Orange County Performing Arts Center, Segerstrom Hall
Wednesday, March 14, 2007, 8pm
Boris Eifman has a thing for choreographing ballets about people with angst. Lots of angst. The maddening, painful, and extremely melodramatic kind where characters run around with their hands splayed in the air. Several years ago, Eifman's company brought a piece called Tchaikovsky to Orange County, and that was all about the composer Tchaikovsky's anguish over his homosexuality. Eifman has also choreographed a ballet about George Balanchine for New York City Ballet, where Eifman's character of Balanchine had all sorts of angst when he fell in love with ballerinas who became his muses - but those ballerinas didn't love him back (a la Suzanne Farrell). In many ways, Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy's novel of longing and love in aristocratic Russia, is a perfect fit for Eifman. The title character feels all sorts of angst: angst against the society that entraps her, angst for falling in love outside her own loveless marriage, angst for not getting to see her son when she decides to follow that forbidden love... And Eifman delivers plenty of stage anguish in a fairly predictable melodramatic fashion. There's even an ecstatic, dream orgy to cap off Anna's descent into madness - just like there was at the end of Tchaikovsky. Bottomline, Anna Karenina was typical of stuff I've seen of Eifman - and whether that's good depends on willingness to go for it at the time.
Unfortunately for the Eifman Ballet, I wasn't so ready to go for it tonight. Hamburg Ballet was here just a few weeks ago, and John Neumeier's two ballets were much better than Boris Eifman's piece tonight. The Neuemeier ballets and Eifman's ballets share several common traits: they're both full evening dance dramas, both are original creations, and the music is pieced together from pre-existing classical music. But Neumeier chose his music better and used it to better dramatic effect: in The Lady of the Camellias, for example, Neumeier used many different Chopin pieces, but instead of relying on the music to provide all the necessary dramatic moments, he placed it in the background like a movie soundtrack. It's the music these characters would have heard sitting in their drawing rooms. The choreography was better, too. It utilized the music, of course, but the drama was powerfully conveyed using the steps and the interactions of the characters in movement - a true command of dance as an expressive tool.
Eifman, on the other hand, relied on a the same gimmicks over and over and asked the music - in its swells and swoons - to suggest love or tension. That music was usually composed to represent something entirely different than what Eifman is force fitting it into his ballet for. And to make matters worse, Eifman selected well known classical music - the Fantasy Overture from Romeo & Juliet, or Serenade for Strings which Balanchine used very memorably in Serenade - but tries to make it serve his own purposes in a different context. Trouble is, I can't help but recall my own version of what's going on with that music, and I got very distracted (the fact that Eifman is clearly influenced by the other choreographies and throws sloppy pastiches of those moments from Balanchine onto the stage as well doesn't help).
And all that melodrama and thrashing around in Anna Karenina got really tiresome. There wasn't much character development, just a bunch of violent pas de deux where Anna basically gets tossed around (by her jealous husband) or kissed all over (by her passionate new lover). The only effective tool for me was the periodic appearance of her child, here played by an actual child on stage. He'd show up, she affectionately hugs him, but her husband keeps pulling her away - causing her to cry. It was a pretty effective moment to show how much she's losing by going with a new lover: kids always make the audience cry.
I'm also a bit taken aback by Eifman's program note, where he offers his interpretation of the story's central conflict (note the italicized portion): "[Anna] did not find happines in travles, her husband's rich estate, or the habitual amusements of the society in which she lived. Instead, she fell captive to a woman's tragic enslavement to her sensuality. I understand a woman who becomes dependent on a man. This dependence, however, like any disease, brings only suffering." Wow. That's, like, the most feminist interpretation of Anna Karenina that I've ever read (sarcasm, people). Is that what Eifman really boils the whole thing down to - that she goes through all this because all she needs is a man, and she's just got that women's thing of being 'tragically enslaved' to a man? That interpretation rubs me the wrong way, especially when Eifman throws his Anna around on stage so much and has her husband taking sex from her so brashly in their first scene together.
The audience at OCPAC seemed to love the whole ballet though - they stood up enthusiastically at the curtain call. Perhaps the applause was for the dancers, who really did give their all for the performance. I just wasn't buying the ballet they were dancing.
Eifman offers up a ballet adaptation of Chekhov's play The Seagull this weekend. Haven't decided if I'm going to go see that yet. But tomorrow is Los Angeles Ballet with Agon and Concerto Barocco. I'm super excited to see that.
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