Worlds Apart
From Russia with love, to suicide's gritty interiors
For a brief moment last week - make that three hours and 40 minutes, including triple intermissions - Music Center audiences might have felt like Princess Aurora and her kingdom's subjects: taking a hundred-year snooze from our calamitous world and waking to find all's good.
Well, anyway, some might find that kind of solace in the illustrious Kirov Ballet's Sleeping Beauty, which arrived at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for five performances.
It was, after all, a peek into a Fabergé egg, of sorts - a leap back in time wherein a huge bureaucratized spectacle rolled out onto the stage, courtesy of the majestic Mariinsky Theatre, Russia's elegant cultural enterprise, the one that brought us creative geniuses like George Balanchine and incomparable artists like Rudolf Nureyev, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Natalia Makarova.
And by now, most major companies in the West have produced their own versions of this quintessential classical ballet. But when the work's original sponsor checks in, with all its power and authority, it's hard not to feel awe at the sight. It was the St. Petersburgers, in fact, with choreographer Petipa and composer Tchaikovsky, who fashioned this tribute to 18th-century French style, which they took to glittery new levels.
No question. To experience it is to be caught in the time warp of Perrault's fairy tale.
But were the Kirovians convincing with this 1952 Sergeyev edition of The Sleeping Beauty? Well, yes. All you needed to observe was their courtly flourish in miming the story line. Unfurled fingers that fearlessly articulated details. Big, juicy, swooping gestures that left nothing to question, carriage that was preternaturally regal and commanding. No pretend stuff here - just the real thing, handed down from generation to generation.
Even a long interlude featuring the superb violinist Yuri Zagorodnyuk - a member of the company orchestra led by Boris Gruzin, who captured the score's spun-sugar tenderness - bespoke the Kirov's capacity. With its deep corps, enough to fill out the endless divertissements, there were no sparse spots. Why, the Lilac Fairy's contingencies had contingencies.
What's more, no expense was spared. Simon Virsaladze's decor gave us palatial glory-plus and costumes to match.
In the star department, though, not everything turned out to be head-snappingly awesome. Yes, Diana Vishneva's Aurora was the perfect petite thing of princessly dreams. She danced with a sublimely organic sense of the movement's impetus - no arm or leg extension was just an ornament. And her phrasing, too, evolved from a rare sense of purpose, not just steps beautifully done.
Too bad, though, that she has not mastered the Rose Adagio's open balances on pointe - those fiendish feats of unsupported stillness that Cynthia Gregory, for instance, used to relish by flashing her triumphant smile with each pass. The even greater trick, of course, is to hold those balances an extra duration, until the fans go wild.
As for the Prince, Igor Zelensky looked right - a beautifully noble dancer with virtuosity to spare - but lacked the directive power that comes from strong head/neck carriage (without which you have a willy-nilly boy, not a prince). Nor did Uliana Lopatkina generate much of an impact as the Lilac Fairy benefactor.
Her long, long arms and big hands, her jutting jaw and her unvarying, molasses-like dancing were the opposite of Vishneva's find-the-heartbeat impulsiveness. To make matters worse, this production gave the good fairy more (uninspired) passages to dance than the two principals. As her evil counterpart, though, Igor Petrov made a plausibly rough marauder of Carabosse, whose curse put the kingdom to sleep.
So, on one night we had a bright, lavish, happy-ending extravaganza, and the next, at UCLA's Freud Playhouse, the famously soul-tormented terrain of 4.48 Psychose, a UCLA Live replay of 28-year-old Sarah Kane's acclaimed 4.48 Psychosis, documenting her own suicide - which did, in fact, take place at 4:48 a.m. But this time, instead of bringing the same stellar troupe and staging from London's Royal Court Theater, the presenters saw fit to import a Parisian production of it, made for Isabelle Huppert - she of such sadomasochist roles as the piano teacher in Michael Haneke's film of the same name and based on the shocking novel of sexual violence amid the strains of Beethoven and Schubert by Elfriede Jelinek, who took last year's Nobel Prize in Literature.
Surely, this was Huppert's next logical step.
But it didn't have to be ours. Just look at the facts: a work written in English, translated into French by director-producer Claude Régy, and then exported to American audiences. Oh, yes, there were a few surtitles - maybe one short sentence for every 10 spoken. (How frustrating. How passive-aggressive. Revenge for Freedom Fries? Or just a test of what saps Americans can be?)
You see, the point of depriving us of titles was to not have our attention directed away from Huppert - who stood stock-still, her feet planted apart, her arms rigid and fists clenched the whole hour and 45 minutes, while she stared past the audience and intoned flatly, litany-style, on the elements of her sojourn to suicide. The struggle to follow proved too much for me, as it did for the many defectors from the Freud.
Have our impresarios lost their minds (too)? This was, bottom line, an exercise in sensory deprivation - unless you're the kind of person who has never met an avant-garde event not to love. If so, maybe Shakespeare translated to Italian would be appealing. And do you have any thoughts on the emperor's new clothes?
Well, at least in New York, subscribers to the Brooklyn Academy of Music will have been warned. "Pack your pocket Larousse" advised The New York Times in advance of the "show's" opening there on October 19.
Certainly, though, UCLA does not have a lock on the experimental arts. When REDCAT, which occupies the lower depths of Disney Hall, opened its season recently, several collaborators from the Wooster Group and dance-theater luminary Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, et al., played around with an aesthetic idea: artists altering others' work and making it their own.
The inspiration? Robert Rauschenberg's retooling of a Willem de Kooning drawing, archived as Rauschenberg's "Erased De Kooning Drawing." Fair enough. The idea has vast appeal to artists on the investigative fringe.
But, somehow, the REDCAT event billed as Erase-E(X) (there, is that properly experimental-sounding enough?) had to be appreciated strictly on what it was - a mysteriously manic round of movement, dog-choking sounds, etc. - not how it derived from de Keersmaeker's work, whatever that may have been.
Now back to the world, where catastrophes continue apace.Published: 10/13/2005
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