Kitri's caboodle

Boston Ballet goes retro with Don Quixote

by Marcia B. Siegel

Don Quixote the ballet has gone through many changes since its premiere in 1869, from freshening-up to major rehab. This often happens with the old Russian classics, but the Boston Ballet Don Quixote has outgrown both its title and its original storyline. Cervantes's quixotic seeker after the feminine ideal may have been a dreamer, but he was an adventurer, too, charging after supposed villains, rescuing maidens in peril, dueling for affairs of honor and getting mocked for his fanaticism. The Boston Ballet Don and his dopy sidekick, Sancho Panza, have become fixtures, peripheral to the thwarted romance of the young couple Kitri and Basilio, and to nearly three hours' worth of dancing prompted by a colorful Spanish locale.

Boston Ballet acquired Rudolf Nureyev's version of the ballet in 1982 and has reworked it extensively since then. Artistic director Anna Marie Holmes and ballet mistress Caroline Llorca have understood that Don Q works best as a pretext for classical and character dancing, but they haven't been daring enough to clean out the dramaturgical dross. Holmes's introductory note in the program tells us to expect "scads of bravura dancing and scores of people on stage at any moment." In this case, less would be more.

The production (which is up through April 9 at the Wang Theatre) got off to a rough start last Thursday night, but the second performance displayed the company's dancing to great advantage. Pollyana Ribeiro and Paul Thrussell as Kitri and Basilio, the mischievous couple who are the ballet's real subjects, overcame the adversities of opening night.

Any time a dancer falls on stage, the audience is momentarily traumatized. The dancer usually picks up the pieces and goes on, but Aleksandra Koltun's injury at the end of the second act was serious, a torn Achilles' tendon, it turned out, and she couldn't get to her feet. The Don Quixote, Arthur Leeth, chivalrously carried her off and Larissa Ponomarenko, one of the alternate Kitris, finished the ballet in her place.

Before that point, there had been opening-night glitches and a persistent nervous hyper-intensity throughout the cast. Ponomarenko threw herself into the breach, but she hadn't rehearsed with Koltun's Basilio, Yuri Yanowsky, and there were more scary moments.

The whole production Friday night was calmer and smoother, but it was the performance of Ribeiro and Thrussell that made the difference, giving the work a focus if not a dramatic credibility. Ribeiro has charm without affectation; she seems to enjoy being playful, and Thrussell reacted boyishly, fondly. If she was unpredictable, he loved her more for it. If she taunted and pulled away one minute, he knew she'd be in his arms the next.

Even with the benefit of this pair's light touch, the ballet is still riddled with clichés and extraneous characters. The frequent scenery changes seem to necessitate mime scenes played in front of a black curtain: a procession of townspeople, all -- curiously -- walking in the same direction; Don Quixote whacking away at some ineffectual ghostly intruders; the foppish wealthy suitor in a reprise of the fussing and preening with which he's been upstaging the rest of the ballet.

Many people are credited with having an artistic hand in this production, and some of the overextended and undermotivated mime seems to originate from Russian traditions carried over into the Soviet period and brought to Boston Ballet by dancers and coaches. Vadim Strukov's Gamache, the vain suitor, was an encyclopedia of pratfalls and powder puffs, way out of scale with Leeth's Quixote, who seemed to be sleepwalking all the time, and the dithery Sancho Panza (I saw Christopher Budzynski and Reagan Messer). Piotr Ostaltsov, as Kitri's father, Lorenzo, opted for either hand wringing or fist shaking as his response to the meandering plot.

Then there are the characters who appear only as a pretext to interpolate more dancing. There were so many I soon lost track, but Simon Ball was impressive as Espada, a matador who dances a lot but has no involvement whatsoever in the story. What's missing from Don Quixote and some of Boston's other blockbusters is firm editing: a look at the logic of narrative, the balance of plot and dancing, the way things fit together.

To take just one example, Basilio is supposed to be a comic as well as a virtuoso dancer -- Nureyev said that's why he took the role. The romance plot -- how to get Kitri's father to agree to the barber Basilio as a son-in-law instead of the rich and totally inappropriate Gamache -- is resolved when Basilio fakes a suicide. Boston's Kitri appeals to her father and to the ineffectual Quixote: I really really love him, let me marry him instead of that space cadet Gamache. They agree. Huh? Don Quixote, as played by Arthur Leeth, hadn't by then made the slightest impact on the townspeople. He clanked in and out; people stared at him, then forgot him. If he was in love with Kitri -- who in literature represents the Don's eternal fantasy, Dulcinea -- he gave no indication, either before or at that decisive point.

The much more persuasive reason for the resolution, and the funnier one (I remember Mikhail Baryshnikov's version in 1978), is that marrying Kitri is Basilio's dying wish, something no religious person could ignore. Kitri falls in delightedly with his whispered plan. Just let us get married so he can die in peace, and then I'll have Gamache, Kitri wheedles. Of course, Basilio jumps up in perfect health the minute the ceremony is performed.

Dancing redeems some of the Boston production's dramatic perfunctoriness. It has, indeed, scads of faux gypsy, faux Spanish, generic-peasant dancing. The Russians perfected the idea of adapting nonclassical dance styles so that they could show off classically trained dancers and give variety to these long ballets. New to the Boston production is a men's seguidilla in silence -- they accompany themselves with stamping and antiphonal clapping, as in flamenco performances -- and two women's dances, one with big red shawls and one with castanets.

And then there's the "pure" classical second act, where Kitri dons a tutu and dances in some heavenly dreamscape with spirits and nymphs of all ages. And the final pas de deux, often done alone as a showpiece, where Kitri and Basilio celebrate their marriage. To Ludwig Minkus's most rousing music, they have their most demanding solo and partner work. Opening night, you could count Ponomarenko's 32 fouettés, she was so dead-on to the music. I couldn't tell you how many Ribeiro did, but her performance was thrilling, because she inserted a double turn about every fourth time.

Boston Ballet CEO Jeffrey Babcock assures us in a program note that we can expect more productions like Don Quixote. I think this is regressive, not to mention expensive. In the age of nightly dance entertainments on television, of stand-up comedy and multiple stories told and resolved in 48 minutes, ballet has to say something else to us. These extravagant gestures to the past don't do it for me.

---

Modern dancers usually make their imprint on the world through choreography, but Boston native Seán Curran was recognized as a distinctive dancer before his recent work as a theater choreographer and director of his own company. Curran returned last weekend to do two of his solos with Dance Collective at the Tsai Center.

Curran applied his extraordinary quickness and clarity in space to create character, with an economy the 19th-century ballet never thought of. In Hegel's Vacation, a man in a bowler hat, mismatching jacket and pants, and bare feet stands in front of an empty picture frame. He carries a black umbrella. The set-up offers lots of possibilities. Soon Curran becomes a whole crowd of museumgoers: an aesthete, a hearty businessman, a neurotic, a bully, a milquetoast.

Like all superb mimes, Curran can transform the look of his body and face with such detailed specificity that the audience instantly makes contact. The characters might not project any more depth than passers-by on the street, but they have definite identities.

In Average Tragedy (abridged), Curran seems to be one person, who undergoes a shocking experience, maybe a heart attack. He knocks his fist against his chest, listening. Something wrong in there. Slices down his front, takes something out, something small and dear like a kitten. Jerks back in a spasm of pain. You don't know exactly what he's going through but you go through it with him. He seems all right at the end, but now neither you nor he can live quite so confidently.

The program also included works by Dance Collective members Dawn Kramer, Mickey Taylor-Pinney and Sun Ho Kim. Kramer's Swan Song #1 fused two separate dances, and finally two dance styles. Kramer dragooned the audience into an improvisation about junk-mail solicitations, and Jeffrey Louizia, a teenage apprentice, did some hip-hop. When the two danced together, I thought breakdance and modern dance made a happy and unexpected merger.