"Cinderella"
Mariinsky Ballet
Brooklyn Academy of Music
New York, New York
January 17, 2015
By Michael Popkin
Copyright © 2015 by Michael Popkin
Alexei Ratmansky’s 2002 production of “Cinderella” for the Mariinsky Ballet made a belated New York premiere Saturday night and proved a black comedy with undertones of menace. (While new to New York, the Ratmansky ballet debuted in St. Petersburg in 2002 and was seen at the Kennedy Center as early as 2005). Danced by the incomparable Diana Vishneva, the fairy tale heroine of this production negotiated a louche post-Soviet Union urban world and ended up anxious. Her prince, portrayed with a combination of tongue in cheek aplomb and superb dance power by Konstantin Zverev, entered the ball looking like Liberace in a white tuxedo and proceeded to act like Harpo Marx. After a trip round the world where he was first accosted by hookers and then by a group of gay men on the make, he finally discovered his princess. But in a radical departure from most productions’ happy ending, the couple here at the conclusion looked depressed and issued forth like Adam and Eve cast out of Eden at the end of “Paradise Lost.”
Photo © by Jack Vartoogian (Left to Right) Margarita Folova, Yekaterina Kondaurova, and Yekaterina Ivannikova as the Stepmother and Stepsisters in “Cinderella”
Shrewdly taking advantage of a fundamental ambiguity in Prokofiev’s score for the ballet (composed during the Second World War in Russia), where troubled minor chords and lurching grotesque marches in fact predominate over the soaring romantic moments, the production immediately established its tragic overtones during the orchestral prelude that precedes the action. The first drop in Ulya Utkin and Yevgeny Monakov’s set designs depicted crisscrossing graphic lines, like a Paul Klee building façade, that left one window high up illuminated with a single cross. The Orthodox Christian world was thus briefly invoked during the overture as a background to the rich sonority that Gergiev pulled from the incomparable Mariinsky orchestra. The drop then lifted to reveal a shabby contemporary-futuristic world with a decaying industrial feel that was nearly out of the movie “Blade Runner,” with a red factory front receding into the distance between scaffolding at either side of the stage that allowed the performers to climb onto various levels and either observe the action or take part in it.
An open space in the middle for the family scenes had only a few chairs for props. But when a further drop rose behind the family quarters, you saw a schematic Piranesi-like palace space with receding perspectives. This set the scene for a second act ball that then thereafter went forward in a more intimate dance space after another drop again cut the palace shallow. The action returned chez Cinders for Act 3. In a further theatrical touch, a huge skeletal metal wheel was suspended over the action to look like a clock, but when turned on its side became a large chandelier with flickering candles that gave the ball a further creepy touch, if any were needed.
The lurching march music in Act One served Ratmansky for a series of grotesque dance parodies. Cinderella’s stepmother (brilliantly portrayed by Yekaterina Kondaurova) and two step sisters (Margarita Frolova as Khudishka or “Skinny,” and Yekaterina Ivannikova as Kubishka or “Fatty”) danced charmingly tongue-in-cheek ensembles that displayed at once their perfectly classical Mariinsky schooling and spacious Russian extensions, but at the same time distorted their dance lines so as to make the comedic point. Unlike in other versions of Cinderella from Ashton to Disney, the family didn’t seem so much hostile to Cinderella personally as just an environment so crass and unpleasant as to leave her completely alien in its midst. When Cinders’ father (performed by Soslan Kulaev) entered with a group of drunken friends he looked like a shabby lush in 1960’s cast-off trousers and a colorless cardigan sweater, stumbling around and begging his daughter for money for one more drink. Yet when the dancing master and his lady partner arrived (danced by Yuri Smekalov and Viktoria Brileva) they looked and acted like a pimp and one of his prostitutes. The portrait of a degraded milieu where everyone was hustling for the basest stakes was complete.
The character of the Fairy Tramp to whom Ratmansky gave the functions of the traditional Fairy God Mother also reinforced the specifically Russian character of the time and place. Here she looked like a peasant Babushka, that nearly mythological Russian figure described by turn of the 20th century ethnologists as an older crone past child bearing age (and not necessarily even a blood relative of the children) who tended and swaddled the village children while the parents worked the fields. Danced by Elena Bazhenova with great dramatic presence, this fairy figure dressed Cinders for the ball, gave her the glass slippers, and thereafter entered for delightful finger wagging solos where, circling the stage, she moved things forward and consistently intervened to bring about what should have been, but clearly wasn’t, a happy ending.
Like the tramp, the four seasons were also specifically Russian folk tale figures. Danced by four men in leotards of primary colors, each season got a bravura demi-character solo in act one but later presided over the action, frequently crouching on the scaffolding beside the stage where they looked on like familiar spirits. Among them, Ernest Latypov (in red with a pony tail as Summer) made an especially strong impression doing effortless turning jumps that ended in arabesque; while Andrey Solovyov (a taller man in the role of Winter) looked like a Moscow Old Believer with a long, white patriarchal beard and a grey ascetic robe that fell to his ankles.
The world of the Act Two ball was if anything even lower class than the opening scene in Cinderella’s family. To a crowd that looked like peasant men dressed up in tuxedos dancing with slutty women who thrust their hips to a lurching parody of a courtly dance, the Prince’s entry in the guise of a camp Liberace added a final twist.
Vishneva in the leading role showed cracks in her technique at this stage of her extensive career, mainly a diminished amplitude of motion, a line that didn’t extend as breathlessly as once it did when she stretched out in the air or opened her arms across her body. But what she lost in amplitude she made up for in dramatic commitment, leaving no emotion unspent. While it might have been better to cast a more innocent maiden type for the opening acts, in the third act Vishneva’s emotional maturity made for a deeply resonant performance. The aftermath of the ball found her anguished and depressed as she danced an anxious solo full of stooping compressions of her figure, repeatedly burying her face in her hands. When the Prince entered with the slipper she climbed the staging to crouch above him as if terrified. Their final duet was then tender but wounded, a recognition scene on the edge of Katyn Forest or Buchenwald.
Meanwhile Konstantin Zevrev’s dancing as the Prince was a revelation throughout. Tall and perfectly placed - well built but not overly muscular (with an athlete’s body but the lines of a classical dancer) – the perfection of his large scale movements joined with the relaxation and ease of his delivery to consistently astonish. His brisés had elevation and beautiful form, while his extension was if anything better than Vishneva’s at this point. To his movie idol looks were added fine dramatic talents as he segued from the whacky comedic touches of his first entrances to the tenderness mixed with anxiety necessary for the final scene. He was in addition throughout a superb partner, handling Vishneva with strength and ease, instinctively knowing where she would be and just where to find her optimum points of balance, and doing all this without showing the faintest touch of narcissism.
So what was there to complain about in this? Why did the evening often drag as it did and overall seem like hard work for the audience?
The production has many defects. First among them is probably Ratmansky’s inveterate habit, present substantially in his weaker ballets and undeniably at times in this one, of larding his work with occasional passages of formulaic choreography that seem merely to backfill steps against portions of the score. Cinderella’s solos in this work especially suffered from this and looked at times merely rote, and Ratmansky here also often put steps very literally against notes so as to give even romantic moments the feel of a lurching visual paraphrase of the music. Only against the shimmering and sweeping chords of the duets did he choreograph across musical periods but even here the lifts and romantic moves often seemed clichéd. It felt as though Ratmansky’s heart was more in the louche world of the stepmother and sisters; and indeed, Kondaurova, Ivannikova and Frolova got much the best of the dancing.
Maestro Gergiev also deserves criticism, ironically, for punching things out too much in the orchestra. This was a ballet, not an orchestral performance, and kettle drums going off like cannon shots to start the primary duet at the ball did nothing to establish a romantic mood. There are grace notes and subordinate elements in any score; you can’t elevate them to the same musical value as the melodies and themes on top without distorting the musical experience.
Yet the production's ultimate defect was, as it so often is, the reverse side of the very quality that made the work unique. Cinderella as a text is at heart optimistic. Like Abraham recognizing the angel in the Bible, Cinderella treats a stranger (who happens to be a Fairy God Mother) with dignity and kindness and the God Mother, aided by Pagan Nature in the guise of the Four Seasons, rewards Cinderella by making her dreams come true. The Prince is good and an agent of Divine Justice in the story; he sets things right. By turning the fairy tale into an emblem of a degraded post Soviet world, the production pushes its material, if not beyond, at least to the edge of its appropriate theatrical use. This Cinderella was frequently depressing. That a dramatic experience should be depressing is of course not in principle a criticism - art, reflecting life, can legitimately do that. But that Cinderella should be so is perhaps a critique?
Photos © Jack Vartoogian: Middle – Diana Vishneva and Konstantin Zverev as Cinderella and the Prince; Bottom – Diana Vishneva and Yekaterina Kondaurova (rear left), Yekaterina Ivannikova (left) and Margarita Frolova (right) in “Cinderella.”