The Paris Opera Ballet is at Lincoln Center’s Koch Theatre, and what a sight they are. P.O.B. is the oldest ballet company in the world. Its origins go back to 1669, and the dancers look as though they have been practicing their dégagés since then. The corps is usually in exact unison, which is not a circus trick but a way of making the group a symbol, rather than just a bunch of people. Furthermore, all the dancers’ style is the same. Unlike most other ballet companies, the P.O.B. rarely hires anyone not trained in its school. Consequently, the dancers don’t just do what is physically the same dégagé; they do it with the same tone. And, as befits a company founded under Louis XIV, they are fantastically elegant. This makes them look artificial and snooty to some people, especially in the United States, where George Balanchine taught audiences to value a less lacquered manner. But I think it’s a joy, a French joy.
It works best when something is working against it, and that, I think, is the secret of P.O.B.’s “Giselle.” “Giselle,” which was made—for this company—in 1816, is one of the oldest ballets in existence, and wholly representative of its time and place: French Romanticism. In it, Count Albrecht woos an artless country maiden, Giselle. But, given the social difference between them, their love is not to be. As Albrecht does not tell Giselle, he is betrothed to another woman, Bathilde, the daughter of a prince. When Giselle discovers this, she dies of sorrow, whereupon she becomes one of the Wilis, girl-ghosts who kill young men. Albrecht encounters her spirit in the forest, and, in memory of their love, she saves him from the other Wilis. Then he loses her—and his hopes of happiness—forever.
Because “Giselle” is such an icon, we often get mausoleum-type performances. Everyone is trying to live up to the ballet. But curiously—or perhaps logically—P.O.B., which more or less owns “Giselle,” does not go in for this. Their production was appropriately mythic. You have never seen such Wilis—doom in pink shoes. (And the ensemble was huge: twenty-four women, as opposed, for example, to American Ballet Theatre’s eighteen.) On the other hand, the show was full of persuasive acting. When Albrecht is blowing kisses to Giselle in Act One, he actually makes smooching sounds. As the curtain goes up Act Two, where Albrecht will meet Giselle’s ghost in the forest, there are men playing craps in the mist, by lantern-light. You can hear the dice knocking around in the cup. Nothing is presented as “This is the great ‘Giselle.’” It is all real.
Accordingly, it is nuanced. In many productions, Myrtha, the queen of the Wilis, is a sort of Cruella de Vil. Here she was gentler and therefore, in a way, more frightening. She enters in what seems a five-minute passage of bourrée (the gliding step), travelling sideways to the middle of the stage and then all the way downstage slowly, like a summer stream, or a virus. Giselle, too, was softer. Her rising from her grave and appearing to Albrecht is often performed like something out of a medieval morality play, but in the Parisian version there was still warmth—even companionship, strangely—between the two of them. They’re sad about what happened, but also, it seems, grateful that the passion, with all that heat and noise, is behind them. The Giselle I saw was the sweet, down-to-earth Isabelle Ciaravola; she really did embody the poetic idea of the Country Girl. My favorite, however, was the Myrtha, Marie-Agnès Gillot. She made death look inviting.
As always with the Paris Opera Ballet, something has to be said about the costumes. The Wilis’ long white tutus flowed like cream. (If the French can get fabric like that, why can’t we?) Bathilde, Albrecht’s aristocratic fiancée, had a pearl-studded snood. Incidentally, it was wonderful how this titled girl, in her actions, demonstrated the social-class rules of the ballet. When Giselle, discovering that her Albrecht is actually Bathilde’s Albrecht, goes into her famous mad scene, Bathilde turns to her father and says, in movement, “Do we have to watch this?” They exit.
All the virtues of P.O.B.’s production of this nineteenth-century ballet were missing from the company’s mixed bill of twentieth-century ballets. There were three offerings: “Suite en Blanc” (1943), by Serge Lifar, who was the artistic director of the troupe for most of the years between the thirties and the fifties; “L’Arlésienne” (1974), by Roland Petit; and “Boléro” (1961), by Maurice Béjart. Petit and Béjart were part of the artistic left wing of the post-Second World War period. Instead of seeking berths at P.O.B., they went off and founded their own companies, making ballets with flexed feet and rock music and sex. In Béjart’s “Boléro,” a woman (or, on some nights, a man) dances, mostly in place, on a tabletop, repeating her movements as relentlessly as Ravel’s famous composition, to which the ballet is set, cycles its ostinato. Meanwhile, sixteen well-toned, shirtless men, flanking the table on three sides, slowly move in on her, looking as though they might eat her. The piece is sort of a cross between “The Rite of Spring” and “Suddenly Last Summer.”
As for Petit’s “L’Arlésienne,” based on an 1872 play by Alphonse Daudet, it, like “Boléro,” is set to a beloved score, Bizet’s incidental music for Daudet’s play, and, again like “Boléro,” it is primitivist in spirit. We are shown a sort of village—a corps of eight women and eight men, against a backdrop painted with a van Gogh-ish landscape—and, in front, what seems to be a betrothed couple, Frederi and Vivette. But Frederi doesn’t want Vivette any more. We aren’t told why, but in view of his habit of gazing intently into the distance, I think we’re supposed to assume that he (like Albrecht) has the Romantic problem of wanting something more than his society has offered him. In any case, he pushes Vivette away; he drops her on the floor. She can’t believe what is happening. She hangs on his neck, she kisses him, she removes his shirt and sort of smells it. You begin by sympathizing with her, but soon, shamefully, you start to agree with him. Will she never go away? Finally, Frederi takes matters into his own hands and throws himself out a window. Before this, the couple and the corps combine their ballet steps with a lot of would-be rustic—or, more to the point, anti-balletic—maneuvers: hip wiggles, shoulder rolls, bag-of-potatoes lifts.
Like “Boléro,” this piece seemed daring when it was premièred, but neither looks especially innovative now. In fact, even at their premières, their shocks were not so shocking. There had been plenty of sex in ballet before “Boléro”—consider Nijinsky’s 1912 “Afternoon of a Faun,” complete with orgasm. As for flexed feet and unlyrical lifts, Balanchine and others had been using them for years. (Petit may have got them from Balanchine.) And if we had seen these ballets’ épatismes before, boy, did we see them after. Rape became ho-hum on Kenneth MacMillan’s stage, not to speak of what it is in modern dance: Paul Taylor, Pina Bausch.
No, ironically, the one ballet on the mixed bill that looked experimental was the oldest one and, in its origins, the most conservative: “Suite en Blanc” by Lifar, the director of the company that Petit and Béjart rebelled against. The base of the ballet is a suite of emphatically classical numbers, with the women all in white tutus and everybody looking very presentational, even mannered. (Lifar, a famous dancer as well as a choreographer, was a notoriously affected performer.) Into this museum piece, Lifar inserted slung hips, spastic-looking arms, weird hops, even the Charleston, if I am not mistaken. These peculiarities are still peculiar, which doesn’t mean that they are interesting. Think of a three-tiered wedding cake with some turnips stuck in the icing. I should add, though, that, at this point in the season, “Suite en Blanc” is the clearest demonstration of the company’s—especially the women’s—technical power.
The mixed bill’s run is over; “Giselle” will be repeated tonight. Then comes Pina Bausch’s “Orpheus and Eurydice” (1975), a dancers-plus-singers version of Gluck’s opera, which will play Friday through Sunday, completing the company’s New York season. I haven’t seen “Orpheus and Eurydice”—this is its first showing in the United States—but it is worth going to if only because it is the oldest piece we will ever have seen by Bausch.
Photograph by Stephanie Berger.
