Anti-balletics

Boris Eifman's Red Giselle

by Marcia B. Siegel

Olga Spessivtseva, the highly fictionalized subject of Boris Eifman's Red Giselle, was one of the great Giselles of the 20th century. Trained in the Imperial Russian school at St. Petersburg, she starred in the whole gamut of ballet classics, and she resisted the innovations of Soviet avant-gardist Fyodor Lopukhov, as well as those of Serge Lifar at the Paris Opera and the young George Balanchine. After a touring career in Europe and South America during the 1930s, she emigrated to the United States. She was institutionalized for 20 years after a mental breakdown in 1943 and then resided at Tolstoy Farm in New York State until her death in 1991.

What Eifman makes of this life is billed as a tribute, but it looks more like pure theatrics laced with some confused polemic. To a pastiche of selections from Tchaikovsky, Bizet, and Schnittke, his Red Giselle gets involved with a Secret Police Agent and eventually flees Russia, but she comes unhinged from sexual tyranny, it seems, rather than political oppression. The Ballerina (Yelena Kuzmina in Friday's opening night at the Wang Theatre) first submits to the sadistic regimen of her ballet teacher (Sergei Basalaev), so it's no surprise that later she likes being dragged around by the leather-raincoated Soviet official (Albert Galichanin). After arriving in Paris she falls for a narcissistic ballet master (Igor Markov). His homosexuality is what finally pushes her over the edge.

Truckloads of big effects and hallucinations pad out this dubious plot. Any account I could offer here of the dance/politics in St. Petersburg would be as glossy as Eifman's rendition, but it appears that the real Spessivtseva had a stellar career during the early Soviet period, when the ballet classics were kept alive as populist entertainments despite their taint of imperialism. Boris Eifman had his own difficulties under the latter-day Soviet regime, and his depictions of mechanistic proletarian armies and refugees trudging up a gangplank must have appealed to the many Russian-Americans in the audience.

The first time the Soviet rabble marched into our faces, I flashed on many similar maneuvers in the ballets of Yuri Grigorovich, the last head of the Bolshoi Ballet under the Soviet regime. Eifman has adopted the spectacular choreographic tactics of his former antagonists, along with the glitzy homiletics of Maurice Béjart.

Eifman's Giselle in effect becomes yet another example of the Nijinsky stereotype. Naïve, dedicated, and filled with uncontrollable sexuality, the artist becomes a victim of the very society that adores her. To complete this phony moralizing, as the ballerina descends deeper into irrationality, all her male admirers are also punished. The ballet teacher collapses over her defection to the arms of a revolutionary; the KGB guy commits suicide after she splits; even the Paris partner suffers regret as the doors of her delusions shut him out.

What we don't get much of here is the art part. There's a lot of motion in Eifman's choreography but little to show us the dance Spessivtseva lived in, the dance she resisted, or the gifts that established her place in history. Whether we're looking at large social groups, like the lumpen revolutionaries or the revelers in a jazz-age nightclub, or intimate encounters, like the duets and trios where the ballerina gets wrenched into submission by various men, or the serious exercise of classicism in a studio or on a stage, the steps of classical ballet are just another part of the eclectic vocabulary that Eifman uses to create effects.

There are broad gestures and poses to identify character, distortions to signify emotional states, quotes from at least six or seven other ballets. When the ballerina re-enacts her doppelgänger, the betrayed and doomed heroine of the ballet Giselle, we get a fast précis of the first act and some even wispier nods to the second act, with signature steps but no sustained dancing at all.

I don't know whether Kuzmina and company can dance classical ballet. That is not what Eifman requires of them. In their program bios they sneer at the clichés of ballet and often speak of themselves as actors. Eifman seems to be making an alternative to the ballet stage, a medium that doesn't depend on classical ballet's conventions, its virtuosity, musicality, or formal structures. Although his productions are conceived on an operatic scale, the personal crises at the center have no comparable grandeur.

Well, it's a demanding enterprise, ballet. Eifman is not the first to unload its burdens, to forgo its exacting discipline and its "elitist" rewards. Classical dancing is what elevates Giselle's story to tragedy. Without that, I find Eifman's account merely monotonous and melodramatic.