Psycho drama

Eifman Ballet's Tchaikovsky

by Jeffrey Gantz

"The great composer is dying. . . . In his fading consciousness images that have tormented him his entire life rise up: the Fairy Carabosse rampages, the mad Wife pursues him, and the exhausting dialogue with Himself continues. There is no peace for the tormented soul!" That's the beginning of the lengthy synopsis for Tchaikovsky: The Mystery of Life and Death, which the Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg brought to the Emerson Majestic this past weekend, and it suggests that whatever shortcomings Boris Eifman's 23-year-old ballet troupe suffers from, lack of ambition isn't one of them.

The Eifman Ballet has been making a splash in New York with its own repertory of works like The Karamazovs (from the Dostoyevsky novel), Requiem (to Mozart), My Jerusalem (Eifman's trip to the Holy City), and Red Giselle (not the classic ballet but the biography of émigrée Russian ballerina Olga Spessivtseva; the company will be bringing it to the Wang Theatre next month). Anna Kisselgoff has described these works as "psychodramas," but Tchaikovsky, at least, walks the line between psychodrama and melodrama. As the curtain rises, the composer is lying on his deathbed, knees raised, suspended between sexual agony and sexual ecstasy. Carabosse (the Bad Fairy from Sleeping Beauty) and her minions assail him. They give way to a handsome young man, Tchaikovsky's double, his repressed homosexual desire, who strips down to a jockstrap and then runs off. Friends and relatives appear, but they can't keep the flood of flashbacks away -- next up is Antonina Milyukova, the bride of Tchaikovsky's disastrous marriage, in a tattered dress meant, I suppose, to presage her imminent madness.

The first of Tchaikovsky's two acts (set, in a bold move, to the entirety of the Fifth Symphony) describes the composer's attempt to satisfy the social and sexual conventions of tsarist Russia by taking a wife; but the real story is that repressed homosexuality. And it's not a simple one. Herr Droßelmeier (from The Nutcracker) appears with a nutcracker doll; it turns into a handsome Prince whom Tchaikovsky wakes, à la Sleeping Beauty, with a kiss. A flock of black creatures -- Birds of Black Thoughts, according to the synopsis -- take the stage, followed by the white swans from Swan Lake. Tchaikovsky's mystery (they never met) patroness, Nadezhda von Meck, tries to encourage him with a baton. His double offers him the legendary glass of unboiled water from which Tchaikovsky allegedly contracted cholera; Tchaikovsky refuses and, looking like a man on a three-day bender, marries Milyukova, only to panic and run away.

In the second act, Tchaikovsky confronts his sexuality more directly. One harrowing sequence (set to the Elegy from Serenade for Strings) has the Nutcracker Prince doing barre exercises; Tchaikovsky slumps in a chair while his double investigates and tries to interest the Prince, but when a young ballerina appears, the Prince takes up with her and the double loses out. To the strains of the Capriccio italien a card table appears, followed by the Queen of Spades (out of Tchaikovsky's opera La Pique Dame). There's a homosexual orgy scene, and Tchaikovsky finally embraces his double, but in the end (to the last movement of the Pathétique, of course), he dies on that card table. "A STEP INTO IMMORTALITY," the synopsis tells us.

If you're not intimate with the particulars of Tchaikovsky's life, all this may seem a mystery -- it's not dramatization so much as illustration. Then again, if you are well-acquainted with Pyotr Ilyich, you may be equally flummoxed. Tchaikovsky's homosexuality was an open secret in the right circles; he was tortured about it but not repressed. A fuller disclosure of his life would have included his homosexual brother, Modest, his string of lovers, and his predilection for teenage boys. And though the men here -- Tchaikovsky, his double, the Prince -- are complicated creatures, the women -- Milyukova and von Meck -- are stereotypes. As for Tchaikovsky as dance, Kenneth MacMillan, Roland Petit, and Maurice Béjart have been cited repeatedly (and correctly) as models, but I was struck more by the influence of Soviet ice-dance couples like Bestemyanova/Bukin and Klimova/Ponomarenko, with their thematic theatricality, their primal passion, the centripetal sensibility of their lifts and spins (many quoted here verbatim), and their affinity for long long scarves. Like professional (as opposed to Olympic) skaters, the Eifman dancers have the attitude, the extension, the articulation of their medium but not always (as in the case of the white swans) its demanding vocabulary.

The lead quintet -- Albert Galichanin (Tchaikovsky), Igor Markov (the double), Yelena Kuzmina (Milyukova), Vera Arbuzova (von Meck), and Yuri Ananyan (the Prince) -- are expressive, to say the least. And the psychodramatics of Eifman's tableaux are disturbing (though I wish he wouldn't martyr the composer with so many Crucifixion and Deposition poses): Milyukova's clingy sexuality informing the gorgeous slow movement of the Fifth; the triumphant apotheosis as a wedding march. In a dance-impoverished town like Boston this is intriguing stuff; but if Eifman is the future of ballet, give me Balanchine.

The Eifman Ballet will return to Boston to present Red Giselle at the Wang Theatre April 20 through 22. Call (800) 447-7400.