Hamburg Ballet: The Lady of the Camellias

(Joëlle Boulogne, center. Photo: Holger Badekow)

Hamburg Ballet: The Lady of the Camellias
Orange County Performing Arts Center, Segerstrom Hall
Tuesday, February 13, 2007, 7:30pm

The Hamburg Ballet gave an exceptional performance last night in The Lady of the Camellias. I loved this performance - an ideal combination of fantastic acting, performances and dancing. It was well worth the drive through 2 hours of gross Southern California traffic.

This production of The Lady of the Camellias is a ballet adaptation of Alexander Dumas' novel of the same name, created in 1978 by company artistic director John Neumeier. It's the same story as the opera La Traviata: boy - Armand - falls in love with the girl that everyone else also enjoys - Marguerite, a popular Parisian courtesan - and chaos ensues when family relations, societal customs and girl's terminal illness keep them apart.

The performances were exceptionally strong from the entire company, but most particularly the from Joëlle Boulogne and Alexander Riabko as Marguerite and Armand. For them, the love story was a nuanced journey that began with Armand's impassioned proclamations of love and Marguerite's bemused enjoyment of it, through to desperation as the affair fell apart. The dancing was intensely emotional and thrillingly acted.

Neumeier's choreography and staging was garbed out as a traditional ballet, but the movement and storytelling structure was decidedly contemporary. The ballet's three acts were centered around a lengthy pas de deux for Marguerite and Armand, each one showing a different stage of the developing relationship. Sudden lifts, impassioned rolling around on the floor: this wasn't a typical 19th century costume drama. And there weren't endless streams of divertissements. The scenes and tableaus all had something to do with the story - even if some decorative dancing served as a backdrop to the drama, it was a necessary backdrop.

I'm going to try and see this again, perhaps on Thursday, before the company switches to performances of Death in Venice over the weekend.

I admit to being surprised by how much I enjoyed this performance... last time Hamburg Ballet was here they did another John Neumeier piece called Nijinsky. It was a highly cerebral homage to one of Neumeier's favorite dancers - the legendary Vaslav Nijinsky, a male dancer with the Russe in the early 20th century. Neumeir's ballet was a fragmented, kaleidoscopic vision of Nijinsky's insane life, from phenomenal dance career to literally insane relatives. Unfortunately, though, if you it was too fragmented: it was only interesting if you were just as into Nijinsky as Neumeier was - I could appreciate the performances from the dancers and I understood what Neumeier was doing, but I felt it didn't work as a standalone dance evening. Especially in Orange County.

Camellias is definitely more 'mainstream' (if that exists in the ballet world). It is much more traditional in its storytelling: it's fairly linear, and though much of it is supposed to take place as a flashback. The opening scene is an auction of Marguerite's possessions after her death - Armand rushes in, mourning, where he sees his father. Armand proceeds to 'tell' his father the whole story of his and Marguerite's affair... this stuff isn't very clear unless you've read the program notes but fortunately the dance drama itself is clear enough that you understand the love story if not the framing device. At least the whole thing isn't as fractured as Nijinsky was. Since Camellias was created fairly early in Neumeier's career, I can see how it may have served as a bridge between traditional dance drama and his later experiments, repressented to me via Nijinsky. We'll have to see how Death in Venice goes when the company performs it this weekend... it's even more recent than Nijinsky in Neumeier's choreographic ouevre, and I'm not quite able to imagine how he'll turn Thomas Mann's highly introspective, slightly depressing novella into a 2 hr 30 min ballet production. The most action I remember the main character doing in the novella is sitting in a chair, watching the object of his lust run around on the beach. Whatever the case, I'm sure the dancers will at least provide something interesting to watch!

The Hamburg Balelt performs The Lady of The Camellias at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, with alternate casts, through Feb 15. The company will also perform Death in Venice, a new ballet from 2003, on Feb 17 and 18. www.ocpac.org


(1) Joëlle Boulogne as Marguerite, in Act 1. Photo by Holger Badekow. (2) Joëlle Boulogne and Alexander Riabko in Act 2. Photo by Holger Badekow. (3) Curtain call at OCPAC on Tuesday night, from my camera phone.