Thursday, July 27, 2006

A Brief Note on Mark Morris’s Sylvia

San Francisco Ballet
New York State Theater
Lincoln Center Festival
Sylvia
July 26, 2006

Mark Morris has done a very good job with this production of Sylvia. Here is a three act ballet that I am happy to say is not only not terribly painful to sit through, but is actually enjoyable throughout. Its greatest assets (in addition to the lovely score) are that Morris has taken the convoluted story seriously and has devised a very clean choreographic narrative that he uses to structure each act. Morris’s simple, earthy style works well for most of the cast of characters, but it looks best on the peasants and satyrs in Act 1 and the benignly thuggish slaves in Act 2. He also uses movement motifs to good effect, not only to identify a character, such as Orion’s (Yuri Possokhov) sweeping arm movements, or the sequence of steps given to Eros (Jaime Garcia Castilla) in his various disguises, but also to express shades of emotion, for example, the use of the attitude, often en tournant, in various forms and contexts. We see this movement given, for example, both to Aminta (Gonzalo Garcia) and to Sylvia (Yuan Yuan Tan) in Act 1, and then performed again but slightly differently by Sylvia when she is trapped in the cave in Act 2, where she uses the step to help express her frustration.

Where the balletomane will most feel a sense of loss in this production is Act 3, where Morris’s simple, not-overly-ballet-y style most shows its deficiencies. (Tellingly, it is also here where the Ashton version, as performed by ABT, anyway, which has moments that made me squirm, displays its greatest strength.) Act 3, with its pizzicato variation for the ballerina and the big adagio, is the ballet’s (as it is any 19th-century ballet’s) meat and potatoes. The bond between Aminta and Sylvia needs to be expressed in this adagio; it is not, and this results in a sense of emptiness. In some ways I can see the problem that Morris has set for himself: he is seeking a way to apply his clean, mostly unaffected, style to this most traditional aspect of the ballet, to modernize and update it, and I greatly respect this; and yet the traditional balletic adagio, as it exists here in what is essentially a traditional ballet, remains stubbornly in need of greater substance than that which Morris’s choreography is able to supply. This also may be the reason why I felt that I hadn’t really seen what this company can do; the SFB dancers look very good and perform well, but I wanted more. I hope Morris continues to search for a way to express this; if he is successful he may be able to stop the art form from dying a slow death (after Agon what is there, really?).

While this lack of choreographic substance is problematic, it does not entirely diminish the production as a whole, which for the most part, does work very well. There is much that is charming: the swing in Act 1; the bathing nymphs, who remove their scrunchies (at least that’s what they looked like from the fourth ring) and let down their hair; the presentation of garlands to the statue of Bacchus in Act 3. The costumes and sets are lovely and tasteful; the set in Act 3, with its bright white agora, is particularly notable.

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