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Reviews

All Our Tomorrows
The Stuttgart and Hamburg Ballets in New York

by Nicole Collins
copyright © by Nicole Collins
Winter 1999

Hamburg and Stuttgart are less than 350 miles apart, but the dances their ballet companies each chose to bring to the Lincoln Center Festival in July were worlds apart in terms of sensibility, taste, intention, effect. Stuttgart brought two John Cranko ballets from the ’60s—Onegin (1965) and Romeo and Juliet (1962). Both are cornerstones of the troupe’s repertoire, the ballets that made both the company’s and late director Cranko’s reputation. Familiar to longtime dancegoers, neither work has been seen much in New York recently (the company last visited in 1979).

What distinguishes these ballets is not choreographic inventiveness or complexity, but Cranko’s prodigious ability to tell a story in dance. Looking at them today, his ballets remind one that only thirty years ago balletic storytelling was still alive and well. The current dancers perform the works as though they still care about and believe in them, finding them neither anachronistic nor Pollyannaish.

In contrast, the two dances that the Hamburg Ballet presented, both by John Neumeier, its director since 1973, suggested that ballet is neither very alive nor very well as the twentieth century ekes to a close. All Our Yesterdays (1989) and the new Bernstein Dances were, at best, third-rate. Neumeier’s craft is limited, his vision pretentious, his mind either unfocused or else woefully misguided by the current vogue for eclecticism.

More disturbing is the inauthenticity I sensed in these works. Neumeier’s ballets vacillate constantly between narrative suggestion and the snuffing out of that suggestion. At moments arms reach for the ceiling, fingers outspread, as though the dancers are anguished and searching for solace. But then it’s all over, and Neumeier has them freeze their faces in masks that seem to see nothing, to feel nothing. Perhaps he wants to express that man has no free will, but, instead, free will seems forcibly to be taken from the people in his universe: His dancers often resemble cult members who’ve exchanged their souls for drugs and ideology. Dehumanization might make good subject matter for literature and some other art forms, but dancers cast as puppets in the theater of life dance like puppets, not like people. And this is how the Hamburg Ballet danced.

The Cranko Legacy in Stuttgart

The Stuttgart troupe opened the festival. The company’s full repertoire includes ballets by Neumeier, who formerly danced there, but Reid Anderson, director since 1996, seems to have wanted to show New York how the troupe was faring with its heritage. Cranko’s ballets probably seemed conservative when they premiered. And few critics in the U.S. or Britain would credit them with the genius of Balanchine or Ashton, both of whom were still choreographing when these ballets were made. Yet in the simplicity of his steps and his organic manner of telling a story through dance, Cranko seems to have shared the ideals of this century’s first great ballet choreographer, Michel Fokine.

His ballets are kindest to dancers with acting facility, but they are equally at their mercy, for without this type of interpreter the works can be rather flat. This is true more, I think, of Onegin than Romeo and Juliet. Of the two, the former is the less even work, and yet it is the more impressive achievement, for there Cranko was starting from scratch. Based on Pushkin’s 1831 verse novel, Eugene Onegin—often called the first poetic masterpiece in the Russian language—the scenario is wonderful for ballet. Tchaikovsky was the obvious choice for the score, but instead of turning to the composer’s own operatic setting of the story, Kurt-Heinz Stolz had the difficult task of trying to arrange disparate compositions into a program. He did a good job under the circumstances, but the result is not seamless. The score sometimes sounds lost, and some of the dramatic choices seem questionable, especially given the options afforded by the source; the job of holding the ballet together at these moments falls to the principals.

Cranko’s Romeo and Juliet is strikingly musical, and it is musical in a surprising way, making us hear Prokofiev’s score as an effective, clear medium for telling the story. In some versions the score produces a confusing scenario; and sometimes this music seems both too Russian and too contemporary to suit a story set in Renaissance Verona. Yet here music and dancing work together in such a way that the title couple’s “death-marked love,” the brawls that end in gruesome slayings, the rash decisions, the no-win choices necessitated by divided loyalties—all take on a kind of inevitability, something that is absolutely necessary to the success of a dance rendering of Shakespeare’s drama. A propulsive dramatic motion throws the story forward to its tragic ending.

Cranko’s Balcony Scene exemplifies his gift for detail that seems true to life, though his preference for expressing l’amour fou with swooping lifts and running partnered grand jetés is rather unimaginative. What’s marvelous about his Balcony Scene is the way he begins it: Not with Juliet dashing down the stairs, à la Aurora rushing to the ballroom for her sweet-sixteen birthday party, but looking wistfully over the steep, stairless drop of her balcony. Her bedroom is not fitted out with a private staircase; young girls from wealthy families would never have been afforded so much liberty, as Shakespeare makes perfectly clear. Confined thus, she seats herself at the ledge’s edge, gaze fixed on her suitor. As her pointe-shoe-clad feet dangle below the flimsy long skirt of her nightgown, she seems small, young, and at the mercy of forces more powerful than she. Romeo responds by climbing up and carrying her down, slowly and by degrees. The sense of Juliet’s restricted movements and the literal difficulty the two have in coming together provide the complexity that is missing from the passion-equals-swooning-and-flying virtuosity of the partnering.

Still, I can appreciate how difficult this pas de deux is, and both casts I saw negotiated it well. I was not able to see the opening night dancers, but of the other two casts, Robert Tewsley’s Romeo was technically stronger than Ivan Cavallari’s, though both were excellent in the points that most mattered here: They were musical, and they were convincing in the role. The tall, fair, gracefully built Tewsley, whom Anderson brought with him from the National Ballet of Canada, was an elegant Romeo, shown to best advantage in the classical moments in this simultaneously classical and demi-caractère role. The opposite was true of the Mediterranean-looking Cavallari, who was an attentive partner and a robust sword-fighter but was not as smooth in his landings from jumps and turns as one might wish. (Except for Tewsley, the technical level of Stuttgart’s male principals was not equal to that seen at all levels of New York’s own companies, but I did admire the acting abilities of some.) Sue Jin Kang, Juliet to Tewsley’s Romeo, has an admirable build, with a long, lush line in extensions, but she has real trouble acting, which made for an uneven performance.

Julia Krämer, on the other hand, was an extremely affecting Juliet. A tall dancer, but with a much more willowy build than Kang’s, Krämer likewise had a beautiful, strong, open arabesque line. The difference was that she used her legs—and arms, face, and body—expressively. She was carefree and girlish at the outset, involved in love, and then matured far before her time as the last act’s events unfold. The scene in which she refuses her father’s command to marry Paris, difficult to pull off well, proved her considerable dramatic abilities. And as she paces the room after her parents leave, her determined, quick steps betraying the agitation that her cast-down face disguises, it’s clear that her thoughts will irrevocably change the course of a life that was meant to be planned entirely by others.

In the street scenes and also at the Capulets’ ball, the choreography for Romeo and his friends is mostly demi-caractère, as suits their music. Cranko likes to make choreographic leitmotivs, and the one for Romeo and his pals is a jaunty, impudent step related to the hornpipe but here given a sort of Venetian carnival feel, with wobbling head movements and a nose-thumbing manner. At the ball, the bent legs of the trio’s attitudes, their bent-over body positions, and general nonclassical revelry, contrast sharply with the arabesques and the stately, head-back walk of the Capulets. This is Cranko’s way of indicating the Montague clan’s irreverent gate-crashing attitude, his equivalent of the play’s boisterous, bawdy repartee, and it’s typical of what one notices most in his dancemaking: Not intricate patterns—his ensemble dances typically provide the least interest—or sequences that seem profound in and of themselves, but his deep understanding of character and his ability to convey that through step sequences.

Marcia Haydée, the company’s star dancer for thirty-five years, and, after Cranko’s untimely 1973 death, its director for twenty of them, gave a wonderful cameo appearance as Lady Capulet. (It was Haydée whom New York audiences first saw as Juliet in this production back in 1969.) She was a model of how to be larger-than-life and restrained at the same time. Other dancers at the ball held their necks stiffer, their chins higher, but she remained more grand. She also gave a bracing performance mourning Tybalt’s death. She was an Everywoman faced with the loss of a child (or, in this case, a nephew). It had the immediacy of a clip from the nightly news stylized as dance, yet one felt it reverberate not just as a moment from this story but as a moment from all time.

Jürgen Rose, the set and costume designer, also contributed significantly to the dramatic effectiveness of this staging. His costumes, colored in the magnificent oranges, reds, and magentas of Italian Renaissance painting, captured the luxuriousness of the period without being fussy or too heavy for easy movement. The colors were always carefully chosen to complement, but also stand out from, the tones of the streamlined yet elaborate set. Constant in all twelve scenes was a bridge that cut across the entire length of the stage. This elevated walkway formed a second level that Cranko used to much effect: He created split-level genre scenes in the market tableaux, for example. In addition, the bridge emphasized the story’s interlacing strands of love and death: It was Juliet’s balcony, of course, but it later became the ground level from which her body was lowered into the family crypt.

Here, as elsewhere, Rose’s choices seem informed by a close reading of the play: In the opening scene of Act III, for example, the stage curtains open on the night that Juliet has waited for so impatiently. “Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night,” she invokes in the play, adding, “Come, night; come, Romeo; come, thou day in night. ” Rose obliges her with a set that hides the lovers among magnificent sky-blue bedclothes, part of a sky-blue zone cutting across the backdrop and the ceiling overhead, directly center stage. At first glance, the room looks realistic enough, a period reconstruction, but on closer inspection it seems surreal. It is a metaphor: There, on the marriage bed that will later become a deathbed, time stops in an eternal blue predawn. In reality, of course, Romeo must discover the sun rising behind the colonnades of Juliet’s room and leave her: “More light and light—more dark and dark our woes! ” he says. The ballet’s moonlit nights, dawn, and realistic sunrise well evoke a play in which day’s turn into night and night’s turn into day are essential moments. Rose adds his own touches too: The shawl Juliet wears over her white gown in the final scenes is colored the same crepuscular blue as her bedclothes. It is a visual sign of the love, at once idealized and entirely carnal, that motivates all of her actions, sustaining her as she drinks Friar Laurence’s death-mimicking potion, guiding her hand as she stabs herself to join her lover in death.

Onegin

Rose also designed the sets and costumes for Onegin, again to wonderful effect. He is as faithful to Pushkin’s Russian countryside and nineteenth-century interiors in the one as he is to Renaissance Italy in the other.

Unfortunately, however, the opening night of Onegin was woefully miscast. As interpreted by Kang, Tatiana— whom Onegin first describes to his friend Lensky as “remote and wistful”— was remote enough but not at all wistful. Poring over a book while her feet automatically performed the initial steps, Kang resembled the doll Coppèlia; her wooden acting was more of a problem here than as Juliet. If anything, she displayed the hauteur that should have been Onegin’s but wasn’t; Roland Vogel seemed to be trying his best, but he should never have been given the title role. His world-weariness resembled more that of the tubercular, hopelorn Ralph Touchett from The Portrait of a Lady than that of the arrogant, bored Eugene Onegin.

To her credit, Kang negotiated the difficult pas de deux in the dream scene almost single-handedly; poor Vogel, too slightly built for her, struggled valiantly, but the effect was not one of romance. I rated her an A for fearlessness and determination and he one for effort and earnestness, but I wondered how the two of them could possibly have been chosen for the first cast.

The real first cast, to my mind, appeared on the second night. It was led by the appropriately pale and fragile-looking Yesult Lendvai as Tatiana (Lendvai was the first-cast Juliet, which probably explains her tardy appearance in Onegin) and tall, dark Tamas Detrich as Onegin. Vladimir Malakhov, a resident guest artist with the Stuttgart company, was an ardent, graceful Lensky. Elena Tentschikova, a member of the corps, danced the part of Olga admirably in both casts. (On the second night she was a last-minute replacement for fellow corps member Penelope Cantrell, who reportedly had a mild case of food poisoning.)

At the outset, Lendvai’s Tatiana has a languid, daydreaming air, as if living through books and floating through life. Her sister Olga, meanwhile, does a little solo that is full of bouncing, light ballotés, a small jump that is well described by its name, which means “tossed.” Tentschikova, a pretty strawberry blonde with sparkling eyes and an easy smile, is certainly well suited physically for this role, and her high chin and exaggerated, steeply tilted épaulement communicate an openness and joyousness no less apt. (In the novel Pushkin describes Olga with a wink typical of his writing: “All flaxen-ringleted and smiling/Celestial blue of eyes, beguiling/By grace of movement, form, and voice/Thus Olga . . . Novels (take your choice)/All paint the type to satisfaction. . . . ”)

As Lensky, Malakhov was an eager fiancé showering Olga with real kisses. A solo with a surfeit of tours jetés allowed him to show off his by-now famously powerful jumps and famously soft landings but without his seeming to show off: He remained in character.

The main pas de deux for Olga and Lensky purposely suggests a sweet, fairy-tale sort of love, as though we see it through Lensky’s idealizing eyes. The tuneful, songlike music—interpolated, I believe, from Tchaikovsky’s Seasons—has a bittersweet repeated theme to which Cranko sets a dance motif that emerges as an anthem of the couple’s love: Supported by Lensky, Olga bends over as she brings her leg up through passé before extending out to an à la seconde développé; the gesture suggests that she is gathering up her love and spreading it abroad, that she is in love with life, and that her love for Lensky is just one part of that generalized love and happiness. As she completes the extension, Lensky lets her fall a little off balance to the side, so that he can look into her eyes. They stand there thus, hip to hip, eyes interlocked, arms bridging over into a lovely, simple arc.

Tatiana falls in love with Onegin at first sight, but it’s an emotion that turns her even paler instead of glowing. Lendvai’s small figure follows her handsome, composed, city-bred neighbor like an obedient pet. They dance together, but appropriately, theirs is not so much a pas de deux as a solo for Onegin, in which he sometimes thinks to offer her his arms for a friendly, but distant lift. Detrich is appropriately self-absorbed as he draws a hand across his forehead in repeated lunges, clear expressions of ennui.

But it is Lendvai whose characterization held the greatest surprises: As Detrich extends his arms to her for a lift, for example, she holds hers back in an affectingly hesitant and uncertain way. Then, after he leaves, she exits on the other side of the stage in a slow, limp, moony backward walk into the wings. One hand reaches toward Onegin’s receding figure, palm out, as though pressed against an invisible wall. The suspended, taut movement conveys her divided state of mind, at once desiring to call out to him but paralyzed through wanting it so badly.

In the entr’acte that follows, Cranko condenses several pages of the narrative: Suggesting the passage of time, the dancers walk across the dark corridor formed between a downstage scrim and the changing set. Onegin allows a peremptory little nod as he passes Tatiana, while Lensky echoes the latter’s backward walk as he parts from Olga; she, unable to recognize the stricken face of love, blows him a playful kiss and does a little schoolgirl skip off. In between these scenes, Cranko intertwines several ensemble passages for what the program calls “country folk.” In every performance I saw, the corps was well rehearsed and dancing its heart out.

I have some quibbles with Cranko’s choreography in the dream scene after which Tatiana writes her famous letter, mostly because it resembles too much his Romeo and Juliet, both in overall construction and in the rushing lifts and running partnered jetés of the pas de deux. Nevertheless, Lendvai and Detrich offered a romantic and musical portrayal, articulating well what chiefly distinguishes their love duet from Romeo and Juliet’s: the anxious pauses that interrupt the cataracts of Tchaikovsky’s full-bodied scoring. The music is caught between a passionate heedlessness and the anxiety of being thus swept away, which seems right to express Tatiana’s novel-fed romantic fantasies.

The birthday party that opens Act II offers perhaps the most effective ensemble choreography I saw from Cranko. He skillfully depicts an entire community, of which the central characters are members but within which they carry their own individual universes. The dual focus he achieves there resembles the judicious use of close-ups within a panoramic film shot. Indeed, the choreographer seems to have consciously sought this effect, judging from a quote in 101 Stories of the Great Ballets, where he observed: “The plot of the Pushkin poem is balletic—explainable in three different dance styles. The first act is a youthful peasant dance, the second is a bourgeois party, the third is an elegant St. Petersburg ball. And like a thread going through a labyrinth you have your soloists, with their problems, their stories.” In fact, his idea for the ballet’s three scenes, with their different types of dancing, is not at all the self-evident choice he suggests (Pushkin is actually concerned almost exclusively with the clashing worlds of the bourgeois country provincial and the aristocratic city dweller; peasants are nearly absent), but Cranko is entirely accurate insofar as he describes the effect of his ballet.

An opening waltz and then the fast polonaise that follows indicate the enjoyment of those able to take this evening of pleasure at face value—the merrymakers initially include Olga and Lensky—and also the sense of Onegin’s and Tatiana’s isolation from them. Even during the tense scene in which Onegin returns Tatiana’s letter, Cranko keeps the other couples dancing giddily around the pair. This contributes to a lifelike sense that the evening is throttling full speed ahead, too fast to circumvent the unhappy events that ensue.

Onegin, in a perverse mood, drags a compliant Olga onto the dance floor. Malakhov carefully avoids overplaying his jealousy while at the same time imbuing appropriate outrage to his actions as he grabs Olga, slaps his friend, and throws down one glove, challenging Onegin to a duel. But then the choreography turns too reductive, and the action verges on melodrama: Tatiana rushes toward Lensky, grabbing his arm while executing sharp, strident sauté arabesques. Each scissoring jump is like a plea, and each is absolutely unnecessary. The duel scene that follows would have been better if Cranko had followed the source and left the women out of it.

Act III fast-forwards to a St. Petersburg ball given by the now-married Tatiana and her husband, Prince Gremin. The ball cleverly mirrors the one in the second act, while at the same time diverging from it in telling ways: The guests are dressed much more formally, and they look older here, too, what with the men in military uniforms, and the women graced with elbow-length gloves and more-severe-looking coiffures. The room itself is also much fancier, a real ballroom instead of a parlor cleared for dancing. Even the polonaise here is statelier and slower than the one in the previous act.

The pas de deux for husband and wife again finds Cranko at his most creative in terms of using classical technique to indicate the relations between characters. Most notable about this duet—and what distinguishes it, for example, from Olga and Lensky’s—is its frequent use of one-handed partnering. This gives the dancing a very open look, literally and figuratively. It suggests that Gremin and Tatiana trust each other enough to have free rein. In their mirrored terre à terre steps and in their courteous body language, they evoke a picture of mutual respect, independence, and tenderness.

This pas de deux contrasts sharply, too, with that of Tatiana and Eugene in her earlier dream. Movements from this pas de deux reappear in the final scene as Eugene, captivated by the mature, confident Tatiana, regrets his former indifference and tries to reawaken her youthful feelings. The ballet ends somewhat disappointingly as Tatiana, whom Eugene has accosted in her own room, sends him away with a finger pointed toward the door. I think that Pushkin’s suggestive, but open-ended final treatment of his title character would have made a stronger close: Tatiana exits, leaving her would-be suitor rooted to the spot, alone in a room where he shouldn’t be. Presently he hears, writes Pushkin with cruel satisfaction, “the ring of spurs, and unexpected,/Tatiana’s husband entered. Here,/At a sore pass in his career,/We leave our hero, reader, brother,/For long . . . for ever.”

Hamburg Ballet

Of the dances that the Hamburg Ballet brought, the second half of All Our Yesterdays, set to Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, was the only one I could sit through again. In it, I was glad at least to see that the dancers looked like dancers instead of the dolls and toy soldiers of the first half, set to Mahler’s Soldier Songs.

The Fifth Symphony was, for the most part, in the symphonic ballet tradition, with large groups rushing across the stage in unison washes of movement. In the first section the curves and circles of rondes de jamb en l’air and renversé turns shaped the women’s long blue chiffon dresses in pretty spirals. The ankle-length skirts later gave way to pink knee-length ones, and the step palette shifted color as well: Curves gave way to a more wide-open, angular, allongé line in the body, with the legs carving out straight lines in front and side extensions. Interludes of pas de deux became more frequent, though there was an unremittingly breakneck pace throughout.

For the fourth section, the well-known adagietto, Neumeier interpolated a pas de deux he’d originally made for Natalia Makarova and Erik Bruhn in 1975 (then called Epilogue). This piece looked interpolated: It didn’t really match the more-academic tone of the rest, and it was also far more intimate than the other pas de deux had been. In this dance Anna Polikarpova gave the only touch of phrasing I saw in the entire Hamburg engagement. The suppleness she allowed between music and step, the tension of holding a balance a little too long and then having to race to catch up to the music, gave this dancing its only breath of air. It was like a bit of wind blowing over a landscape that was elsewhere entirely climate-controlled; it indicated human consciousness and interpretive liberty in choreography that otherwise seemed to allow the dancers no freedom whatsoever. I don’t think the other dancers lacked the ability to phrase their sequences, but they were never given an opportunity. Here, for a moment, there was one, and she took advantage of it.

Far better than the rest, this dance yet had grave flaws: At several points, Neumeier interprets the sharp blows of kettledrums as gunshots, having the dancers collapse and literally crumple to the floor. This was jarring in an otherwise pure-dance piece, and it was a reductive way to treat Mahler’s obsession with death. If Mahler had wanted to be that literal, he would have scored for guns instead of drums, as he frequently scored for nonorchestral instruments. Neumeier’s motives for these unexpected slayings, which took place during pas de deux and so forth, seemed disingenuous, an excuse merely to suggest the violence of our day. I could find nothing redeeming about Bernstein Dances.

Ostensibly about the composer and conductor, the dance was a hackneyed tale of a misunderstood artist who makes good but whose public success belies a tormented personal life dogged by homoerotic urges. Lloyd Riggins played the Bernstein figure. His hair had been carefully disheveled, but here resemblance stopped. Bumbling and untutored before reaching success, dissipated and conflicted afterward, he never seemed remotely like the charismatic, over-the-top person pictured in the large-screen photographic projections of the opening set. The character also never once conducted, which seemed a strange thing to leave out of a dance about a man who was at least as famous for his conducting as his composing.

The score had been pieced together from a variety of Bernstein’s compositions, and Neumeier described the work as a revue. The dancing, like the music, was a collage job mixing a Robbins-style ballet-jazz fusion with Neumeier’s trademark flexed feet and anomie. Two excellent singers, mezzo-soprano Angela Horn and baritone Scott Cheffer, provided the only expressive, human moments.

The ballet had generated much hype for its costumes, which were designed by Giorgio Armani. This may explain why there were so many costume changes (the outfits impressed me only by their number), but even so, it seemed unnecessary for Riggins to take off his various shirts onstage no less than three times. Neumeier evidently likes to see his men dance bare-chested (this was a feature of all three ballets).

The sets, like the costumes, looked to have cost a mint. Color photographs of New York, enlarged to fit across the entire stage, scrolled up into view behind the dancers. Skyscrapers rose into a sunset sky, a grand piano rolled on and off as though remote-controlled. It was difficult not to feel that Neumeier was trying to flatter New Yorkers into liking this work, which cele-brated their city as much as it did Bernstein, a favorite native son. He succeeded: The audience clapped for the sets, and they returned after intermission.

I came back after intermission gloomily comparing the tawdriness and disingenuousness of what the audience had paid to see onstage with the free show on display outside the State Theater that evening: The dancers at Midsummer Night Swing provided a powerful counter argument to the assumptions underpinning Neumeier’s ideas about dance and contemporary society. Is contemporary life dehumanizing? Perhaps it is. But ordinary people dance to defy the encroachments of careers and habit, to shake off routine. They dance to assert their humanity, not to deny it. They dance to have a good time, and because they enjoy dancing well. Theatrical dance should do something more than this, of course, and, in skilled hands, it does. The Hamburg troupe danced well enough—they were well rehearsed and their feet made perfect Fifth Positions—but these ballets squandered classical dance’s potential for expressivity and profundity. The result was worse than a missed opportunity: It was an opportunity willfully missed.