Dancing triumphs over the often overwrought plot
Story ballets thrive on white-hot emotion, but rarely does the mercury soar as high as it does in American-German choreographer John Neumeier’s long, complex and sometimes overwrought treatment of Anna Karenina that opened the National Ballet of Canada’s hometown season in its North American premiere on Saturday night.
It has passion run amok, and toys somewhat equivocally with the gender imbalances of a world in which women are too often victims while men bulldozer ahead. The score alternates between Tchaikovsky and Schnittke with improbable interventions by Yusuf Islam (a.k.a. Cat Stevens). The modular sets, atmospheric lighting concept and costumes are all of Neumeier’s devising, except for the elegant attire worn by the ballet’s title character. These are the handiwork of Albert Kriemler, creative director of the Swiss luxury women’s fashion house Akris.
Neumeier states that his version of the late 19th-century literary masterpiece is “inspired by Leo Tolstoy.” Unlike the several other choreographic treatments that have preceded his, it should thus not be viewed as an adaptation. This conveniently licenses Neumeier to take liberties that will doubtless infuriate devotees of the book but, to be fair, make for some dazzlingly intense theatrical moments. Whether Tolstoy is turning in his grave at Yasnaya Polyana is an open question.
For those who have not conquered the book’s epic proportions, Tolstoy sets it in the declining years of the Russian aristocracy, a social milieu in which a facade of elegance and etiquette masks inherent decadence and hypocrisy. Tolstoy focuses on the lives of a small group of interrelated families. There’s Anna and her important state official husband, Alexei Karenin. They have a son, portrayed in the ballet as a robust, but one must presume emotionally arrested, teddy-bear cuddling young man.
Anna’s philandering brother Stepan (Stiva) Oblonsky has a long-suffering
wife, Dolly, and brood of children. Konstantin Levin is an old friend of Stiva’s, a rich landowner who prefers life on the farm to elegant salons. Levin pines for Dolly’s younger sister, Kitty, but she has her matrimonial sights set on the spoiler in this cozily dysfunctional coterie: the dashing — in Tolstoy — cavalry officer, Alexei Vronsky. His wandering eye has settled on Anna, who in Vronsky’s arms discovers the passion lacking in her marriage to a stiff, much older bureaucrat.
Tolstoy enriches these personal dramas with reflections on religious faith, mysticism and the changing nature of Russian society amidst advancing industrialization. It’s a closely woven tapestry of character and circumstance that cannot readily be picked apart.
Undeterred, Neumeier chooses to set his ballet in the present and, one must assume from his retention of Russian names, in a vaguely modern Russia of materialistic oligarchs. Oddly, some of them still bear titles such as “prince” or “count.”
Karenin is now an important Saint Petersburg politician. The ballet opens with a raucous rally. He is pursued by the media and protected by suited, sunglassed bodyguards. Obviously, any romantic dallying on his wife’s part would be politically damaging. Inevitably, there are vague echoes of Donald and Melania.
In Moscow, Stiva employs what the synopsis calls a “governess” — in this day and age? — with whom he is caught in flagrante delicto by his wife, who at this point seems more like a servant returned from grocery shopping.
Somewhere out there in the countryside — it could be the steppes or Oklahoma — Levin in red plaid shirt, tight leather pants and gumboots, communes with the soil and his farmhands. He favours antique farm equipment. His tractor, fresh from the wash, looks like something out of Norman Rockwell. In a later, superfluous scene, Levin joins 20 of his employees, picturesquely silhouetted against a pink dawn, in a stylized hay-gathering routine to the strains of “Morning Has Broken.” They are using scythes!
It’s hard to tell exactly what Vronsky does for a living. He spends a good deal of time working out at the gym or playing Canada’s official national sport which, one hears, has become very popular in Russia. Instead of Tolstoy’s steeplechase event, we have an unnecessarily lengthy lacrosse game.
As in Tolstoy, railroads and stations — he died in one — play an important functional and symbolic role. The death of a worker haunts Neumeier’s Anna as it did Tolstoy’s.
A “mushik,” Neumeier’s updated version of the stolid Russian peasant, hauls around what appears to be a body bag and emerges at various points in the ballet, almost like an embodiment of the moral awareness many of the characters have abandoned.
Typically, in such challenging circumstances, the National Ballet’s dancers acquit themselves most honourably, whether negotiating some of the mechanical awkwardness of Neumeier’s numerous dance duets or bringing conviction to his emotional excesses. The scenes of Kitty in an asylum and of Anna giving birth to Vronsky’s child verge on the risible.
On Saturday, Svetlana Lunkina triumphed as Anna; a detailed, insightful performance that earned one’s sympathy for a complex character. Piotr Stanczyk was a suitably austere and physically buttoned-up Karenin. Xiao Nan Yu’s good-hearted Dolly made one wonder why she’d ever married the vapid Stiva portrayed by Naoya Ebe. Félix Paquet is a stolid, likeable Levin and Antonella Martinelli looks as good in a lavish wedding gown as she does dressed as a tractor-driving farmer’s wife. Kota Sato, always a reliable performer, brought emotional heft to his dramatically puzzling mushik role. Harrison James, a romantic through and through, made Vronsky much more endearing than he deserves to be and manhandled his Anna with genuine ardour.
Neumeier made this two-act, 24-scene work for his own Hamburg Ballet in July 2017. Another production of it was presented at Moscow’s Bolshoi earlier this year. The National Ballet has spent a cited $1.9 million to acquire its own.
If the ecstatic opening-night ovation — are they ever otherwise? — is any guide, the company could be excused for believing it is money well spent.