Star Styled Dream
American Ballet Theatre, The Dream
Metropolitan Opera House, New York, NY
June 20, 2007
By
MINDY ALOFF
mindy@voiceofdance.com
VoiceofDance.com 2007
Diana Vishneva in rehearsal at the Kirov Ballet. Photos of Vishneva in Frederick Ashton's The Dream are unavailable. Photos in collage by Valentin Baranovsky.
Diana Vishneva'the strong and stylish Kirov ballerina'also dances at the Met each spring as a principal with American Ballet Theatre. She is wildly popular here with audiences as well as with critics, many of whom discovered her perfectionism in Balanchine works during the 1990's, first in stagings at her home company in Russia and then when she performed in New York as a guest artist with the New York City Ballet. Since joining ABT in 2003, she has successfully taken on leads in powerhouse roles, most of them in the evening-length ballets that make up the larger part of the company's spring repertory at the Met: Kenneth MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet and Manon, George Balanchine's Ballet Imperial, and current productions of Don Quixote, Giselle, and Swan Lake. Her particular brand of virtuosity'her ability to create magical effects in the theater entirely through full-bodied, aggressively disciplined, and seemingly invincible classical dancing'has conferred on her performances a somewhat severe yet utterly fascinating moral glow, unparalleled by ABT's other ballerinas, despite their fine techniques and marvelous personal qualities as performers.
The Titania of The Dream'Frederick Ashton's Victorian one-act version of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, set to Felix Mendelssohn's incidental music for the play'in which Vishneva just made her debut, is asked at the outset for some of the moral severity that is natural to her dancing. Yet she isn't the first ABT principal one might think right for the role, since it also requires that the ballerina soften in a tenderly comic sequence of love at first sight for the transformed Bottom and, finally, that she reveal the depths of her nature to Oberon, her true love, in an emotionally complex pas de deux. This dance, on which the ballet concludes, encompasses elements of both restraint and ardor on the part of the danseur playing Oberon and of sweetness, wild resistance, and melting submission for his Titania: she passes momentarily from her ballerina identity as a classicist to an embodiment of Ashton's beloved Isadora Duncan. (In an ABT pre-performance seminar, the Ashton biographer David Vaughan, referring to Julie Kavanagh's Ashton biography, Secret Muses, noted that, unlike many of Ashton's ballets'which, as Kavanagh reveals, originated in Ashton's feelings for his particular lovers'The Dream apparently had no association for the choreographer with a living love-object: it was a ballet that seems to have sprung purely from his imagination and impulse to make art.) The partnering is a marvel of continuously resolved technical paradoxes, and the theatrical result, when seamlessly realized, is of a molten event in which one can hardly discern individual steps and gestures. It is certainly a dance that is among the peaks of Ashton's choreographic career, yet the complete opposite of the polar clarity and stylistic rectitude that one associates with Vishneva.
So much for preconceptions: in the company of Angel Corella, her hot-blooded and wildly bravura Oberon, and of the doe-eyed and uncomprehending Bottom of ABT corps dancer Julio Bragado-Young, Vishneva's Titania was a triumph: by turns icy, heated, generous, flirtatious, and, for a few voluptuous measures, effectively unbuttoned. It wasn't a perfect performance'the great pas de deux broke into sections at a couple of points'but it was an amazing debut and a brilliantly varying account of the role, regardless of whether it's compared with the waterfall-and-gossamer performance of Alessandra Ferri. Ferri was ABT's original Titania, with Ethan Stiefel as Oberon, when the company gave its premi're of The Dream in 2005 in a staging by its original Oberon, Anthony Dowell, with Christopher Carr, with the much-admired performances of Rebecca Wright and Burton Taylor in The Joffrey Ballet's 1973 production. I happened to see the second of Vishneva's two performances at the Met, and my only lament is that she and Corella weren't able to dance the ballet more. It rewards the interior discoveries and mutual ease that result from dancing it over time.
Ashton choreographed The Dream in 1964, for a Royal Ballet Shakespeare festival to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the playwright's birth. Titania and Oberon were the Royal's young and harmoniously matched "golden pair," Dowell and Antoinette Sibley, dancers who had trained together at the Royal Ballet School and who knew each other well as partners and as friends. The Dream's choreography was not only tailored to their individual gifts'Sibley's classical exactitude below the waist and her capacity for abandon in the upper body, Dowell's frictionless and sculptural pirouettes and nuanced acting'but also to their partnership, with its complementary temperaments, matched skills, and undercurrents of personal feeling. The Royal brought The Dream to New York, with Sibley and Dowell, in 1965, and one could still see them in the roles in London during the 1970's: they were an emotionally transparent and deeply sensual Titania and Oberon for their age-peers, a generation that insisted on an I-Thou relationship with all aspects of the world, including the world of high art. This I-Thou intimacy with the theater is something that Ashton evidently shared, although he was of an older order altogether. Only an artist who could count on his audience's intimate knowledge not only of Shakespeare's text and Mendelssohn's score but also of the landmark 1937 Vic-Wells Midsummer production, famously set in the world of Victorian children's book illustration, would comfortably excise from his ballet the peskily unenchanted royal characters of Theseus and Hippolyta'even though, without them, the appearance of the rustics in the enchanted wood has no justification. (Shakespeare brings the rustics to the wood so that they can rehearse the Pyramus and Thisbe theatrical they plan to present at Theseus and Hippolyta's wedding.)
American Ballet Theatre corp in Frederick Ashton's The Dream. Photo by Gene Schiavone.
I don't know if Ashton had seen Balanchine's two-act 1962 ballet A Midsummer Night's Dream, to a Mendelssohn score of the incidental music and excerpts from other compositions that Balanchine had worked for a decade to put together (he said that he didn't choreograph Shakespeare but rather Mendelssohn). In this earlier ballet, the entire complicated story of the play is swiftly and marvelously told in the first act while the second act is mostly set aside for wedding dances, including a "wedding pas de deux" that, in keeping with other distancing structural elements in the ballet, is performed not by any of the couples getting married but rather by hired performers. (In Balanchine's Midsummer, Titania and Oberon never dance together: they are not human, and their relationship is therefore not made literal on stage.) However, there is no question that Ashton's version is quite unlike Balanchine's, given the bounds of ballet entertainment, their shared respect for Shakespeare's plot and setting, and their common use of Mendelssohn's music. Balanchine's fairies, for instance'perhaps inspired by the images of Max Reinhardt's 1935 Hollywood movie of the play'are personified by a corps of tiny children whose numbers are amplified by a ballerina Butterfly and an adult female corps; as in his last, 1981 staging of Mozartiana, the variations in physical scale between small children and adult dancers serve to emphasize the facets of the ballerina they showcase, a figure of immortal youth and yet also artistic maturity. Ashton's fairies, entirely danced by a female corps de ballet, have a life independent of their ballerina, as in Petipa's ballets: they perform a beautiful ensemble number, lyrical yet slightly ruminative and dotted by poses on point that recall the corpsmonumental dance in the Shades scene of La Bayad're'which, as it happens, was staged in 1963 for the Royal by the newly arrived Rudolf Nureyev. It is Ashton, not Balanchine, who links the corps to those of the 19th-century classical repertory, with their vision scenes. The two choreographers also treat Bottom differently, with Balanchine following the more common stage practice of only transforming him into an ass through the addition of a headpiece'he becomes a masked lout'and Ashton choosing the less conventional idea that Bottom's entire body is transformed. (Ashton may have been thinking of Peter Hall's 1959 production of the play for the Royal Shakespeare Company, in which Charles Laughton's Bottom the Weaver had furry hooves as well as outsized donkey ears. Ashton gives his Bottom prop hooves for his hands and, for his feet, black point shoes, so that, when he dances on point, his image suggests a partial transformation of gender as well as of species.)
The Dream is much more than its leads, of course, and on Vishneva's second evening at ABT, the company gave her strong support. Bragado-Young's Bottom, half-man half-boy, was callow yet surprisingly affecting. Craig Salstein's Puck was sufficiently exciting that one didn't think about the production's original Puck, the amazing Herman Cornejo. The human couples were all praiseworthy: Marian Butler (Helena), Jennifer Alexander (Hermia), Sascha Radetsky (Demetrius), and Jared Matthews (Lysander). Also to be commended are the fairies, including Ashley Ellis (Cobweb), Jacquelyn Reyes (Peaseblossom), Caity Seither (Moth), and Yuriko Kajiya (Mustardseed). Conductor Ormsby Wilkins, to whom Vishneva knelt during the bows, provided her with sensitive tempi. The Young People's Chorus of New York City, amplified by adult singers Elizabeth Nuňez and Anne Ingram, who sang Shakespeare's lyrics when Titania was in her bower, were charmingly light and piercing in the 4,000-seat Met. It also helped that The Dream was preceded by a crystalline and, for moments in the second movement, breathtaking account of Balanchine's great teaching ballet, Symphonie Concertante, to Mozart, with ABT soloists Stella Abrera and Maria Riccetto as the luminous ballerinas and soloist Gennadi Saveliev as their flawlessly diplomatic escort, partnering them by their fingertips simultaneously. As ABT evenings go, this was one of its very best.
American Ballet Theatre corp George Balanchine's Symphonie Concertante. Photo by Rosalie O'Connor.
