Tuesday 20 June 2017

Emotional Roller Coaster Ride

In the last half-century or so, the art of the "story ballet" has evolved out of all recognition.  The purely decorative and entertaining stories of the nineteenth century -- which usually showed only "what happened" -- have been bypassed in favour of powerful, gritty works which explore all aspects of characters and their motivations.

Even amidst such a stunning sea change with all that it implies, John Neumeier's A Streetcar Named Desire stands out as one of the toughest, most wrenching of its kind.  It recently received its Canadian premiere with the National Ballet of Canada.  I saw it over a week ago, but it has taken me this long to absorb it all and then set my thoughts in order.

Neumeier's work was created in Frankfurt in 1983, based (of course) on the 1947 play by Tennessee Williams -- one of the truly great classics of the twentieth-century theatre.  The power of Neumeier's work arises specifically from the fact that he doesn't try to retell the story as given in the play.  A smart decision, given that the two theatrical disciplines of drama and dance are so different in their range of possibilities.  Indeed, Neumeier's first act is entirely devoted to Blanche Dubois' back story -- the earlier events of her life which only emerge, in bits and pieces, throughout the original play.

This choice opens up the tremendous scope in dance to express emotions and deep inward thoughts which can only haltingly be presented in spoken words.

The first act, then, begins with Blanche in the asylum (i.e. at the end of the play).  We get taken through memory pictures of Blanche's sterile emotionless encounters with various men at the Flamingo Hotel.  The heart of this act is the stylized scene of her disastrous wedding day, and the act ends with the metaphorical "collapse" of Belle Reve.  The second act presents a series of vignettes drawn from the play, and Neumeier does not scruple to present sexuality and brutality forthrightly, albeit still in dance terms -- not in raw physical action.   This is not a ballet for the squeamish.

Neumeier's choice of music, then, is intriguing because on the surface there appears to be no connection at all with the material of the ballet.  Prokofiev's Visions fugitives for piano accompany the first act, and the second is set to Alfred Schnittke's Symphony No. 1.  Since the entire ballet is seen through Blanche's eyes, the Schnittke with its almost nightmarish mixtures of conflicting musical elements serves as an ideal musical metaphor for the slow collapse of her world which helps to precipitate her withdrawal from sanity.  Curiously, the choreographer has required that the music all be presented in recorded form.

In this performance the central role of Blanche was danced by Svetlana Lunkina with an apt mixture of strength and fragility underscoring her movements in many key scenes.  Expressive gestures and facial expressions clearly reminded us that this was the world as she saw it.  Particularly striking was the tentative air she assumed on her arrival into New Orleans at the beginning of the second act -- a compounding of uncertainty and fear with distaste and displeasure.  Lunkina apparently made light of the complexities of Neumeier's choreography.

In Act One, the other key role is her husband-to-be, Allan Grey, danced by Robert Stephen.

Conflict of Interest Alert:  My nephew.

One of the strongest scenes of the ballet is the dance sequence at the wedding, in which Grey continually finds himself facing another man (danced by Nan Wang) who obviously attracts and excites him.  The result is a kind of two-tiered choreography: the guests are dancing together in a kind of genteel square dance while Allan and his friend, within that group dance, are also having a private encounter -- without leaving their places in the group.  Neumeier has them edge towards each other, then away, then a little closer, and away again, several times. Stephen and Wang built the tension within this extended sequence into a powerful force that began to feel as if they were magnetically locked onto each other -- which, in terms of human desire, they were.


At last they get close enough to touch hands, and from there matters move more swiftly to the moment when they kiss each other -- and the crowd opens to allow Blanche to see them.  Allan then swiftly kills himself, leading us to another dramatic moment concluding the first act, a strong visual metaphor for the end of the plantation life at Belle Reve.  In the play, Blanche is compelled to surrender the estate to creditors.  Here, though, the loss turns into a physical catastrophe with the black-gowned and black-suited figures of her ancestors collapsing one by one on the floor as Lunkina raced desperately from one to another, trying to prop them up.  The apparently solid walls slowly dissolved downwards as slackening curtains in the final moments.

Strong as it is, this first act is nowhere close to the dramatic force of the second act.  Key to that dramatic force is the darkly threatening performance of Piotr Stanczyk as Stanley Kowalski.  You wouldn't have to know much at all about the story to know the instant he appeared that here was the embodiment of brute animal force without any hindrance of conscience.  Throughout the act, Stanczyk's face projected a kind of sneering disdain for everyone around him -- even for his wife, Stella.  Chelsy Meiss as Stella quickly and clearly delineated the key difference of positive energy which made her the polar opposite of her lacklustre and fading sister Blanche.

Donald Thom made a very good thing out of Stanley's friend, Mitch, his movements projecting a softer-edged approach to life that contrasted vividly with Stanczyk's edgier harshness. 

The ballet reaches its ultimate climax in the rape of Blanche by Stanley.  Neumeier asks a lot of his dancers, never more so than in this scene.  The choreography is anything but sexual in nature, and the message that rape is about power and not sexuality comes across loud and clear.  It's high-stakes physical motion through angular, awkward poses and movements succeeding each other with what is, and has to be, a sense of inevitability.  Kudos to both Stanczyk and Lunkina for superb execution of one of the most difficult dance scenes I've ever witnessed.

The denouement follows quickly, with Blanche being taken away to the sanatorium by a matron and a doctor.  As in the play, it's the doctor's kindness that wins her attention but more than that -- and this is another of Neumeier's flashes of genius -- the doctor is portrayed by the same dancer as Allan Grey (Robert Stephen) and this likeness is what truly persuades her to go, showing better than any words just how far her grasp of reality has slipped.  Lunkina beautifully portrayed Blanche's air of bewilderment in these final moments.

I know it wasn't just my reaction.  Several audience members I heard afterwards were expressing the same feeling, that this was an incredibly exhausting and intense ballet to watch.  All of us too wondered, I'm sure, how much more so it must be for the dancers.  John Neumeier's ballets are always dramatic and powerful, but with A Streetcar Named Desire he has reached new heights of intensity.  In that respect alone, he has been more than faithful to his source material.  And the National Ballet has been more than faithful in matching his vision with powerful dancing and staging.

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