STRAVINSKY DOUBLE BILL
A modern touch from Grands Ballets
Some 105 years on, it’s perhaps difficult to conceive of the uproar that met the original production of The Rite of Spring, the NijinskyStravinsky ballet about human sacrifice in prehistoric Russia. Difficult, but not impossible. Walking into Les Grands Ballets’ rehearsal studio on the fifth floor of the Wilder Building and coming face to face with the set design causes, if not shock, then at least a whiplash double take, as expectations are upended.
Instead of a primeval, earthy landscape, we get what looks like a burnished, metallic skateboard park topped off with forbidding chain-link fencing. When the ensemble goes through its paces to Stravinsky’s bludgeoning beat, it’s hard not to think of the tribal dynamics of dystopian back-to-basics films and stories such as Lord of the Flies, Planet of the Apes, even Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.
Of course, hundreds of wildly different versions (including by Montreal’s Marie Chouinard) have played out since that riotous first night at Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, which had audience members shouting “Ta gueule!” at the orchestra and howling at Nijinsky’s “ungainly” choreography. (Even Stravinsky later mocked the “group of knock-kneed and long-braided Lolitas jumping up and down.”)
This production from young Parisian choreographer Étienne Béchard is unlikely to provoke polite Montreal audiences into such frenzies, and even those moved to entertain a grimace of disapproval at its modern urban setting might at least admit he has reclaimed its sense of being a bold, groundbreaking and, above all, youthful ballet.
Béchard, who danced under Maurice Béjart and now runs his own Brussels-based company, Opinion Public, has his dancers arranging themselves into two groups, one group sliding down the curved metal of the set to the lower level while the other group proceeds to lord it over them.
“I think it can be seen as rich people against poor people, or looking at different levels of society,” Béchard says during a break in rehearsals. “At the beginning I wanted the set to be like an arena. But I wanted it to be something more abstract. You said it reminds you of a skateboard park. Someone else pointed out it looks like a boat, which made them think of refugees. With dance, there’s room enough for the meaning to be open.”
At one point, the apparently privileged higher-ups effect a series of spectacularly convulsive jumps — all the more impressive, given they’re perched on a narrow strip of the upper level — which can’t help but bring to mind Nijinsky’s weirdly angular leaps, as included in the painstaking reconstruction by the Joffrey Ballet back in 1987. (Nijinsky’s original choreography was never noted down.)
As it turns out, Béchard didn’t go back to the source.
“Yes,” he agrees, noting the similarities between those leaps and Nijinsky’s, “but actually I didn’t look at a lot of the original choreography, so I don’t think I have inspiration from Nijinsky.”
Béchard muses that perhaps it’s just the music that sometimes drives him in a similar direction.
As for any possible reproduction of the outrage the ballet first inspired, Béchard says: “Nowadays, it’s difficult to shock and to have something really new. Maybe my ideas look new to people because I’m from the new generation of choreographers. That’s good. I don’t want to do something just to be new. I like to develop every style and kind of dance. Now the new dancers can do everything, so it’s nice for me to be able to take something from hip hop or classical or circus or anywhere.”
While the relative radicalism of The Rite of Spring perhaps allows Béchard more freedom to mix neoclassical with contemporary dance, the other piece in the double bill, The Firebird, is likely to be more traditional. It was created a couple of years before The Rite, and though Stravinsky ’s music and Fokine’s choreography hint at the cultural upheaval to come, there was a conscious attempt to create the first purely Russian ballet, complete with an enchanted bird, a prince and princess, and an evil sorcerer and his minions.
For this production, Ohio-born choreographer Bridget Breiner is dropping the fairy tale elements to tell a more streamlined version.
“I think Stravinsky himself fought with those elements over the years,” Breiner says, “because he did many different versions of it where he cut out a lot of the pantomime scenes. So we’re using what most of the companies who do a new Firebird do these days: they use the half-hour version, which becomes more of a pure dance piece.
“But I’m telling a story for sure. In our version, the prince is a boy who has a chance of enlightenment. It’s inspired by the political situation in Russia at the time the ballet was being created. The Firebird represents freedom.”
The part of the Firebird is often seen as one of the most physically demanding roles in ballet — and it’s usually female. This can’t help but bring to mind the recent controversy over Les Grands Ballets’ announcement that a show in their upcoming season, Femmes, will be choreographed by three men. (The name of the piece has been changed to Parlami d’Amore.)
So will the Firebird be a symbol of female empowerment in this #MeToo era?
“Not at all,” says Breiner, director of Ballett im Revier in Germany.
“We started talking about (The Firebird) a year and a half ago, before #MeToo was this much of a deal. We didn’t have this in mind, the idea that the Firebird needs to be powerful because she’s a woman. We almost cast a man. But we do have a female lead as well, the one person in this society who believes the boy. I look for female protagonists who aren’t just princesses looking to be saved all the time.”
The Danse Danse season continues this week with the Quebec City-based “research lab” Alan Lake Factori(e) bringing their new show, Le Cri des méduses, to Place des Arts. Inspired by Géricault’s famous French Romantic painting The Raft of the Medusa, it’s a multimedia depiction of catastrophe using film, objects and body paint, as well as live music from Lake’s usual collaborator Antoine Berthiaume. Anybody who caught the company’s previous Danse Danse visit, 2015’s Ravages, will be anticipating 70 minutes of strikingly spectacular, often disturbing contemporary dance.
The Rite of Spring and The Firebird
■ play March 15 to 17 and March 22 to 24 at Théâtre Maisonneuve, Place des Arts, 175 Ste-Catherine St. W. Tickets $59-$139. Call 514-8422112 or visit placedesarts.com.
Le Cri des méduses plays March
■
20 to 24 at Cinquième Salle, Place des Arts. Tickets: $30-$39. Call 514842-2112 or visit placedesarts.com.