Pina's Orpheus and Eurydice—Don't Look Back

Paris Opera Ballet in Pina's Orpheus and Eurydice. Photo: Stephanie Berger

Pina Bausch's Orpheus and Eurydice is one of those rare fully-produced operas led by a choreographer with enough name power to have complete artistic control. It was performed by the Paris Opera Ballet at the Koch Theater as part of Lincoln Center Festival 2012. And while a handsome artistic totality, perhaps predictably, it showed specific, fairly narrow elements of Bausch's talent.


Backing up a little, even before her premature death in 2009, Bausch's reputation and legend had been building into its own mythology, and with good reason. The works that BAM (where I work) brought beginning in the early 80s, and through the mid-90s, formed the foundation: they were unsparing, tough, gritty, sadistic, yet humorous, sensual, and ultimately optimistic about our ability to thrive in the face of adversity, without being as didactic as that just sounded. 


These tough works (including such pieces as Palermo, Palermo; Arien; Gebirge; Nelken; and Two Cigarettes in the Dark) in the eyes of her many fans forged her reputation as a visionary artist willing to put her dancers through hell and, literally, (not so high) water, and their willingness to endure her psychological steeplechases. They also paved the way for her subsequent phase, which would last for the remainder of her career— numerous commissioned travelogues about specific cities or cultures that shed most of the darkness that had engulfed her previous output. 


In all of these pieces, which had only been presented in New York at BAM, dance played a significant, but not necessarily proprietary, role. Often more memorable were the shocking scenes in which women (and occasionally, men) appeared to be if not actually tortured, then symbolically so. Or the comical vignettes involving one of her many charismatic dancers slowly promenading while doing something ridiculous, yet behaving as if it were the coolest thing in the world, and watching our reaction. Or the never-ending flirtations between women, in satin slip dresses and heels, and men in suits, or shirtless. 


The dance sections came with regularity, of course, but her slippery, lyrical phrases seemed fraught with urgency, as if the dancers needed to get them out of their system before the next bizarre section began. They were the glue that always brought the emotional dynamic back to neutral ground.

Marie-Agnès Gillot and Stéphane Guillion in the title roles. Photo: Stephanie Berger

Bausch created Orpheus and Eurydice way back in 1975; performed by her company, it was one of her earliest creations, after Iphigenie et Tauride and Rite of Spring, also in POB's repertory. It indisputably bears the look and feel of her collaborative team, with sets/costumes/lighting by Rolf Borzik (whose aesthetic was carried throughout her creative body of work by Peter Pabst and Marian Cito). The illusion of architectural partitions is formed by fabric panels, augmented by plexiglass panes and various dead or "live" flora; very tall chairs create a man-made forest. 


The women, barefoot, wore elegant long-sleeved, floor-length gowns of black, white, and pale pink throughout the respective sections (mourning, violence, peace, and death). The three featured solo singers wore black gowns of a similar design; they moved in concert with their corresponding doppelgänger dancers. (The Balthasar-Neumann Ensemble und Chor performed with clarity and verve in the pit.) The male dancers wore suits, butcher aprons, or nude-hued trunks. The long-limbed Marie-Agnès Gillot portrayed Eurydice in a red gown, and an ardent Stéphane Buillion, Orpheus, the night I attended. As fluent as the POB dancers were, I missed the strong, individual personalities that Pina had cultivated over many years in Wuppertal.


Bausch often relied heavily on a jukebox music approach to set the mood for each section in her non-operatic work. With Gluck's score as the one prevailing given, that liberty was taken away, so Bausch needed to describe the mood with action and movement. She couldn't or wouldn't use mime, instead relying on dance. Yet dance was but one tool she worked with, and she never seemed completely interested in expanding her fairly limited choreographic vocabulary, at least not the way she voraciously probed the human psyche, or new cultures.

Marie-Agnès Gillot as Eurydice. Photo: Stephanie Berger

Thus Orpheus is filled with repeating sweeping arms, taut upper body oppositions, and various plaintive gestures of sorrow. Pretty much just one character (Love) ever seemed happy (alright, I know it's the story of Orpheus); the rest moved somberly or apologetically, similar to the way Bausch usually carried herself in the public eye. The group dances were emotionally powerful—a Greek chorus evoking a tribal feel–with touches of primitive folk dance. An experiment with lengths of string, reeled out across the stage to form a sort of horizontal web, seemed only to be a hazard. And the final death scene was notable for its utter stasis as Gillot lay cross-wise on top of her vocal counterpart for a long time (Yun Jung Choi; Maria Riccarda Wesseling sang Orpheus). In a moment of restlessness, I recalled how early this work was in her career, and where Bausch would go from there.

Paris Opera Ballet Visits Gotham

Mathieu Ganio and Aurélie Dupont in Giselle.

The Paris Opera Ballet came to New York with a production of Giselle—one of my favorite story ballets—with a version that's new to me. Exciting, right? Yes, but it's also slightly irritating, because while watching it, I spent half my mental energy comparing it to the version done by regularly by ABT (staged by Kevin McKenzie after Coralli/Petipa/Perrot). Ooh, the cottages are painted flats rather than built structures. The costume palette is primarily warm with the exception of Giselle and the Count. Hilarion is more masculine and wears nearly the same costume as Albrecht, making the playing field more level. There are no Borzois or kids! And so on, one relatively small detail after another.


But there were some significant differences. While Giselle is being feted by her friends on the occasion of her birthday, she is placed on the seemingly mandatory hay cart and in addition to receiving a flower headband, is given a sprig of flowers, with which she gaily conducts her friends—the same one used by Myrtha later on to dispense her magic. This dramatic foreshadowing strongly links Giselle to the consigned fate of becoming a resurrected spirit of an unwed dead woman, perhaps even a successor to Myrtha, and gives this carefree scene a shot of gravitas. In contrast, in ABT's production, there are some oddly out-of-place children in the cart, merrily waving their beer steins back and forth as Giselle watches. In general, the POB production (same roots, restaged by Patrice Bart and Eugene Polyakov in 1991) is more somber in the first act, emphasizing less Giselle's girlishness and youth, and more her mutability and mortality. She's less happy-go-lucky and seems conscious of her fate. 


The company uses a shiny floor surface, so that in Act 2, the Wilis are reflected as if in water, adding to the supernatural illusion. They are arrayed more like an army, in neat columns, to be deployed by Myrtha efficiently and ruthlessly when a man strays into the area. And when Hilarion does, he is banished down the line of Wilis with flicks of their hands, one at a time. The lighting is particularly effective, with white tones that read as silvery moonlight. The schemes particularly contrast with those by both NYCB (same house) and ABT (across the plaza), which are murkier. 


And yet I was less moved by this production than ABT's. In fairness, I saw one of the most heartfelt performances ever at ABT, featuring Marcelo Gomes and Diana Vishneva; their technical prowess combined with their range of expressivity was simply alchemical. POB's cast was led by Aurélie Dupont and Mathieu Ganio. Dupont is serene and confident, but I felt that she was too mature to play the teenage Giselle, and I don't mean old. She worked her lovely feet to best advantage; the womens' toe shoes appeared to be slightly more flexible than their American counterparts, with more care given to rolling through the foot. Ganio fit the bill as the callow prince, yet didn't explore the movement and expand on its potential.


Dupont was far better suited to Béjart's Bolero (1961), on the French program. Occupying the center of a round red table, she was surrounded by men seated on red chairs on three sides. There was nothing unpredictable in the way she pulsed seductively to the inexorable rhythm, rocking foot to foot, the movement building in scope as the bare-chested men increasingly gathered around her, echoing the primal beat. Here, her maturity commanded and intrigued. At times, the strikingly modern imagery evoked The Green Table by Kurt Jooss, driven by games of love rather than war. 

and... Dupont and Ganio in Suite en Blanc

This program led off with Suite en Blanc (1943) by transplanted Russian Serge Lifar, which displays the academic accomplishments of a large company by showing each dancer's strengths in sections of varying dynamic and mood. Its striking black and white aesthetic (uncredited, oddly) gave it a flat, dramatic appearance underscored by numerous MGM spectacle-like tableaux and stage compositions. Emphasizing ballet's artificiality to an extreme, it's a fragmentary representation of what Balanchine's counterparts abroad were producing in the post-Romantic period. 


L'Arlésienne, by Roland Petit (1974), utilizes Bizet's catchy, familiar music. Petit drew on folk dance motifs that, when paired with the marriage theme, brought to mind the feel of Nijinska's Les Noces—flat shapes, lines of peasants underscoring the Van Goghesque painted panels. Only a too-long solo for the lead male, toward the end, put the brakes on this charming short ballet.


Paris Opera Ballet will further reveal its scope this week with Pina Bausch's Orpheus.

Emotion + Motion, Disconnected, 2/18/10

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Works and Process on falling in love, with etoiles from Paris Opera Ballet

http://www.thirteen.org/sundayarts/blog/ballet/emotion-motion-disconnected/800/

The Guggenheim Works & Process Emotion & Motion program on Feb 14 & 15 featured two top-ranking dancers (étoiles) from the Paris Opera Ballet—Clairemarie Osta and Mathieu Ganio—performing three ballet excerpts, plus the speaker Dr. Helen Fisher. Works & Process events usually trace a theme elucidated in dance performance excerpts, or preview an upcoming performance, or the work of one or more choreographers. This program, timed for Valentine’s Day, oddly felt more like a variety show than a unified presentation, with unrelated dance segments breaking up blocks of Dr. Fisher’s more conventional, if interesting, lecture.

Dr. Fisher is a biological anthropologist who has studied the brains of people in love, as well as analyzed data from huge numbers of participants on match.com. She presented her findings—including ideas like romantic love can be chemically similar to addiction, and that humans are almost uniquely monogamous among mammals—peppered with quotations about love from famed historical writers and philosophers. Her style ranged from scholarly to frank best friend handling subject matter innately appealing to pretty much everyone, looking from the inside or outside.