Nicolas Le Riche of Paris Opera Ballet in Maurice Bejart’s Le Sacre du printemps. Photo by Laurent Philippe.
In mid-December, the Paris Opéra Ballet’s Hommage à Maurice Béjart, staged in remembrance of the renowned choreographer who died in 2007 age 80, was packing the Bastille Opera House night after night. No one would dream of presenting such a program in England, where Béjart’s name is synonymous with choreographic flamboyance and emotional excess, and Americans were only interested in him while Suzanne Farrell was a member of his Brussels-based company, the Ballet of the 20th Century. But European audiences love the grandiose theatricality and the mystical and philosophical overtones that flood his work by turn, and the Paris subway was already plastered with huge posters advertising the June appearance of the Béjart Ballet Lausanne at the Palais des Sports, which seats 4,500.
From the 13 works Béjart taught to the Opéra Ballet and the ten he made for it, director Brigitte Lefèvre devised a triple bill comprising, in order, Serait-ce la mort? (1970), to Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs; L’Oiseau de feu, created for this company in 1970 to the 1919 suite Stravinsky drew from the complete ballet score; and Le Sacre du printemps (1959). Only a brief pause separated the first two, which would have had the London audience up in arms, and all three were danced in leotards--no tutus, no jewels, no pretty music, no narrative--which is more than London’s ballet public can usually bear.
Having never seen any of the pieces before, I was intrigued to find Béjart’s strengths and weaknesses so similarly displayed in all of them. Accompanied the night I attended by the soprano Twyla Robinson, who sang from the stage and occasionally joined the action, the first work represents a meditation on life, love and mortality in which a man partners four women who personify different facets of the heart’s affection and death itself. In L’Oiseau de feu, a male firebird, striking in a red unitard, rises over a cadre of partisans in army fatigues; when he dies and is reborn, he unites the birds that flock behind him and the soldiers. Béjart considered the ballet an abstract expression of the two elements informing the score, Stravinsky’s dual nature as a Russian and a revolutionary, and exclaimed, “The poet, like the revolutionary, is a firebird.”
The vocabulary of deep second position pliés, flexed feet, tilted torsos and soaring jetés scarcely varies between these two works, yet its tone is contemplative in the first and almost strident in the second, conjuring sharply different impressions that redeem the paltry assortment of steps. “With Béjart, everything was about the intent,” one of his former dancers told me several years ago, “the movement was only part of the whole, and so the personality factor became important...They said he was the choreographer with five steps, but the steps...were not the ultimate goal. They were just the chassis to carry what you had to give.”
If successful realization depends on personality, it’s little wonder that L’Oiseau de feu fell flat for me, with Mathieu Ganio transforming the title role, supposedly a symbol of revolution, into a cabaret turn of flapping limbs and preening poses. By contrast, Nicolas Le Riche’s luminous presence and pure noble line seemed to focus the vagaries of Serait-ce la mort? and burnish its repetitions with purpose.
Neither piece prepared me for the intensity and violent aggression of Le Sacre du printemps, which opens with 22 men surging up from a crouch in a barely controlled frenzy of orgiastic anticipation and ends with 22 couples copulating ecstatically. Forcibly isolating a single figure, L’Elu, from their midst, the muscular phalanx of men yields the stage to a mass of women, who also choose one person, L’Elue, as their leader. Privileged rather than victimized by their selection, these soloists propel their colleagues into a voluptuous mating ritual that affirms the annual renewal of life.
I found the women’s choreography less urgent and considerably less interesting than the men’s, but Béjart was always less interested in writing for women than for men, and almost anything would have looked inconsequential after the power and precision of the opening section. Balanchine once said that this Sacre was the best one around, and I’d be tempted to agree if I weren’t totally hooked on Pina Bausch’s brutally austere staging, in which the momentum builds with excrutiating inevitability and the score seems to create the choreography spontaneously.
But once you’ve seen those 22 men dancing like savage athletes, it’s harder to state a preference, and the fortunate Parisians don’t have to. If they’re patient, they can see both versions without leaving home, because this is the only company beside her own to which Bausch has entrusted her production.
Marie- Agnès Gillot and Nicolas Le Riche of Paris Opera Ballet in Rudolf Nureyev’s Raymonda. Photo by Julien Benhamou/Opera National de Paris.
Meanwhile, a few miles away, another portion of the Opéra Ballet was celebrating its classical heritage at the Palais Garnier, not with The Nutcracker which monopolizes the holiday schedule in England but with 23 sold-out performances of Nureyev’s glittering Raymonda. The exotic spectacle of proud Crusaders and swashbuckling Saracens offered all the opulence and tradition the Bastille program deliberately avoided while honoring, simultaneously, Petipa’s last major narrative, Glazunov’s first ballet score, and Nureyev’s reign as artistic director, which he launched with this work in 1983.
His designer, Nicholas Georgiadis filled the stage with opulent furs, brown and gold brocade, and snowy plumes, and the action even includes a brief passage of realistic jousting--on nearly life-size horses-- between the hero, Jean de Brienne, and the fierce Saracen Abderam. But despite its sumptuous presentation and its place in dance history, it is a silly ballet, lacking both plot and drama, which has only survived because Petipa wrote such dazzling divertissements for the final act. All the choreographic value of Raymonda lies in that Grand Pas Hongrois, which contains a stirring czardas, a formal pas de deux, a fiendishly difficult male pas de quatre, and a string of sparkling solo variations, including the heroine’s alluring hand-clapping solo.
Crammed with Nureyev’s fiddly additions, complicated sequences of small jumps, beats and changes of direction, the first two acts worked the French dancers hard for little reward, and only Le Riche, as the predatory Abderam, brought any conviction to his role. But finally, the company came alive in Act III; the ensemble stamped their heels into the ground with gusto in the czardas; the men floated effortlessly through double tours in the pas de quatre; and the women turned their delicate solos into golden filagree.
The younger artists show little personality so it’s difficult, on first viewing, to tell them apart--apparently they are encouraged to deliver the steps rather than themselves. But all the dancers are beautifully placed, immaculately polished and elegant in manner and bearing. Every jump and pirouette ends cleanly, and hips remain aligned even beneath the highest extensions, so what the performers lack in heart they make up for in assurance and academic refinement.
