by Leigh Witchel
“Les Noces” is a bucket-list ballet that very few folks get to check off their bucket list. Beyond the brilliance of Stravinsky’s score for four pianos, vocals and chorus and percussion, Bronislava Nijinska’s masterwork is one of the most pictorially perfect ballets of the 20th century. There are so many indelible images with nothing extraneous. Everything – choreography, music and design – comes together into a whole.
It’s also a logistical nightmare. Somehow, you need to get four pianos into the theater. If they’re in the pit and you want another orchestral work during the evening, you have to move them. As Adam Sklute, the company’s director, opined in an informal conversation, the complexities of getting the work on the stage are the biggest obstacles to seeing it more.
A hundred years ago when “Les Noces” made its debut, Balanchine also fled the newly-created Soviet Union, going with a group of dancers on a tour to Germany, and not returning home. Nijinska had left Russia permanently in 1911, in solidarity with her brother Vaslav Nijinsky’s departure from the Maryinsky.
The Ballets Russes provided a haven for Russian artists, but both “Les Noces” and Nijinsky’s masterwork, “The Rite of Spring” were nostalgic and anti-nostalgic at once. Two beautifully stylized rituals, both of fertility, one involving human sacrifice, gave an idealized, yet stark view of a harsh land.
Ballet West opted not to sing the work in Russian, but in the English translation by D. Millar Craig. The words weren’t central; in some ways like James Joyce or Charles Ives, you’re eavesdropping on snippets from all over the room. The phrases don’t rhyme either, they only need to scan properly. There’s one disconnect if you listen closely: the lyrics mention the bride’s golden tresses. In the ballet, like the costumes, they’ve always been brown.
“Les Noces” is so complex it takes time to see the work’s intricacy. The steps seem reductive. When you can finally take in more than the monumental tableaux and look at the actual choreography, it’s profound in its restraint and concentration. The women’s pointe work seems like nothing more at first glance than turned-in, nervous, pawing. But it’s not; the women quickly turn out, then turn in, then pick up each foot. The arms are curved like scythes, ending in fists or flat palms.
The company’s men and women, working separately and finally together, took the ballet seriously. You could see them trying to absorb it all the first show. There was a big jump in synchronization after just one performance.
There are moments in “Les Noces” that have influenced art for a century. The bride standing still, her friends at her sides, her braids trailing across the stage. The women creating a totem pole of faces staring impassively at us. The thrilling hunched circle of jumping men that seems to continue even after the lights fade, perhaps forever. Unison, split stage and counterpoint are all used brilliantly, with incredible restraint and hermetic focus.
The bride’s mother is a non-dancing role, but Katlyn Addison has a magnificent stage face. She could telegraph the mother’s concern at the end of the third tableau without a lot of time or acting. The mass of the final tableau was amplified by Nijinska dividing the stage into two planes. Below, a celebration with Jenna Rae Herrera and Jordan Veit leading squadrons separated by sex with short, insistent phrases. They moved in and out of counterpoint, repeated and danced in parallel to the score as well as directly to it. Above, on a raised platform the bridal party sat. The parents did not move. Periodically the bride and groom slowly walked across the stage. It might have been painted on lacquer.
Having watched the ballet from center and off to the side, the greatest impact is viewing it from dead on. “Les Noces” is a picture in motion. Flattening your view to imagine it in 2D rather than 3D paradoxically gained a dimension. Major props to Jared Oaks for his conducting and the musicians and singers in the pit. The only problem with watching from above, marveling at what they were navigating, is it forced you to divide your attention with what was happening on stage. If only the sound had more mass, but the acoustics in the Capital Theater seemed muffled and only one piano among the four was a grand. “Les Noces” should jangle.
“Les Noces” stands at the confluence of the agricultural and mechanical age. The footwork and gestures, stiff bows, hands going doll-like to the brow, are robotic and machine-like. The effort and exertion on the stage is very human. “Bless me, my father, my mother, bless me, your child who proudly goes against the strong wall of stone to break it down.”
I remember talking with classmates when they were dancing the ballet almost four decades ago. They knew its historical importance, but hated the experience of dancing it. It’s neither dance-y nor simple; they were constantly counting. Without being able to see it, it seems like far more effort than it’s worth. Hopefully the company can do “Les Noces” again so the dancers can get it all the way under their skin and lay claim to a masterpiece.
With four pianos to squeeze in, “Les Noces” was the elephant in the orchestra pit. Nothing could be rearranged quickly enough to do another work with a different pit configuration. “In the Night” used one of the pianos without needing to move it, “Light Rain” was danced to a recording.
Strangely, even with a backdrop of a starry, open sky, the Capital Theater seemed less infinite during “In the Night” than in “Les Noces.” The space for the first pas de deux for Amy Potter and Hadriel Diniz seemed hemmed in and at a walking pace, the first duet seemed stilted. The dance didn’t start to really make sense until things sped up. By the second night, things went much smoother; the two were using the phrase before to prepare for the next and not getting stuck.
In the second duet, Emily Adams and Adrian Fry also dealt with a glitch that showed up opening night: a partnered turn that ended half a revolution too soon. But they also figured that out by the next performance. The three duets have very different moods, and they approached theirs as more presentational; she was dancing with him but looking at us. They seemed to be the couple who live in the mansion across town. But they also found a spark in the restraint.
Often now at New York City Ballet, the third duet comes close to being played for laughs: the couple that takes themselves and their drama way too seriously and fights with one another because the make-up sex is so good.
Addison played her part completely without irony, which might have made it more ironic. She was genuinely upset at Brian Waldrep leaving, genuinely asking for forgiveness and went through all the mental steps in her decision to go and lay herself at his feet. Addison and Waldrep didn’t have first night issues; They got a tricky slide and walkover down pat and the final drop also went well.
An interesting detail you could miss at Lincoln Center: In the coda, when all three couples come together as a return to social conventions, the men all greeted each other with the same small polite bow that is usually done.
Not the woman here. Each had a different mood, and Addison had a story; she told her partner to wait before greeting the women.
Yes, Gerald Arpino’s “Light Rain” can be crass. No, it’s not a bad closer. The opening was very Arpino: a clump of folks in Lycra, the men bare-chested, everyone spritzed with glitter.
Made in 1981, the dance uses a recorded score, South Asian music transposed to western instruments by Douglas Adamz and Russ Gauthier with a glittery Orientalism. Arpino wasn’t making specific references; Adams was turned upside down in a split by two men and slowly moved manipulated by them. She was less a specific figure and more generically exotic.
She and Diniz did the big sexy duet, sliding, stretching to a repeating ground phrase. Adams dove past a 180° penchée. She has gorgeous banana feet that she’d pop into an arched échappé, then shiver back in. Arpino loved his pretzel women with long, beautiful legs. Diniz picked her up under her armpits and slowly spun her all the way round the stage. It had the feel of a cabaret act; the man bare-chested, the woman on display. He moved and manipulated her, dragging Adams to and fro on the stage in a split, but was he her puppet master or her assistant?
The duet ended with Diniz on the floor and Adams lying on top of him. He split his legs, then on the last note put his hands on the ground, and . . . well . . . Oh Jerry. Not the most subtle metaphor.
Arpino often ended his ballets in a shower of fireworks, and that’s what happened here. Everyone raced in and out, punctuated by a few solos of folks doing their best moves. Fry had a period a few years back when he looked at sea, but he’s in fighting shape again, kicking his face in grand battements. Soloist David Huffmire moved beautifully throughout, traveling sideways in a sinuous shimmy with such an individual quality it became a calling card.
“Light Rain” ended without overstaying its welcome, in the same clump it started with. How the ballet got from moment to moment might have felt as arbitrary in pattern as cars on a highway, but like them, it also sped to its destination. Structurally, it’s goulash, but hey, goulash can be tasty. And if Arpino was no formalist, (and let’s face it, no tastemaker) he could pace a dance number and please an audience in a way Nijinska didn’t bother to. Things went by before you knew it, and there were no, uh, limp, moments. “Light Rain” moved at exactly the rate the audience wanted it to.
copyright © 2023 by Leigh Witchel
“Les Noces,” “In the Night,” “Light Rain” – Ballet West
Janet Quinney Lawson Capital Theatre, Salt Lake City, UT
April 14-5, 2023
Cover: Dominic Ballard (center) and artists of Ballet West in “Les Noces.” Photo © Beau Pearson.
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