Alas, our youth was what we made it,
Something to fritter and to burn,
When hourly we ourselves betrayed it,
And it deceived us in return;
When our sublimest aspiration,
And all our fresh imagination,
Swiftly decayed beyond recall
Like foliage in the rotting fall.
Alexandr Pushkin
In his pre-curtain talk, guest Drama Coach Javier Galitó-Cava warned against a common misidentification– referring to the dancers as storytellers: “The choreographer, Yuri Possokhov, is the storyteller. The dancers are the story.” According to Galitó-Cava, to be the story, “the steps must be driven by intention.” During his stay in San Francisco, he worked with all 16 of the of the four four-member lead casts to help them find intention, and provided the entire cast with a guidebook detailing the characteristics they should be looking for to shape a backstory for their characters during their moment on stage. I found myself channeling the memory of the Cuban dance pedagogue Fernando Alonso emphasizing that no dancer takes the stage as an observer. Each one carries a story that penetrates every sinew and determines the trajectory of every step. Galitó-Cava helps the audience appreciate, just as he had done with the dancers, that the old instruction to “smile here,” “weep there,” contributes nothing to the spine of the work. Instead, each dancer must seek in his or her inner life a corresponding response to the stimuli arising from the libretto, choreographed.
If it is this self-scrutiny that summoned the most outstanding dancing in memory by an opening night cast, we owe a debt to this company led by Tamara Rojo for resurrecting coaching grounded in the best traditions of Stanislavski and, in Galitó-Cava’s case, Sanford Meisner, as foundational to producing a ballet work. Casting Joseph Walsh in the title role could have become an argument for casting against type, but rather than dancing the role as if he were the fish who didn’t realize he was in water until he was out of it, Walsh grew Onegin from a profligate, who cared little about the consequences of his insolence, into the dissolute confounded by the unanticipated consequences of his choices, the kind that destroy from the inside out, a parallel to the neutron bomb, known to vaporize people but leave the institutions they create intact.
A short dancer, who at first looks dwarfed by infinitely tall columns that anchor the simple but eyepoppingly elegant sets by Tom Pye, Walsh leverages what diminishes him against a less rarified cohort of society than the one that formed him. His bumptious irritation swells like an infection destined not to heal, but to scab over and scar. Katherine Barkman is a natural for making his admirer Tatiana her own in spite of having been deprived of some of the most arresting opportunities that inhabit the original John Cranko version of this ballet. Specifically, she never gets to dance what leads to her tearing up Onegin’s letter to her when he repentantly seeks to recapture her affections because the scene where that takes place is absent in this version. She doesn’t get to dance what is the most moving pas de deux in the Cranko work—with Gremin, the one she chooses to marry. Her moment of epiphany about her own worthiness in direct proportion to Onegin’s unworthiness where she tears up his plaintive letter, is scrapped in favor of closing a door on him. Tatiana’s bearing witness to her coming into her own, no longer a hungry, hungry caterpillar, but a seasoned and socialized butterfly, is the highlight of the Cranko version. It’s the scene that Onegin aficionados look forward to watching and even enjoying; so that substituting closing a door for tearing up the letter feels like not only Tatiana, but Possokhov closing it on the audience.
Certain dancers, Wei Wang as the indefatigable Lensky, Wona Park as the flighty Olga, and Nikisha Fogo as the Lead Spring Spirit, totally rocked in this evening’s performance. They presented us with a double helix: giving their all to make what they were given sparkle, as we watched them cultivate it, grow it, and harvest its abundant flowering.
Bolstered by brilliant sets, and costumes you’d like to hang in your closet, there were two aspects to this production that detracted from it. The first was the score, which, considering that Pushkin wrote his poetic novel in the 1830s, went anachronistic in places, with semi-jazzy snatches that felt borrowed just a bar or two short of plagiarism, interspersed with ungainly classical passages. The second was a temptation to which Possokhov succumbed—reconfiguring the libretto as a paeon to his Russian Bear origins. It had the feel of a scrapbook given over to the Great Russian Chauvinism that survived both because of and despite Stalinism. It populated the dream scene, the outdoor pagan romps, and relied choreographically on an unremitting number of renversé in several of the ensemble segments, as if he were turning back the clock to what Possokhov now cherishes but earlier on rejected and regrets having left behind. Whether intended or not, it serves as an off-key echo of Onegin’s remorse.
If this were your first rodeo, no foul, no harm. On the other hand, if you’ve seen and fully appreciated the Cranko version, you’ll mourn what these tropes supplant: Cranko’s manicured aristocratic enchainements creating an atmosphere that captures the precise temperature, tempo, and customs of the era, and the iron-clad social conventions that conspired to condemn an indecent variant of heartbreak while all the while feasting on it.
Toba Singer
