by Leigh Witchel
Ballet West isn’t a Balanchine company – whatever that means at this point. It doesn’t need to be one to do the triple bill the company presented, which concentrated on early ballets of the Ballets Russes era. The opener was a rarity: Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer’s reconstruction of Balanchine’s 1925 production of “Le Chant du Rossignol” [Author’s note: To read my report about “Chant,” please see the December 2019 print issue of “Dancing Times”]. The other two works were more familiar: “Apollo” and “Prodigal Son,” both well staged by Colleen Neary.
Ballet West wasn’t able to mount Bauchant or Chanel’s designs for the Ballets Russes’ “Apollo,” but it did offer the superior 1957 setting that maintains the birth scene. The company fielded two good casts. There was both an Apollonian and a Dionysian lead. Adrian Fry is tall and lean; you might have expected a more classical performance from him, but Fry’s Apollo was young and wild, walking the line between classical and demi-caractère. He stumbled like a baby unsteady on his legs after he turned to spin off his swaddling, and came to the front of the stage, looking around confused. In a turn, instead of placing his arm en haut, he let his hand go over and then touch his head. It was not a position, but a gesture.
His Terpsichore, Sayaka Ohtaki, was all long angles and flexibility used to effect – at the end of their duet, the last backbend was really bent. Like Fry’s variation, their duet was about communication as well as shape. Ohtaki came to Fry and waited for him to notice her before she moved.
Calliope, Katie Crichlow, played it cool. The slumping in her variation was less from depression, more for display. Beckanne Sisk nailed four turns as she started Polyhymnia’s variation, (but there was music for three). And with that smile, you knew she was going to blab at the end. Neary’s staging was rhythmic; you could feel the bounce in the coda. Fry attacked the moment when he grabbed hands with the muses like horses pulling a chariot, handling them by bracing with his torso and looking away.
In the other cast, Sisk moved from Polyhymnia to Terpsichore to dance with her fiancé, Chase O’Connell. Unlike Fry, O’Connell took a more classical, Peter Martins-ish approach. He is 6’5” and a more manly, rather than boyish, Apollo was the path of least resistance. O’Connell is so long-limbed that the moment when he reached his hands away to close and open them like signals felt as far from his body as if they were satellites.
This cast also had a conversational feel to its dancing. Sisk gauged O’Connell’s reactions all through her variation; their dancing together was fluid. In her coda, she kept her leg low to play with the timing. As Polyhymnia, Chelsea Keefer was quick and bright; she made the variation feel like Amor’s in “Don Quixote.” Emily Neale’s Calliope was drawn with clear, clean movement: she controlled the grand rond de jambes that made up the variation, but she also knew the story.
“Prodigal Son” also had two good casts, a breakout role for a young soloist and a cap to a career for a senior one. Interestingly, they took a similar approach, and it worked for each. Hadriel Diniz and Christopher Sellars both played the Prodigal as young and inexperienced – at New York City Ballet the rebellion can get almost cosmic.
Diniz is tall and looks emotionally young; his encounter with the Drinking Companions might as well have been a visit to another planet. He had the power of youth when his leg flew round and round, as he turned in the air lifting it to the side.
Katlyn Addison’s Siren was a mix of elegant and crass; she strutted across the stage like a model on a runway, but let Diniz touch her breasts and pushed his head into her cleavage. When she threw Diniz from her later, he hit his head against the table. His reaction to being robbed and abandoned was simple and direct: embarrassment.
Even though Sellars is older, he looked innocent and green enough to take the same approach, but there was an erotic subtext. It’s there in most every staging (who is The Siren, after all?) but not always as clear on the part of the Prodigal. You could sense when he met Allison DeBona that Sellars was as excited as a kid taking his first trip to the city alone because he thought he was going to get laid. This was the first prostitute he had ever met, and he was an easy target.
DeBona’s Siren was a tough survivor, using her hips almost as a weapon as she made Sellars grab them. Even when she wasn’t looking right at her prey, she never lost sight of her objective. After she and her companions robbed him, she strutted out and divided up the loot, satisfied. And in her high-fashion moment, she beveled her foot before arching back to emulate the prow of a ship.
Despite the fine performances by the leads, the real stars of “Prodigal” were the men of the corps. A Drinking Companion is a role no one seems to want to do at NYCB. In Salt Lake, you have never seen so much stage business: galumphing about, pawing at The Siren as she parceled out the spoils. “Mine mine mine! Give me the jug! Give me the trumpet!” They were hell-bent on proving there are no small parts.
Both ballets were in good shape, and spoke to Neary’s abilities as a stager. Tiny details that seemed slightly different from current productions at NYCB became fascinating. In “Apollo,” during Calliope’s variation where she comes forward and “speaks,” at NYCB, Calliope slows down her arms coming away from her mouth as if declaiming. It’s as if her speech is trailing off. Neary’s staging had the arms speed up, almost as if she were babbling and realizing that stopped her. But the “text” of a ballet isn’t stone, it’s more like a cloud. The details aren’t fixed, but movable and porous. And were they actually differences or just your memory playing tricks on you?
Ballet West is a leggy company, so it isn’t the look that’s different than NYCB’s, it’s the attack, which is less punctuated. But that’s arguably only one kind of Balanchine style – a late one that continued to slowly morph after his death. There are Balanchine ballets that need to be within his style to make sense – particularly the abstract works. These early works, where Balanchine was still combining gymnastic influences with classical ballet, got strong performances in a non-Balanchine setting.
copyright © 2019 by Leigh Witchel
Balanchine’s Ballets Russes
“Le Chant du Rossignol,” “Apollo,” “Prodigal Son” – Ballet West
Janet Quinney Lawson Capital Theatre, Salt Lake City, UT
October 25-6, 2019
Cover: Hadriel Diniz in “Prodigal Son.” Photo © Beau Pearson.
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