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Bejart Does Valhalla
| Article
# : |
19027 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1991 |
2,084 Words |
| Author
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Maya Wallach
Maya Wallach is a dance writer, critic, and photographer
currently based in Los Angeles |
Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle may have been rendered by the world's greatest voices, but it has yet to be performed by the world's greatest instrument: the human body. Until now. Maurice Bejart's latest ballet, Ring um den Ring (Ring around the Ring), gives Wagner's music a choreography, which matches the ecstasy of song with the sensuality of movement. Portraying Valhalla is only part of the picture.
Directed and choreographed by Bejart using a scenario devised in collaboration with Philippe Godefroid and coproduced by the German Opera of Berlin, Bejart's Ballet Lausanne's Ring does not simply replace opera singers with dancers. Ballet and opera have different strengths and limitations and Bejart is just as interested in exploring how the two media overlap as he is in telling an already well-told story one more time. When they do not overlap, Bejart interrupts the flow of the action, as deliberately as a schoolmaster rapping your desk for attention, pointing out where opera is more adept at conveying a certain idea, or where theater is more effective than either musical medium. His self-awareness is so extreme that it is dramatic rather than pedantic, adding to the production's flamboyant theatricality.
Where Wagner foreshadows with an overture, Bejart foreshadows with a visual prologue, introducing many of his key elements in the ballet's first moments. The three Rhine maidens, keepers of the gold that will become the Ring, look like the three fates posed at the front of the opening tableau. Behind them is a slightly dilapidated ballet studio, complete with an iron-railed balcony for visitors, a mirrored back wall, a reel-to-reel tape machine and a rehearsal piano. Bejart soon establishes classical ballet as the land and language of the gods.
As in the beginning of Bejart's classic Sacre du Printemps, dozens of dancers lie motionless on the floor in semi-darkness, people of a new era. Over them stands a man (Olivier Chanut) in a loose-fitting pin-stripe suit and overcoat. He is the Wanderer; he moves about the stage looking for something. He comes to a second piano, drinks from the fountain that spouts from its strings, lifts the heavy lid and is blinded by a flash of light. It is an instant and dramatic metaphor for his thirst for knowledge and the price he must pay for it. Now blind in one eye, the Wanderer spends the rest of the ballet reliving that moment in greater detail, watching the fateful story of the Ring of the Nibelungen unfold.
Sturm und Drang
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