Moon princess makes a rare landing
KYLIAN’S KAGUYAHIME gets an appropriately extravagant staging by Les Grands, with two markedly different takes on the title role
So what or who is Kaguyahime? For several months, billboards featuring the odd-sounding name have been plastered across downtown Montreal in what must be the longest teaser campaign in the history of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens. On Thursday, at last, the company will reveal Kaguyahime in Place des Arts’s biggest theatre, Salle Wilfrid Pelletier. It’s an appropriate venue for a work of grandiose design.
Kaguyahime (pronounced “kagu-ya-hee-muu”) is the name given to a beautiful moon princess whose appearance in a medieval Japanese village excites rival suitors, incites a war and stimulates both the emperor’s intervention and his lust. Ultimately, she spurns it all and returns to her lunar abode.
Les Grands seems to have a fondness for disenchanted visitors from other worlds. This year, the company staged Didy Veldman’s ballet version of a story about another extraterrestrial, The Little Prince, who decided that Earth’s squabbles and armed conflicts were not his cup of tea.
Les Grands artistic director Gradimir Pankov had hoped Kaguyahime could be the splashy opener to the company’s first season operating out of new downtown studios opposite Place des Arts. But one delay after another has pushed back the studios’ opening to early 2015. Pankov, though, is not one to wait.
“It’s very brave for Gradimir to take up this huge production — so difficult to put together and so expensive,” said Jiri Kylian, Kaguyahime’s celebrated choreographer, in an interview by Skype on Wednesday from his office at Nederlands Dans Theater in The Hague.
The 1,000-year-old Japanese legend of Kaguyahime inspired Kylian to create a two-act ballet for Nederlands Dans Theatre in 1988. Appointed company director 13 years earlier, he quickly made an outstanding international reputation as a choreographer of abstract ballets whose symbols opened vistas on spiritual and universal horizons. Among these was Symphony of Psalms from 1978, one of several Kylian works that Pankov, a friend and former colleague of the choreographer, has introduced into Les Grands’ repertory, which today has the strongest Kylian representation of any North American dance company.
“(Kaguyahime) is one of his few storytelling ballets. He’d done two before — L’Enfant et les sortilèges and L’Histoire du soldat — but he doesn’t do it often,” Elke Schepers, one of the two original Kaguyahimes, commented recently. She was in Montreal to teach the work to the dancers along with two other invited Kylian specialists, Ken Ossola and Patrick Delcroix. In 2008, Schepers also taught the title role to two étoiles of the Paris Opera Ballet, the only other company until now to have staged the work.
Schepers was 24 at the time of the work’s creation, about the same age as Eva Kolarova and Sarah Kingston, two corps de ballet members who will alternate in the title role during 11 performances in Montreal. (For those curious to know whose photogenic features have been on the billboards these many weeks, it’s another corps member, Tetyana Martyanova.) Pankov has a history of promoting rank-andfile members to leading roles, often with impressive results.
“For the lead, you need to have a beautiful, strong woman, but she needs to have innocence and vulnerability. It’s what she radiates,” said Schepers, who coached Kolarova and Kingston. “She moves very slowly most of the time, so you can’t just stick out an arm or a leg. She has to radiate her Kaguyahimeness, which is love and innocence, but very strong and determined as well.”
At a recent rehearsal of Act 1, in which the moon princess is wooed by one vigorous suitor after another, Kolarova showed both the flowerlike beauty and poised self-control that helps to make Kaguyahime an object of fascination.
“Eva has something very fearless, a beautiful femininity and a good sense of movement from the body,” said Schepers. “Sarah has more innocence, a little more fear of exploring movement physically, beautiful long arms and great musicality.”
Two quite different moon maidens, then, which is what the choreographer likes to see.
“I would be very disappointed if I saw just two versions of Elke,” said Kylian, adding wisely that one should never impose one’s interpretation on another dancer.
Act 2 explodes in a sweep of balletic leaps as white-clad villagers fight with the emperor’s soldiers in black for control of Kaguyahime. These energetic passages are loudly accompanied by the famous Kodo drummers, brought specially from their base on the Japanese island of Sado. (The expense involved is one reason why Kaguyahime is rarely staged.) Their big sound is supplemented by Western percussionists. The late distinguished Japanese composer and conductor Maki Ishii put the drummers’ oversized boom into relief by employing Japanese musicians playing Kaguyahime’s delicate theme on traditional instruments like the flute and sho, a bamboo mouth organ.
Act 2 also presents Kaguyahime in a languorous solo, which is interrupted by the arrival of the emperor amid a gold-curtained backdrop and a wide golden piece of material that unfurls under his feet. At one point, the emperor, unseen behind the golden material, lifts Kaguyahime off the floor, causing her to twist slowly in what might be an act of defilement. (Ten years later in Bella Figura, Kylian included a similar gesture involving a partially nude woman turning within the folds of a black curtain, only there it’s an erotic dream.)
One design element from the Nederlands Dans Theater production that Montreal will not see is the shiny four-door Mitsubishi sedans that represented Kaguyahime’s voyage through space.
“Critics asked, ‘How far will he go to get (sponsors’) money — putting cars on stage?’ ” recalled Kylian. “That wasn’t the intention!”
So in Montreal, as it was in Paris, the cars are replaced by figures of stately horses.
Kaguyahime, Thursday to Oct. 13, Oct. 18 to 20, Oct. 25 to 27 at 8 p.m. and Oct. 20 and 27 at 2 p.m. at Salle Wilfrid Pelletier of Place des Arts. Tickets cost $46.04 to $124.04. Call 514-842-2112 or visit pda.qc.ca.