Why I hate Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake: A Rant

(Rant Warning:  very strong opinions ahead.)

So, Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake is one of those "Visionary Re-imaginings" of a much beloved classic.  Considering how much I love Béjart's Sacre du Printemps, that does not mean I will automatically hate it. I'm picky about "reimaginings" and believe you need to respect the source material to do it right, but I don't dismiss them out of hand.

A good while ago, I spent way too long on YouTube comparing versions of the Danse des petits cygnes pas de quatre.   From what I remember, aside from squeeing over the precision in the Paris Opera Ballet video, I started pondering the different presentations of gender in the Trocks version and in the Matthew Bourne version.   I found a lovely quote from the artistic director of the Trocks, talking about how they weren't mimicking femininity in dressing in tutus and dancing en pointe, but that they were expressing variations of masculinity.

"The company is not trying actually to emulate females. It's a company of fifteen male dancers who are, and however you want to define the word "male".  But , the male dancer in Ballet is really known for an aggressive attack, and that's how we try to approach these roles. So, just because we're in a tutu doesn't mean we're not male.  It doesn't mean that we're not expressing different kinds of masculinity.  And that masculinity can be a very wide range." 
--Tory Dobrin, artistic director of the Trocks, interviewed in a radio interview in Brisbane in 2002. http://www.trockadero.org/from-the-director.html

  I just generally love the Trocks to begin with, but I found this statement really insightful in its commentary on gender portrayal in interaction with the traditions of Ballet and of Camp.

  In the meantime, I wasn't as impressed with, the Matthew Bourne version, because the complete lack of straight lines pretty much came off like a stereotyped "limp wrist" expression of gay masculinity.  There's nothing inherently wrong with that expression of masculinity, but the fact that what is basically a comedy drag act (that is also a group of excellent dancers) seemed to have a far more nuanced portrayal of gender in dance kind of bugged me.

So more recently, I saw the whole ballet on TV.  My opinion stands.  The Trocks are a much better, less reductive examination of gender in ballet form.  When it comes down to it, Bourne, in (re)creating a gay Swan Lake, creates a misogynist narrative with serious "mother issues" (come on! stereotypical overpowering, controlling mother much?) plus a gauche and annoying -- and then dead -- rejected girlfriend figure.  Yay for reductive stereotypes.  And Bourne's choreography all too often epitomizes "limp wrists". In this ballet at least, Bourne seems constitutionally incapable of allowing straight lines into his choreography.  Some of the lines are beautiful, but can we have variation please?  One of these things without the other might be acceptable (again, there's nothing inherently wrong with a limp wrist), but the overall effect is not positive for anyone.  Particularly when you add in the Prince character having a mental breakdown.  There's a tragic love story, and there's a tragic love story that makes homosexuality an impossible to survive tragedy, with Mommy Dearest as the villain and a dead disposable girlfriend to top things off.

And now to get to what really pissed me off . . . well two things:

1.)  From watching his Swan Lake, Bourne doesn't respect ballet.  I'm not saying I expected him to work in the mode of classical ballet when "re-imagining" one of the most famous ballets of all time -- it's pretty hard to escape Petipa -- but Bourne chose to create a ballet within a ballet section in which he had a wonderful opportunity to create a tribute that would highlight his difference from the overshadowing tradition, and which could have been a lovely commentary on the different styles and the development of the art form.  Instead, Bourne gave the most hideously ugly broad caricature of ballet that I've seen on stage.

Another funny thing:  One of the reasons that 20th century ballet moved away from the story ballet into more abstract "pure" dance --  we dumped the traditional sequences where the dancing stops for stylized mimed explanations of the plot because it stopped the dancing and ballet should be able to stand on its own.  (What was Balanchine's quote?  "The important thing in ballet is the movement itself, as it is sound which is important in a symphony. A ballet may contain a story, but the visual spectacle, not the story, is the essential element.")  This Swan Lake, however, had less actual dancing than the "traditional" versions.  It had lots of walking and exaggerated "acting" that took up a lot more time than the traditional mimed bits of convention.  And you know what?  The walking and mimed "acting" were boring.  I want dancing.

2.)  Which brings me to what pissed me off the most:  Bourne doesn't respect Tchaikovsky.

Let me back up to the beginning, and the basic history / common "everyone knows" wisdom about Swan Lake that I learned I don't know when.  The first production of Swan Lake  was an absolute flop.  Tchaikovsky composed it quickly on commission, but (as I learned it) the choreography was done independently of the music and didn't suit the powerful, emotive score that Tchaikovsky composed at all.  One of the things that made the Petipa / Ivanov revival such a success was the musicality of Petipa's choreography.  It's iconic because it fits so perfectly.

A lot of Bourne's choreography pretty much ignores the music.  He only pays attention to dynamic build or the sense of line or quality of movement that the music gives when it suits him.  Instead, he actually has his dancers shouting "HOORAH!" and laughing over the music. Obviously, his concept is more important than the synergy of beautiful sound and beautiful movement telling a powerful story. Um, no.  Just no.  This kind of carry on pretty much destroyed any chance of me just getting to squee over a very strong cast of male corps de ballet dancers, which should always be a pleasure to watch, even if the women don't get much of a chance to dance at all.

. . . and I think that's about that.  To say more I'd have to watch it again.  There were bits I liked and absolutely beautiful moments, but they kind of got overwhelmed by my general irritation.

Fabulous Beast's "Rian" and Donka: A Letter to Chekhov

Rian and Donka: a Letter to Chekhov

(previously posted on keestone.livejournal.com)

This evening, I got a standby ticket to see Fabulous Beast Dance Company's Rian. I'm glad I didn't drag anyone with me. 

Now don't get me wrong, Fabulous Beast is a very good ensemble of dancers.  I have no gripes with their technique or artistry.  And there were some excellent pieces within the concert as a whole.  But I think the concept behind Rian was fundamentally flawed, it lacked anything other than the concept to unify it, it was static, disconnected, and at least 45 minutes too long.  I got bored.  And if I of all people get bored watching dance, that's a bad sign.

I suspect I'm a bit synaesthetic in my physical response to the shape of music. It's probably why I'm so passionate about dance.  When I listen to music I love, I love to close my eyes and watch it take shape, watch it dance.  (I nearly had a fit when I saw the Fantasia 2000 "Rhapsody in Blue" set-piece. Can't they hear that's a curved line?!?)  It's also probably why I so vehemently hate some music. I mean, I can't listen to distorted electric guitar because it makes me physically ill, and I don't feel like I'm exaggerating when I talk about certain repetitive heavy beats being the equivalent of hitting me in the head with a baseball bat over and over.  So when it comes to dance, I get pissy when the the movement doesn't fit with the sound.  I got pissy this evening -- not at every piece, but enough to make me less appreciative of the very good dancing.  The concept of the piece was generally flawed in this.  Rian  mixed Modern dance with Irish Trad. music.  Occasionally it worked --  when the music wasn't actually Trad. music for instance, or in some slower, Sean-nos style songs (one of which was beautifully choreographed with three women mostly moving very little except for their arms, while one woman moved more) -- but mostly it didn't.  There's a very good visual equivalent of the "diddly-idly" jigs and reels, and that's the stiff, percussive movement of traditional Irish step dancing.  Not that I want a repeat of Riverdance for a concert performance of dance to Irish music, but the curved, smooth, breath-movements paired with the jigs and reels made me feel like they got the wrong place and the dancers should have been at a Jefferson Airplane concert at the Fillmore, but they somehow got plunked down in a trad. session while still hearing the psychedelic rock.   Except for that one point when I really really wanted the couple dancing to just break into a Lindy Hop, because they had the perfect swing and partnership for that even if the music had nothing to do with it.

So, I got pissy.  And then I got bored.  The choreography lacked dynamism. It was very much one level. The evening overall didn't have any structuring movement; it was just a concert, a bunch of songs thrown together.  For two hours.  Without intermission.  I started checking my watch about an hour in, but I had no idea when it was ever going to end because there was no build, no climax, just another song starting.  Some things might have worked better if they'd been before or after other things, but in any case there was entirely too much of the "music starts, one person starts a repetitive series of movement, another person runs up and joins in, wash, repeat.  As in, like half of the choreography was that.  Yawn!  And then there were a few absolutely beautiful moments, and I got pissy because the rest of it could have been of that caliber but it wasn't.

That's enough of that.

Last Saturday, was Donka: A Letter to Chekhov, which really only had tenuous connections to Chekhov but was beautiful, spectacular, and really enjoyable.  It basically mixed the kind of acrobatic performances you'd see in something like Cirque du Soleil with clowning (of the more traditional commedia-inspired action, not of the painted faces . . . although there were big shoes at one point), with some absolutely stunning set-pieces and shadow play.  Its only real flaw in my opinion, was that there was a bit too much talking, part of which was trying to a more clear connection to Chekhov. Just give me the pretties!

But here!  a video!




And that's it for now.

16 Possible Glimpses -- Marina Carr

(previously posted on keestone.livejournal.com)

So.  16 Possible Glimpses.  The first night of actual performances.  Not opening night, but the first preview performance of the world premiere, so there will probably be some changes still.  What do I think? As often happens with Marina Carr's plays, I come out thinking I really need to contemplate it more and wanting to see it another time before I can really say something meaningful.  There's always so much in them.  They're dense, in a good way.  Richly layered and highly symbolic, leaving me with a feeling of depth and power.  It's "a series of dialogues and domestic scenes" rather than a more traditionally written play with a linear plot and unified narrative, so it takes up until nearly the end for the shape of the play to reveal itself.  The first scenes and last scenes link and you come full circle.

16 Possible Glimpses has been 10 years in the works.  Beloved thinks it's the best Marina Carr play he's seen yet.  (I'd probably lean more towards Woman and Scarecrow for its sheer power and poetry. But, I think 16 Possible Glimpses would probably balance very well with Woman and Scarecrow as two sides of facing death.) It's definitely more accessible than some of her other work.  I mean, it's a Marina Carr play without incest and/or suicide.  It's gentler than most of her other plays.  It's beautiful, tender, and full of humour. and it's more clear than ever that she sees death as very much a part of life, not as an ending.  There is a soul-guide character in this play, like the Ghost Fancier in By the Bog of Cats or Scarecrow in Woman and Scarecrow, but Chekhov's Black Monk is even more clearly a friend.    It's very clear that she loves Chekhov, and that she sees him as a great soul.  That would have been obvious even if we hadn't attended a talk before the play in which she totally geeked out about Chekhov in interview.

Technically, it's very interesting.  In the pre-show talk, Carr made it very clear that the title is non-literal.  "Why 16 Possible Glimpses?  I like the number 16, I like the word possible, I like the word glimpses."   There aren't sixteen scenes, there aren't sixteen cast members, it was just a number she liked for the title. She focused a lot on the word "possible" as a reminder that she wasn't writing a literal biography either, but a response to "her" Anton Pavlovich Chekhov  (I like "her" Chekhov").  But the "16" and "Glimpses", I think, come into the technical side of things.  16 is a nice, large number for plurality, and what Carr and director Wayne Jordan have done is give you multiple visual perspectives using cameras projecting different angles of what is happening on stage on the backdrop and occasionally on a scrim in front of the action.  16 may not be literal, but we were definitely literally given multiple possible glimpses.  Sometimes it worked better than others, and some of the cut scenes were a bit distracting, but some of those will probably have been ironed out by the time previews ended.  Sometimes it was stunningly effective dramatically speaking.   On a bit of a tangent, there seem to be two emerging trends at the festival this year: site-specific theatre, and the use video projectors (blah blah blah multimedia experience).  I'm a little resistant to both, not because I think they're a bad thing, but currently they seem to be way too faddish. And like many things that are faddish or overused, they're often used to use them and not because they are the best technique for the desired effect.  And often, the logistics are just not thought out well enough and it distracts from the effect.  Here, though, the use of projected video really did seem integral, and it I think it added layers and depth to the overall experience.

The Lulu House - Dublin Theatre Festival 2011

(previously posted on keestone.livejournal.com)

The Dublin Theatre Festival has opened, and  my sister-in-law and I have seen our first of the season.  The Lulu House, featuring Lorcan Cranitch and Camille O'Sullivan, and directed by Selina Cartmell (who directed, among other things I've been blown away by, both Woman and Scarecrow and the production of Sweeney Todd we saw at The Gate).

It's on the more experimental side of things, since it's a site-specific, "immersive experience" that mixes acting, music, projected video, and installation.  It ranged all over the James Joyce House (The Dead), as we followed the actors from room to room for different acts.  A lot of it involved the two actors reenacting scenes from a film starring Louise Brooks while the same scenes were projected into the room, with the audience gradually coming to a deeper understanding of the circumstances that this was happening in.

So, The Lulu House is about voyeurism and the violence of obsession.  And as it's immersive theatre, it's trying to make you the audience feel complicit as a voyeur to a crime as one who stands and watches victimization, who is invited into the scene by a man who wants to show you his "presentation"about Louise Brooks.  You start in the sitting room on the ground floor, moving to the hallway, and thence to increasingly intimate and disturbing spaces and scenes, eventually ending up in the cellar (and then out the front door).

It was really well-performed, beautifully designed, and disturbingly creepy, and oh so close.  Unfortunately, it didn't quite work.  A couple of the problems were logistical.  There were too many audience members.  The "limited audience" was just plain not limited enough. It's not an immersive experience when you're distracted by trying to duck around shoulders to see what's going on, and getting stepped on is the wrong kind of immersive experience.  The other thing was getting us from room to room -- the actors had to do the herding as well as portraying their characters, and sometimes it stood out awkwardly, diminishing the intensity of emotion.  And, it was pretty emotionally intense when logistical problems weren't getting in the way, and as you figured out what was going on.Sis-in-law pointed out afterwards that there was actually a simple way to do this without confusing things:  a plant.  If they'd just had one "audience member" to go where we were supposed to go next, the rest of us would have followed like sheep no problem.  You wouldn't have had to have Cranitch's character in particular trying to call "Louise" on to come upstairs, etc.

Another thing was that I could see exactly why the episodes or acts were ordered the way they were ordered, but it ended up feeling a bit too contrived . . . a bit of a cop out.  Although, it did end up with one of the weirdest ways to end something I've ever experienced, as we all followed O'Sullivan's character out the front door, watched her cross the street and walk across the bridge into the distance . . . and then stood around not entirely sure if that was it, eventually deciding that we'd been told it was exactly an hour long, and it had been an hour so it must be over.

Anyhow, here's a blurb from the Theatre Festival's website:

"THE LULU HOUSE is inspired by George Pabst’s masterpiece Pandora’s Box,
the 1920’s silent film starring Louise Brooks, and German playwright
Frank Wedekind’s 19th century ‘Lulu’ plays.  This immersive experience
will take you on a shocking, thrilling and intoxicating journey
exploring how Lulu has eluded and seduced, spreading desire and
destruction wherever she goes and offers a unique opportunity to get up
close and personal with the amoral psyche of this seductive femme
fatale."

 I'm very glad I just went "Oh!  Selina Cartmell's directing that.  I want to see it!" and didn't bother reading the blurb too deeply until after seeing it . . . because that blurb is really misleading.  It's not about Lulu, it's about obsession with Lulu.  And psychotic obsession is not the same thing as "seduction".  That's what we call victim blaming.
It wasn't completely satisfactory, but I'm glad we went.

Le Sacre du Printemps -- The Polish National Ballet, Warsaw

Three different versions of The Rite of Spring -- a performance of Millicent Hodson's  reconstruction of Nijinsky's original choreography, a contemporary version by Emanuel Gat that premiered in 2004, and  Maurice Béjart's version that premiered in 1958.  The company, the Polish National Ballet, was excellent, and the programme was well conceived and fascinating.  It was inspiring to see, as well as extremely interesting.  The angular movement, the Primitivism, yeah.  The celebrated rioting at the premiere wasn't caused by the music, it was the choreography and design.   The Primitivst elements are very much of their era, but the movement seems very contemporary.  It was like I was both watching a piece of history, one of those moments where everything changed, and seeing how near we are to it..


Gat's revisioning was very interesting, but it didn't fully work.  The piece used only five dancers -- two men and three women.  The men were in tightly tailored shirts and trousers, the women in Little Black Dresses.  The set, rather than the lavish, pastel colored backdrop paintings, was plain with the stage mostly dark, lighting focused on a red rug on the middle of the stage.  The five dancers interwove with each other, in ballroom dance-inspired movement, changing partners in an updated, urban, "civilized" mating ritual.  It was ingenious at times, and sometimes the contrast of simple walking or sinuous movements with Stravinsky's rhythms gave an extra sinister level to the movement.  But, it didn't go beyond that and the concept ended up falling flat without a movement from the fertility ritual to the violence or any culmination.  There was no separation between the two acts, and the movement continued without any resolution.  Maybe that was the point --  that modern rituals are lacking in life-force -- but as much as I wanted the concept to work as a whole, it felt forced and too small.  Maybe adding dancers and building could have helped.  Again, though, the dancing was excellent.
(YouTube video is of Gat's choreography, not the production I saw.)

And then there was Béjart's version.  Unlike Gat's it took the themes and concepts in the original, abstracted them, and made them more universal.  Successfully.  And completely musically.  And it added more in the way of gender commentary.  The two acts were separated, with the first act all men, the second act women.  The tribal rituals of a society, in which solidarity and dominance are asserted by choosing a scapegoat who fails to completely fit in in the gender play, ostracizing them, and making sure that mating happens between approved members . . . yeah.  In the simple costumes of various colors (leotards for women, unitards for men, the scapegoats in white), it was clear that this isn't just "Primitive" ritual, this is the way society is still working today.  The same movements of human sacrifice to keep the tribe under control, with whatever reasons or beliefs behind that . . . and it worked so well with the music.  The only distraction from the work of art as a whole, was that the female scapegoat was so thin she was almost skeletal. And ye gods, seeing twenty-two excellent male dancers on stage together in choreography of that power and depth is something special.  From what I saw, the company focus less on "star" quality than on a troupe that works as a single body.  This may be due to the more ensemble nature of the works we saw rather than the company itself, but it seemed like everyone was soloist quality and everyone was on equal ground with little difference between corps and soloists other than who was dancing.

Marble by Marina Carr

(previously posted on keestone.livejournal.com)

 So today, we got to see the newest Marina Carr play at the Abbey Theatre . . . the world premiere of Marble.  I have said this before and I'll say it again, I truly do think that Marina Carr is the best living playwright writing in the English language.  I absolutely adore her work, and Woman and Scarecrow, which I saw last year, is one of the most powerful theatrical experiences I have ever had.  (I think it's a photo finish between Woman and Scarecrow , Floyd Collins, and the production of Mother Courage and her Children that I saw when I was sixteen.)

Marble is the first of Carr's plays I've seen that is urban in setting.  In a way, it's less violent than her earlier plays, but it is no less unforgiving, intense and essentially human.   If I were to try to give it a weird blurb, I'd say it's a strange cross between Woman and Scarecrow and A Doll's House with Yuppies.  Woman and Scarecrow was an intensely psychological, intensely symbolic play -- a divine play in many ways; Marble contains the same urges and similar themes, but juxtaposes them with the ordinary, the "rules and regulations" -- written and unwritten -- of everyday urban life with all its compromises and relationships between people --  Two businessmen, Art and Ben, who are old friends, and their respective wives Anne and Catherine.  Art and Catherine share a dream of making love in a room of marble, and the destructive power of the subconscious urges toward something more than their ordinary lives begins to take over conscious daytime life, with its everyday, regulated dying by degrees, its social roles and responsibilities and jealousy.  It echoes the still-modern themes of A Doll's House with the question of the individual and society; with the reminder of a parent's responsibility to their children; and the refrain that the world outside the family home and the safe if restrictive social structures is cold, unfriendly, and perhaps impossible to survive.  Yearning after something more destroys what is.

Carr displays herself and her language like a virtuoso in this play.  Her ever poetic, symbolist language sits almost strangely in the mouths of characters in quotidian grey suits and 'sophisticated house mom' slacks and heels.  The juxtaposition is a reminder that there could be more depth to life than Anne's regimented three glasses of wine before bed or Art's continual brandy and cigars after work -- that somewhere buried in them, there is something more to yearn after.    There are "catch it if you can" references to some of her earlier plays.  A conversation between Ben and Catherine about a play Catherine has bought tickets to dismisses what sounds awfully like Woman and Scarecrow:  "I forget the name of it . . . about the auld one dying" / 'Auld ones dying don't interest me.  Women who've stopped ovulating should die offstage.  Who cares?". . . , while at another point Anne is reading a French novel about "tasteful incest" which immediately made me think of Portia Coughlan (which does indeed deal with incest -- and suicide --  tastefully, though it is definitely not French). 

I came out of the play wanting to see it again as well as wanting to buy the script as soon as it is published.  Because, I feel there is much more in it than anyone would be able to catch the first time around.  Marble is an opaque symbol. 

Playing "why does s/he look familiar"? and other personal reactions to plays

(previously posted at keestone.livejournal.com)

About four years ago, I saw a wonderful production of Philadelphia Here I Come, which was excellent timing, since I was studying Brian Friel that semester.  I loved the play, but I found it somewhat derivative.  See, I absolutely love The Glass Menagerie, and I saw a great deal of Tennessee Williams' influence in Philadelphia Here I Come.

Today, I saw a wonderful production of The Glass Menagerie.  I almost laughed when the Gentleman Caller walked on stage, though.  It was Private Gar.


Speaking of laughter, this is the second seriously dramatic play I've seen at The Gate that the rest of the audience audience seemed to find much more funny than I did.  It's kind of weird to hear people laughing at moments that you find painful.  The other play that this happened in was Uncle Vanya.  Part of this was Brian Friel's translation, which I didn't particularly like.  It played some moments for broader humor rather than what I remembered as more cynical and fatalistic, and it seemed to be trying to make Uncle Vanya an Anglo-Irish Big House play.   It was one of the less satisfactory productions I saw during the Dublin Theatre Fetival.  It was still very good, mind.  Vanya and Sonia were both excellent.  But, I preferred the other translation I'd seen before, Yelena seemed to have wandered in from a Noel Coward play, and I found Astrov a wholly unlikable ass, where I'd previously found him the most sympathetic character.

Speaking of somewhat off characterization...  While the production of The Glass Menagerie I saw today was excellent and all the actors were wonderful, I felt that Laura was miscast.  A couple of the other people in the group I went with had the same thought . . . she wasn't fragile enough.  It was more than that though.  It's hard to express this . . . she was too extroverted.  Too expressive, almost.  (I suppose that it also didn't help that she looked like Wynona Rider.)  The actor was really really good, and she gave a beautiful performance, but it just didn't fit quite right.  It bugged me, and it was personal.  See, Laura is the first character I really, really touched.  I haven't played her in a full production, but I've played her in scenework, and I did do the scene with Jim in a student showcase.  It was a meaningful experience.  I've always identified a little too closely with Laura Wingfield.  (Amusingly enough, my knee seized up during the play, so I ended up limping out of the theatre at the end.)