Svetlana Zakharova in Modanse at the Coliseum, December 3
Svetlana Zakharova as Gabrielle Chanel (photo: Jack Devant)
Svetlana Zakharova is the prima ballerina of the Bolshoi Ballet and the artistic director of MuzArts, the producer of this double bill, Modanse. The program includes two works — Mauro Bigonzetti’s Come Un Respiro (‘Like a Breath’) and Yuri Possokhov’s Gabrielle Chanel — in which Zakharova is the star accompanied by two male principals, two male leading soloists and fourteen artists of the Bolshoi Ballet.
For Zakharova to present herself in a context that focuses the spotlight uniquely on her talents is in keeping with a culture of celebrity. When the Bolshoi first came to London in 1956 its undisputed star was Galina Ulanova but her artistry was subsumed in the ballets in which she appeared — Romeo and Juliet, Swan Lake, The Fountain of Bakhchisarai and Giselle; by all accounts her identity was not separate from the roles she played. The current double bill turns this notion of the star inside out; in both works Zakharova appears as herself. Bigonzetti’s Come Un Respiro eschews character for an abstract study of articulate lines and shapes — both of which suit Zakharova’s outstanding plastic ability — and while Possokhov offers Zakharova the opportunity to inhabit the life of the iconic Chanel, she fails, by her own admission, to take it.
Come Un Respiro takes the breathless beauty of well-trained dancer’s bodies as the starting point of a physical puzzle that manipulates the classical lexicon into unconventional shapes and demonstrates, with a knowing sense of wit and playful eroticism, how such manipulations of the body affect its emotional expression. The program describes the work as ‘a modern reflection of the aesthetics of the Baroque period’; it rides on a recording of Handel’s Suites for Keyboard and is enhanced by the costumes of Helena de Medeiros. The men are bare chested in tights, and the women have stylish bodices with a baroque curlicue confection around their waists. Their arms and legs are laid bare like steely tendrils of an exotic plant with beautifully curved tips that can extend endlessly into languid shapes, hinge, cantilever or wrap themselves enticingly around their partners. Bigonzetti seems to love this show of sex more than he loves the pure pleasure of movement; his choreography too often manipulates shapes in place (with the exception of variations for Zakharova and Jacopo Tissi who refreshingly expand their shapes in space) that runs counter to the current of the keyboard suites. The effect of Come Un Respiro is overwhelmingly visual to the detriment of choreographic flow.
When she was researching the subject of Possokhov’s new ballet, Zakharova visited Chanel’s apartment at 30, rue de Cambon in Paris. She writes that it was not what she expected to find; the Byzantine luxury of the furnishings confused her. In looking for Chanel, ‘at some point I started to lose her’, she continues. ‘I tried to find at least some similarity, but the more I sank into her image, the clearer I realized that there was nothing in common between us. And that thought freed me, unchained me, and gave me the freedom to invent my own Chanel…’ For Zakharova and Possokhov it is apparently immaterial in the creation of Gabrielle Chanel that the central character is irredeemably conflated with the prima ballerina of the Bolshoi Ballet. There is no further need for biographical depth; Alexey Frandetti as librettist and director guides us through a timeline of events in Chanel’s early life that Possokhov uses as choreographic set pieces for his trio of principal characters: Chanel and two of her early, wealthy lovers, Étienne Balsan and the elegant Englishman, Arthur (Boy) Capel. While the Chanel-designed costumes are beautifully styled period reproductions, and Maria Tregubova’s sets and Ilya Starilov’s video projections make creative reference to contemporary taste, Ilya Demutsky’s score seems less concerned with finding flavours of French period music than in painting a contemporary portrait of the central character. Choreographically, Zhakarova’s two duets with Tissi as Boy Capel are the highlights but Possokhov tends to default to a traditional treatment of overwrought emotions. Boy Capel’s death in a car accident is perhaps the nadir of imagination, combining a grainy video projection of a car driving at speed along a narrow coastal road, stage lights momentarily blinding the driver (and audience) and a climax of Tissi performing a double tour to the ground not unlike Albrecht in Giselle. We do not learn very much in this sumptuous work about Chanel, but that is not its purpose; it’s about the legend, and as Chanel famously said, ‘Legend is the consecration of celebrity.’
San Francisco Ballet: Programme C, Sadler’s Wells, September 19
If this was the one performance of San Francisco Ballet you were able to see, you would have missed some of the better works in the repertoire, but you would have felt the surge of approval for the quality of dancing, especially for the female principals. Of course there weren’t any in Beaux by Mark Morris because it was a cast of men only, but Maria Kochetkova in Yuri Possokhov’s Classical Symphony, Yuan Yuan Tan in Possokhov’s Raku and the trio of Vanessa Zahorian, Sarah Van Patten and Kochetkova again in Christopher Wheeldon’s Within the Golden Hour all received rapturous applause for their performances. Kochetkova’s partner in Classical Symphony, Hansuke Yamamoto, was also singled out. It was applause for the dancing rather than applause for the dance. This was perhaps the weakest programme the company presented and not even Wheeldon could raise its choreographic temperature. I wonder if this was not one programme too many.
Economics may have something to do with this. San Francisco Ballet is a large company, and the cost of bringing over the dancers (seventy-seven dancers’ portraits grace the printed program) plus crew and administrative staff must be considerable. For it to come to London at all has to make economic sense for Sadler’s Wells and for the company, and a third programme may have been deemed necessary to whet the audience appetite sufficiently for the run. But performing ten works in nine performances over a stretch of ten days with two days preparation and one day off is a tough challenge, the brunt of which is taken by the dancers. It is wonderful they receive their due recognition, but there was one injury last night (Pierre-François Vilanoba), an unfortunate symptom of such a full-on schedule. Hopefully there will be no other incidents.
By weak programme, I mean the works did not add, individually or collectively, to the image of the company that the other two programmes had already provided. Mark Morris’s Beaux was the only all-male work in the tour repertoire, and it is Mark Morris, but his celebrated musicality has always seemed to bob on the surface of the music rather than swim with it in the manner of Jiri Kylian, James Kudelka or Christopher Wheeldon, for example. Apart from showing off the male dancers to full advantage in Isaac Mizrahi costumes, cross-gender dancing and showing the obverse of what men normally do (especially in this company), Beaux does not have, to my mind, a lot to recommend it. What men normally do, however, goes to the other extreme in Possokhov’s Classical Symphony, to the score of the same name by Sergei Prokofiev. Possokhov, who is the company’s current choreographer-in-residence, brings his Bolshoi bravura to the men (Hansuke Yamamoto opens with a double tour to a deep plié), but showers so much technique on his dancers that the choreography has a prickly relationship with the music, though it gives his principal couples a chance to shine. In Raku, to a score by Shinji Eshima, Possokhov’s Russian proclivity for melodrama overpowers the Japanese sensibility for restraint. The story is loosely based on the burning of the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto in 1950 by a deranged acolyte, to which has been added a parallel story of love and loss, jealousy and betrayal. Both strands of the story are set in an earlier, samurai period, replete with inexcusably wooden swords. Yuan Yuan Tan is the exquisite Japanese noblewoman, and her samurai husband who dies in an offstage battle and whose ashes are ceremonially returned and scattered over the stage by his distraught wife is the unfortunate Damian Smith. Pascal Molat is suitably nefarious with his shaven head and black costume as the evil acolyte, who is cast as both philanderer and arsonist. It’s all a bit exaggerated, and Possokhov’s treatment robs the plot of any real drama. The exquisite Tan is thus left to fulfill a dramatic role that really has little credibility or traction and for which her exquisite line and dramatic hair pulling cannot compensate. Eshima’s music, Mark Zappone’s costumes and Alexander V. Nichols’ lighting and set design were right on the mark, so it is a shame the whole idea doesn’t gel.
I was expecting the evening’s last offering, Christopher Wheeldon’s Within the Golden Hour, to raise my spirits, but I fear Wheeldon, in choosing the minimalist music of Ezio Bosso, found himself with insufficient height and depth to carve out his characteristically deep creative line. As always, Wheeldon makes the music visible through rhythms and patterns, but very quickly Bosso’s music proves less and less appealing (as did some of the solo violin playing), resulting in a rather low-key, minimal work. Wheeldon’s cast is exemplary, with Luke Ingham replacing the injured Pierre-François Vilanoba, but this was not Wheeldon’s, nor the company’s golden hour.
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