Wesley Doucette - Page 6

ABT's choreographer, Alexei Ratmansky, has pulled out all the stops for his earnest revival of Petipa's oft-forgotten 1900 hit, Harlequinade, now in performance at The Met Opera. Based off of the commedia dell'arte tradition, it should be the best of two worlds, combining both the

On This Side of the World, now playing at Access Theatre, has a cast that would make any production green with envy. From song to song they deliver both a technical high gloss and a go for broke sincerity. They perform with the conviction of actors who know that what they're undertaking is important and, indeed, it is. What is offered by this hour and a half long song cycle is a rare ground floor view of the lives of the Filipino community. However, this gloss doesn't just describe the technical quality of the musicianship of both the cast and orchestra, but also the manufactured sheen of the musical composition, which investigates little.

This past year, while attending an extraordinary program at Paris's Opéra Garnier which featured the Paris Opera Ballet tackling, among other works, Pina Bausch's Rite of Spring, I wondered to myself, 'Why is New York still the house of Balanchine?' Sure, it could be argued other choreographers have made their mark on the company, from Robbins to Wheeldon to Peck, but the basic machinery of the pieces and their executions is consistently Balanchine in a way that Paris isn't Nureyev. Lincoln Center is nearly as synonymous with Balanchine as Bayreuth is with Wagner. Happily, this past Tuesday's four-part 'All Balanchine' program was an excellent justification for the company's conservation of the choreographer's composition and indelible flair.

This month Artistic Director Olivier Py unveiled the poster for the 73rd Festival d'Avignon, which will take place in the medieval city between July 4th and 23rd. Painted by Syrian artist Miryan Haddad, the work is a vibrant contrast to the previous festival's forlorn group of melancholy, monochrome children. Exploding with energy, the painting is a dreamscape, which features a portal, framing a sunlit lake. Like the Festival theme, odyssey, it promises adventure, danger, and hope. This concept of 'odyssey' is not locked in the ancient world, but extends to contemporary experiences, particularly the lives of refugees, as well as the state of theatre itself as a journey into the unknown.

Under the direction of Ivo Van Hove, Czech composer's Leos Janacek's song cycle, The Diary of One Who Disappeared, is given a rare performance by Muziektheater Transparant.

The NYCB's five-part 'Classic NYCB' program, performed this past Wednesday, February 6th at Lincoln Center, featured a broad choreographic landscape. Through the work of four choreographers and spanning four decades, the evening featured not only the 'Classic NYCB,' as promised by the program title, but also a rare brand of 'Iconoclastic NYCB.' While some audiences might be nostalgic for the glory of 50's Balanchine, this evening proved that perhaps the best is yet to come and that even Balanchine did not shy away from experimentation as he reached towards artistic relevancy.

Brecht and Weill's The Threepenny Opera (l'Opera de Quat'Sous in French) is one of those works that became the hallmark of its era. Its sound, its look, and its cynicism are pure Weimar. However, during the 1928 Berlin premiere, early songs such as 'The Ballad of Mac The Knife' and 'Pirate Jenny' landed with a shrug, and it wasn't until the 'Canon Song,' halfway through the first act, that the audience became engaged. All of this to say that The Threepenny Opera is a complicated play whose virtues might not be immediately evident to the uninitiated. The production at Avignon's Opera Confluence, as directed by Jean Lacornerie, comes in at a swift two hours without intermission. While crammed onto an over-packed stage and breathlessly paced, Lacornerie still manages to keep the action moving with style.

Avignon's Opéra Confluence is a challenging space, located some kilometers outside the town center near the TGV train station. It was recently constructed as a temporary theatre space while the city 19th century opera house undergoes significant restoration. The interior of the space resembles an exposed wood warehouse with red chairs. At the far end of the theatre, rather than the proscenium filling out the audience view, a yawning black screen fills the space, with the center third cut out for the performance. This scenic letterbox effect, coupled with the added distance made by the pit orchestra, makes dramatic intimacy and scenic delicacy difficult. Opéra Grand Avignon's production of Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro, under the stage direction of Stephan Grögler, turned what is at times a distant screen, into an enchanting diorama in which Grögler sure-footedly welcomes the enchanting tonal and aesthetic contradictions of the 18th century opera.

On the sides and upstage a dense curtain of chains hangs, framing the dance space. It is a stark wasteland. Thankfully, choreographers Emio Greco and Pieter C. Scholten's fascinating movement vocabulary and exciting theatricality rescue the evening's program from becoming a moralizing dirge. The works, Extremalism and Bolero, navigate catastrophe with invention and without pity. In both of the pieces, presented October 6th 2018 at Avignon's Opéra Confluence, the effects of disaster, most noticeably physical exhaustion and emotional disassociation, propel the movement of the incredibly talented performers of the Ballet National de Marseille.

In Audrey Schebat's La Perruche a married couple, while waiting for their friends to attend a small soiree, fall into disagreement and start to analyze the nature of their relationship. This couple, male and female, don a veritable wardrobe of well-worn married archetypes. Throughout the play we witness 1950's dynamics, 1990's sitcom banter, what feels like an allusion to A Doll's House, and contemporary technology. These masks, coupled with little analysis of social circumstances that somehow brought them to this state in 2018, create a loss of dramatic intimacy. However, actors Arie Elmaleh and Barbara Schulz are superb as they emit heat and passion within the artifice.

Our heritage might define us, but it doesn't get to define itself. Over the past decades we've witnessed as heroic archetypes turned dated, or even villainous. We've watched as the emotional collateral of a masculine old guard has been given a platform. From this vantage point such voices have shifted the focus from the passions of privileged men, to the scars of those left in their wake. Fool For Love by Sam Shepard is an aggressive portrayal of this passing. The play's location, a motel in the once wild west, is the embodiment of this contradiction: quotidian mediocrity, and mythic Americana. The Parisian Compagnie du Vingt-Trois withholds not a drop of the emotional intensity of this piece in their performance at Avignon's Pixel Theatre.

Based on Julie Otsuka's novel The Buddha in the Attic, Certaines n'Avaient Jamais Vu La Mer, in performance in the Avignon Theatre Festival's Cloitre des Carmes, is a look at the lives of Japanese immigrants in America from the turn of the 20th century to FDR's internment camps. Director Richard Brunel's multimedia and elemental staging is supremely inventive, and the performances spark with vitality. Those familiar with the history might find themselves treading familiar territory. However, Certaines n'Avaient Jamais Vu La Mer can serve for some as a theatrically dynamic introduction to one of America's great historic shames.

As my time attending performances in the Avignon Festival's 'In' comes to a close there are certain consistencies that float to the surface. Among these are nudity, bodily fluids, video integration, and a spectacular quality of sound design. Les Batard Dore's Meduse, now in performance in the Avignon Theatre Festival's Gymanse du Lycee St Joseph, has a bit, or a lot, of each. However, even in as such lofty company as the Avignon Theatre Festival, Leny Bernay's soundscape is transporting. Translating mental anguish, the sea, and dizzying poetry in a heart rumbling bass his presence is a boon to Les Batards Dores extremely promising production.

Anne-Cecile Vandalem's Arctique, now in production at the Avignon Theatre Festival's La FabricA, is a spectacular and rare diversion in a program laden with portentous prophesying. Equal parts Black Mirror and Murder on the Orient Express, Arctique is set after the fall of global warming in 2025. Though, never mind that, the downfall of world order is simply a social backdrop. Doubt not however that Vandalem has made a deep social mythology to rival the best of the speculative fiction genre. It's just that, dramatically speaking, she simply has more pressing matters to deal with.

Has anyone embodied the industrial elegance of central European theatre more fully than Ivo Van Hove? His worlds are factory made with squares of glass, metal, and stone. His characters reside within an inescapable atmosphere of manufactured order. Whenever disorder breaks the mold, whether it be by cascading water and blood in his View From The Bridge, or by reams of black snow in De Dingen Die Voorbijgaan, now in performance at the Avignon Theatre Festival's Lycee Saint Joseph, its breach comes as a violent shock. Gazing at the looming black metal and industrial lighting yawning over Jan Versweyveld's slate tiled scenography, it's hard to imagine that this world could contain full people. However, such is the case in De Dingen Die Voorbijgaan which, within this environment devoid of softness creates a drama of the deepest intimacy and the most raw humanity. In Van Hove's glittering diadem of masterpieces, it is a particularly glowing jewel.

An actor once vented to me after a performance that the cast 'had something good, but the director screwed it up by trying to make it something important.' The word 'screwed' is my addition. So too is the fatal flaw of Oskaras Korsunovas's Tartiufas, now in performance in the Avignon Theatre Festival's Opera Confluence. The world is glowing in a post-baroque kitsch. The actors are superbly game, throwing themselves into daring feats of theatrical acrobatics. Yet, politically overcompensating, Tartiufas repeatedly doesn't stick the landing.

To enter or exit The Avignon Theatre Festival's stunning Cloître des Carmes one must cross in full view of bleacher seating on the space's Marley floor, which extends uninterrupted from the upstage gothic corridor. Despite such a conspicuous route, or perhaps because of it, many attending Raimund Hoghe's 36, Avenue Georges Mandel took a speedy or defiant mid-performance exit. The performance I attended this past Tuesday ended in a sturdy division between aggressive boos and a smattering of impassioned standing ovations. I am not sure if either extreme reaction was truly merited. I am even more uncertain as to why this piece, first performed in the Festival in 2007, was picked for a rare Avignon Theatre Festival revival.