New York City Ballet: A Midsummer Night's Dream

(Photo: Paul Kolnik)

Tues, Jun 16 - New York City Ballet concluded its spring season this year with George Balanchine's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Based on the Shakespeare play of the same name, it is a light, early-summer creamsicle of a ballet. I attended Tuesday night's first performance, the beginning of the company's week-long run that will go through Sunday.

Joaquin De Luz started the performance as Oberon in Act 1, but was replaced later in the performance by Gonzalo Garcia. (Philip, at his appropriately named blog Oberon's Grove, reported that the switch happened right after the Scherzo; I didn't notice the switch from my seat farther away until they announced the change before Act 2.) What De Luz did perform, though, was spectacular: his dancing in the scherzo was gasp inducing, with all of its direction-changing jumps, fast entrechats and turns. The virtuoso antics were tempered by a real elegance, and his imperiousness as the character of Oberon in the overture scene was just perfect. The switch between DeLuz and Garcia was seamless, and Garcia, too, has a remarkable elegance and jump, though Oberon's dance role diminishes after the Scherzo. No explanation was given for the cast switch, though I hope its not a serious injury or something like it.

Darci Kistler's Titania had an appropriately commanding, regal air in her acting scenes, but I found her dancing shaky, lacking in ease and flow. The dance in Titania's Bower, with its grand adage, is one of my favorite moments in the ballet, but it wasn't as smooth as it could have been. Sadly, the erosion in her once-prominent technique is showing, and you can see the big effort she has to put into her dancing now (I didn't see those earlier years live, only having seen them on the few videos of her in Nutcracker and Theme and Variations).

Teresa Reichlin was a very impressive Hyppolyta, long legs and all. Daniel Ulbricht's Puck had all of his usual high-flying impressiveness, but some of his characterizations were a bit too hammy for my taste. The scenery for New York City Ballet's production in Act 2, looks way too much like The Nutcracker, with its over-abundance of pink painted drapery (I prefer the more elegant midnight ballroom shown on Pacific Northwest Ballet's video of Midsummer). However, Jennifer Ringer and Philip Neal were fantastic as the divertissement's central couple, and the corps' dancing had a delightful, energetic quality here. It was a wonderful way to end the evening.

Overall, though there were many charming things about the production and the performance, it is not one of my favorite ballets. I can understand its popular appeal (it is revived regularly in the end-of-season slot), with its colorful sets and costumes, and I adore the brilliant Act 2 divertissement – a plotless mini ballet of its own. But I often get bored during Act 1, with all of its story-telling fussiness. I can't help but fall into the comparison trap here, and I find that Balanchine is much less adept at conveying narrative and literal characters than his contemporaries Jerome Robbins, whose work was shown at City Ballet last week, or even the Royal Ballet's Frederick Ashton. Ashton's one-act treatment of Midsummer, entitled The Dream, is to me more entertaining and has much more vividly drawn, interesting characters than their equivalents in the Balanchine work.

(Photo: Paul Kolnik)

Balanchine's Midsummer, is rare in his oeuvre in that it is evening-length and a story ballet; Midsummer and Balanchine's version of Nutcracker are the only two that are in regular active repertory, and his Don Quixote has been only occasionally performed for the last several years. Balanchine's brilliance comes from his stirring musical sensitivity. In his ballets, there is a near-perfect visual interpretation of the music – but more than that, from the music, Balanchine also drew a great depth of emotion and tantalizing suggestion of characters and relationships among the dancers on stage. Narrative is not explicitly stated, but the viewer can often find something of his or her own interpretation in the dancers' interactions.

In telling a full narrative with A Midsummer Night's Dream, Balanchine follows the rough sketches of Shakespeare's story pretty closely. The plot is reduced to 60 minutes in Act 1 and its telling relies on the audience's prior knowledge of the play. It is relayed mostly through broad gestures: boy in blue loves girl in blue, and indicates such with a big hug, while boy in red tells girl in red he does not love her by throwing his hands at her in disgust and stomping away, etc. - all this representing the love quadrangle of Hermia, Lysander, Demitrius and Helena. The fairies get most of the attention and dancing, perhaps because ballet's language of pointe shoes and bourres lends itself naturally to a heightened world of flying creatures.

Act 1 is laid out in episodes and presentational dance moments: after the overture, where we meet the main characters in a sort of grand pageant, there is a dance in Titania's bower that shows her as an elegant queen among a retinue of girls. Oddly, though, she dances here with a male cavalier who is unrelated to the story (his presence as the lone male in her bower brings up all sorts of questions...). Oberon gets a dance scene next, and it is highly virtuosic, filled with flashy jumps. He is surrounded by his entourage of butterflies, danced by corps girls in pointe shoes as well as a huge gathering of the cutest young children imaginable - in NYCB's production, they are all young students from the School of American Ballet.

These are great dance moments and wonderfully entertaining when danced well, but they only establish generic ballet types for these fairly complex characters. Ashton's The Dream, in contrast, choreographed unique, individual steps to his characters that establish personalities for them. Titania, for example, has a sort of zigzagging hop on pointe that gives her a simultaneously imperious and flirtatious nature. Oberon's overbearing impetuousness is more clearly drawn simply in the way that he walks. Balanchine's scenes for the quartet of human lovers tells their story very straightforwardly, but for some reason I find these passages long and boring, the characterizations and choreography generic. In the Ashton it is charming and amusing, the story told more economically. Ashton quickly gets us back to the fairies' dancing, which is more interesting to me in a non-speaking production.

I further love Ashton's climactic pas de deux for Titania and Oberon, set to the gorgeous Nocturne from Mendelssohn's score for Midsummer - it appropriately finishes out the story of our two main lovers. But Balanchine gives no such pas de deux to Titania and Oberon, and he uses the Nocturne for a comic pas de deux between Titania and the donkey Bottom.

There are, though, many things that the Balanchine version gets spectacularly right: the children who play butterflies and woodland creatures throughout the whole ballet. They bring a delightful innocence and joy to all of the proceedings. I also like how Balanchine uses Mendelssohn's Midsummer Overture in full, as composed, where Ashton's version chops it up into pieces to fit his dance scenes.

And the Act 2 divertissement is one of the most beautiful pieces of Balanchine choreography. At its center is a suite of dances set to Mendelssohn's Symphony No. 9 and a meltingly gorgeous pas de deux for non-named divertissement dancers, one of the romantic of Balanchine's pas de deux. The entire essence of Midsummer's themes of love is encapsulated here in this non-narrative dance, making the dance very much like Balanchine's standalone plotless ballets. It's brilliant, and nearly worth the entire ballet itself.

All photos by Paul Kolnik, of Midsummer Night's Dream, choreographed by George Balanchine: (1) The New York City Ballet corps and children from the School of American Ballet in the finale; (2) Darci Kistler as Titania and Charles Askegard as her Cavalier in the Bower scene; (3) Kister as Titania, with Botton; (4) the finale with a different cast than the one reviewed here, Adam Hendrickson as Puck.