danceview
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Reviews

The Paris Opera Ballet (almost) without Étoiles
Spring 98

by Carol Pardo

When perusing the roster of dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet, one starts at the top of the hierarchy with the étoiles and, energy and interest permitting, works down through the four remaining levels, with the company's school unconsciously acknowledged in the background. The three programs presented by the Paris Opera Ballet in April 1998 turn this point of view on its head, ceding pride of place to the corps de ballet and the "petits rats," as the pupils of the POB School are colloquially known. Anyone actually looking for étoiles (active or retired) found more of them in the audience than on stage.

Only two current étoiles-and the newest and youngest at that-were cast to appear on stage. Agnès Letestu and José Martinez danced Les Variations d'Ulysse, a full-length work choreographed by Jean-Claude Gallotta. The two remaining programs were both mixed bills. One featured the youngest members of the corps de ballet in excerpts from nineteenth century ballets and a bit of Balanchine. The other presented senior students from the school of the Paris Opera Ballet in a program of twentieth century choreography.

Les Variations d'Ulysse has a rather convoluted history. Gallotta choreographed an earlier version, Ulysse, for a cast of eight in 1981 as an exploration of the tools of dance making. Because the choreographer reread Ulysses (both Homer and Joyce) around the same time, allusions to both works crept into the ballet. The piece was revived and reworked in 1981 and again in 1993. When the POB commissioned the choreographer to create a piece in 1995, he revisited Ulysse again. The costumes from 1993 were revised and adapted. A new score incorporating the pre-existing tempi, rhythms and drama was commissioned. The cast was expanded to forty dancers with a trio of lovers danced by Carole Arbo, Marie-Claude Pietragalla and Patrick Dupond representing the heroes and heroines of Joyce and Homer. The ballet became Les Variations d'Ulysse. For the 1998 revival Gallotta tinkered with the work, expanded the cast to forty-five dancers and reconfigured the leads with Letestu taking over from Pietragalla, Martinez from Dupond, and the role once allotted to Carole Arbo shared by Stéphanie Romberg and Miteki Kudo.

How much of this melange of choreographic vision and revisions, literary inspiration and homage to the tools of choreography actually appears in performance? The set includes various lighting changes and a sphere that rolls around independent of the action on stage. The costumes allude to neither ancient Greece nor Joyce's Ireland, but with their insistence on all white, the use of torn fabric as fringe, and chiffon overlays, to some version of present-day chic. The costumes tend to make the dancers look particularly heavy and segmented. Martinez is especially ill-served by a pair of hot pants, one leg of which is overlaid with Bermuda-short-length chiffon.

Choreographically, the work functions most clearly when harking back to its roots as an exploration of the basic ingredients of choreography. Clarity, however, does not necessarily beget kinetic interest. Much of the choreography for the corps is unison work. The device is used far beyond its ability to be the sole means of holding the attention of an audience for an hour and twenty-five minutes. There is also a resolute lack of changes in the weight or angles of the dancers' bodies, which, if present, would add texture and visual interest to the proceedings.

One is hard pressed to find much of Joyce or Homer here. I've been told that the piece was more dramatic as originally conceived for a trio. Now casting, not drama, determines which of the three unattached women will end up with the lone unattached man. The audience knows who will win the only unattached male without resorting to drama or movement: Kudo (daughter of former POB étoile Noëlla Pontois) is too short a partner for Martinez, Romberg too tall. Letestu is the best match physically and is also his most frequent partner. Add saturated colored lighting, and chic white costumes to the diluted drama, and Les Variations d'Ulysse seemed more like a light summer flirtation at the beach than a meditation on two literary giants. Letestu charmed the audience. Both she and Martinez seemed much more at ease here than they did when I saw them try to master the technical and musical demands of Theme and Variations two seasons ago.

Although performances showcasing younger members of the company have been presented as part of the POB season since 1987, rarely are the dancers chosen solely from the ranks of the quadrilles or junior corps members. Their presence on this program indicates that these young dancers, ages seventeen and twenty-one, have already cleared two hurdles in their professional careers: first they have been asked to join the parent company, second, they have been able to make themselves stand out from the ranks of forty-six corps dancers. They are considered to be "the best of the up and coming generation".

Whether consciously intended or not the young dancers' program provided a "round trip" though dance history. The pas de six from La Vivandière dates from the height of the influence of the Paris Opera Ballet. La Vivandière was followed by pas de deux from act 2 of Giselle, Petipa's transposition of French style to Russia, followed in turn by Capriccio (a.k.a. Rubies), Russian style exported to the USA via Balanchine. The second act consisted of Nureyev's version of the St. Petersburg tradition in excerpts from his productions of The Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake and Raymonda. Nureyev is currently the most widely represented choreographer in the repertory of the Paris Opera Ballet, so his view of Petipa is also that of the company as a whole.

La Vivandière was a showcase for the only soubrette of the evening, Juliane Mathis, and Mallory Gaudion, the most technically finished of the men and possessed of beautiful feet. Although the intricacies and scale of nineteenth century style is obviously not innate for these dancers, there was a minimum of late twentieth century extensions or distorted geometric shapes in evidence. One could not help but be drawn in by the momentum, musicality, and general buoyancy of the choreography.

Even in an excerpt with a minimal set (the Cross only) the atmosphere required for act 2 of Giselle was palpable. The action takes place against a not quite black cyclorama. Albrecht is dressed in shades of blue violet with its collective allusions to night, nobility, and mourning. The dancers were well coached. Laurence Laffont, as Giselle, appeared to weigh nothing. Nicolas Paul is a solid and attentive partner. It is very pretty dancing-almost purely dancing. They didn't dance as though they had lived the first act; they hadn't suffered.

These performances of the pas de deux Capriccio upended one of my basic assumptions about the ballet, the equality of stature of the two participants in the adagio. While Alessio Carbone is quite short, his partner Marie-Isabelle Peracchi is tall and leggy, swallowing space as she moves, qualities that are usually associated with the ballet's second ballerina role. The shapes of the adagio were different, moving up in space rather than out like a rubber band stretched to the limit then rebounding. This was the only twentieth century choreography on the program. With its wit, speed and jazziness, Capriccio served as a sorbet between courses.

That the fussiness of Nureyev's version of the grand pas de deux from act III of The Sleeping Beauty did not overpower the dancers is a credit to Bruno Bouché and Marie-Solène Boullet. Bouché is an elegant presence on stage, with beautifully arched feet, who looks at ease as a prince even unto the queue tied with a ribbon. All too often Aurora's solo can look like a string of quotes from other acts of the ballet, but Boullet gave the audience a sense of Aurora all grown up and on the threshold of something wonderful-the most complete synthesis of technique, situation and character of the evening.

Nureyev's Black Swan pas de deux is actually a pas de trois. This does let the audience watch Odile and von Rothbart connive to trap Siegfried, but it throws the drama off when Rothbart gets the flashiest solo of all (and the lion's share of the applause). This was in part because Jean-Sébastian Colau, the Rothbart, was a more technically secure dancer than Hervé Moreau, the Siegfried. Eleonora Abbagnato, the Odile, was last seen as the lead in the school performance of Lifar's Le chevalier et la demoiselle. She moves on a large scale and very clearly with a face that reads well from the stage; no one in the audience doubted that this Siegfried was doomed.

The evening ended with the pas de dix from Nureyev's Raymonda here with the number of corps couples doubled to form a pas de dix-huit so almost all the dancers were back onstage for the grand finale. (The exceptions were Juliane Mathis and Alessio Carbone.) In this case the fussiness of it all, choreography and costumes, did overcome the dancers. Even the presence of Marie Agnès Gillot and Stéphane Phavorin, soloists being groomed for bright futures, could not redeem the leaden tempi and ugly choreography. The only amusing moment occurred during the first performance when after a very short pause, Jean-Sébastien Colau took his place in the corps still in Rothbart's full makeup. It was as though a vampire had been invited to the ball. At subsequent performances, the pause was lengthened and the makeup toned down. All that was left was to head quickly for the exit at the end, wondering why an evening which had been so full of promise and talent had to be compromised by such an inept and unmusical finale.

The students' program, the last of the month, was designed to challenge and extend the dancers while also offering some variety to the audience It included three pieces by Jiri Kylian, Balanchine's La Somnambula and Graduation Ball by David Lichine.

The works by Kylian were chosen to expose the students to a "different way of moving," according to the program. They included a male pas de trois from Nomaden, a pas de deux from Return to a Strange Land, and Evening Songs given in its entirety. Nomaden is the result of the choreographer's exposure to the ritual dances of native Australians. He translates the theme of the fusion of the hunter and the hunted into European theatrical dance and mixes poses (crouching hunters) with movement qualities (the heavy gait of an animal lumbering by). The three dancers wear green, orange or brown footless tights and baseball caps with the visors turned to the back. As such they resembled hunters in an urban jungle rather than anywhere else.

Return to a Strange Land is described as a meditation on life and death, the strange land as both rebirth and a premonition of death. The pas de deux is a lyrical adagio in which the man and woman are rarely apart. The most memorable sequence is the final one. The man (Fabrice Calmels) lies on the stage with his legs straight up and helps his partner-(Emilie Cozette) wrap herself around his knees. At the final moment, his hands fall away and she is still there, unsupported. Part of me accepts this image as one of resolution;.part of me sees it as a gimmick with the rest of the adagio designed solely to lead up it. Fabrice Calmels is tall and long legged but with a certain weight to his movements and he is a confident partner. Cozette is one of the few female dancers I've seen who has a body that is flattered by a unitard.

Evening Songs seems be a pastoral depiction of a small self- sufficient community-an estival, rustic, earthbound cousin of Dances at a Gathering. Some of the partnering would indicate that all is not well at this gathering, however. At times three women partner each other by manipulating their skirts while the men partner the women by manipulating their heads. The latter was particularly unsettling, though whether intentionally or not is never certain.

Throughout the Kylian pieces, the dancers looked poised, alert, confident and secure. Whatever ambiguity one might feel about the pieces themselves, the choreographer, who selected the excerpts with students in mind, gauged the performers and the works perfectly.

La Somnambula with its atmosphere of rot, eroticism and danger, and its emphasis on characterization, would seem to be an odd choice for students. Yet this is the second time that the ballet has been presented on a student program. The first, in 1994, featured Laurence Laffont, seen earlier in the month in Giselle, as the Sleepwalker

Before the curtain goes up, a note in the program causes some unease:"this version [originally danced by the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas] does not include a Harlequin dance which Balanchine set for Edward Villella in 1960." There was a dance for a harlequin in the original production, performed by Marie-Jeanne. What other surprises are in store?

The curtain rises to reveal a wide tower at the rear of each side of the stage with a raised walkway between the two. The set, with its dark greenery and oversized leaves and vines successfully conveys the enclosed hothouse atmosphere of the ballet. Unlike any other production I've seen, all of the men in the corps are dressed alike, as are all of the women, the latter in skirts whose black, fuschia and scarlet tulle look very like the corps costumes for La Valse, while the puff sleeves make the costumes seem too demure and girlish for the ballet. By showing the corps as a block rather than as a group of slightly differentiated couples, one of the compositional devices used to heighten the Poet's solitude disappears.

The dancers in the divertissements didn't convey the atmosphere required by the ballet. The five performers in the Pastorale were very young, fresh-faced, forthright performers. The dancers in the Danse nubienne (barefaced) were taller than most everyone else on stage. Casting against the grain might have been more effective if doing so had been used to reinforce the decadence of the Baron's household. In the Danse nubienne, the woman, Eva Grinsztajn, grinned throughout. In this household? Nor was the casting of the principal roles successful. Fabrice Calmels, so impressive in Return to a Strange Land, looked adrift here. I assume he was cast as the Baron because his height makes him look older than everyone else, but one needs more than this to carry off the part. Caroline Robert, as the Coquette, danced it straight; nothing is straightforward in La Somnambula. Emilie Cozette, as the Sleepwalker, entered with her legs straight and each step on the beat. She had not heard or did not heed Allegra Kent's advice to "keep your knees bent".

The ending of the ballet differed from that in any other production I've seen. The Poet's body is draped over the Sleepwalker and she retreats to the nearest tower. However, she appears moments later on the walkway carrying what seems to be the Poet's body off to parts unknown. The body is actually a dummy, but the implacable walk does end the ballet with some of the drama that it had previously lacked.

With Graduation Ball the evening ended on a more secure footing. The ballet, given for the third time by students from the school, has proven to be a good showcase for future étoiles; as documented by the informative and richly illustrated program book. In 1979, the Sylph and the Scotsman were danced by Sylvie Guillem and Laurent Hillaire, the Girl with Pigtails by Elizabeth Maurin; in 1988 the lead cadet was José Martinez, and the Drummer Nicolas Le Riche. Maurin was in the audience for at least one performance. (Among the other étoiles sighted throughout the month were Cyril Atanassoff, Jean Guizérix, Elisabeth Platel, Monique Loudières, Manuel Legris and Yvette Chauviré. Only Chauviré was approached by anyone in the audience at intermissions.)

Although this may not have been true in other years, there were only three attempts at characterization: Sabrina Mallem and Marc-Benoît Créancier as the Headmistress and the General and Julie Martel as the Girl in Pigtails. Martel was particularly successful. She managed to make the mischievous girl appealing without being coy, cute or heavy-handed. She also kept the momentum of the ballet going; one couldn't help looking for her on stage. No one else in the technically excellent cast could match her ability to project her character. Unlike La Somnambula, Graduation Ball works even so.

At the last performance, there was an unannounced cast change. The Headmistress, a little zaftig, and very blond, was danced by Claude Bessy, the director of the school. She looked as though she was enjoying it all and keeping a very close eye on her charges. A fitting end to the month as most every dancer to have appeared was raised under her aegis.