E-Mail This Article to a Friend Mortal in folly Wrapping up Boston Ballet’s La Sylphide BY JEFFREY GANTZ

"Men and the Immortal Women They Love" is a timeless theme of life, myth, and literature, from man and the Goddess to the Church and the Virgin, Dante and Beatrice, Faust and the Eternal Feminine. Ballet has thrived on the idea of the young man who has a loving domestic sweetheart but yearns after something more: Giselle, Coppélia, Swan Lake. Sometimes the "immortals" love back. At the outset of August Bournonville’s La Sylphide, we see the Sylph fluttering about James — but is she "real" or are we seeing a projection of his dream? Is she merely the woman James wishes Effy could be? Then there’s Madge, the old woman who tries to warm herself at James’s hearth (and an ancestor of sorts to bad fairy Carabosse in The Sleeping Beauty). In Celtic tradition — and the ballet is set in Scotland — the hag is often the Eternal Feminine in disguise, and it’s the hero’s task to see through to her inner beauty. Is the Sylph an illusion, a test, that Madge creates in James’s mind? Does he have to accept his inner hag before he can enjoy his outer Sylph? And what really happens at the end, when Madge triumphs over a prostrate James? Is he dead? Or has she won him for herself in another world, far from Gurn and Effy?

Former Royal Danish Ballet principal and Bournonville authority Sorella Englund not only staged the Sylphide that Boston Ballet mounted at the Wang Theatre over the past two weekends, she also danced Madge, and her character rather than James was the focal point of the production. This can be a reductive interpretation — as if the Weird Sisters rather than Macbeth were at the center of Shakespeare’s Scottish Play — and Englund’s Madge did push the ballet toward revenge tragedy, more Middleton than Shakespeare, manipulating James rather than tempting him. All the same, the quality of Englund’s movement, her articulation and the detail of her anger, were hard to take your eyes off; she made everyone else on stage look bland.

Former New York City Ballet principal Merrill Ashley’s Madge was softer, surprised rather than angry when James ordered her away from the fire, and more sensuous when wrapping the fatal (to the Sylph) shawl around her body, as if she hadn’t given up the hope that James would see she’s the real Sylph. George Balanchine was such an idealist, even a Neo-Platonist, in his ballets, it’s not surprising to see Ashley embody that optimism. She’s danced Carabosse in Peter Martins’s NYCB Sleeping Beauty; I wonder whether Boston Ballet artistic director Mikko Nissinen will get her back for the company’s production of that ballet in May. This Sylphide’s third Madge, company principal Adriana Suárez, was softer and slower still, an enigmatic presence. Less invested in James, seeing rather than sowing in him the seeds of his destruction, Suárez’s hag was often more disturbing than Englund’s or Ashley’s.

Of the four casts I saw, corps member Misa Kuranaga seemed the most idiomatic Sylph, her weight going in different directions in her opening solo and then disappearing altogether in her second-act relevé hops. Her mime had the same finesse: the palpable sigh and the wistful shake of the head with which her Sylph reproached James after learning he’s about to marry Effy; the delicacy with which she held his plaid to her cheek. Her James, Nelson Madrigal, was similarly pellucid, from his boyish, poetic "My dream has come true" awakening to his hapless dismay as he prepares to try to explain the Sylph to Effy, and there was always a sense of wonderment about him. Saturday, afternoon, however, his dancing let him down: he was patently winded after his first-act solo, and in the second act, his exiting brisés volés had no volé. Their Gurn, John Lam, matched their affect with his innocent, hopeful, "why not me?" wooing of Effy, and he was also well suited to Suárez, whose Madge took to him as the faithful husband James would never be.

Bournonville’s distinctive style is not built in one production. The opening-night Sylph and James, Larissa Ponomarenko and Roman Rykine, didn’t quite take wing, Ponomarenko appropriately light and fluid in her movement (she can dance in any style) but not sylph-like in her emotions, Rykine violent and a little angular, though he had the strongest beats and entrechats. Yury Yanowsky and Karine Seneca were well paired, Yanowsky matching Madrigal in wonder and poetic belief and Seneca using her size to fill and extend the phrases and constantly inclining toward him; neither embodied the Bournonville æsthetic, however. Carlos Molina made me think of a young Don Quixote; though more of Madrigal’s whimsy and Rykine’s backbone would have been welcome, he offered the best combination of technique and sensibility. Lorna Feijóo as his Sylph looked heavy and a little disjointed in act one, as if she couldn’t get her bearings; in act two, where the Sylph has more extended stage time, she started to create a bigger arch with her interpretation, and what had seemed heaviness became gravitas. Like Ponomarenko, she seemed to want to get more out of the role than Bournonville put in. She and Molina managed their shared changes of physical direction and emotional mood particularly well.

Joel Prouty was, like John Lam, an all-American boy of a Gurn who in his solo made a point of looking beseechingly at Alexandra Kochis’s Effy whenever the choreography brought him near her. Reyneris Reyes was harder, tougher, a choice that might have worked better opposite Yanowsky or Madrigal as opposed to (the two times I saw him) Rykine and Molina. Kochis’s Effy was exquisite in her little-girl-lost 360-degree turn after her James (Yanowsky) disappeared during the reel; Kathleen Breen Combes had marginally snappier footwork but was also marginally less individualized. Sarah Wroth’s Anna was a beaming maternal presence, and arresting when with her hands she made a deprecating response to Effy’s plea for an opinion regarding Gurn’s proposal; Vilija Putriute was sterner and more withdrawn.

Anna is James’s mother, or Effy’s; it’s not clear which, and it hardly matters. It would, however, be easier for Gurn if the story didn’t make him persist in his attentions to Effy on her wedding day; the action on stage would still work if she and James were just getting engaged. There was one intriguing detail: when in act two the Sylph holds up those two fingers to swear eternal love and James follows suit, every James I saw spread the fingers, as if not quite swearing.

John Rockwell came up from New York to review this production for the New York Times (March 10), and he deemed it "honorably done on Saturday afternoon [March 5], but only honorably." Mark Morris, on the other hand, went to the second March 12 Saturday-afternoon performance, seeing Kuranaga, Madrigal, and Suárez, and was enchanted. I think Morris is closer to the mark, though Rockwell’s criticism of the Boston Ballet Orchestra as "only adequate" was borne out by the continuing problems with string intonation, a problem the company will have to address if it hopes to impress New York critics.