Making the Most Of a Contradictory Work

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The New York Sun

Kissing on the ballet stage – do we need it? The late Sir Kenneth MacMillan, whose “Manon” was revived by American Ballet Theatre on Monday night, thought we did.

MacMillan evidently believed that classical ballet was too prettified and false, and needed to be roughed up a bit. In his 1974 “Manon,” he choreographed not only gulping kisses, but groping, fondling, foreplay, and sexual abuse. His crusade had a hollow ring, however, since his choreography relied on sensationalism and hackneyed theatrical devices. How many times can two people whisper to each other in a three-act ballet? How many times can a woman lift up her skirt to denote availability?

Self-contradiction is a birthright of creative imagination, but MacMillan’s aesthetic too often rests on the cusp of near impossibility. The problem lies in his almost naive belief in the expressive power of unadorned ballet steps to convey meaning or move a story along.

In Act I, for instance, Manon’s scoundrel cousin,Lescaut,finds his mistress making eyes at someone else and slaps her. Soon after, Lescaut launches into his first solo of the ballet, made up largely of academic,rather princely ballet steps and combinations. Immediately after his exit, a street ruffian, the beggar chief, launches into a solo that feels very similar to Lescaut’s. We’re supposed to resort to the suspension of disbelief implicit in archetypal 19th-century ballets, in which all characters express themselves in the lexicon of classical ballet vocabulary. But MacMillan then elaborates the beggar chief’s solo with cartwheels that make him and his merry band seem like something out of “Oliver.”

In other words, we’re never sure in a MacMillan ballet whether characters are going to be speaking “ballet” or something more realistic. The shifts in tone are jarring, even when one gets used to them.

Monday night’s “Manon” was led by Alessandra Ferri and Julio Bocca. Ms. Ferri was a personal favorite of MacMillan (1929-92), and she and Mr. Bocca have danced the leads for years.

There was some straining in their characterizations, particularly in Act I where they are meant to be young and nubile,but all of MacMillan’s characterizations are set in such bold relief that some straining is almost inevitable. Overall, both stars gave honorable and finely drawn performances.

Ms. Ferri was a good deal more circumspect than other interpreters of the role. Some of her best dancing came in the first act, in her introductory duet with Mr. Bocca’s Des Grieux. She submitted to all the necessary swooning and swooping, but her lines were clearly described. In the Act II gambling scene, she evoked the fragility of a Traviata. In the next scene, her response to Lescaut’s murder was properly scalding, but she didn’t overdo the verismo.

Mr. Bocca’s role was created by Anthony Dowell, then at the peak of his supple style, and it is laden with many irrelevant arabesques. Mr. Bocca is a very different type of dancer than Mr. Dowell, but he labored honestly to evince the refinement of ballet line and physical expression with which MacMillan supplies a kinetic equivalent to Baroque manners.

St. Petersburg’s Kirov Ballet first performed “Manon” in 2000 and performed it successfully until last year, when its license expired. It may be out of the Kirov’s repertory there, since Lady MacMillan has complained publicly about the company’s treatment of her husband’s ballet. It’s true that the Kirov is not treating its imported material with much respect, but its beautification of “Manon” in fact did no harm to MacMillan’s work.

Take the difference, for instance, between Galina Rakhmanova’s Madame at the Kirov and Georgina Parkinson’s performance of the same role on Monday night. (I assume that Ms. Parkinson performed the approved text, since ABT’s production was recently restaged by MacMillan’s longtime assistant, Monica Parker.) Ms. Rakhmanova performed with the affected but redoubtable grandeur of Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, the queen of the underworld. Ms. Parkinson, on the other hand, played her as bawdy, loquacious, boisterous, and increasingly drunk throughout the gambling scene.

In her debut as Lescaut’s mistress on Monday night, Gillian Murphy made all the right slattern moves but wound up seeming just kittenish and a bit juvenile. She never seemed completely comfortable in the part – for which, I must say, she wins my admiration. Likewise, Herman Cornejo in his debut as Lescaut tried very earnestly but remained too impish. It was unfortunate that they chose to dance their Act II drunken duet like a baggy-pants slapstick team.

Closing “Manon” is another one of MacMillan’s favorite devices: the deformed adagio in which the vigor of bravura partnering exists in inverse proportion to the plot point being demonstrated.Here Manon is dying,yet Des Grieux whirls her through some of the most reckless lifts, twirls, throws, and catches imaginable, in order to convey the couple’s grief and desperation. This bull’s-eye of balletic expressionism is one of MacMillan’s most distinctive statements.

This final duet was perhaps the high point of Mr. Bocca and Ms. Ferri’s performance. Ms. Ferri, for the first time in the ballet now wearing a costume almost as abbreviated as a tutu, showed us that there is still a throb in her legs, and Mr. Bocca’s partnering was remarkable. The two will repeat their performance together on Thursday night; that “Manon” marks Mr. Bocca’s farewell to the ABT stage.

American Ballet Theatre’s Metropolitan Opera season runs until July 15 (Lincoln Center, 212-362-6000).


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