Spectacularly disappointing
Giannandrea Poesio
Mikhailovsky Ballet London Coliseum
It is somewhat refreshing that the 2008 summer ballet season in London is not monopolised by either the Bolshoi or the Kirov/Mariinsky ballet companies as it has been for the past few years. The presence of two rarely seen formations, such as the Mikhailovsky Ballet and the National Ballet of China, has caused a nice stir in the sleepy world of ballet, and flocks of international balletomanes have converged on London.
I am not sure that opening the former’s season with a new production of Spartacus was a good idea, though. Spartacus is to Russian ballet what Aida is to 19th-century Italian opera: brassy, spectacular, colossal, often edging between ultimate spectacle and a pure explosion of truly bad taste. The ballet, popularised by the 1968 version choreographed by Yuri Grigorovich for the Bolshoi Ballet and filmed in 1976, is, in a nutshell, a sword-and-sandal B movie in pointe shoes. It relies on a large deployment of characters and on a fine display of female breasts squeezed into skimpy pseudo-Roman attires, bulging biceps and, in the Mikhailovsky new version, a great deal of fashionably waxed male buttocks and thighs as well.
In this new version by George Kovtun, Khachaturian’s 1954 score includes an active and almost constant participation of singing chorus and soloists, whose presence enhances greatly the operatic feel hinted at above. Like Aida, and its renowned productions in the Arena at Verona complete with horses and elephants, this production should have also had a live tiger walking around, but it seems that the animal, seen on Russian stages, did not make it to London.
Yet the major problem about this Spartacus is not, in my view, the excessively over-the-top quality of the whole, but rather the new choreographic and dramaturgic approach to this quintessentially Soviet work. Originally permeated by not so subtle Soviet propaganda, the ballet drew upon the political ideology of the time. The new version dispenses with all that, trying to focus more on pure story-telling. Alas, the story is not a strong one, and its choreographic narration, devoid of any political metaphor, slips too frequently into the ridiculous — someone should have taken more care of the dance movements of the singing chorus, who danced in the Roman orgy scene as though they were moving to an ABBA song. The often uninventive choreography, in which traces of almost every ballet from the Russian repertoire are to be found, does not enrich the psychological palette of the main characters either. It is also true that the handsome Denis Matvienko lacks the stereotypical beefiness required by the main part, as well as technical flashiness. Similarly, Irina Perren, as his beloved, took little or no care in portraying the inner turmoil of the ‘poor’ oppressed woman.
Interestingly, neither artist managed to shine in a completely different context, that of the Romantic ballet Giselle, a few nights later. Perren’s portrayal of the weak-hearted, 1841 heroine was anything but memorable, and so was that of Demetvienko as her philandering lover. I must admit that this was one of the worst performances of Giselle I have ever seen, with no respect whatsoever for style, history and tradition.
It is a pity, however, that history and tradition formed the backbone of the last programme presented by the Mikhailovsky in London. A pity because their composite bill, almost exclusively based on 19th century works from the golden era of the Imperial Russian Ballet repertoire, was performed only once as a farewell item, whereas it could have been a much better visiting card than the Spartacus they opened with. Petipa’s 1896 La Halte de Cavalerie is twee and a bit prissy, but it provides a unique insight into what the great ballet master was up to when he was not creating classics such as Sleeping Beauty or Swan Lake. The ballet, which has long been a warhorse of the Mikhailovsky Ballet — known in the Soviet and immediately post-Soviet eras as the Ballet of the Maly Theatre — elicited welldeserved applause and laughter.
Applause also saluted the endless series of duets and ‘party numbers’ performed in the second part of the almost three-hourlong programme, as well as at the inevitable divertissement from Paquita, in the third and final part of the evening, another display of pure balletic bravura. Yet those who could see beyond the flashy and pseudo-flashy tricks the dancers continuously resorted to remained severely disappointed by the lack of stylistic consistency that informed the whole programme — something balletgoers of my generation would have never expected from a Russian company. Let’s hope that the National Ballet of China, due to open before this article is published, will provide less disappointment.
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