Throw
Tolstoy From the Train
Eifman
Ballet of St. Petersburg
“Anna Karenina”
New York City Center
May 26, 2005
by
Nancy Dalva
copyright
©2005 by Nancy Dalva
All
good ballets are alike. Each bad ballet is bad in its own way. Or ways.
For instance, the ballet Boris Eifman calls “Anna Karenina”
is vulgar, meretricious, rapacious, and lewd, a low-brow spectacle cloaked
in high brow pretensions. Rather than reminding the viewer of Tolstoy,
the author of a novel of the same title, or even of Freud, with whom Eifman
seems to confuse him (he notes, in the program, Anna’s “psychoerotic
essence"), the work is reminiscent of the MacMillan of “Manon”
(though that louche ballet is a paragon of delicacy next to this one)
tempered with the subtle elegance of the World Wide Wrestling Federation’s
genteel pageantry.
I admit I was vexed with the choreographer going into this, for I have
not forgiven him for his portrayal of Tanaquil LeClerq in his ballet about—or
I should say, “about”—George Balanchine, made for the
New York City ballet for the Balanchine centenary. But I resolved to emulate
the open mindedness of Tolstoy’s concert-going Levin.
He, you will recall, is actually a character in the novel, although not
in the ballet, where neither he nor his wife Kitty appears (sparing us
a childbirth scene). There are, however, some characters in the ballet
I could not quite place—for instance, two corps of leather queens
and leather goons for whom I searched the novel’s pages in vain
upon returning home after the performance. But there, in Part Seven, Chapter
V (which would be p. 684 of the recent Pevear/Volokhonsky translation,
in the Penguin Classics edition), Levin attends a matinee. “Both
pieces were new and in the new spirit,” Tolstoy writes, “and
Levin wanted to form his own opinion of them....[he] resolved to listen
as closely and conscientiously as possible. He tried not to get distracted
and spoil his impression....” Me, too, and it wasn’t easy.
Eifman chooses to set the opening scene of his ballet to the same music
Balanchine chose for “Serenade,” the first ballet he made
in America, and well enough known to me that I could run it in my mind
while watching the Eifman—or to be more precise, I couldn’t
not run it. At the opening, a little boy is playing with a train. (The
whole thing takes place, basically, in a set that is variations on a train
station. A ballroom that sees frequent service is an inversion of it,
and the whole thing reeks of foretelling and doom and sexual imagery unknown
to readers of the novel, who actually do not know in advance that Anna
is going to kill herself, as neither does she.) A beautiful woman in a
gorgeous velvet cocoon coat parts her legs and opens her arms, and drops
the coat at the exact moment the girls in “Serenade” snap
out of parallel position.
I
doubt this is a coincidence. Eifman is smart, and Eifman is talented.
He is also an extrovert, without any seeming self-knowledge, or indeed
a sense of humor. (He is not, for instance, self-knowing in the way Liberace
was, though certainly given to flash.) It probably hasn’t occurred
to him that but for politeness, one could fall out one’s seat laughing
at some of his excesses, like the sex scene where Anna engages erotically
with her bedframe, or the one where she drinks a potion like Alice in
Wonderland and has a bizarre hallucination in which, seemingly naked (nude
unitard, and, let’s not forget, toe shoes),she dances a section
of something not unlike Jerome Robbins’s “The Cage,”
if Robbins had included a chorus of the damned (also naked). After this,
she gets carried off stage, stiff as a board.
These scenes occur after Anna, who in the Eifman ballet is married to
the mob—or at any rate, to a domineering older man who looks like
a mobster—has fallen in love with a younger man, a real hottie,
who likes to paint her when not attending parties in variously hued tailcoats.
Although he never scorns her that I could see, and her ominous spouse
still seems eager to have her in his household and underwrite her lavish
wardrobe, she quickly—and the second act goes pretty fast—falls
into an inexplicable decline, ending with her suicide, but not before
she despairs in a down spot, and some swirling snow.
There are two good scenes in the ballet. The first occurs when Anna and
her lover, of course named Vronsky, are seen in their separate rooms,
spotlighted on either side of the stage. Unfortunately, he is on a couch
and she is on her bed and they are wracked with desire, but that does
not diminish the impact of their moving, though apart, in exact synchrony.
Then they dance out of their rooms and into the middle of the stage, and
the moment is totally destroyed. The other really good scene is—I
am not making this up—the scene in which the company depicts the
train under which—or actually, into the midst of which—Anna
is going to throw herself. For one thing, the score—a patchwork
of Tchaikovsky, who like Tolstoy is conveniently long dead and thus unable
to protest, or for that matter, sue—gives way to train sounds. Chugga-chugga,
chugga-chugga.
To this inexorable sound, Eifman choreographs, very cleverly indeed, a
little Constructivist ballet, quite forceful and, for a change, formal.
Movement, and not a lot of expression layered on to it and into it and
under it and over it, inspires a visceral response. Drama, not melodrama.
Then Anna jumps from the train station platform, and the next thing you
know, her corpse is being wheeled center stage on a luggage trolley. Curtain.
And mad applause. Just, in fact, what Levin heard that day he went to
the concert. “He was in utter perplexity when the piece ended,”
writes Tolstoy, “ and felt great fatigue from such strained but
in no way rewarded attention. Loud applause came from all sides....Wishing
to explain his perplexity by means of other people’s impressions,
Levin began to walk about, looking for connoisseurs....”
These were not hard to come by at City Center, where one Eifman devotee,
in from the suburbs, told me “This is what ballet needs. Ballet
needs passion.” What could one say? To complain about this ballet
is like complaining that “Oliver” distorts Charles Dickens,
or that “Les Miz” misconstrues Victor Hugo, or that “Cats”
is a misreading of T.S. Eliot, or that “The Phantom of the Opera”—well,
you get the idea, though at least those entertainments don’t pretend
to be close readings. To take Eifman’s “Anna Karenina”
seriously is to give it too much credit. It isn’t appalling, it
is merely atrocious, and successful. The dancers, by the way, are very
glamorous, and very good at dancing Eifman. They chew up the scenery.
He chewed up a novel.
Volume 3,
No. 21
May 30, 2005
copyright
©2005
Nancy Dalva
www.danceviewtimes.com
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