88. Transits: “Carnaval”, “Ariane”, “The Future Future”, and “Barbie”, reviewed by Cheryl S.
Sandy has begun a new pas de deux for Master Raro and myself to one of the famous waltzes of Johann Strauss Jr. Our dance has been directly inspired by a viewing of a Russian film of Michel Fokine’s 1910 ballet Carnaval, to the music of Schumann and with costumes by Léon Bakst. The ballet deals with a group of flirtatious young people at a party during the Biedermeier period. Carnaval became famous for the role of Harlequin as danced by Vaslav Nijinsky when Diaghilev brought his Ballets Russes to Berlin and Paris.
The film (now streaming) features Sergei Vikharev -- famed here for his revivals of classic ballets -- as Harlequin, along with a group of young dancers who had just been produced by the Vaganova Academy on their way to what would then have been the Kirov Ballet (now the Maryinsky). The film has a magenta cast in its color photography and a rushed look in its editing, but it manages to capture something of the essential spirit of the ballet.
As is often the case with period-conscious choreographer Fokine, that spirit has its satiric aspect: the coy, charming flirtations of the ensemble of party-goers is caught not only by details in mime and dress but in contrast to the commedia dell’arte characters (Harlequin, Columbine, Pierrot, Pantalone), who are more direct in the display of their infatuations through anti-Philistine mockery. Fokine came to view his ballet as un-revivable because its portrait of women – experts in flirtation – eventually no longer applied to twentieth-century mores. He saw contemporary women not as witty temptresses but as eventual beggars in erotic byplay. He felt the satiric aspect of the ballet would inevitably fall flat with later audiences. This actually turned out to be the clue for Sandy to make our new ballet, Arabesque.
The operative no-no word out in the world today: flirtation. Here is the danger-zone according to 2023 dance club protocols. I now quote an example of current how-to advice from the internet and directed to clubland lads: “How to Flirt with a Girl in a Club. Just approach them [not “her” notice] to engage them like they are regular people. Sometimes when they are dancing just dance with them and make eye contact and smile. They will show you if they are into it. If they are not, they will move away. Be respectful of personal space. Talk to them like they are regular people and be charming. If they are rude, do not take it as a blow to your ability. Move to someone else. They are likely not worth knowing.” How, indeed, times have changed.
Our new dance will be classical in style but set in a contemporary club where an invitation to the dance is now land-mined. Luckily for our purposes, in a classical pas de deux incriminating eye contact is not so much an issue: often the male serves as partner from behind the ballerina, who looks out and above, except at crucial moments when direct recognition of the cavalier is unavoidable. Thus, the choreographic opportunities for drama in the interaction of the two dancers. My costume will be a short blue-black mini-dress with knitted top and black pointe shoes. Master Raro will sport a green Henley shirt, black fitted chinos, and trim black dance boots. The scene: The Danube, the newest N.Y. dance club, otherwise deserted. I’m inventing a heroine of our time, and Sandy is setting the club in motion.
To prepare myself, I have been reading a 1910 novel, Ariane: A Russian Girl by the French writer Claude Anet (New York Review Books, 2023). Talk about flirtation! The novel is about a very young and very precocious Russian beauty in pre-Revolutionary Russia who makes her way toward higher education and economic stability by developing a wide reputation as a brilliant young adventuress. I found the ficiton to be sub-Colette in its narrative surprise- and swoon-quotient. The biggest problem is that the heroine is supposed to be knowledgeable and witty, and yet she never says anything really trenchant or humorous over the length of the book. Madame Guermantes she is not. Ariane’s chief achievement is to pretend she has had (and currently has) many lovers in order to lure her main amour – forced to jealousy -- into confessing his authentic affection for her and a possible life-commitment. Here, certainly, is one form of flirtation, but rendered across much time so that erotic play is reduced to a calculated (and laborious) strategy of seduction. Talk about patience on the part of the love-object!
Billy Wilder (and his collaborator I. A. L. Diamond) turned this novel into a 1957 film, Love in the Afternoon, as a vehicle for Audrey Hepburn. I watched it on streaming. The movie becomes a dedicated study of a Parisian gerontophile, since Hepburn’s amorous opposite, Gary Cooper, is so aged he practically dotters his way through the love scenes. His character is a fabulously wealthy Lothario, so Ariane’s aims may include a married (and soon widowed?) life in very high style. The film is long, so this thought does occur to one. Love has two features to which I am always susceptible. The sets are by Alexandre Trauner, and they are miracles of detailed evocation of time and place – mid-twentieth-century Paris. And there is a sumptuously staged and edited railway station finale. Wilder tries hard for the Lubitsch touch throughout, but many of the comic routines fall flat.
For my research on The Female In Our Time (or perhaps of All Time) I also read a new novel The Future Future by Adam Thirlwell (Jonathan Cape, 2023). Like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (but without a gender-switch), our heroine Celine lives through her origin century (here, the eighteenth) into our (1923’s) future via an imaginative and deliberately anachronistic mixture of feminine private needs and impersonal historical forces. Celine is an upper middle-class Parisian celebrity who suddenly finds herself a victim of a version of “cancel culture” in the form of pamphlets that describe her private life in scabrous terms. She is alienated from her husband (males are a general source of brutality throughout the novel). Bereft of funds, she turns to art, politics, and, eventually, emigration across the Atlantic. She also produces a child (named Columbia, of course) without benefit of re-marriage. You, too, would escape France if you had to face both poverty and the Revolutionary Terror, and Celine tours both George Washington’s America and even the Moon in a charming Méliès-like episode. Back in a France under Napoleon, she turns upon the nosy tyrant himself as another version of his Josephine, administering inadvertently a lethal coup de grace in a decidedly alternative version of Imperial French history. Celine ends in a poetic state of eco-consciousness, nurturing a mini-forest with an abiding friend, Saratoga. The author has been studying Deleuze and other French philosophes.
The Future Future works as a fantasia about feminine survival instincts – an improvised career achieved primarily through intuitive self-defense and a love of aesthetic nuance. Celine’s transit through time and space is archetypal in what she and her friends trace against the background of common history: “The garden Celine and Saratoga had constructed wasn’t really a garden at all, but more a sequence of confusions. There was their studio or pavilion. And then around it was an increasingly entangled structure that wasn’t really made by them at all. They intended it as a place of total experiment and mischling kinkiness, a series of green explosions. Everything was slow release and delay, as if to imagine how a landscape could be constructed involved choreographies way beyond the usual forms: into months and seasons and years.”
Do any of us ever do anything more than flirt with life? Does history do nothing, indeed, but repeat itself: an endless Eternal Return? I recommend this Future highly as a charming pas d’action of a novel.
For comparison, Master told me to see Transit, the 2018 movie by Christian Peltzold for another example of deliberately anachronistic art. The movie is based on a novel by Anna Seghers. The film describes a German-Jew’s attempt to escape France as Hitler’s army approaches Paris. In Marseilles, he assumes the identity of a writer who has also attempted to leave the country for Mexico, and he becomes involved with the writer’s wife and child and with a mysterious woman who is also trying to obtain papers to leave France. The movie is set simultaneously in the past and in our 2023 world of vast movements of populations from one benighted country to another. Peltzold manages to show two times in one film – a pre-Occupied France and the many borders which people are currently crossing to find better lives. He manages this with an exacting attention to visual details and with a vivid evocation of lost, drifting, would-be migrants as they await delayed, fateful bureaucratic decisions. Transit is a masterpiece of anachronistic double-vision.
The new film Barbie also tries for a double-vision: a baby-doll satiric view of the feminine, alongside intimations of women’s actual lives. Many stale ideas about female identity and the constrictions of the patriarchy are employed toward a comic fantasy in bright colors and music-video workouts. The problem is that the attempted comedy doesn’t really extend past the moment Barbie arrives in a real-world L.A. and visits the board room of the Mattel Corporation. A chase ensues that leads nowhere. And the big “dream ballet” (“I’m Just Ken”) has uninspired music and labored dance routines right out of retro-MTV. The film’s Dolby sound and laser projection gave me a headache. There is one good moment: the costume designer Ann Roth, whose work is on ample display in Ken’s wardrobe, appears on screen as a “beautiful” older woman. I suppose the director saw the entire film as an extended agit-prop gesture, but the idea that Barbie’s dollie fate is controlled in the real world by her “owner” is just too Karl Marx (rather than Groucho).
Back to that movie of Carnaval. How fascinating that, aside from the role of the Harlequin, the ballet does not require advanced dance technique. It’s all stylistic sensitivity. The result is a perfume that is light, heady and delicately complex. At the end, while everyone else celebrates, neither Pierrot nor Pantalone gets his girl. Neither wealth nor a butterfly net can do the job.
Toward our new ballet, Sandy has given me some notes on the Catch-22 of clubland flirtation: “Your suitor is anxious and angry at having to initiate the encounter. As a result, immediately he comes on too strong. Any initial response on your part short of capitulation can be taken as a rebuff. He’s angry for no reason. He approaches you once more with a stronger invitation. He’s obviously insecure, but you must not condescend or comply too quickly. Male vanity is touchy. So easily pricked. If you seem too willing, he will be too grateful, so you become more cautious. He turns away. You both stroll in opposite directions -- but turn back simultaneously on one another. A vicious circle! From the top!” Thus, the waltz music for our ballet – circles, rotations, turns upon turns, rather than erotic transits. And all of this is done without literal mime interaction – only dance movement. Who knows what the critics will say? (Here I am, writing reviews!) Our new effort may not ring the dance critics’ bells, but as Master Raro says (echoing Proust), the critical vocabulary may be pure, but a reviewer may utterly mistake the vision of the artist. The prideful act of judgment may obscure or omit the very essence of the thing: critics as an army of Philistines.
C.S.
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