Through a photographer’s lens, sets mimicking the framed innards of a box camera, and costumes reviving custom-crafted fabric that great-grandmothers should have been photographed wearing, we meet the historic Raymonda. She is reimagined by San Francisco Ballet Artistic Director Tamara Rojo as a Florence Nightingale figure, a wartime nurse devoted to her profession as an innovator whose best practices won nursing it’s standing as the indispensable, license-worthy cornerstone of modern patient care.
Created by Petipa and set in the Middle Ages, in which the Raymonda character is an aristocrat with a heart of gold, in this prodigious version that spares no expense, the Crimean War becomes the proving ground for Nightingale’s inauguration of nursing as a profession and less the double burden of a woman’s domestic role. The war posed challenges for medicine which offered Nightingale a laboratory for culturing nursing protocols, which applied to good effect, enabled thousands of women to pursue first-time professional careers.
The challenge for the choreographer is to marry a pre-existing storyline with a protagonist whose own life adventures and accomplishments assume pride of place alongside those of Clara Barton, the “American Florence Nightingale,” and others of similar class origin, disposition, and achievements in the 19th Century. However honorable the intention to give each character and scene its due, choreography adhering to the demands of the Glazunov score, if overstuffed and underbuilt, courts the danger of becoming a mash-up into which each carefully-tended ingredient sacrifices piquancy.
In this production, the staging was precisioned by venerated interpreters Loipa Araújo, Daniel Kraus, Vadim Sarotin, and Hua Fang Zhang. The stylized enchainments by the Turkish Guards were forcefully masculine in their dexterity, volume, and dashing dispatch. Jasmine Jimison as Sister Clemence, this version’s White Lady, probes the tenor of relationships between women that on the down low, violated certain boundaries, while discreetly drawing back into safe territory when necessary. That iteration of the woman friend has been lost to us in a moment where “gender issues” override the subtleties of women’s friendships and sensual intimacies that may touch on the sexual but also retreat to a social compact of guardedness. Jimison inhabits both, at the same time that she demonstrates no hesitations in dancing full-out the powerful influence of her personality as she stewards the story. Katherine Barkman, as Henriette, infuses it with contagious, bounding joy, the counterpoint to the murky definition of what is real as opposed to a vision in the dream sequences.
The male casting raises a few doubts. Was the guest appearance of Australian Ballet principal Joseph Caley meant to fill a vacancy or was it an audition, or both? While he fully established his aptitude for capturing the John de Bryan skittishness, his technique and stamina lagged, forcing him to re-position Sasha De Sola several times in lifts to the shoulder. As fatigue became apparent, his arabesque leg lost its luft. John de Bryan is a physically demanding role. Why assign a guest artist, with much to adjust to in establishing collegial company relationships with dancers who have years of experience and familiarity with the company’s work culture? Fernando Carratalá Coloma, as Abdhur Ramen, De Bryan’s half-friend and half-rival, sounds an adolescent note as Raymonda’s intriguing yet second-string suitor. It may be the gestural “comments” that he ends combinations with or that the work is so larded that the real rivalry is found in the competition for focus on role development.
Borrowing from other classical works is a feature of both the original and new versions. It’s a little more out-of-body than required to see in the vision sequence, Raymonda sitting at a desk seeming to write a letter, conjuring the twin emblematic letter scenes from Onegin. The divertissements featuring folkloric traditions invoke Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, and Nutcracker, and men instead of women, descending a ramp, repeating the step-step- arabesque- cambré-back sequence from Kingdom of the Shades is pushing the envelope. The corps de ballet and soloists deliver fully in the divertissement segments, which go on longer than any in memory. Notable are the Hungarian Workers, danced virtuosically by Sasha Mukhamedov and Nathaniel Remez; Ratchull, danced brightly by Isabella DeVivo and Joshua Jack Price; and the Spanish Couples, danced by Kamryn Baldwin, Ruben Cítores Nieto, Sasha Mukhamedov and Mingxuan Wang, leaving no doubt that Spanish traditions value the strength in the Maja as fully as in the macho.
As Raymonda, Sasha De Sola, once again regains her place in the Pantheon. She is unerring in her technique, enviable in her stamina, authentic in her responsiveness, selective in her choices, intelligent in her pacing, and brilliant in her portrayal of the conflict, determination, and discretion that make Raymonda the Lady with the Lamp who leads the way out of, rather than follows social conventions. Her crowning performance makes seeing this Raymonda worthwhile.
Toba Singer
