(Irina Dvorovenko and Maxim Beloserkovsky. My photo)
On Friday night, Irina Dvorovenko and Maxim Beloserkovsky added back the spark that was missing from American Ballet Theatre's Swan Lake the night prior. It was wonderful to see an Odette/Odile beautifully and majestically danced, as Dvorovenko did. And as much as Kevin McKenzie has beefed up the Prince's role in this production (and spoken to the press about how Swan Lake is the Prince's story, blah blah), it's really the ballerina that holds Swan Lake together, and order was restored Thursday night with a magnetic ballerina on stage.
Dvorvenko has often been criticized for two-dimensional over acting, and rightly so, but the performance that I saw on Friday wasn't so bad at all. She could perhaps add some nuance to her Odette, but her body and technique is so beautiful to look at that she wins the performance over simply by exquisitely executing the steps and poses. Her Odette was a study in adagio, with breathtaking control over slow passages, while her Odile was all glamour and dazzling pizzazz. Dvorovenko was trained in the Russian style in Kiev, Ukraine, and the Russians all have Swan Lake in their blood - the temperament, the physicality, the phrasing. So in many ways, seeing a Russian-trained dancer as Odette/Odile is instantly pleasing. Though I thought she was very good in her own right in any case, just absolutely beautiful to watch. She also gave a principal-quality performance: her dancing and persona filled the stage in a way that Michele Wiles did not on Thursday.
Dvorovenko shared an easy rapport with her Siegfried, Maxim Beloserkovsky, who is also her husband in real life. He is a wonderfully noble partner and together, the two make an especially handsome couple. Dvorovenko, though, is such a stage eating presence that I spent much of the performance watching her. Whereas on Thursday, David Hallberg's Siegfried was phenomenally more interesting than his Odette, so the scales tipped in Siegfried's favor.
Seeing a relatively weak performance next to a stronger one on two successive nights reinforces the fact that ABT's production of Swan Lake lives and dies on the strength of its two principals, particularly on the strength of its Odette/Odile. The rest of the filler dancing in this production is exceedingly bland, even more noticeably so on repeat viewings. Act III's national dances are a complete and utter bore here, as much a fault of the fussy staging as the dancers who don't fully jump into the character of the choreography. The national dances aren't really my favorite part of the ballet anyway, but at least in other productions they are reasonably entertaining - not so here, and I just twiddle my thumbs and wait for the Black Swan Pas de Deux. When it is middling and inconsistent as it was on Thursday, the rest of the show falls on its feet. But Dvorovenko and Beloserkovsky's Black Swan was thankfully worth it and flashy enough to lift spirits again on Friday night.
This upcoming Friday, I am travelling to Thousand Oaks to see the Tchaikovsky Perm Ballet perform Natalia Makarova's new production of Swan Lake. This will be a distinctly Russian Swan Lake, and the troupe is considered third in line behind the Kirov-Mariinsky and Bolshoi (who are roughly equal and far more international in repution) among Russian companies. We're hoping for a nice, securely classical Swan.
1 comment:
art, the tchaik perm ballet's "Swan lake" at berkeley was definitely "nice" and "classical"...except the stage was extremely small so literally, had swans squished and space was tight, not too much space for much bravura dancing.
polina whipped off those fouettes brilliantly though.
Post a Comment