(Curtain call for The Seagull. Choreographer Boris Eifman in the center.)
Eifman Ballet: The Seagull
Orange County Performing Arts Center, Segerstrom Hall
Sunday, March 17, 2007, 2pm
It was with trepidation that I attended the Eifman Ballet's The Seagull in Orange County this weekend. But it's without trepidation that I say I enjoyed it. It's not without the Eifmanisms that I couldn't take on Wednesday at Anna Karenina, but the ballet as a whole was much better developed in story, choreography and spectacle.
Boris Eifman's Seagull is a ballet adaptation of Anton Chekhov's play of the same name. In the Chekhov, the young playwright Treplev is in love with established actress Arkadina. He writes a daring new play, seeking approval from her for his new work, but she giggles instead (basically). Arkadina is distracted, instead, by famous playwright Trigorin, who arrives and causes a ruckus. Meanwhile, a young actress Zarechnaya becomes Treploev's main actress, but she too longs for Trigorin (because famous artists are super sexy like that). In the ballet, the playwrights become choreographers, and the actresses ballerinas (how clever!). With this as a launching point, Eifman creates a pretty wacky contemporary ballet for us, with diversions into uber-arty performance art ballet and street hip-hop. Yes, hip-hop. More on that later.
It's interesting how many literary to ballet adaptations there have been here in the last two months: John Neumeier's Death in Venice with the Hamburg Ballet did much the same thing to the Thomas Mann novella of the same name - there, tormented writer became the tormented choreographer. I guess it's a brilliant way of transposing a great literary story into the world of dance and images: ballet speaks its own language, so why not tell a common story by translating it into the world of ballet? In both cases, the transition works and the choreographers bring across the essence of both stories through dance: art is universal, they seem to say, and the struggle of artists in literature relates strongly to the trevails of artists in dance.
But back to The Seagull, I liked Seagull because first of all there was a bunch of great dancing. The scenes in the rehearsal studio where Trigorin rehearses his company and teaches them new choreography are filled with fantastic dancing from the Eifman company, and it's all very classical and very hard looking. It's just so much fun watching really good dancers move in ways that show off their strong technique, and the Eifman dancers have exceptionally strong technique. They're all impecably trained in the Russian style - you can see that in the way they move - while the contemporary neoclassical movement that Eifman puts in the classroom scenes pushes that training to the limit. It's a lot of fun.
But simply great dancing does not a whole ballet make (after all, Anna Karenina had good dancing but I still didn't like that very much). This time around, The Seagull had well developed characters and a balanced sense of pacing. There was plenty of Eifman anguish and angst, but it was spaced out more appropriately and we saw on stage, and therefore understood, where each character's anguish was coming from. Eifman carefully singles out each of the main characters within the first scene of the ballet, giving them enough time and space to establish themselves and their relationships with other people on the stage. Costumes and hairstyles were kept relatively consistent through the ballet, so that we could visually follow each character as well.
The scenes that Eifman created for the ballet were entertaining as well. When young choreographer Treplev creates his choreography, it's this weird Euro-chic white blob: a bunch of dancers undulating beneath a shiny white cloth, which sinks in the middle to reveal a unitarded Zarchnaya who acrobatically climbs out. Treplev and Arkadina are shown watching this, staring out at the audience; Treplev anxiously stares at Arkadina to gauge her reaction, but she falls asleep, causing Treplev to launch into his twisted Eifman anguish dance. When Arkadina wakes up, she feigns enthusiasm, clapping and congratulating him as though he didn't just see her fall asleep. This causes more anguish for Treplev, who cowers on a bench somewhere on the stret - then, on come the hip-hop dancers. Strangely, they're dressed in colorful baggy rainbow garb - a rather odd, theatrical vision of American 'street' but whatever, it's fun. The ballet dancers accomplish the hip-hop with marginal success, but the point comes across: it's Treplev's vision of dance outside of Trigorin's strict classroom classicism. And in the landscape of Act One's 45 minutes, it's an upbeat wake-up-the-audience moment.
So Eifman made an interesting case for a full-evening dance drama this time around. It's definitely a contemporary vision, and a convincing way of telling a dance story in contemporary terms. Oleg Gabyshev danced Treplev, Natalia Povorozniuk was Arkadnia, Anastassia Sitnikova was Zarechnaya and Oleg Markov was Trigorin.
