The Three-Ring Circus of ‘Czar’

Kudos to Kathryn Bennetts, the artistic director of the Royal Ballet of Flanders since 2005, who put her company into international circulation with a revival of William Forsythe’s 1988 three-act “Impressing the Czar,” which came to the Lincoln Center Festival last week. For 15 years, beginning in 1989, Ms. Bennetts was Mr. Forsythe’s ballet mistress at Ballett Frankfurt. Not seen since 1995, “Czar” was revived by the Flanders company in 2006 and has since become its global calling card and perhaps breadwinner.Mr. Forsythe knows the value of a saleable gimmick; he is a clever showman, whose formula of reinventing the Dada wheel, combined with his own brand of balletic neoclassicism, has coalesced into a distinctive statement. He created “Czar” as a sort of wraparound enclosure for “In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated,” which he’d made for the Paris Opera in 1987. It registers as a scrambled parallel to multi-act grands ballets of the 19th century.Act 1 of Mr. Forsythe’s “Czar” is a three-ring circus evoking the ancien régime and its love affair with ballet. The simultaneity of nonsequential action evokes the monarchial chessboard surrealism of “Alice in Wonderland,” as well as the gibbering bedlam of “Marat/Sade” inmates. Costumes encompass fluttery, frock-coated dancing masters and ball-gown-clad women on pointe. The music combines Beethoven with the consuming aural soundscapes to which Mr. Forsythe is partial. There are a lot of identical twin pairings, a lot of echoing, and a lot of choral interludes by a balletic ensemble dressed in elegant practice wear. Actress Helen Pickett bustles around in schoolgirl short skirt and stock-tie blouse, a kind of stage manager/traffic director, as well as audience stand-in. Her dialogue continually clues us into her interlocutory detachment from the onstage spectacle. Much of Ms. Pickett’s patter has to do with the well-being and whereabouts of a Mr. Pnut, danced by Jim De Block as a Cupid/Pan figure in a skirt and holding a crossbow. Perhaps he represents a kind of life force, a procreative potency, society’s cultural as well as biological inheritance. And he is certainly an emblem of commercialism.Act 2 is “In the Middle” pure and simple. The company did well with it by not overdoing the insolence and thus preventing the whole thing from turning entirely into an exercise in cool-kids snootiness. They also gave the movement texture and friction, rather than taking the easy way out via excessively facile joint rotation and limb extension.The third act of “Czar” is divided into three sections. First there is an auction, presided over by Ms. Pickett, who races along as if infected with a bit of Red Queen mania. Here she functions as the archetypal raisonneur of drama and farce, a mouthpiece for the author’s own sentiments. Mr. Forsythe has done some tweaking of the original for the revival, and last week Ms. Pickett’s patter took aim at the tanking American economy and the lack of government funding for the arts. Everyone onstage, including hapless Mr. Pnut, is sold off.In the third act’s second scene, the entire company is now dressed as Ms. Pickett was in the opening act. Why are the men in drag? Well, why shouldn’t they be? Mr. Forsythe doesn’t seem to be saying anything in particular here, but he’s tossed a new gag into the mix. The ensemble snakes around the stage in a processional, skipping in little jumps. This might be a reference to what is sometimes perceived as the proto-minimalism of Petipa’s 1877 Kingdom of the Shades in “La Bayadère.” Certainly the shades and other transfigured Nirvanas of 19th-century Romanticism instantly make their presence felt. Mr. Pnut is flat on his back pierced by an arrow. Does all this revelry constitute a sort of funeral game? In the final section, Mr. Pnut is resurrected and alternately leads and eludes the snaking stompers.“Czar” is an eyeful and a stageful, and it provides a fecund compendium of Mr. Forsythe’s trademark tropes and philosophical concerns. The Flanders company pulls it off with panache.

The Three-Ring Circus of ‘Czar’

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