La Bayadère: Still Beautiful After All These Years

La Bayadère
American Ballet Theatre
Metropolitan Opera House
May 17, 2007

I saw this Natalia Makarova version of Bayadère when it was brand new; I even got a chance to see the company rehearsing some of it in that now long-demolished building right off of Broadway (it was in that big studio right off the elevator, which you can see in The Turning Point, when Clark Tippet closes the door in Shirley McLaine’s face. And how can I not reference that film, when it uses the opening of the Shades scene to show not just what classical ballet is, but how beautiful and moving it can be?) So, much of this was swirling through my head at the performance at the Met last Thursday (thank you, Myra!), which I saw from a beautiful seat in the Dress Circle (that’s the third ring, for those of you who never leave the State Theater).

The production looks good; the sets and costumes are subtly colored, with very little clutter (thank goodness, given the plot). While the ballet may have a weak plot (two powerful men cause problems for two women, who then fight to the death over a third spineless man), the performance had a strong cast: Paloma Herrera was Nikiya, David Hallberg was Solor, and Gillian Murphy was Gamzatti.

What struck me as I watched the ballet (while in my mind’s eye watching a younger self watch the ballet), was the extent to which watching Balanchine has retrained my outward eye, to be always seeking structure. It is only once you get past the mime scenes and get, finally, in Act 1 scene 3, to the meat, to the Petipa, that you get that structure, and to the steps that flesh it out, steps that are pretty and inventive and strung together with skill and musicality. (Note the groupings: three groups of three in the background, with the main couple in the foreground; and the groupings shift and evolve and are in constant motion.)

But the real, and ultimately, maybe only, reason to see this ballet, is Act 2, the Kingdom of the Shades. And yes, it is still beautiful after all these years. As each corps member makes her entrance and steps into arabesque and begins the process of snaking around the stage, the restless stop rustling, the coughers stop coughing; all is serene and everything is beautiful at the ballet. The Minkus score is what it is; but I love it here, nonetheless. The corps got a huge hand, deservedly.

On the whole, the dancing was solid throughout. There was some clomping from the girls in the purple tutus in the Pas d’Action in the garden scene, but the girls in light blue did well, and the men here looked very strong (the sluggish tempo in this section probably wasn’t helping anyone).

Herrera can be a mystery; she is all feet, with a baroque line. Sometimes she seems to be afflicted with the same problem that can creep into Maria Kowroski’s performances, a seeming mental absence. In the first act, for example, when she comes out in that fetching red costume and dances with the fatal basket of flowers, she doesn’t seem to understand that she should be milking those steps; that she should be both seducing Solor as well as beseeching Gamzatti, both of whom are sitting at the end of the diagonal on which she dances. Whenever she turns her back on the audience and runs upstage, she loses any trace of characterization that she had created. She was much better in the Shades scene, where all she had to do was dance.

Murphy has a stronger presence as an actress as well as a bravura technique, and she doesn’t allow Gamzatti to become invisible. Hallberg, whom I last saw in The Green Table, a role of a slightly different virtuosity, has a solid, generous technique, and no annoying mannerisms. While this is positive, he might want to work on developing a stronger stage presence here. Unlike the role of Death, where much of that persona is created for him, here he is on his own, and too often there is not much there beyond some well-executed jumps and turns.

Other notable performances came from the three soloist shades, Sarah Lane, Yuriko Kajiya, and Melissa Thomas; Victor Barbee as the High Brahmin; and Gennadi Saveliev as the Radjah.