47. Egeria: “Macbeth” and City Center’s Studio 5, reviewed by Pippa Hammet
Louise and I have been having intense discussions about the new version of her ballet company – “The Ballet” – so that we can move rapidly when the pandemic allows a return to BAU (Business As Usual). In the process, she has revealed many of her motivations over the years that led to this revived project. My impression is that Louise once had a governing influence on the operation of Ebersdorf Enterprises, an entrepreneurial power that lessened with the growing separation of husband and wife over the decades. When the first Ebersdorf Ballet was formed, my boss’s energies were newly directed, and her involvement in that institution took the place of some of her commercial ambitions. Louise had an artistic world awaiting her advice and consent. As artistic director of a company, it becomes a matter of not only supporting, but sometimes influencing, the creative artist. A choice word in such an ear allows entrée into a consecrated realm of invention, doesn’t it?
Didn’t a Lucia Chase inspire certain effects within the ballets that she sponsored as co-founder and co-director of American Ballet Theatre? I assume our Louise aspires to the same kind of influence, and that she would be the first to admit such an ambition. How much of the genius of the artistic system in these States has depended on the producer’s involvement in the work of regular invention, one way or another? Didn’t Lincoln Kirstein have some say at NYCB?
In Roman mythology, the kind of figure that Louise might represent at our projected new company, The Ballet, would be the nymph-goddess Egeria. She was said to have advised the second Roman king, Numa. When in need of counsel, King Numa would repair to a convenient grotto and listen to Egeria lay down the Roman law, quite literally. You can think of this nymph’s continuing role as a series of coaching sessions. Outside the world of politics, I can think of various figures who held or hold an Egerian position. In the field of motion pictures, the movie critic Pauline Kael played Egeria toward a film director like Robert Altman or a producer-director such as Warren Beatty – or, at least, she attempted to fill that position. Our First Daughter currently advises the great Trump – at least, that is what we surmise from news reports and tips from our Belle. Since a number of the world’s larger ballet companies are now run by their boards, Artistic Directors (Kevin McKenzie, Kevin O’Hare) may function as front-men Egerias to the august members of such bodies, those who actually make the crucial decisions. While our Cheryl and Sandy have been devising ballets here at the Tower, I have not noticed Louise prompting their artistic decisions in any sense. But she will always be available for consultation.
I was directed to these thoughts while watching two versions of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, now streaming on the Internet free of charge.
Orson Welles’ 1950 film of the drama (Welles acts the lead and directs) is a portrait of a passive-aggressive soldier when off the field of battle. The military mind is used to briefings, in order to know the strength of the enemy or the lay of the land. In Welles’ movie, the famous consultations with the witches have the force of Faust’s Descent to the Mothers in Goethe’s Part Two. A rapt raptor, Welles’ Macbeth listens to everyone and everything. He is open to advice from Duncan, the witches, Lady Macbeth, Banquo. The result is something like a focused sketch of a paranoid personality, a man who needs help from every hand to fabricate something like a working identity and a moral conscience. And after one murder or two, what’s two or three more? Can the sanctified killer be integrated into civilian life? The dominos smoothly topple past a certain point. I do think it was a directorial mistake to have Macbeth actively present at the murder of Macduff’s wife and children. Too involved an act.
Here is another of Welles’ characterizations of hollow, almost unknowable men, empty human vessels awaiting someone or something to provide a little content. As actor, Welles is so physically stolid throughout his film (the soliloquies are voiceovers in the Olivier Hamlet style) that John L. Russell’s camerawork has to provide what visual dynamism the movie can manage. There is a great deal of continuous “hand-held” imagery to float Welles’ handsome profile. Jeanette Nolan’s Lady Macbeth does a lot with sensuous body language, but even she is rendered bedbound by the end of the movie.
In the final act, Welles’ Macbeth is trapped, besieged in his castle awaiting news of the approach of Malcolm’s army. The corporeal passivity I am remarking is thus partly built into the Shakespearean structure. Welles merely takes it further. Perhaps the combined actor-director roles that Welles assumed here prevented his objective view of the performance which he delivered. (In his great Falstaff film, Chimes at Midnight, Welles makes the fatman’s lumbering part of the humor.) There is some wonderful Wellesian hurly-burly, especially during the “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech: roiling cloudscapes that are perfect metaphors for the psyche as the Uncreate. Kurosawa echoed Welles’ stolid effect in Throne of Blood, where his Macbeth (Toshiro Mifune) is ultimately pinioned to a wall with the strikes of multiple arrows.
In the 1979 video version of Trevor Nunn’s RSC Macbeth, the staging emphasizes theatricality by having the cast sit in a circle in the opening scene, as though assembled for a first reading of the script, which here is pretty much uncut. (This version of the play is often recommended as the best available on video.) And Ian McKellen’s Macbeth becomes a fascinating portrait of a narcissistic thespian in need of reassurance from supers and groupies. Those who caught McKellen’s pre-Gandalf theater performances know that the actor could substitute extraordinary technical command for coherent characterization across much of his career. This was a common complaint among theatergoers. But here his portrait rings true via a look behind the scenes of a theatrical troupe or sound stage. When this Macbeth is not enjoying the drama of the battlefield, he indulges in self-dramatization to fill the void of the daily grind. Ordinary political ambitions are nothing in comparison to their backstage equivalents. McKellen makes Macbeth handsome, exquisite in thought, and initially grateful for tips on the serial murder of rivals. Not for nothing does this Macbeth refer ultimately to a “poor player” who struts his hour upon the stage. This actor wants more hours and more acclaim, no matter the body count.
Judi Dench is Lady Macbeth, and she is perfect here as the kind of acting coach who became famous in the 1940s and 1950s on Broadway and in Hollywood. I am thinking of Mira Rostova, who coached Montgomery Clift; Paula Strassberg, who advised Marilyn Monroe; and the early training that Marlon Brando is said to have received from Stella Adler. (The other Hollywood coach of the period who worked steadily with actors and actresses of stage and screen was Nina Foch.) Dench is particularly good at prompting her Macbeth against “stage fright”: he must “screw his courage to the sticking place”, indeed. Surely there were actors’ coaches at the Globe Theater? Perhaps Shakespeare himself helped his fellow artists by serving sometimes as their adviser? Maybe this is why the play has been called “unlucky” – it is about the theater itself as a place where sandbags land bullseye and broken glass is hidden in toe shoes. Macbeth is often thought of as a “dark” tragedy and almost perfect in its tight form. Perhaps that is because Shakespeare knew quite well his own theatrical milieu.
Nunn’s Macbeth may be accurate in its discussion of a type of actor who takes instruction and then leaves his teachers behind as his name climbs the marquee. Dench’s wife-coach goes to the hereafter because she’s no longer needed. In the final scenes, the great tragedian is alone, but then aren’t all geniuses doomed to solitude? Macbeth no longer needs mothering, any more than Macduff needed a conventional birthing. The tyrant’s self-dramatization is complete because now unique in its delivery. Claiming a conscience is all part of the required dramatic tension. There is a closeness between Olivier’s Othello and McKellen’s Macbeth. Both men envisioned skilled warriors who were narcissists.
McKellen and Nunn make the play a story of collusions not only at the Scottish court but backstage and off-shore. An exiled Malcolm has to be coached toward kingship. (And then he prompts Macduff to revenge.) When Macbeth visits the witches a second time, they enact a voodoo ritual upon him. This is the kind of rite Olivier must have imagined Paula Strassberg using on Monroe during the filming of The Prince and the Showgirl.
In the new City Center Studio 5 series currently streaming on the Internet, we can watch principal dancers being coached by former ballerinas who are familiar with classic repertory. The most famous coaching system in ballet is, of course, the Russian practice of assigning a young ballerina to a coach who is a former ballerina and who follows and guides the younger woman’s career, sometimes for life. This system has been developed in a culture of curation rather than invention. In other words, the coaches are not in competition with practicing choreographers. They watch over the continuing performance of repertory classics. New York ballet audiences would once see visiting Russian companies bring the veterans along with their charges during a local season. I am told that the coaches would sit in folding chairs in a downstage corner of the stage and monitor every move of the developing ballerina from that position. The brief of the coach covered many aspects of the dancer’s life: accuracy of detail in individual roles, the health of the dancer (including periods of injury), general education in the arts, maintenance of public image both on and off stage, relation to Party politics during the Soviet period, backstage politics (rivalries between ballerinas and their coaches), life decisions (marriage, motherhood, retirement), and maintenance of standards, especially during international tours. As you can see, the U.S. ballet companies have no equivalent of such a system (although American Ballet Theatre has imported several former Russian ballerinas as advisers to its stars over the years). Now that blanket curation looms as many companies’ fates, perhaps coaches will multiply.
The first Studio 5 program allowed us to observe Merrill Ashley coach Tiler Peck in three New York City Ballet roles choreographed by George Balanchine. Peck was at her most ebullient and efficient in her demonstration of the basic materials. Ashley could pursue inflections and refinements in her comments. There was not enough time to do justice to the three solo variations from The Nutcracker, Divertimento No. 15, and Symphony in C (First Movement). As a result, Ashley didn’t distinguish between the styles of the three ballets in her comments. It was as though she was asking for a generic Balanchine approach throughout. Ashley was dependent on that old standby of the American coach: “Here is what I see.” She emphasized many details and was able to identify them verbally via the Zoom format. It was left to Peck to apply Ashley’s observations. There was no time for this coach to advise on the “how”. I loved the moment when both women commented on a difficult move for Sugar Plum, where the ballerina has to shift quickly from one effacé position to another. Ashley appeared to concentrate on how the dancer must achieve the maximum plastic display of her figure at maximum dance speed. If the session demonstrated nothing more, it made clear how this challenge is a regular one in Balanchine ballets. Ashley was the efficient one-off coach and Peck her apt pupil.
The second Studio 5 coaching session assigned Sara Mearns to Nina Ananiashvili. Both women are charming and hard-working, but even with their session expanded to an hour’s length, the presenters made the mistake of covering four excerpts of material from Swan Lake, thus insuring superficial surveys. Basically, Mearns showed her fleet, stripped-down Western versions of Odette’s solos, and Ananiashvili kept insisting on the kind of dance details that have to be bred within the slower tempi of the Russian tradition. It’s not just a matter of American “technique” versus Russian “expressivity”. Ananiashvili made clear how much the material benefits from the plastique of the Ivanov-Petipa Odette, which looks both seductive and old-fashioned from a twenty-first century balletic vantage. Again and again, Ananiashvili called for an extended silhouette and a “Russian back”. It was unfair to expect Mearns to adapt such an approach on the spot.
Louise Ebersdorf watched the session with me and claimed that the pairing of the two women reminded her of those shotgun artistic collaborations arranged by hotshot theatrical agents for Broadway and film over the decades. The result is always inorganic and unrealistic. I did enjoy Ananiashvili’s report that her own coach, the legendary Marina Semionova (who was Stalin’s favorite and who retired as a balletic Egeria at the age of ninety-six), claimed to have been the first Odette to perform on pointe the second act solo’s rond de jambe with développé to second position. Perhaps she was also the dancer who asked for a slower tempo to accomplish the big effect? And now, when Western ballerinas attempt it at an even faster tempo, they discover the challenge is maintaining balance. Surprise? Semionova also suggested to Ananiashvili that Odette should be danced as though the ballerina had eyes in the back of her head -- perhaps an idea that was inspired in many Russian citizens during decades of living under a tyrant?
Once again, the “how” was omitted from the demonstration – and by that I mean how a practical meeting place could be found between old and new, American and Russian, approaches to the art. Usually that sort of thing is handled by a choreographer. Is it possible that City Center’s administration is itself only now beginning to discover what complexities balletic style can involve? Surely someone in the house has a little sophistication? Or does this represent a level of reception of the dance art that never goes beyond a beginner’s level? I am not sure the general viewer of Studio 5 learns much more than surface signs of the art’s complexity, especially if the chosen challenges are self-limiting ones. Forcing mismatches is certain to obscure the subject rather than to illuminate its depths.
If our Louise is eventually to function at The Ballet as Egeria to her composers and choreographers, lighting and scenic designers, costumers and makeup artists, I’m sure she will bring much forethought to her role. And, remember, if she can whisper into certain ears, the rest of us – Master Raro, Mme Sesostris, Belle, and I – have Louise’s ear ourselves. What a team!
P.H.
__________________
Comments