Stop me if you've heard this one, but the big dance event last week came the night the two Borzois who are extras in San Francisco Ballet's excellent production of Giselle started humping each other, and also the Duchess Bathilde, near the end of the first act. Picture a stage set that looks like the clearing in front of Snow White's cottage, into which suddenly sweeps an aristocratic hunting party. They make an important entrance, first young men with hawks on their hands, then elaborately dressed gentlemen, the majordomo in scarlet, and finally the Duchess comes in on the big music leading two magnificent wolfhounds, who are totally well-bred and expensive-looking and behave like majesty itself till they get to their spot across the stage, when suddenly one dog gets on the Duchess' leg, and the other mounts behind her (him?), and they have at it.
The Opera House went into uproar, the audience was howling with laughter, the orchestra had to stop, the Duke of Courland (Ricardo Bustamante) had to take both dogs and con forza haul them into the wings, whereupon the majordomo (Myles Thatcher) broke the fourth-wall convention, turned to us, and adopted the famous "There you have it!" posture of Jack Benny. It stopped the show, it brought down the house �" and then the orchestra picked back up and events resumed. There were many small mishaps the rest of the night, though nothing disturbed the concentration of the ballerina (Sarah Van Patten), who proceeded to give us a deep, rich interpretation of the peasant girl who dies of a broken heart when she finds out that the charming new guy she's fallen in love with is not who she thought he was, but in fact a nobleman in disguise, indeed the fiance of the lady in the very fancy dress. Van Patten's mad scene was so powerful it almost upstaged the dogs.
Your reporter saw two performances. The show was not ruined on the wild night, though Van Patten was not well-supported by her partner, Luke Ingham, who was unconvincing from his first entrance, long before the dogs came on. He did his steps just fine, but he lacks projection in a role that calls for much more than dance technique. We have to know how he feels about her �" is he toying with her, is he at least a little in love with her, is he really in love with her, when does he fall in love with her? All these things a great dancer/actor can show through their dancing. No-one who saw Baryshnikov in this role will ever forget what a nervous wreck he was whenever he was not around Giselle, and how only she could give him a reason to stay alive.
Photo: Erik Tomasson
The other performance was an altogether different affair. Mathilde Froustey and Tiit Helimets were magnificent in the second act, when the ghost of Giselle rises from her grave to save her broken-hearted lover from the vampirish Wilis who want to see him dance till he drops down dead. Froustey's a new ballerina to us. She comes from Paris, and with her training and her superlatively flexible body can create imagery that defies credit. But seeing is believing. Her neck seems to begin between her shoulder-blades, and when she arches her throat, she is pleading for his life. It is a mute appeal, but this is ballet, and she completely wins us. She can seem to melt through his hands when he reaches out, half-believing she is really there, until the moment comes when his hands do close around her and he lifts her overhead like a chalice at the Mass.
Photo: Erik Tomasson
Helimets also understands this style, and he builds his effects so that the impossible seems to be more and more likely; at the climax of the action, when he is under command to dance till he drops, he seems to enter a zone of fatality, and begins a series of entrechats way upstage �" again and again, he springs up, his legs scissor back and forth almost imperceptibly, just barely off the ground, and as he continues to do the same step, we see his image gradually grow clearer and larger (he's moving forward imperceptibly, as if a camera were panning in on him, and jumping imperceptibly higher each time), as the music mounts in excitement, repeating the same motif modulating upwards a half-tone with each repetition. The audience begins applauding after 16 of these, but he continues, seemingly in a trance, under the Wilis' compulsion, and keeps going through the music, so we're screaming, and then he falls, panting, begging for his life, and then must get up and jump some more, and then Giselle jumps in and dances for him, and saves his life.
That's what a classic can do. They showed us something in it that, though I've seen Giselle many times, ranks with the very greatest I've seen, and included feelings I've never felt before.
One of the ways art becomes classic is to outlive the era in which it was old-hat. Giselle survived a time when it had died out in Paris but was kept alive in St. Petersburg, then got a whole new lease on life under the Soviets, who amped up the class conflict and made Giselle a heroic figure from the moment she stepped out her cottage door.
Graham crackers
Later in the week, we saw a mixed bill from the Martha Graham Dance Company at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley that made it seem that those ballets have material in them that young fresh dancers would not willingly let die.
Graham was already going out of style by the 1960s, and lived on into the 90s, many, many years after her initial triumphs. What was fascinating to see in Appalachian Spring, Cave of the Heart, and Maple Leaf Rag was how magnificently stage-worthy they still are. The secrets of stillness that she commanded are riveting to see �" her dancers can stop in mid-air, just as Nijinsky was famous for doing, and can also hold a standing position with complete, riveting outline for great stretches of time, while on another part of the stage a character dances his heart out. Noguchi's sets provide razor-edged perches, but the dancers' outlines are as clear and sharp as his �" almost as if they'd been drawn there. Their silhouettes are as legible and unforgettable as those in a painting of Warhol's �" the pioneer woman, the bride, the preacher of Appalachian Spring are literally iconic in their dancing, and even more in their stillness.
They received wonderful support from the Berkeley Symphony, who played Copland's music, and Barber's score for Medea . Marc Shapiro played the Scott Joplin with style on a piano onstage.