87. Intersubjectivity: American Ballet Theatre, Proust’s Folios, Kafka’s Diaries, and Petzold’s “Afire”, reviewed by Master Raro
It is in the performing arts that ephemeral experiences can be evoked with sufficient intensity to permit audience belief. For example, the depiction of a shared rapture between human beings can require music, dance, and/or acting as lyrical coefficients. A dance viewer can enjoy vicariously an enacted union of lovers, however impermanent, thanks to the channel between artwork and recipient. Communion then seems actual for performers and viewers. Could an ensemble dance ever project a definitive disunion? There may always be a residue of collaboration between performers on the stage, however divisive its surface action.
There is that wonderful passage in Proust where young Marcel attempts to conform his opinions to those of the admired writer Bergotte, even though our narrator is confused and wondering at his own aesthetic likes and dislikes. Art’s disciple comforts himself: “. . . perhaps indeed there exists but a single intelligence of which everyone is a co-tenant, an intelligence towards which each of us from out of his own separate body turns his eyes, as in a theater where, if everyone has his own separate seat, there is on the other hand but a single stage.”
I am thinking of such issues because Sandy wants to make a new pas de deux for Cheryl and me, and that is exciting. And because he and I went to American Ballet Theatre’s Giselle at the Met. This ballet shows how the young village lass Giselle has her concept of her Albrecht change over the length of the story – and how Count Albrecht changes his view of Giselle. Initially, she is simply charming and charmingly simple from his point of view. In her eyes, he is the gallant fellow from out of nowhere. (He is initially in disguise as a commoner.) Albrecht thus intrudes on her intended’s -- Hilarion’s -- territory. Giselle is the prize, and Albrecht impulsively pledges his love for her. She is named the Queen of the Bacchic Festivities – the best dancer in the village – and dedicates her solo dance to him, the visiting Dionysus. Then Albrecht proves false, and she goes mad and dies, only to return as a faithful, loving spirit in Act Two in order to officiate at a further stage in Albrecht’s education through his trial before the Wilis. The audience is privy to parallel shifts in perception. The shock for Giselle of Albrecht’s betrayal is equaled by his lesson in supernatural forgiveness through the spirit-Giselle’s pity and compassion.
It is too bad that the ABT production makes its heroine such an unresisting martyr: manipulated, treated as “special”, betrayed, driven insane and crushed. ABT requires the ballerina to locate the character’s strengths through the dance materials since the mime for Giselle is too infected with the sickly-sweet. We know that she is a country creature because the music for that big Act One solo resembles bird-song. (Her girlfriends dance to a sophisticated urban galop.) And we hear how willful Albrecht can be in the driven music for his second act dance to near-death. In the first act, Giselle gives herself up to her beloved; in the forest, she is received by eternity. She is always nature’s child. But Albrecht cannot escape his place in the given social order, whether that of the local court or at the mercy of a supernatural sorority. These are the perspectival tensions of the ballet in the current ABT production.
Sandy tells me that Balanchine helped to stage a Giselle for American Ballet Theatre in 1946 for Alicia Alonso, and that bits of his choreography survive in today’s ABT setting, which overall is ascribed to Dimitri Romanoff. Sandy says that Balanchine included Gothic touches in the staging. I would like to know what survives of the Balanchine contributions in the present version at ABT.
Our ballerina this season was young Catherine Hurlin, whose Odette-Odile Cheryl and I were so impressed with last year. This was Hurlin’s debut in the role of Giselle. Sandy felt she was miscast, but I’m not so sure. It is true that Hurlin is no weeping willow. Her country prodigy is scrupulous in her dancing, always vivid, and more than a touch self-dramatizing. Here is a young peasant girl who is naturally mercurial, with shifting moods like an over-indulged child, but utterly without self-pity. She combines physical vivacity with a fey quality that derives from the sustained delicacy of her dance effects. Whereas Albrecht develops as a character, Hurlin’s Giselle simply becomes more and more herself. She unfolds from within. This ballerina inevitably contradicts – and elevates -- the general tone and intent of the ABT production in its present state.
Hurlin’s Act Two spirit-Giselle creates a mystic zone around her figure, just as she traces a magic circle around her Albrecht to protect him against her sister Wilis. (Ethologists would refer to such invisible shields as permitting a “protective distance”. Ballet is the ideal art for evoking such stage imagery.) Hurlin combines an aura of spiritual cool with a passionate dance focus. Her technical command and her imaginative powers are in full evidence. She possesses an especially eloquent torso, and the arch of her back reminds me of films of Suzanne Farrell. In Act Two, she lucidly incarnates a fantasy of graveyard redemption. This Giselle’s psychic powers consign Albrecht to his fate: a life-long memory of loss.
Albrecht was nobly danced by the handsome Daniel Camargo, whose mime was especially convincing and whose partnering of Hurlin was alert in its timing. Jarol Curley made Hilarion sensitive to all territorial trespass. David LaMarche was the conductor. His support for Hurlin’s debut gave her clear aural parameters and room for the release of youthful energies. (This ballerina’s musical precisions contribute to the aural amplitude; she and LaMarche collaborate closely.) Sandy was impressed by the classical dancing of Tyler Maloney in Act One’s Peasant pas de deux.
I have quoted Proust because I have been reading the recently published volume Marcel Proust: The Seventy-Five Folios (Belknap Press, 2023). (As you might guess, it has inspired me to another traversal of the seven volumes of the Search.) In preparation for his enormous project, Proust undertook a series of first drafts of primarily autobiographical material in the early 1907-08 period of novelistic gestation, begun even before the writing of a series of Notebooks which continued and expanded the process. The Folios are therefore the earliest consecutive series of extended prose germs from which the novel was eventually harvested. They were lost for decades because a collector hid them and presumably enjoyed them over decades for his own purposes. Rediscovered and published, they give us new insight into the genius of the French master.
The volume has been translated by Sam Taylor and has been edited by Nathalie Mauriac Dyer, who has written a Commentary and Notes. The famed Proust scholar Jean-Yves Tadié contributes a brief preface. The Folios are divided into sections that deal with An Evening in the Countryside, The Ways (Méséglise, Villebon-Guermantes), Visit to the Seaside, Young Girls, Noble Names, and Venice. In addition to glimpses of the author’s biographical cache in the Folios, the materials are supplemented with the related versions found in the later Notebooks, and therefore the development of the novel can now be followed in stages prior to the eventual achievement of the published text – to the extent that Proust (a demon of revision) could ever have been said to be “finished” with his work.
If you know the Search in all its profusion of details and its vast formal command, you will grasp how Proust has placed the “jewels” from the Folios like gems into his superstructure. As he wrote, he could thereby look forward to “working in” a number of set-pieces available in draft form. The experienced reader can enjoy the nostalgia of re-meeting old haunts and friends in their generative states. The plastic powers of Proust’s imagination are evident throughout the Search. Here are the materials on which they worked wonders. Those readers unacquainted with Proust can find in the new volume a type of preview-of-coming-attractions which may inspire a first assault upon the towering edifice.
The Folios’ segments do not contain the developed explorations of memory, jealousy, amatory disappointment, snobbism, social machinations, sexual compulsion, and redemptive aesthetics to be found in the depths of the author’s thought. In terms of intersubjectivity, the Folios do not peer from behind the eyes of a great character such as Charles Swann. But the preparatory contexts for such soundings are everywhere present in the extended sketches. What is particularly (and inevitably) missing is the way Proust will prefigure a motif in the Search several volumes in advance of its full exposure and development: Swann commenting casually on the fatal imprisonment of a beloved long before Albertine Simonet will be locked up; or indeed the way that Albertine is initially introduced in brief references as a classmate or a child-niece before her occupation of Marcel’s amatory life. But I will not say more so as not to spoil the first encounters that the Folios now make possible for beginners.
My current bedside book (a present from Pippa) is the new translation of the Diaries of Franz Kafka (Schocken Books, 2022). The translation and notes are by Ross Benjamin who restores the “rough” language of the original manuscripts, with no smoothings, omissions, or euphemisms, as in the earlier Max Brod version. Kafka gave a great deal of himself to his notebooks: gnomic jottings, dreams, self-doubts, travel notes, drafts of letters, theater gossip, health worries, progress reports on his writing projects, portraits of friends and strangers, and versions of works in process. The latter include portions of The Castle, The Trial, and Amerika (The Missing Person). I was fascinated by Kafka’s story “The Judgment” and his report on the fevered state of its production in one unique night of concentrated inspiration. I was also new to a Russian story, “Memories of the Kalda Railroad”, which is laugh-out-loud funny. Orson Welles caught something of this revue-sketch Kafka in his 1965 film of The Trial.
In a moving 1917 epistolary statement about his ultimate goal as an artist, Kafka wrote that he wished to “survey the whole human and animal community, to recognize their fundamental predilections, desires, moral ideals, to trace them back to simple rules, and to adapt myself to them as quickly as possible to please absolutely all . . . . To sum up, then, only the human tribunal matters to me and moreover I want to deceive it, albeit without deception.” The Diaries were a tool toward that project.
On a 1911 trip to the city of Friedland, Kafka visited the local Kaiserpanorama – a communal stereoscopic emporium of illuminated photographic slides of foreign cities, lands, and exotic customs. (Walter Benjamin wrote about its popularity as part of the modern urban spectacle.) Kafka prefers it to the silent cinema because the stillness of the slide images allow a gravitas that the “nervous” energy of the cinema cannot yet achieve. (He longs for the two media to be combined in their best features. 3-D Imax is here imagined?) Kafka’s interest in this form of commercial entertainment is part of his wide-ranging interest in the world around him and how it appears through the eyes of its varied citizens, a very different version of the author than the expert on paranoid subjective states found in the novels and stories.
I was intrigued by Kafka’s comments because it seems to me that George Balanchine transferred something of the touristic spectacle of the Kaiserpanorama into certain of his ballets. I am thinking of his Bizet Symphony in C, Tschaikovsky Concerto No. 2, and Gounod Symphony. Kafka was a sometime balletomane. One of the first Diaries entries from the 1909-11 period concerns a performance of the ballerina Eugenie Edouardova of the Maryinsky Imperial Russian Ballet of St. Petersburg, which appeared in Prague in 1909. According to his entry, Edouardova’s performance occupied Kafka’s dreamlife for some time, a special modernist tribute to the art and the ballerina.
Sandy and I caught a screening of the new Christian Petzold movie, Afire, which was presented at the IFC, with the director in attendance. The movie concerns a group of young people on a summertime escape to a Baltic island where there is a looming forest fire. For much of the film, the quartet ignores the threat, and Petzold’s emphasis is on the way the four (three men, one woman) reveal new aspects of themselves, especially in the occluded vision of the protagonist Leon (Thomas Schubert), a writer in the middle of composing a new book about which he has doubts. The woman, Nadja, is played by Paula Beer, who is a regular in Petzold’s movies. At first, she appears to be an ice cream seller at the local beach, and then she is discovered to be a literary scholar. Her lover Devid (Enno Trebs) is the handsome local lifeguard. Felix (Langston Uibel) is a photographer working on his portfolio. Thomas retreats into his frustration with his new fiction, and we see that he is largely cut off from the world around him, a condition that allows him to mistake real-life relationships and roles. Into this milieu comes Leon’s middle-aged editor, Helmut (Matthias Brandt), who is willing to involve himself with the young people in a way that humiliates Leon both in recognizing his writing limitations and in his failure to acknowledge the complex, shifting world around him among his peers. Schubert is very fine indicating the petulance of Leon without allowing the character to become obnoxious.
Afire resembles a Germanic version of an Éric Rohmer movie. (Its use of the firestorm motif also reminded me of a 2018 Paul Dano film, Wildlife.) Petzold knows how to catch the delicate ensemble interplay among his actors, their suggestion of an atmosphere of youthful improvisation, of experimentation with mood and self-creation in the very texture of summer days, a milieu that frustrates Leon and ultimately might educate him. Petzold shows a genius for time and place, a reliance on the rhythms of daily life. He is abetted by the cinematography of Hans Fromm, who manages to catch the colors of shadows beneath parched trees.
Leon claims to have fallen in love with Nadja, but has he? Does he prefer her because she sells ice cream, falls off her bicycle, criticizes his writing, and eventually steers a wheelchair? Paula Beer’s moving recitation of a Heinrich Heine poem “The Asra” may be the moment when Leon’s confusions are exposed at their most unforgiving. Petzold allows this kind of question to hover over his narrative. Those of my readers who have enjoyed his Barbara, Transit, Phoenix, and Undine can add another wonderful film to the growing achievement. At the IFC interview following the movie, the director was unpretentious and insightful about his work. He claimed that the solipsism of Leon in the new film mirrors an equivalent period of confusion early in his filmmaking career. Afire is now screening at one of the theaters at Lincoln Center.
Sandy points out that our new pas de deux’s fantasy of communion will partially be there in the shared style of movement granted by his choreography. Cheryl and I will hopefully enact that image of union in the very details of our performances. Potentially, couple dances can present that achieved bond of the performers. Such skill implies a common source. The theme is innate to the form. To work!
M.R.
______________
תגובות