Thursday 19 November 2015

Poetry in Motion

This week's highlight -- one of the highlights of the entire fall culture season for me -- is the Canadian premiere of the National Ballet of Canada's newest production:  The Winter's Tale, derived from the late Shakespeare play.

This full-length new work comes from the same creative team as the wildly successful Alice's Adventures in Wonderland:  choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, composer Joby Talbot, and designer Bob Crowley.  The similarity stops right there.

Alice is wildly dynamic, like its source material: fast-paced, even frantic at times, hilariously absurd, and brilliantly costumed.  The Winter's Tale owes its very different tone to its very different source material.

This play is one of a quartet of late plays by Shakespeare sometimes called the "romances":  The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, Pericles, and The Tempest.  Only the last-named is at all well-known.  All four share some common thematic material.  Each one features tales of people who are lost and then rediscovered.  Each one has its innocent character who must become acquainted with the wider world.  Each one revolves around some terrible wrong or injury maliciously done by one character to another, and the process by which the injury is set right again usually involves some sort of magical or divine intervention.  Each play ends with a scene of recovery and reconciliation, a scene in which the mystical tone is well to the forefront.  In current modern usage, I'm tempted to call these the "karma plays" because of these common thematic threads that weave them all together.

From this brief synopsis, it's not surprising to find that the play takes a very poetic approach to the subject.  The artists creating this ballet have wisely done the same.  The result is involving, gripping, thought-provoking, and does indeed rise to the purest form of poetry in motion -- especially in the final scene, a near-miracle of emotion conveyed through dance.

One of the difficulties of the play is the disjunct nature of the script: four dark and dramatic acts set in the kingdom of Sicilia frame one much lighter and more comical act taking place in the kingdom of Bohemia.  The scenario of this ballet has succeeded, with a little rewriting of the story, in linking the two kingdoms more firmly together and thus integrating the entire main plot line.

The settings for Sicilia have a formality, rigidity and sterility that reflects the emotional coldness of that kingdom.  The dominant colours are monochrome -- whites and greys.  Rectangular pillared archways move in and out, statues appear in different positions, a staircase has a solid block-like banister, and everything is plain to the point of dreariness.

Bohemia, by contrast, is a kingdom bubbling with life and energy, and its setting naturally matches that quality.  The curtain rises on a marvellous "tree of life" taking up three quarters of the upstage wall.  It's such a spectacular sight that the audience instantly burst into applause, and no wonder.  Poised high on lacy interwoven roots with air space clearly visible between them, the tree looks gentle and delicate and yet possesses great strength as people climb it on ladders, sit on the roots, even step inside the gap in the trunk.  The entire tree is coloured in the most vivid greens, colours that appear almost greener than green under the lights.  What a wonderful metaphor for life itself, in all its fullness!  The costumes in this act capture an appropriately peasant look, with earth tones predominating, although brighter colours appear too.

A key visual effect is a series of projected backdrops which provide the sky for each scene.  In Sicilia the sky is normally a dull mass of clouds.  Bohemia's sky is brighter, more colourful, more lifelike.  This is no accident.  A front scrim projection of a sailing ship at sea is used to great effect for the two voyages which link these disparate kingdoms together.

Joby Talbot's score for this complex story is vivid and colourful, often lacking the structural strength that informed his Alice score, but very effectively supporting the action and the stage pictures all the same -- and in some scenes contributing heavily to the emotional atmosphere.  In that respect it resembles the best of film music.

The stakes for Christopher Wheeldon, already set high in Alice, are raised still further here.  His choreography is rooted in classicism, yet consists as often as not of steps, lifts and turns that derive from modern dance.  The fusion of the two into a single rich choreographic language is critical to the success of this piece.  It gives the dancers the power to express the full spectrum of human emotion, even at its rawest, while still maintaining the poise which reminds the audience that this story is, after all, still a fable and should be examined as such for the meaning beneath its surface.

Some of the most spectacular choreography of the entire ballet comes during Act II, the Bohemian act.  The first and third acts, by contrast, are dominated by the characters of the story.  These are the Sicilian acts.  A short prologue introduces us to two young princes who grow up as the best of friends.  When grown to manhood, they become the kings of the two kingdoms.  A brief but telling segment shows the wedding of Leontes of Sicilia and Hermione, with the stylized gestures they each make to the other taking the place of more conventional balletic gestures to the ring finger and heart.

In the first act, Leontes becomes convinced that Hermione has borne two children to his good friend, Polixenes of Bohemia.  The moment when this horrible jealousy first touches him is tellingly underlined by a switch of the music from stylized harmonious tones to grinding dissonances.  Leontes (portrayed by Piotr Stanczyk) dances a jealousy solo which is gripping in its hard-edged, enraged quality.  Hermione (Hannah Fischer) pleads with him but is banished and Leontes tries to stab Polixenes (Harrison James).  So great does his rage become that his son Mammilius drops dead and Hermione -- after giving birth to a daughter -- also dies of grief.  Leontes orders the baby girl to be left by the seaside to die or live, as the case may be. 

In the play, the mistress of the household, Paulina, begins to rage at Leontes for what he has done.  The appropriate physical equivalent comes here when Paulina beats on Leontes with her fists until he collapses in despair on the ground.  Xiao Nan Yu was already powerful as Paulina in this scene, but there was much more to come.

Paulina's husband, Antigonus, is given the duty of taking away the baby princess.  He sails with her to Bohemia, there leaves her on the beach in a basket, and then is pursued to his death ("Exit, pursued by a bear" is the infamous and laconic stage direction).  The almost magical appearance of the bear at this point was not the least of the gripping visual images of the ballet and the music underscoring it was also gripping and intense.

The Bohemian act, as already described, is a vivid picture of springtime and the first coming of love.  The infant princess has been raised by a shepherd and his son, played by Etienne Lavigne and Dylan Tedaldi.  Tedaldi was very effective in the comical caperings of the young shepherd, often leading the corps de ballet alongside a shepherdess danced by Jordana Daumec.  This couple sets the light, playful tone of the entire second act, a tone sustained by the generally energetic -- and occasionally clumsily comical -- choreography.

Indeed, this act really belongs to the corps de ballet, lock, stock and barrel.  There's an onstage banda playing on traditional instruments, and the music incorporates earthy rhythms that demand to be danced.  The corps have a whole series of wonderful folk-dance styled pieces in this act.  The music is frequently shot through with added and dropped beats.  I have it from an authoritative source (my nephew Robert Stephen, who dances in the company) that the dancers are doing a lot of counting in their heads and it's no wonder!  I'm sure the orchestra musicians are too -- but the game is definitely worth the candle, as the whole vivid act pulsates with life and energy and growth and generation.

This is where we meet the young princess, now called Perdita (Jillian Vanstone), who has fallen in love with the son of Polixenes, Florizel (Naoya Ebe).  In the theatre these are considered plum roles for rising young actors, but here they are danced by two principal dancers in the fullness of their artistic maturity.  Vanstone and Ebe made a fine partnership, convincingly portraying the youth and lighthearted high spirits of first love.  Their energetic dancing was as delightful as the lyricism of their slow pas de deux.  Vanstone has always been good at playing under her age (her Alice a notable example) but this is the first time I've ever seen Ebe loosen up and grow into a role this believably.  Only for one or two brief moments was I aware that there were dancers before us executing complex steps.  Wonderful work from both!

Harrison James convincingly portrayed the rage of Polixenes at discovering his son on the point of marrying a low-bred shepherd girl.  Edgy, yes, but also noticeably different from the abandoned jealousy previously shown by Leontes.  In a few brief seconds, James told us everything we needed to know about the differences between the two kings -- a telling moment of characterization indeed.

The final act seems at first blush to be hurrying to the conclusion of the story.  The mourning ritual of Paulina and Leontes is emotionally intense in slow motion.  Here above all, Xiao Nan Yu gave 110% of herself in some the most powerful dancing of the entire work.  Her sad yet lyrical solo certainly held me rapt with attention under the spell she cast.  Truly a remarkable performance.

The arrival of Perdita and Florizel, Leontes' recognition that Florizel looks like his lost friend Polixenes, Paulina's recognition of the green emerald around Perdita's neck which proves her Leontes' daughter, the arrival of Polixenes and his reconciliation with Leontes -- all this passes quickly and without much chance to register. 

But the emotional climax comes when Paulina unveils a new statue of Hermione -- and the statue comes to life.  In a heart-tugging reminiscence, Hermione repeats the stylized gestures made at their marriage, and then takes Leontes by the hands and leads him through the ritual as well.  The following pas de deux of love reborn and trust restored between Hermione and Leontes is the true emotional climax of the ballet.  Here, Fischer and Stanczyk amplified and extended the rapt, dignified quality of Yu's solo a few minutes earlier with stunning grace and emotional force.

My one beef has to do not with the performance itself, but with the description given in the programme and in Ballet Master Lindsay Fischer's pre-show talk.  In both cases, we were told that Hermione was concealed for 16 years until Leontes came to his senses -- whereupon she posed like a statue for that final scene.

But the play doesn't tell us that.  As Hermione returns to life, Paulina simply says that she has done this without resorting to the dark powers.  The text is ambiguous on what has actually happened, very cleverly so -- and I am convinced this is deliberate.  Whether in fact Paulina has used magic or not is left to the audience to decide, and the stage production I saw was content to leave it there.

It's a pity that the choreographer decided to shut off the possibility of some magical element so definitely.  In a fable, why not admit magic?  That little "what if..?" underlines the crucial need for balance to be fully restored to the lives of the central characters in the story -- the karma, if you like.  More's the pity that Wheeldon chose not to allow that idea, for it weakens the emotional impact of that final scene.

This magnificent new full-length ballet is truly a landmark in the development of contemporary story ballet, and will certainly repeat in coming seasons.  I for one will be looking forward to that, and to seeing this marvellous creation danced again with new and different casts adding their own depths and dimensions to the piece.

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