Katharine Kanter
Inscrit le: 19 Jan 2004
Messages: 1477
Localisation: Paris
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 Posté le: Ven Déc 10, 2004 1:24 pm Sujet du message: "Quaternaire" |
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Junior Ballet Contemporain et Classique du CNSM
Spectacle de fin d’année du samedi 4 au mercredi 15 décembre
Works by Waehner, Bart, Decina and Armitage
To tell the truth, I attended the evening’s event solely because the CNSM had commissioned a new, twenty-minute piece for the students from M. Jean-Guillaume Bart, étoile at the Paris Opera. The latter’s “Javotte”, danced at Garnier in 2003 by M. Josua Hoffalt and that Muse to choreography Mlle. Laura Hecquet, had piqued one’s curiosity to see fresh work by M. Bart.
Bird of ill omen, on the programme distributed to the public, appears a photograph presenting the young students in the worst possible light (in the Armitage piece ?). Taste prevents one from describing it here.
The first work on the programme, by the Junior Ballet Contemporain, was Le Miroir Brisé (The Cracked Looking-Glass) by Karin Waehner, a German expressionist who was a disciple of Mary Wigman. I’ve no time for the Wigman crowd, and cannot be bothered to waste paper and ink on their squiggles. Wigman’s world outlook has been more than adequately discussed in Laure Guilbert’s study “Danser avec le IIIème Reich”.
On to Quaternaire, this time by the Junior Ballet Classique.
This is an ambitious work, strictly in the classical idiom, to Rachmaninoff’s second Suite for two pianos (Op. 17), and that would need to be seen more than once. Proof, yet again, and as though proof were needed, that without backdrop, without silks and satins, without electronic amplification, without a huge orchestra, fancy lighting and the expenditure of hundreds of thousands of Euros, the classical music and classical dance suffice unto themselves to hold an audience’s attention.
M. Bart states on the programme notes that he began to choreograph because he “felt the need to express his own vision of what the music calls forth”. Has he succeeded in doing that here, or, like most allegedly “classical” choreographers, does he simply rely upon the music like wall-paper, to waft round a Muzak-to-shop-by mood ? Well, my own sentiment, and bearing in mind that I’d never heard the Rachmaninoff suite before, is that he has succeeded. There are a number of moments where the steps take on a certain inevitable quality in relation to the score, in other words, had one attempted to choreograph that passage oneself, one feels one would have done something very like that. In music, the rhythmic, the melodic and the underlying structure call up definite affects; the problem being how to get across both to the dancers (these are yet students) and to the public, something of that multiplicity, rather than simply dance on the beat, or – as Georges Balanchine very often does, I’m sorry to say – one beat, one step. M. Bart has resisted all temptation of literalness.
In Quaternaire, for the men he has designed passages rich in steps, some very pretty allegro work in intriguing step-combinations, but I was less taken with his steps for the woman, and with the pas de deux. In the soli for the women, one began to overdose on developpés and some cloyingly-pretty pointe work, and in the pas de deux, rather than letting both the man and the woman to dance actual dance steps in counter-point, we dissolved in something rather more conventional.
Now, speaking generally about the pas de deux, and not at all in reference to M. Bart’s Quaternaire, I think we’ve gone as far as ever we could or should, with this Goleizovski business. Not for a moment would I suggest that the way forward should be still more dangerous, complex and savage tossing and throwing of the woman about. Enough of that with MacMillan et al. ! Back injuries amongst the men have become so serious and so prevalent, that I think we should throw in the towel, and get back to actual paired dance steps as one sees in the final section of the Peasant pas de deux, or the final section of the Blue Bird pas de deux. One of the reasons that we have got ourselves bogged down into the Goleizovski quagmire is that most choreographers today cannot read a score and do not give a fig about the music. So they take Jane, throw her up onto Tarzan’s aching shoulder, and hav’em run about for 163 bars of music. Saves thinking ! Saves inventing steps !
M. Bart CAN read a score, and he is, plainly, a thinker. So might one suggest that he re-work the pas de deux sections of this otherwise most rewarding piece ?
After reading the programme notes for the piece by Paco Decina and Karole Armitage (another woman for whom this writer has no time whatsoever), I decided to call it a day after M. Bart’s piece. Why disrupt one’s thoughts on the latter’s worthwhile invention, by watching classical dance students tangle themselves into knots ? The Armitage programme notes speak of “Kung Fu, Voguing, Free Style, Catwalk, Capoeira, mod dance....” ? Every weekend, behind the CNSM in the Parc de la Villette, the youth from the surrounding neighbourhoods do all that, better, and at no cost to the taxpayer.
Lastly, to get people’s dander up, and although I am sure that M. Daniel Agésilas, the School’s Director, is a thoroughly delightful man, this writer is like many others rather concerned about the drift in the CNSM.
Twenty years ago, the CNSM was a school of classical dance as reputed as the Paris Opera School. Indeed, many of its alumni joined the latter’s troupe and went on to become soloists, even étoiles. However, over the past decade or so, one senses somewhere, somehow, that we are being sucked along with the Zeitgeist”, or as the French say, seuls les poissons morts vont avec le courant. The classical section is become a poor relative to the modern, the classical students are expected to be “multi-purpose”– and you know what THAT means ! - and overall, the classical students at the CNSM live and work in an environment ruled by the outlook of Pierre Boulez (the very architecture of the school’s buildings seem to be a kind of living mausoleum to Boulez), and his world of electronic and synthetic music. Beethoven and his chums are tucked away in an area known as “Musique Ancienne”. Ancient music to me means music from the Homeric or suchlike epochs of which we know little, but that just shows to go yer how wrong one can be !
Does one see the effects of this on stage ? Yes, one does, despite the CNSM’s classical dance faculty, that includes some of the most dedicated and brilliant elements in the country, such as M. Cyrill Athanasoff. One sees it in the slightly-depressive stance of the young men, the head and neck bobbing unsupported, one sees it in the port de bras, that bear the imprint of jazz dance and musicals. For example, in the jetés entrelacés, the connecting steps were taken with absolutely ramrod straight and totally unclassical port de bras. Nor is the stage manner of these youths and maids strictly classical. As one can be 100% certain that neither M. Athanassoff nor his colleagues would teach them that, they are picking it up “from the environment”, carrying it in like a scraggly wet cat from their “modern”, or “jazz”, or Capoeira or who knows what class, into the classical dance, where it becomes jarringly unclassical.
Let the classical dancer be classical, and let people who want to do something else, do it. But let’s not muddy the waters, slop about, and end up neither fish nor fowl.
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