Through the Eyes of a Dancer: Selected Writings

Love Is the Crooked Thing: Paris Opéra Ballet

112 | Love Is the Crooked Thing: Paris Opéra Ballet Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center June 24 through July 3, 1996 Village Voice, July 30, 1996 When I started writing for the Voice again, I wanted to challenge myself to write ballet reviews. I guess I was still smarting from what Doris Hering had said about my writing years before. I was grateful to Elizabeth Zimmer, who was editing the dance reviews at the Voice, for trusting me enough to let me cover this age-old, purely classical company— which I had never seen before. The Paris Opéra Ballet sets itself the double challenge of upholding its 335year history in classical ballet and propelling itself into the future. La Bayad ère, a Petipa ballet from 1877, seen here in a 1992 version by Rudolf Nureyev , the company’s former director, is a three-hour marathon in which lavish sets and costumes outweigh fairly standard choreography and staging. But Isabelle Guérin, who plays the temple dancer Nikiya, is terrific. With her waterfall arms and supple legs and feet, her rich phrasing and sure dramatic instincts, she provides the emotional center of the performance. (Her costar, Laurent Hilaire, comes alive only when he has hard steps to do.) Although her utterly natural demeanor and convincing passion pull us through the story, the weak choreography does not blot out questions like “If this dance is set in India, why is there no hint of India in Minkus’s music and only the most superficial flavor of India in the dancing?” Le Parc, on the other hand, is stark, ominous, and ultimately satisfying. A product of the French experimental choreographer Angelin Preljocaj in 1994, it tethers a postmodern outlook to strong classical technique. Using various Mozart string and piano pieces and a cast of twenty-six, it progresses from social flirtation to sublime love. Thierry Leproust’s set, an abstracted version of formal French gardens, includes three flat towers upstage against a threatening sky, and several slatted cages on high stems in the wings. The second act disperses these cage-trees, creating a geometrical forest that can be read as the cold, forbidding environment where seduction takes place in the era of aiDs. A quartet of “gardeners” introduces each act.Wearing leather aprons and sunglasses but looking as if they have never touched soil, they set the tone and guide the action. Like the cubic trees, their arms move in geometrical shapes and rhythms. With hands alternating between fists and limp wrists, The Nineties | 113 they embody both warrior and hairdresser, dancing to chilling sounds (ticking and trickling) by GoranVejvoda that leave traces of unease on the Mozart that follows. Preljocaj brings an edginess to Mozart’s phrasing by breaking the lines of the dancers’ bodies. The dancers have fun in the first act, both men and women wearing the same period costumes by Hervé Pierre—flared waistcoats, leggings to the knees, and pilgrim shoes. After elaborate seduction rituals, they tear around the stage in a wild game of musical chairs. Later the women wear doll-like dresses over huge crinolines. In a daft, wafting sequence, each one falls to the floor, deflating like a marshmallow beneath its burnt crisp. In another scene the women, in fetching underclothes and bare feet, wander into the “forest,” each finding her own cage-tree. The men crawl in on all fours, obedient dogs or prowling bears, heralding the power of the women and promising an animal sensuality. The star couple, Elisabeth Maurin and Manuel Legris, dance a wrenchingly ambivalent duet. He touches her and turns away; she slips away and he turns back, ardently caressing the empty space where she’s been. Maurin is distrustful, hurting with desire. In the opening of the last act, the gardeners (maybe they are therapists now) tend to her desires, lifting and swirling her through her dreams. Finally, Maurin and Legris melt into each other again and again, finding ecstatic moments in their new intimacy. Le Parc is carefully crafted and inventively staged. The Opéra dancers bring out its humor and daring beautifully, sustaining Preljocaj’s jagged magic throughout. ...