Adding Chrome to Classics
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The act of rechoreographing a great piece of ballet music can be seen as an attempt to imagine what the piece must have sounded like to virgin ears. This is inevitably a quixotic endeavor: By virtue of the associations that a hallowed score accrues, the first statement is almost always the definitive one, and therefore a revisionist choreographer is forced to at least acknowledge the themes of the original ballet.This need not, however, preclude the creation of a successful new work, as Paul Taylor’s “Le Sacre du Printemps” or Jerome Robbins’s “Afternoon of a Faun” demonstrate conclusively.
On Tuesday night, the Italian modern dance troupe Compagnia Aterballetto brought new productions of Stravinsky’s “Les Noces” and “Petrushka” to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Rechoreographed by the company’s artistic director. Mauro Bigonzetti, these epochal scores gestated two of the greatest and most enduring ballets created for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Mr. Bigonzetti’s productions, which made their debut in 2002, are shiny and chic, engaging the eye and cogently updating into contemporary fantasy the original ballets’ statements.
First performed in 1923,”Les Noces” was conceived perfectly by Bronislava Nijinska to Stravinsky’s cantata, which overlays a hubbub of voices arising from the participants in a peasant wedding. Over the years, there have been several other attempts to fashion new productions, including Robbins’s 1965 version for American Ballet Theatre that derived a great deal from Nijinska without improving on her work.
In Mr. Bigonzetti’s contemporary setting, nattily dressed women are aligned on one side of the stage, men on the other. As the ballet progresses, a gradual move to the banqueting table center stage binds the ensemble into couples that replace the massed phalanxes of Nijinska’s original. But the newlyweds are no closer to conjugal bliss in Mr. Bigonzetti’s “Noces” than in Nijinska’s. Whereas she portrayed them as sacrificial victims to society’s crushing insistence on propagation and conformity, here the presumed bride and groom grapple lethally with each other in a choreographic language that partakes of Graham-esque contract/release.
Nijinska’s brother, Vaslav Nijinsky, created the role of Petrushka in Fokine’s 1911 ballet, transforming the knockabout stock figure of Russian puppet shows into something of a Russian Pierrot. Five years later, Nijinsky choreographed “Till Eulenspiegel,” a balletic homage to another folk hero. This voice of the oppressed was much more subversive than Fokine’s Petrushka, whose refusal to be vanquished became clear only in his virtual apotheosis at the ballet’s conclusion. From the first moment of Mr. Bigonzetti’s “Petrushka,” the hero is clearly a renegade, closer to evoking Nijinsky’s Till than his Petrushka.
Ambulatory clothing racks are ar rayed around the stage; at the back of the stage stand doorframes like changing-room entrances. We discover this Petrushka in media res, shoplifting until store security guards arrive and he disappears up the aisle of the theater to elude them. Soon he has traced his steps back to the stage, where he engages once more in a struggle with the brutish Moor for the attentions of a Ballerina; here Moor and Ballerina are store mannequins sprung to life.
A towering vixen in a miniskirt and high white boots, the Ballerina prefers the thuggish Moor to Petrushka. A tribe of voyeuristic automatons peeps through dress racks to watch Ballerina and Moor perform an Apache mating dance. Petrushka’s rejection leads him to suicide before his ultimate resurrection and vindication.
Aterballetto’s dancers are excellent and put over both works with admirable pizzazz.The women are tall and spidery and the men agile jumpers; both men and women can summon up a razor sharp attack. Befitting the nation that brought us the Renaissance,Lamborghinis, and Armani, Aterballetto’s design elements are first-rate and assume a vital importance in sustaining the momentum of both Bigonzetti works. The gleaming chrome chairs in “Les Noces” are integral to the choreography, as are the women’s black velvet tops and draped skirts trimmed with satin.
Performed to taped music, Mr. Bigonzetti’s “Les Noces” and “Petrushka,” separated by an intermission, constitute a rather abbreviated evening; including a third work would have made this a more substantial program.
This program will be performed again November 10, 11 & 12 at the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House (30 Lafayette Avenue, 718-636-4100).