by Leigh Witchel
Old-fashioned skills are a virtue, but they are old-fashioned. Lushly produced and more than three hours long (so costing a small fortune because of the Paris Opera’s overtime rules) Pierre Lacotte’s “Le Rouge et Le Noir” placed a complex story on the stage with clarity, and did it using classical ballet. That’s no mean feat. But though it told us the story, it didn’t make us feel it.
The ballet plowed through a complicated plot based on Stendhal’s 19th century picaresque saga of the rise and fall of a poor but ambitious young man, Julien Sorel, through his adventures in the military, the clergy and with love. Tracking Lacotte’s fidelity to Stendhal is a job for someone more familiar with the source material, but Lacotte adapted the novel into a ballet narrative with a lot of acting and a minimum of mime.
We met Sorel, danced by Florian Magnenet, sitting on a bench, reading in his family’s sawmill. His father ordered him to work; he fought with his brothers, and in came Julien’s protector throughout the novel, the Abbé Chélan. That was a lot of plot in a few seconds, and Lacotte dispatched it with the shorthand efficiency of a Roadrunner cartoon. It helped to read the synopsis.
Lacotte provided numerous group numbers for the corps de ballet; the next scene was the first of many: a dance of the townspeople. Not having seen the Paris Opera Ballet in a while, a large corps number showed that the company has taken steps in the right direction towards diversity.
Chélan appeared again but seemingly most of what he did was put his hands on Sorel’s shoulders. Portrayed by Yannick Bittencourt, Chélan was the most hamstrung character, whose emotions ranged all the way from concerned to fretful.
After a long set change, we found ourselves in front of a chateau, the home of the de Rênal family. Sorel was their tutor and gave a dancing lesson to the three young boys. Lacotte was being retro using that as an excuse, but it showed off what Paris does better than almost any other company: produces exquisitely technical dancers.
Lacotte also believes in the enchaînement. Madame de Rênal, Hannah O’Neill, did a variation that was all danse d’école: echappés and other detailed footwork, and pirouettes. Then it was Monsieur de Rênal’s turn, and Marc Moreau spun through multiple pirouettes slowly raising his arms or ending in tricky finishes. Moreau is a demi-caractère firecracker but this is Paris: he didn’t milk applause.
Where Moreau’s variation was all grand allegro and turns, Magnenet’s was all batterie. Forty and a long-time premier danseur, he is tall and elegant, but you could see hints of fatigue; he occasionally came off relevé down to a flat foot when the going got rough. Still, there were extenuating circumstances. He was onstage most of a three-hour-plus ballet and he already had to pull this production out of the fire. He jumped into the opening night for Mathieu Ganio, who was injured early in the performance. Magnenet finished it out and took on on several more.
Back to the garden party; everyone got to dance, including the maid, Élisa, played by sujet Naïs Duboscq, whose solo was all light pointe work. But trouble was afoot: Madame de Rênal dropped her napkin at lunch, Sorel returned it with a meaningful hand grasp. Élisa noticed, and expressed her anger and frustration in battements neatly falling to a kneel.
Not to be outdone, Madame de Rênal did chaînés to an impeccable double pirouette (fastidiously pure retiré positions have been trademarked by Paris), sank to her knees and wept. After the party, she danced a soliloquy with praying hands and tricky turns. For all the time the ballet gave to individual characters, it didn’t feel emotional. “Le Rouge et Le Noir” made heavy technical demands on the cast, and the dancers need more time with it to make the technique secondary to the narrative.
The ballet’s group dances felt retro, but so do the pas de deux – not in a bad way. You could sense Lacotte looking to MacMillan and Cranko; the pas de deux between the de Rênals, which is portrayed as a happy marriage, recalled Cranko’s duet for Tatiana and Prince Gremin. There were many times “Le Rouge et Le Noir” recalled “Onegin,” except that Lacotte is far more interested in group numbers than either Cranko or MacMillan, who anchored their narrative works with long duets.
More plot details poured in by telegraph and semaphore: Sorel raced in front of Élisa toward Madame de Rênal; in fury at this “rejection,” Élisa danced a solo stamping her feet and shaking her fist. Lacotte followed convention more than he forged it; there were plenty of drinking game conceits: Magnenet and O’Neill danced an “I’m not sure” duet that started with O’Neill still and uncertain, being lifted halfway up by Magnenet, as Juliet is in the MacMillan production (take a drink). Finally O’Neill yielded and Magnenet pressed her overhead neatly (another drink). She was still careful and kept reverting from passionate partnering to more decorous dancing.
In the scenes that followed, there were shades of Cranko, MacMillan and John Neumeier: In her bedroom, Madame de Rênal tried to push Sorel away and bourréed backwards in parallel fifth (drink!) She relented after her Tatiana moment, and the climax of the duet was a Juliet overhead press in a Manon bedroom. Magnenet and O’Neill almost lost their footing in a complicated promenade, and finished up in the floor roll from “La Dame aux Camélias” before jumping into bed.
Monsieur de Rênal was understandably peeved, and showed it by doing various double air jumps. Madame de Rênal had a Tatiana’s worth of hysteria but evaded this blow to her reputation, and the act ended with two drink’s worth of bourrées in parallel fifth.
That’s only Act 1. There’s more than two hours’ of plot left. Lacotte is an old lion of the company, but if POB gave him carte blanche, it did him no favors.
Act 2 began in a monastery with a dance of the priests, trios of men doing cross lifts in front of a big ol’ Jesus statue. Chélan clothed the reluctant Sorel in priest’s garb, inviting him to slip into something more clerical. The relationship between Chélan and Sorel hovered in an uncomfortably weird spot between holy and sexual. Chélan never abused his position, but he danced with and carried Sorel half naked an awful lot of the time. If that wasn’t commentary, it was odd. If it was commentary, Lacotte never really committed to it. We then met the evil and abusive Abbé Castanede in a section so jammed into lightning shorthand that it verged on funny. “PRAY! I throw you to the ground and crush you with my foot!”
Act 2 is always where the vision scene goes (drink). Madame de Rênal appeared to Sorel dressed in white and palest blue. Lacotte’s touch was that she was suspended upright on Sorel’s back, which was striking, but effortful. At the end, she once again bourréed out in parallel fifth. You may need more than one bottle for this drinking game.
The action plowed on, but the next major plot point was Sorel becoming a secretary to the Marquis de la Mole and having designs on his daughter Mathilde. Lacotte gave her character enough time to develop but also piled on so many technical feats that Léonore Baulac managed only one dimension to Mathilde: Bitch. At her first entry she directed servants to set up a moving stair so she could retrieve a book, then got wheeled off by them in an exquisite arabesque. Mathilde is a cousin to the Coquette in “La Sonnambula,” but seemed at that moment more like Belle in the Disney musical; if she grew up rich and spoiled rotten.
Of course there was a ball. If nothing else, the ballet was gorgeous to behold, with delicious black and white costumes for the corps. Mathilde abused her consort, then made faces at Sorel from jealousy. She was a caricature, peeved rather than with any dignity she might have had.
Somehow Mathilde was left alone with Sorel to dance something like the Act 1 balcony pas in “Romeo and Juliet.” Baulac put his arms around her and immediately got pressed overhead, then did fiendish double turns. If Magnenet timed it wrong, she would have smacked him. Everything she did was tricky and dangerous, requiring nerves of steel.
Act 3 began with another bedroom with Sorel and Mathilde. In many ways, it was similar to the one with Madame de Rênal, but that similarity was a contrast rather than an error. Sorel entered Mathilde’s bedroom brandishing a gun. Her reaction was Stone Cold Bitch: she simply took it from him and put it on a chair. And then they danced.
Their duet was more technical than passionate, and that made sense. Her virtuoso technique could be at the center of her characterization. She was rarely off balance. Sorel beat her legs together for her while carrying her in arabesque, later she stood, curled one foot decoratively and waited for him to press her overhead in a torch. Even though they also ended up in bed, Mathilde’s abandon was completely planned. The lights dimmed and brightened to indicate sunrise, and she had a change of heart, shrieking for him to GET OUT. She provoked a fight, which seemed to excite her. Like Siegfried to Odile, Sorel put his head on her chest in the closing pose.
His happiness and social rise was of course, short-lived. Élisa reappeared to plot with Castanede, who ran around doing double assemblés. Where Mathilde had a grain of her character in her virtuosity, double air turns did not tell us much about Castanede. But the creepy duet where he forced Madame de Rênal to write a letter denouncing Sorel, did.
There’s still plenty of Act 3 to go, so moving quickly to the denouement; the wedding got ruined, Sorel grabbed a gun again, but instead of shooting Élisa, shot Madame de Rênal in church. Her husband showed his distress by doing tour jetés and double saut de basques. Chélan came in like clockwork, and like clockwork, fell to his knees. Madame de Rênal in fact was not dead; at her behest, Chélan returned Sorel’s handkerchief to him in prison. But only after hauling him around again.
More cuckoo clock action. After their ambiguously gay duo, Chélan went out the prison door, and in came Madame de Rênal for the obligatory final regrets pas de deux. Things did get better. O’Neill started by taking rock solid balances in arabesque, but technique was subsumed into emotion and she fell to the ground and crawled to him. She managed to find the most development in her character, an ambivalence that gained detail as she went on. All pretenses got dropped, he begged her forgiveness and she forgave him. There were echoes of the Act 3 pas in “Onegin,” especially the promenades and rotations pitching low and coming up again. But finally, a heartfelt duet by two people who actually loved one another – we waited three hours for this.
The jailer took Sorel off to the guillotine. It looked as if there was going to be an onstage execution but propriety won out and there was a blackout. The women came on to mourn, first Élisa, then Mathilde and finally Madame de Rênal who fainted to end the ballet.
Like many story ballets when they are first staged, all you saw in “Le Rouge et Le Noir” was plot. It’s going to take time for the cast to fill in all the blanks and decide what’s happening beyond the steps. Some things will get fleshed out in performance; “Onegin” has a 50 year performance history and that’s helped it.
Characters also need to be fleshed out; at this point no one except Madame de Rênal is very likable. Élisa is petulant, Sorel is a scheming cad, Mathilde is a bitch. The moral center of the ballet, Chélan, is a cardboard cutout. And it’s strange to complain of too much dancing, but the ballet has a dance of the townspeople, a dance of the priests, a dance of the soldiers, a dance of the churchgoers, a dance of the busybodies . . . with more than three hours in the ballet and plenty of dancing even if edited, sections that don’t move the plot forward could be cut without being missed.
Despite the bloat in “Le Rouge et Le Noir,” it’s still heartening to see Lacotte’s genuine connection to the traditions, craft and history of ballet. Most of the ballet’s issues could be addressed with repeated performance and a stern hand in editing. Its worst sin is overkill. “Le Rouge et Le Noir” is about an hour too much of a good thing.
copyright © 2021 by Leigh Witchel
“Le Rouge et Le Noir” – Paris Opera Ballet
Palais Garnier, Paris
November 2, 2021
Cover: Florian Magnenet and Hannah O’Neill in “Le Rouge et Le Noir.” Photo credit © Svetlana Loboff.
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