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Holy mother Russia! >> Voyeurism, fetishism and masturbation at Les Grands by MELANIE KLIMCHUK
Diaghilev's Ballets russes created the chestnuts Firebird, Le Sacre du printemps, L'après-midi d'un faune, Giselle and Les Sylphides, among others. The current GBC program takes three dances from the 1909-1929 life of the Ballets russes, and a later work inspired by its heyday. Actually, you won't be able to throw a brick in Montreal this year without breaking the concentration of a dancer doing Ballets russes stuff, because the works (and reworkings) appear throughout the dance season. This doesn't necessarily please GBC artistic director Lawrence Rhodes--he sniffs at the way "certain liberties" have been taken with L'après-midi d'un faune by ballet great Nureyev. I tell him I've seen contemporary dancer Marie Chouinard's version. He stops breathing. Faune is, crudely put, a tale of voyeurism, fetishism and masturbation. In it, a satyr watches a nymph undressing. They share steamy looks. He runs off to his lair with one of her scarves, and appears to ejaculate into it. Its 1912 debut begat a riot. And according to the GBC press packet, it became "increasingly corrupted" over time. Watching Faune at Place des Arts is like seeing the figures on a Greek vase come to life, still keeping their two-dimensional, stylized form. It reminds me so much of that scarf-waving, neo-pagan dancer Isadora Duncan that I wonder if Nijinski, the choreographer, might have had a thing for her. Rhodes claims the GBC's Faune is the genuine article. To stage it, he hired dance notation experts Ann-Hutchinson Guest and Claudia Jeschke. "We put a great deal of energy into ensuring absolute fidelity to the original," Rhodes explains. "But despite its physicality, ballet is primarily an oral tradition. Anything approaching authenticity has been handed down verbally from one generation of dancers to the next." So he brought in people who knew people who were there when it happened. For the GBC premiere of Apollo, Ib Anderson came on board. When Andersen danced Apollo in the 1980s, its choreographer, George Balanchine, had repeatedly stripped it down from its 1928 debut. Mount Olympus, the toga and tutus are gone, replaced by a stark black staircase and white tights against a cobalt blue background. Its images are startlingly modern, but you can still see traces of the original, melodramatic, silent-movie style peeking through the choreography. The swirling, hypnotic 1909 Sylphides and the 1938 farcical mimes-in-point-shoes catfight, Gala Performance, were guided by dance veteran Sallie Tisdale, whose former boss choreographed Gala, and saw Les Russes doing Sylphides as a boy. Ballet is a clannish world. Even the late Ludmilla Chiriaeff watched Les Ballets russes in her youth. She founded Les Grands 40 years ago, and it is partly in her honour that this fabulous flashback took shape. Evening and matinee performances at the Théâtre Maisonneuve through Saturday, Nov. 8. 790-1245
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If classical ballet is a kind of time travel, then Les Grands Ballets Canadiens have gone back to early 20th-century Paris, when the Russians took over French dance. Back then, dance impresario Sergei Diaghilev could say to composers Stravinski, Prokofiev and Debussy to choreographers Nijinski and Balanchine, to set and costume designers Picasso, Leon Bakst and Coco Chanel: "Let's spend some time together." And they did.