Poets lost and found

Boston Ballet's "Festival of Firsts"

by Marcia B. Siegel

"FESTIVAL OF FIRSTS,"Le Jeune Homme et la Mort, by Roland Petit; Bachianas, by Daniel Pelzig; and Corybantic Ecstasies, by Christopher Wheeldon. Presented by Boston Ballet at the Shubert Theatre, through March 14.

Poetry isn't something we find very much in dance performance now. We live in pragmatic times. We're busy with life; we don't have time to reflect on it. Maybe that's why Christopher Wheeldon's new work for Boston Ballet was so unexpected and so touching.

Corybantic Ecstasies is a suite of dances to Leonard Bernstein's 1954 Serenade after Plato's Symposium. The composer denied any programmatic intent but allowed that the music is "a series of related statements in praise of love," according to one of his biographers, Joan Peyser. Wheeldon centers each of the five sections of the music on a different set of mythical characters: Eros (Patrick Armand in the first cast), Echo and Narcissus (Tara Hench and Simon Ball or Zachary Hench), Hermes (Pollyana Ribeiro and Carlos Santos), Eros and Psyche (Armand and Larissa Ponomarenko), and Dionysia (led by Adriana Suárez and Yuri Yanowsky).

Wheeldon has made a completely classical and formally structured ballet that nevertheless evokes the diverse human experience so enduringly symbolized by the Greek myths. The work has texture, virtuosity, and poetic resonance, and it doesn't give away all its gifts immediately. It's a wonderful addition to the repertory.

In the first movement, Eros dances with a complement of four couples. No roly-poly infant Cupid here, the God of Love is powerful. His leaps and confident revolutions provide a focal point for a fruitful series of dance designs by the attendants. I was reminded of George Balanchine's Apollo and, often throughout the piece, of the inventive and captivating way Balanchine could arrange small ensembles to feature their expertise within a symmetrical or alternating pattern. In other words, Wheeldon, now a soloist at New York City Ballet, has inherited Balanchine's idea of making a ballet constantly interesting but never letting it spread out into aimless spectacle.

In the second movement, Wheeldon tells the story of the nymph deprived of original speech who can only echo the words spoken to her. Echo first imitates three other women in an innovative three-against-one canon. Then she begins to follow Narcissus. The story of how he falls in love with his own reflection instead is shown economically and beautifully in a mirror dance, with the Narcissus in the water draped in simple cellophane strips. The men carry Echo on their backs, as if she were swimming. She dances between them but can't break their fatal attraction. She sinks to the floor as if melting into the landscape. The gods turned Echo into a mountain spirit and Narcissus into a flower, but we don't need to see this in order to feel the poignancy of their encounter.

In a quick, brilliant duet, Hermes the messenger is doubled, male and female. Ribeiro and Santos dance in tandem except for supported punctuations, like the moment when she spins down almost to the floor and rises again without breaking her tempo. Wheeldon gives them a small circle of flashing leaps so we can see the golden wings on their heels. (The handsome costumes for the ballet are by Gary Lisz.)

With the lightest, smoothest bourrées, Ponomarenko sketches the adventures of the unfortunate Psyche, who provoked the jealous curses of Venus by being too beautiful. Armand holds her as she seems to languish, then revive. We might think of the daunting tasks Psyche had to undergo, and the faithful love Cupid maintained for her through all her trials.

Finally the principals and the almost-forgotten original quartet of attendants, now joined by another couple, dance a wild and sometimes jazzy but still always formal Dionysian orgy led by Suárez and Yanowsky. With Bernstein in a Stravinskian mode, the dance takes on some of the exuberance of Balanchine's Rubies. By now Eros has disappeared into the revels, but the transformed dancers circle around the empty space where he first ruled.

Poetry of an entirely different sort is implied but not quite brought off in Roland Petit's Le Jeune Homme et la Mort ("The Young Man and Death"). Dramatic ballets are out of style if they come from the 20th century, but unfamiliarity is no reason to eliminate an interesting period piece from the repertory. Revivals take extra care, though. On opening night this 1946 work seemed to be treading none too securely on the borderlines between renewing an old style, updating it out of existence, and producing a kitschy homage.

The Boston revival is staged for Roland Petit by Luigi Bonino. Created for the passionate French dancers Jean Babilée and Nathalie Phillipart, it had a libretto by Jean Cocteau and a kinky reputation from the start. It was choreographed to popular music and not paired with the real score, Bach's Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor, until the dress rehearsal. The ballet has since served as a vehicle for several famous dancers, and a terrific film was made in the '60s by Rudolf Nureyev and Zizi Jeanmaire. None of this information was offered in the Boston program, and the audience seemed stunned but intrigued.

Le Jeune Homme comes from the existentialist Paris of the postwar period. Surrealistic and even lurid, it begins with a man alone in a seedy attic. A woman he's been waiting for arrives, but instead of making love, she teases him and finally goads him to suicide, returning with a death mask to lead him away over the rooftops, with the Eiffel Tower and a flashing Citroën sign in the distance.

We can ponder over the possible meanings of this seemingly pointless seduction, but on opening night it looked malicious rather than mysterious. Patrick Armand and Aleksandra Koltun seemed to be trying to imitate the two most famous bits of the ballet's iconography, the Nureyev film and a series of great noir images of the original production by the English photographer Baron. Koltun wore a yellow dress, black gloves, and a black Dutch-boy wig, just like Phillipart. Armand even looks a little like the muscular Babilée. Both tried to simulate their dancer-predecessors without giving a sense of who they thought the characters were. The whole ballet seemed frozen in high intensity, technical precision, and twitchy mannerisms that had no psychological conviction.

Ballets were obsessed with the Meaning Of It All during the postwar years. Intellectuals and artists agonized over whether to act when one knew the act was futile, and whether suicide was an acceptable solution to despair. In the film, Nureyev was young and beautiful and tortured, perhaps with sexual ambivalence, though most critics and Cocteau himself portrayed him as a frustrated artist or poet. Jeanmaire, unlike the demonic Phillipart, smiled enigmatically and stayed cool throughout, a perfect antagonist for the increasingly enraged Nureyev. But, replicating their actions, Armand and Koltun showed no confusion, no ambiguity. They could have been depicting just one more tabloid story of sex and violence in the heartless city.

Also on the program is Bachianas, a new ballet by Daniel Pelzig. Set to selections from Heitor Villa-Lobos's Bachianas Brasileiras, the plotless work has five principals and six supporting dancers in tie-dyed leotards, and it offers exacting and well-rehearsed choreography for all. The movement started out elaborating on a theme of circles, with cartwheel lifts, turns, and supported arabesques for Suárez and Paul Thrussell in the first part. Yuri Yanowsky partnered various women and then walked back and forth through the moving group with a curious sliding, bent-over step and punchy fists. In a later section Jennifer Gelfand did a fast duet with Laszlo Berdo, and then, after a series of death-defying lifts, was thrown into the wings. By then the ballet was drifting from one idea to another. In the last section Gelfand and Suárez were both carried in the air by running partners. At one point they reached for each other. The other dancers assembled in trios and duos, lifting women and trading them off.

For the whole ballet the dancers seemed stuck on an emotional high, exulting in their physical prowess and unconcerned with anything more personal. Maybe I would have seen all this as more than a technical tour de force if I'd understood why the soprano (Maria Ferrante) was on the stage with them, singing passionately about something for two sections and retreating to the wings for the two instrumental numbers. The program supplied no lyrics or other guide to the music.