19. Belle, Book, and Candles: A.B.T. and Petipa Biography reviewed by Louise Ebersdorf.
The strike continues downstairs – Albertine and Paco have been incommunicado for some time, and I have had to make many excuses to Mr. Xu, who refers to our President as “Sissy Pants” and interprets any Western hesitation before China’s Silk Road ambitions as tantamount to a declaration of war. (Don’t mention tariffs.) I refuse to be seen as “little fresh meat” for the Eastern maw! I must call upon all of my diplomatic skills to route the New Road over the Arctic to its waiting WAT-SAS home here in New York. Our Sandy is now recording Firbank’s Vainglory as a second cultural gift for Xu and his fellow countrymen. What better lubricant for international relations than art, and especially my revived American Ballet?
Via emails and multiple phone calls, we’ve approached the White House, whose Arts Council you may remember abruptly disbanded two years ago. Finally, Pippa and I got through to a lovely woman, Belle W., with the title of Head Esthetician at the President’s charming southern lair, Mar-A-Lago. She and I have hit it off: Belle is perfect for deep facials and inside info on the presidential clan, including its political plans. The First Daughter consults Belle regularly for treatments, so I queried my new amigo whether there is any sign that the Presidential Advisor might like to sponsor a revival of the Ebersdorf Ballet, as the Royals support resident companies in England. Belle says it’s doubtful. (Young Wall Street patronizes Equinox Dumbo today rather than any Opera House.) But she confirms that there may be an aborning dynastic ambition for the head office in 2024 – with the Advisor’s lithe husband as inevitable running mate. That would mean I could offer the lead of Albertine’s proposed D.C. Demon Cat to an authentic American Princess! What would Allie-baby think of that for competition? But I have to be cautious if I want a video of Cheryl’s pas de deux, both for Xu and to interest the Trumps.
I’ve come up with a doozy of a plan. Master Raro has confirmed that our government undoubtedly has the technical skill to hack into the vast Chinese surveillance system in Xinjiang. With a White House imprimatur, Louise Ebersdorf could, too. When I send Albertine and Paco to tour that distant province with our live on-stage Nekomata, I could follow their progress via my own video monitors right downstairs on Floor 35 of Ebersdorf Tower. In fact, if my crew (Master, Pippa, Cheryl, and Sandy) was mobilized around the clock, I could supplement the work of the U.S. intelligence community and become a Special Agent, alert for any suspicious Eastern behavior observed on my multiple monitors. Louise Ebersdorf -- Spy Mistress! (It has a ring.) After all, if Lincoln Kirstein could serve as a covert operative in South America, I can sit right here at home and report essential data to our beloved President, first father and/or first daughter, especially following the inevitable worldwide box office triumph of D.C. Demon Cat.
Thanks to the aural ministrations of Pippa and my magical tomcat Murr every night, I’m feeling like a trillion dollars. (Thirty years have melted from my person; you would hardly recognize your Louise.) I’ve asked Belle if I could fly her to New York for a joint meeting with Madame Sesostris. Let others urge their remains – together, we defy time! We’ll toast with Cointreau and “immurr” ourselves. To youth!
More on the art of dealing with power: during my daily Silver Hours (that’s Tolstoyan for post-lunch siestas), I’ve been using my afternoon naptime for studying a new bio by Nadine Meisner: Marius Petipa: The Emperor’s Ballet Master (OUP, 2019). The great Petipa, First Ballet Master to the Czar of all the Russias, was an artist on the grand scale, the kind of hard-working, realistic, inventive figure I venerate and try to encourage today, especially in my capacity as American Ballet Producer. What Meisner makes very clear in her volume is how much Petipa was able to accomplish through the support of Ivan Vservolosky, the Director of the Imperial Theaters from 1881 to 1899, my soul-colleague across the centuries. It was Vservolosky who insisted on serious musical collaborations (Tschaikovsky, Glazunov) at the height of Petipa’s career and who therefore made possible a continued reproduction of Petipa’s choreography around the planet. That’s what great ballet music can accomplish! Those of us who love classical values in ballet owe an enormous debt to far-seeing Vservolosky and his partner, the prolific M.P. These men established a style of dance theater that maximizes opera house legibility. Much that is weak in current international ballet is due to the absence of classical choreographers who can communicate with the children of paradise – the viewers at the top of the house. (N.Y.C.B. often closes its Fourth Ring of Koch Theater for ticket sales.) If the classical dance impulse is lost on the way there, it’s all over, folks. No matter how many novelties -- radical or postmodern -- you may mount, if they can’t be read at such distance, there’s no ballet: the line is broken. Petipa’s style of classical ballet was and is based on legibility across space and time.
When you close Meisner’s enormous book, you have a new sense of how much sheer labor was involved in producing multiple spectacles for an imperial court over the fifty-five years of Petipa’s service. Here is the choreographer’s family background in the theater, his early performing genius as a character dance specialist and mime, his marriages and his ambitions for his children. We learn how important the prior choreographic genius of Jules Perrot and Arthur Saint-Léon was in forming an imperial conception of grand ballet and how much Christian Johansson’s pedagogy contributed to the Petipa style, classroom teachings which are still used today in our international schools. We see how the influx of Italian virtuosity in pointe work among a younger generation of visiting ballerinas forced Petipa to find new opportunities for emerging skills. George Balanchine always claimed that Petipa was a principal foundation for his own achievement. He and Ninette de Valois based their companies (New York City Ballet and the Royal Ballet) upon Petipa’s core accomplishment. Meisner’s broad-ranging research clarifies influences upon the choreographer as well as his flexible, alert response as a showman, a model for us all.
The author has written what is basically an expanded chronology of Petipa’s life and work. Meisner does not attempt any type of choreographic analysis that would indicate what made the aborning Maryinsky dance forms unique. (There is so little description of the individual pas, the reader grasps at the author’s most meager references, for example a passage where the three soloist variations in the La Bayadère Kingdom of the Shades scene are differentiated.) You have to ask: why do writers who are basically not interested in dance-making as an art form insist on writing books about choreographers? At one point in the volume you find yourself reading about a minor backstage robbery instead of what took place on the evening’s stage. There must be a reason for this general failure beyond doubts about reader interest or the lack of contemporary reports on choreographic detail. Perhaps we have reached a point where authors take on new subjects as the most basic opportunity for self-education, without having formulated any pertinent questions they wish to answer via research. But if you enter a research project unable to articulate questions in advance (and this does require some degree of prior education in the field), you may end with no relevant conclusions despite all your laboriously gathered evidence.
An example. For years we have all awaited information from Russian researchers about the Petipa ballet Mlada as a possible progenitor of a symphonic style of ballet (the large architectonic work) like the ones achieved in the white acts of Petipa’s La Bayadère and in the Petipa-Ivanov Swan Lake. Mlada was actually planned before the 1877 Bayadère but finally premiered after it in 1879. Did Bayadère’s Himalayan Kingdom of the Shades have a sister in a primeval Russian Valley of Shades in Mlada, the cloud-like Indian ghosts of Bayadère becoming the pagan local spirits of Mlada? There is also another suggestive linkage between Tschaikovsky’s planned but unfinished opera Ondine and the school-of-Petipa scenes choreographed by Ivanov for Swan Lake, since music for the composer’s abandoned portrait of a rusalka ended up in the score for Lake. (After all, Odette and Siegfried do commit suicide by water.) Meisner explores neither lead. Perhaps she is not interested in Petipa’s relation to the subsequently developed work of Massine, Ashton, and Balanchine in the twentieth century. (She also has that strange blind spot for The Nutcracker that many British balletomanes confess. A national dislike of children?) The style and form of the Russian Imperial Ballet are hinted at in Meisner’s volume, sketched in, and discussed only in their most general identifying features.
Perhaps Meisner is related to many balletomanes I have known who were introduced to the art by Petipa classics and who have never moved beyond his stylistic and formal example. For them the form satisfies and leads nowhere beyond itself. I have known people who find acquaintance with later dance idioms – even, or especially, Ashton and Balanchine -- a big or even an impossible step out of their comfort zone. In that case, any textbook for a Ballet 101 becomes all the more important for accurate discussions of the Maryinsky style. Such a seductive choreographic achievement should not be allowed to degenerate in the report into a fetish for tyros. No wonder certain European ballet companies have turned to modern and postmodern dance for new repertory works, in order to placate local audiences bored with corrupt versions of the Petipa brand.
One pedagogical feature I have noticed missing in many new productions claiming a line back to Petersburg: knowledge of Enrico Cecchetti’s classroom principles, the underpinning of the Royal Academy skills once taught to British products of the Royal Ballet School. In the 1940s and 1950s, the Royal production of The Sleeping Beauty gloried in this performance foundation. The Petipa style is one of active contrapposto and petit allegro, safeguards of dance detail eventually lost to many Russian dancers once Cecchetti classes were replaced by Vaganova training and Soviet choreography turned Bolshoi chesty. Balanchine could call upon a Cecchetti style in his choreography when required – and his dancers absorbed a version of it in his attention to petite batterie. When the Cecchetti element vanishes from current revivals, much of Petipa goes as well. This is a weakness in the K. Sergeyev production of The Sleeping Beauty at today’s Maryinsky.
Meisner is light in her references to attempted reconstructions of the Petipa ballets. I have endured the recent Ratmansky efforts at American Ballet Theatre (The Sleeping Beauty, Harlequinade, The Seasons) only to conclude they are the product of a pedant-swot with a meagre and confused idea of the Master, however deep his archival research and however accurate the individual decoded details from surviving notations. In Ratmansky’s background and training, there appears to have been no inherited or preparatory context – in this case, a strong, relevant performance tradition -- supporting his cryptographic labors. Instead, Ratmansky has turned his reconstruction projects into forms of confessed self-education. In a sense, Ratmansky’s attempt to create a hybrid Petipa style on his A.B.T. dancers can read like a judgment on the company where he is artist-in-residence: it apparently needs retraining, from the ground up, replacing whatever home-grown performance tradition lies at hand. But the eventual result is not convincing to my eyes. Ratmansky’s efforts look like Moscovite copies of the Petersburg Master by a twenty-first century Alexander Gorsky, with more than a touch of hyperactive Léonide Massine for overdrive. (The Ratmansky version of Le Corsair for the Bolshoi was a partial exception, but that may have been due to the contribution of his collaborator, Yury Burlaka.) You may take the boy out of the Bolshoi, but you may not be able to take the Bolshoi out of the boy. I suppose Ratmansky’s “Petipa” will now freight the A.B.T. repertory the way that Nureyev’s icebox behemoths dominate the Paris Opera Ballet’s seasons. Ratmansky makes Petipa ballets with the same blurred focus to be found in his “original” choreographies, whose stylistic impulse often comes across more modern-dance than balletic. Perhaps that’s what he needs: a modern dance company of his own.
Meisner fails to analyze how Petipa “built” one of his ballets in detail – using as an example, say, the brilliantly tiered first act of The Daughter of the Pharaoh in the recent Bolshoi reconstruction by Pierre Lacotte. I must conclude that the most convincing latter-day attempts were those of the late Sergei Vikharev both in Russia and in Milan. If you wish to encounter something closer to a revived Petipa spirit, watch the rough video of the complete 2007 Vikharev version of Petipa’s The Awakening of Flora at the Maryinsky, freely available right now on YouTube. It is like visiting another planet. Vikharev used the surviving Maryinsky performance tradition as a lens to focus upon a Petipa idiom unique to this ballet. He didn’t dismiss his dancers’ inheritance: one reason why the revival can indeed convince in its singularities. Vikharev’s early demise was a major loss.
Last year the Royal Ballet entrusted a new production of Swan Lake to its artist-in-residence, Liam Scarlett. Did he restore Frederick Ashton’s great Act 4 white act from the 1960s? No, all that survives of Ashton in the Scarlett version is the Neopolitan Dance in Act 3. What is this British inability to recognize its main man as a chief connection to the Maryinsky mother lode? Ashton could evoke a past spirit and style, even when changing surface details. Are British balletomanes happy that the Ashton-Petipa aesthetic has emigrated to Sarasota, Florida? Does it require such loss to make room for endless Kenneth MacMillan revivals at Covent Garden? What price gelt?
In a spirit of research (and with lots of educated questions), off I went last week to see A.B.T.’s bland, feckless production of Swan Lake with the Russian-born Christine Shevchenko as Odette-Odile. Schevchenko combines a willowy plastique with highly personal musical choices. Her long, thin limbs are capable of movement qualities so traced in, they seem to efface themselves in the moment of delivery – an impalpability that can be hypnotic because the viewer becomes fascinated with locating its means of production. You watch her figure almost collapse in on itself in delivery of the dance gesture. (Some of Odette’s mime details are also scanted here.) In addition, Schevchenko arranges agreements with Tschaikovsky’s musical phrases that suggest a ghostly tick-tock mechanical-doll aspect in the dual role. As Odette, her clockwork head movements indicate an immediate subjugation to fate; as Odile, the mechanics become really scary, Siegfried as a helpless target. How can a dance image so almost-not-there be so threatening? An invisible malignity? Schevchenko dances much of the ballet on the very edge of what appears to be her technique. There is little sensed cushion in support of her production of dance detail. This adds a certain poignancy to her stage personae: the audience pulls for her, hoping for a supervening relief from evident tension. It is a powerful effect, but I’m not sure it is one required by this ballet. As a result, Schevchenko’s performance has an insistent element of the eccentric – veering toward the grotesque. Was she coached in the role? The A.B.T. audience gave her the usual standing ovation.
Back home, I found that Albertine and Paco had switched off the LED lights in their living quarters, but I still have video scans thanks to Night-Vision. My stealthy detainees sleep and domesticate nude by a couple of candles much of the time, perhaps thinking to foil my surveillance. Hah! (As a general stimulus to introspection, detention cannot be beat.) Before the black-out, Albertine brought her face close to one video lens, and I could see clearly that the concerted purrs of my thriving felines (twenty-one, count them!) continue to youthen the reborn ballerina, although she seems to have developed wonder-rings around her eyes. So exotic that look, so old-kohl. I wonder what paranormalities are afoot down there on 35? A&P do seem to sleep a lot. Where do they now display the Cat Idol? Do avian sacrifices continue? Whence the canaries? All will eventuate.
L.E.
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