of air and smoke and poetic, metaphysical ideas about the human condition, with Scottish villagers celebrating a wedding and stamping out a joyous reel for ballast. It's also full of pantomime — none of which is something most American dancers are especially used to doing these days, but TWB treated the ballet with respect, had obviously taken their coaches seriously, and if the dancers aren't quite ready for Copenhagen, they have every reason to be proud.
Elizabeth Gaither danced the Sylph, a bit carefully at this early attempt, but, with the exception of some wild and wayward arms, with a real sense of style. The choreography for the Sylph (a woodland creature who seduces a young man away from his wedding and his world) is as heartless as she is: very long variations, which the Danes call "puffy," meaning you have no time to catch your breath, and which must be danced without showing any effort whatsoever. The Sylph also has several mime speeches, which Gaither delivered clearly and conversationally.
James — the prototype of a long list of ballet's Romantic heroes, the man who throws everything away for a dream, then kills the dream by touching it — was danced by a guest star from American Ballet Theatre, David Hallberg, one of the most exciting young dancers in the world today. Hallberg could take this to Copenhagen. His dancing, especially the three solos in the second act, in which James loses his inhibitions, his connection to the earth, and gradually becomes as airborne as the sylphs, were brilliantly and beautifully done. Hallberg isn't a natural Romantic, and his acting needs more subtlety, but he entered the ballet's world willingly and well.
Sorella Englund was Madge, the witch who makes everything go wrong and, in Englund's interpretation, enjoys doing so thoroughly. Englund's Madge is one of the great performances in the Danish repertory — or any other repertory today, for that matter. From the way she appears at the fireplace to warm her hands — you never see her enter; she's just there — to the way she downs the liquor offered her in exchange for telling the girls' fortunes, to the bitter delight she takes in her revenge against James, yet another in a long list of men, one feels, who have scorned her — everything has been thought through and developed over 30 years, yet seems totally spontaneous. If that weren't enough, she somehow managed to give a very powerful performance that was also totally in scale with the production and the more tentative miming of the company, and that's genius.
Both Effie (James' fiancee) and Gurn (Joel Prouty, on loan from Boston Ballet, for which Englund had staged the ballet previously) were a bit pallid, as was the corps in the first act. One of the fascinating things about watching a ballet that's been transferred from one company and tradition to another is that you learn things about the work by the transformation. The Danes are never a corps, always a group of individuals: in this case, the friends and neighbors of Effie and James. They burst into the house as though they've been there hundreds of times, they walk around comfortably, gossiping and admiring Effie's presents. Very few other ballets require the same level of individuality, and it is, as yet, a bit beyond TWB's grasp. They looked like a ballet corps, the villagers we're used to seeing in "Giselle" or "Coppelia," say: spirited and engaged, but dancers rather than specific people. The fact that the women are dressed in pale, bulky dresses rather than kilts doesn't help, and totally destroys the dramatic point of Effie's three changes of kilts to show her moving from unmarried girl, to James's bride-to-be, Gurn's wife, and, by implication, the daughter-in-law of James's mother. There can be mothers-in-law in ballet! The designs (costumes and sets by Peter Cazelet) were also borrowed from Boston Ballet and, save for the dresses and the hammock that took Gaither to Sylph Heaven at the ballet's end, were quite fine.
I wish I'd been able to see how the ballet looked after the company had danced it for a few days and had settled into it, but on opening night, the production showed a great deal of care, for which everyone involved, from stagers to dancers to company management, deserve a great deal of credit.
"La Sylphide" was followed by Lila York's "Celts," a cheery romp loosely based on Irish step dancing (but why were the men, in one section, bare-chested and dressed in red skirts?) that gave the dancers a workout and drew WHOOPS from the audience. I could see little point to it. York knows how to move dancers, but the steps themselves were simple and repeated incessantly, with little variety. My colleague George Jackson once noted that character dancing (think the Mazurka in "Swan Lake," or the reel in "La Sylphide"), so popular with audiences in the 19th century, has been replaced by modern dance, or blended all purpose dance, today, adding, as character dance once did, a contrast of weight to classical dancing. I think he has a point. Classical dancing can only be danced by very well-trained dancers; "Celts" looks like something the audience could do -- a good deal of the appeal of the Mazurka and the Reel -- but it, and its many, many cousins, are a lot less stylish than their 19th century predecessors. However, the dancers knocked themselves out and deserved the whoops, on stamina points alone.
