Russian ballerina’s tale at centre of Red Giselle
Eifman Ballet’s production an explosive psychological drama
Art and life, political upheaval and personal disintegration, fraught romance and a tragic descent into madness, all set within the exotic world of classical ballet; these are the combustible ingredients of Red Giselle, a searing psychological drama coming to the Sony Centre Thursday.
This local presentation of Red Giselle marks the third visit to Toronto of the world-travelled St. Petersburg troupe that proudly carries the name of its Russian founder, director and choreographer, Boris Eifman.
Eifman’s ballets are extravagantly theatrical, driven by powerful, boldly drawn emotions and approachable enough to appeal to audiences beyond the regular ballet crowd.
He is attracted to meaty existential themes. To give them substance, Eifman often builds his ballets around the lives of famous historical figures — Tchaikovsky, Rodin, Emperor Paul I of Russia — or literary characters such as Don Quixote, Anna Karenina and Eugene Onegin.
Eifman is fascinated by creative genius, which he often depicts as being in conflict with external societal mores. Even so, Eifman demurs at the suggestion that he is obsessed with tortured souls.
“I do not collect stories about unhappy fates and do not cultivate suffering,” Eifman insists. “I see life as a sphere filled with emotions, experiences, psychological conflicts. The world, which is devoid of passions, is dead. Bright emotional states show the complexity of the spiritual and psychic nature of a human, in the study of which the creative mission of an artist consists.”
Red Giselle, a mid-career ballet many consider Eifman’s defining masterwork, is a liberally fictionalized account of the life of Olga Spessivtseva, a once-famous Russian ballerina whose personal history resonates with the impact of the Bolshevik Revolution and the repressive Soviet autocracy that followed.
Spessivtseva had the misfortune of bad timing. She was born in 1895. By the time she stepped onto the stage of St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre the whole house of Tsarist Romanov cards was about to collapse in war and revolution. Despite unspeakable hardships and the interference of Soviet apparatchiks, Spessivtseva emerged as a luminous leading ballerina.
She was allowed to tour abroad with impresario Sergei Diaghilev’s expatriate Ballets Russes, finally resolving to remain in the West in1924. While continuing to appear with the Ballets Russes, Spessivtseva became a top-rank “étoile” of the Paris Opera Ballet.
Spessivtseva danced a wide-ranging repertoire but was especially noted for her ethereal interpretation of Giselle. Then she became unhinged.
Among other delusions, Spessivtseva believed she was being stalked by a sinister man. Starting in 1943, she spent 20 years in a psychiatric hospital in New Jersey before being released into the care of a home for ailing Russian émigrés in upstate New York. Spessivtseva died penni- less and largely forgotten in 1991. Eifman admits that he did not know much about her until he was a mature adult.
“Then,” says Eifman, “when I became acquainted with the story of this great ballerina, I experienced a strong emotional shock.”
Red Giselle is not, however, a bioballet. Spessivtseva is never named as a character. She is simply listed as The Ballerina.
“I never recite the stories of the lives of famous people or, say, the plots of great books,” Eifman explains. “Red Giselle is a reflection of my own emotions and thoughts on the fate of Olga Spessivtseva herself, as well as about the fate of all those who, in the terrible revolutionary years, had to emigrate and found themselves in a new and alien world.”
In a twist that anticipates by many years the premise of film director Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 psycho- drama Black Swan, Eifman’s tragic heroine dangerously conflates her own identity with the fictional one of a celebrated ballerina role, in this instance, Giselle. As in Black Swan, the point of view is inner. We see the Ballerina’s world through the distorting lens of her own psychosis.
“The reason for her tragic fate was that Spessivtseva completely merged with her heroine and dissolved into this image, forever remaining in the world behind the looking-glass, in a world of phantasmagoria,” Eifman suggests.
Eifman, 70, has always been an original and, for much of his career, an outsider. Born in Siberia into a nontheatrical family, Eifman made his way to what was then Soviet Leningrad to study ballet and choreography.
From his earliest days as a choreographer in the 1960s, Eifman rejected the restrictive conventions of academic Russian ballet. He effectively invented a bold new genre of dancetheatre, one that combines his classical ballet roots with the more visceral, free-ranging expressiveness of contemporary dance. In an early interview he declared his personal esthetic.
“What I do can be called the dance of emotions, free dance, a new language, in which classical ballet, modern dance, ecstatic impulses and many other things are interwoven,” he said.
Against all the odds, Eifman was able to establish his own company 40 years ago. After long years planting a firm foothold among enthusiastic Russian audiences, the company began to tour.
Today, Eifman is as much an international Russian ballet brand as the mighty Bolshoi and Mariinsky.
“Our theatre lived a very difficult life, having neither money nor its own ballet hall, constantly experiencing attacks of the Soviet censorship,” Eifman recalls. “But we had this thirst for creativity, a belief in our own mission and the support of the audience. These things helped us survive to become one of the leading ballet companies, creating a successful modern choreographic Russian repertory.”
Red Giselle is at the Sony Centre, 1 Front St. E., Thursday to Saturday; sonycentre.ca or 1-855-872-7669.