Adapting the Moderns in London
2017; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 10; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/thr.2017.0116
ISSN1939-9774
Autores Tópico(s)Theatre and Performance Studies
ResumoAdapting the Moderns in London Jay Rogoff (bio) For several decades, new ballets have mostly pursued expressiveness through the relationship between movement and music, the legacy of the modernist credo of stripping each art to essentials. Traditionally, though, dance meant narrative, and while some story ballets used original libretti, [End Page 617] many others have drawn on any of a number of sources: fairy tales (The Sleeping Beauty), classical myth (Sylvia), Shakespeare's plays (Romeo and Juliet), other classic literary works (Don Quixote), Bible stories (Prodigal Son), even works of visual art (La Fille Mal Gardée). Even contemporary ballet choreographers who have rediscovered narrative have, for the most part, adapted the literature of previous centuries, such as Christopher Wheeldon, whose Alice in Wonderland and The Winter's Tale, both for the Royal Ballet, have enjoyed great popular and critical success. More rarely, modernist or postmodernist choreographers base ballets on works that are themselves modernist, posing a set of new challenges. How can dance, relying on the visual vocabulary of gesture and the aural accompaniment of music, convey the psychological life, with its thoughts and perceptions, that undergirds so much modernist literature? Despite its illusions of feeling, dance can't present consciousness with the precision language permits in works by James Joyce or Virginia Woolf. Can dance adapt experimental literary works by using its intrinsic balletic devices? Last winter the London season brought two bold attempts to do so. At the Barbican, under the aegis of the Royal Ballet, Venezuelan-born choreographer Javier De Frutos staged Philip Glass's 1996 chamber opera-ballet, Les Enfants Terribles, adapted from Jean Cocteau's 1929 novel and Jean-Pierre Melville's 1950 film with Cocteau's screenplay, while at Covent Garden the Royal revived resident choreographer Wayne McGregor's 2015 Woolf Works, a three-act ballet inspired by three Virginia Woolf novels. De Frutos's Enfants fully integrates Glass's music and Cocteau's text with the choreography. Siblings Lise and Paul inhabit a private, imaginary world in their shared bedroom, made all the more reclusive when Paul becomes an invalid after Dargelos, a schoolmate he adores, hits him with a rock-filled snowball. When their mother dies, Lise and Paul's near-incestuous games intensify, witnessed by Gérard, their friend and confidant. Lise becomes a fashion model and befriends Agathe, who joins the household. She looks remarkably like Dargelos, and Paul falls in love with her. Lise discovers Paul's feelings and jealously intercepts his love letter to Agathe, then manipulates Agathe and Gérard into marrying each other. In despair, Paul takes poison, and as he lies dying, Lise shoots herself. Glass, drawing his libretto from Cocteau's screenplay, makes the material even more hermetic by excising supporting characters, especially the mother and Lise's handsome, jet-setting fiancé, killed in an auto wreck (we see him only in projected videos, created by Tal Rosner). If cinema opens out, the opera does all it can to hem in, distilling the material to five characters, sung in this production by four members of the Royal Opera's Young Artists Program: soprano Jennifer Davis as Lise, baritone Gyula Nagy as Paul, tenor Paul Curievici as Gérard, and mezzo Emily Edmonds doubling Dargelos and Agathe. Glass's score, for three pianos (Robert Clark, James Hendry, and Kate Shipway), employs his trademark circuitous ostinatos, loops, and riffs, to reinforce the claustrophobic atmosphere. The sung melodies alternately float above or surge through, as if the characters' souls were attempting to escape. [End Page 618] In the original 1996 production, choreographer Susan Mitchell used four dancers, each paired with one of the singers to give each character a voice and a body. For his new production, De Frutos has expanded the cast to four men and four women, half of them Royal Ballet members, the other half modern dancers. The larger complement permits a combination of balletic virtuosity, especially embodied by Royal principals Zenaida Yanowsky and Edward Watson, with modern expressiveness, most expertly conveyed by Clemmie Sveaas and Thomasin Gülgeç (the cast also includes Royal Ballet members Kristin McNally and Thomas Whitehead, and contemporary dancers Gemma Nixon and Jonathan Goddard, all of them essential...
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