Ballet Preljocaj
“Les 4 Saisons”
Robert and Margrit Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts
University of California Davis
Davis, CA
April 18. 2009
by Rita Felciano
Copyright © Rita Felciano, 2009
Angelin Preljocaj could make bags of sponges, coiled ropes, strings of pearls or unkempt bushes dance. As a matter of fact he did in his witty and ever so delightful “Les 4 Saisons.” He set this sturdily danced yet whimsical ninety-minute work to one of Western music’s most popular scores, Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons.” And the subject of this flight of fancy? Not so much the predictable cycle of the seasons but their less predictable weather patterns. Still, you couldn’t miss the cool spring days, sultry summer afternoons, brisk fall breezes and shiveringly cold winter. This gently humorous piece comes from a choreographer who is better known for edgy probes of our most hidden desires and unacknowledged fears. Most amazingly, Preljocaj succeeds in making us hear Vivaldi’s evergreen with new ears.
Apparently, the choreographer chose the Vivaldi exactly because of its popularity. He wanted to see whether there was something for him to unearth. As a collaborator he chose Fabrice Hyber, a French multi-media artist who designs ordinary object which have been alienated from their original purpose—a square ball, a twenty-seven ton bar of soap. Hyber’s only requirement was that Preljocaj would work with anything that he would throw at him.
Hyber designed a circular, overhanging rack that traveled in and out of the wings, not unlike what you might encounter at a dry cleaners. From it he suspended plastic planets and cardboard weather symbols—lightening bolts, clouds—but also ordinary items such as a bunch of grapes, pants, wigs, a swing and a Santa Claus suit. Periodically one of these objects would drop onto the stage for the dancers to interact with. Hyber’s approach was an imaginative way of suggesting the periodicity of the seasons and the unpredictability of the weather. It set the tone for this Gallic look at the Prete Rosso's experiments with string writing. Appropriately, Hyber called what he did “chaosgraphy.”
Musically, Preljocaj seems to have picked up on Hyber’s concept of removing an object from its habitual usage. He amplified the Venice Baroque Orchestra’s version of the score (conducted by Andrea Marcon) to the point that you heard every bow scratching on a string. By the addition of these noise elements, what is usually is a fairly gentile auditory experience became a visceral tempest of volume and mass. Even a solo violin sounded as if a giant played it. The percussive tutti felt like an approaching tsunami. Additionally, Preljocaj periodically stopped the sound, not only between the concertos but also between movements so that the whole score became one long chain of musical continuity. It stretched the concept of the passing of the seasons and gave his twelve dancers an opportunity to perform in silence when they didn’t giggle, tease or yell.
The music starts with the house lights on and when the curtain opens two creatures, encased in plastic, make their way across the stage. Whether they are huge teddy bears, astronauts or workers in protective suits is not clear. A group of semi-nude caped dancers joins them. In best musketeer fashion they curl, walk and swish. It’s all quite formal until a planted tree plops on them. So, with the birds twittering, they don brightly colored tops and shorts. Later on a woman in black languorously puts on a pair of high-heeled dropped-on-her pumps. She daintily traipses on some stairs when two men begin to test her balance on some rocking stairs, and the whole incident blossoms into a ménage à trois.
Specifically focused incidents—little squabbles, a furtive kiss—give way to more generalized ensemble dancing that not too often comes out of the music.At times Preljocaj’s vocabulary is almost pedestrian, with an easy swing to kicking, throwing, stabbing limbs. He often starts maybe with one couple whose moves get picked up by another until the whole ensemble is involved.
Some sections veer on the macabre. A woman makes her way crablike, her belly in the air, across the stage. A man repeatedly tries to flatten her out. Another female crawls oblivious to the rain of sponges and its owner’s massages. A hysterically flailing woman finally gets unceremoniously lugged off. Once in a while a note of misogyny creeps into this what safely can be called an intelligent family entertainment.
Overall “Seasons” is playful—a game of Simon Says has movements travel from one body to the next, a tug of war becomes a competition of one-upmanship. A rope-jumping contest, full of pas de chats, continues even without the rope. A mask dance is the evening’s most delightful trio. Two women try to egg each other out of the oblivious man’s attention by pushing, shoving and crawling between each other’s limbs. The combination of persistence and hilarity could have come from Marcel Marceau.
In the lovely winter section, with the dancers in white bikinis and pearl chokers, movements slow down with the performers on their back and three different kinds of unisons. Sometimes the only things in motion are vibrating fingers.
“Seasons” also has its moments of darkness. In a female duet, the dancers manipulate each other by forcefully twisting each other’s skin. Women attach themselves incubus-like onto their partners. And the little green men—dancers in green florescent body suits—have a sneaky, spy-eyes quality about them despite the innocent charm of their cavorting frog hops.
Preljocaj choreographed “Seasons” in 2005; it received one performance in Davis. In 2007 he created the extraordinarily beautiful and meditative “Eldorado (Sonntags Abschied)” to a score by Karl Heinz Stockhausen. In 2008 he rethought “Snow White,” not the Disney but the Grimm version, to Mahler. Shouldn’t we be able to see serious works such as these without having to travel beyond the Bay Area?
Ballet Preljocaj in “Les 4 Saisons”
Photo by JC Carbonne