"Scheherezade"
Baltimore Ballet
Kraushaar Auditorium, Goucher College
Towson, Maryland
May 17, 2009
by George Jackson
copyright 2009 by GJ
Is there any ballet more difficult to bring back to life than the Diaghilev company's legendary "Scheherezade" of 1910? Part of the problem may be that Mikhail Fokine, its choreographer, had experience, instinct, insight and imagination that few today share. The harem life he evoked on stage was more than merely colorful and strange. It might actually have been alien - in the extraterrestrial, science fiction, frightening sense. Montesquieu, in his "Persian Letters", refers to the seraglio as "another world". Fokine had traveled to the Persian parts of Czarist Russia. He had certainly read the "Arabian Nights". He knew the harem's rules were cruel by civilized Western standards and its inhabitants obsessed with immediate sensual gratification - whether pleasure of the flesh or the possession of treasure - even at the risk of death. Immerse yourself in that world if you can and likely you will tremble.
The music Fokine used was suggested, like the ballet's topic, by Leon Bakst who designed the sets and costumes. The score, though, was not an obvious choice despite its title. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's orchestral tone poem "Scheherezade" is a dense medium for dance and pantomime. It had not been composed as a narrative and when made to serve as such it both dawdles and spurts - as if storyteller and listener are immersed in an opium dream. This gives rise to practical problems in staging the ballet: when should movement glide over the music, when penetrate into it or how long ought it to linger within the volume of sound? In those parts of the score which have pronounced dance rhythms, did Fokine take them at face value, play with them or do a bit of both? Is there even hearsay about such matters as there is about the dance/motion relationships in his "Les Sylphides"? In any event, deploying this pre-existing concert music (and not taking it whole but discarding a portion) was a daring thing for Fokine to do. He made it work, and with Bakst's potent designs plus a strong cast "Scheherezade" had singular success.
The choreographer fashioned the role of Zobeide for Ida Rubinstein, who looked tall, had a long clear line and was powerfully yet economically expressive. Vaclav Nijinsky, as the Golden Slave, was short, low-kneed and not macho but had a cat's pounce and a horse's flaring nostrils. The contrast between the two, Fokine considered essential*. He felt that Diaghilev's Ballets Russes maintained his ballet well, even when Tamara Karsavina replaced Rubinstein. He did not approve of Lubov Tchernicheva's uneconomic expressivity as Zobeide with the DeBasil company, the first of the big post-Diaghilev Ballet Russe troupes.
The DeBasil production of "Scheherezade" with Sirene Adjemova as Zobeide and Oleg Tupine as the Golden Slave was on the initial bill of ballets I saw. Adjemova in 1945 was much touted as the first new dancer from Europe to appear in America following World War 2, but it seems she soon left the stage for the screen and it was Tupine who would contribute significantly (as dancer, repetiteur and teacher) to the world of ballet. "Scheherezade" did not impress me, a teenager at the time. Undoubtedly, I'd been desensitized to harem sights by Hollywood movies and didn't realize that this work's original impact had helped to spawn them. I much preferred other items in DeBasil's repertory - David Lichine's "Cain and Abel" for sexiness, Anton Dolin's "Pas de Quatre" for its display of classical schooling and Fokine's haunting "Paganini".
The other big post-Diaghilev company trying to follow Diaghilev's example, Denham's Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, revived "Scheherezade" during its many years of American residency when, one season, injury prevented its prima - Alexandra Danilova - from doing pointe roles. Danilova was a magnificently imperious Zobeide, but again the ballet itself left me unimpressed. The two stagings in which I finally saw choreographic value were Nicholas Beriozoff's for what was then London's Festival Ballet and Frederic Franklin's for Dance Theatre of Harlem. The Harlem company's innocent sensuality was refreshing. Beriozoff made the movement work as choreography: there were ever-changing patterns - circles, arched lines, files - and no dead spots. The recent Kirov/Maryinsky production, supervised by Fokine's grandchild Isabelle, stalls in places and is dull despite the company's skilled mimes and that Uliana Lopatkina's Zobeide draws all eyes as if they were compass needles pointing to the magnetic North Pole.
The dancer I'll always imagine in the Nijinsky role is Rudolf Nureyev. For his American debut at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with Ruth Page's Chicago Opera Ballet, Nureyev appeared in a classical pas de deux (the "Don Quixote" with Sonia Arova) and not in "Scheherezade", yet his leap onto the stage was that of the Golden one uncaged.
For the Baltimore Ballet to tackle "Scheherezade" was bold. It succeeded as action, with Cem Catbas' staging keeping the energy going - sometimes, though, too neatly for scenes of orgy and slaughter. Had an even bigger cast than 30 been involved on stage, the ballet's patterns might have emerged more organically. As the Zobeide, Evgenia Singur looked the part of harem favorite, moved with pliant elegance and conveyed the decision to kill herself wisely and nobly. Catbas' Golden Slave seemed so driven to consummate his few moments of pleasure that he might have died of exertion and not by the sword.
Baltimore Ballet shared this program with its school's year-end recital. That meant that lots of kids were in the audience. How did their parents answer questions concerning exactly who and what "Scheherezade" is about?
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*Fokine - Memoirs of a Ballet Master. Little, Brown & Co., Boston, 1961