Article by:
Judith Mackrell
Ever since Matthew Bourne cast Swan Lake as a male love story and Mats Ek set Giselle in a lunatic asylum, it’s been widely accepted that the way to re-energise the 19th century classics is by reinventing their stories. But during the last two years Alexei Ratmansky has been developing his own quietly revolutionary approach. Far from straining after narrative shock and awe, Ratmanksy has applied himself to the task of learning the original notation in which ballets like Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake were first recorded. And in using that notation to restore or reinterpret the original choreography his effect on these familiar ballets has been radical.
Until I saw Ratmanksy’s production of Beauty, danced by La Scala Ballet in Milan last weekend, I hadn’t fully realised what the difference could be. Many productions that are performed today claim to be relatively faithful to the ballet that Marius Petipa choreographed back in 1890. Yet over the decades its text has been subject to editorial revisions, excisions, and interpolations, while changes in the technical skills of dancers have, over the generations, introduced their own subtle changes.
So what does this new, restored Beauty look like? It’s very far from the literal four-hour reconstruction mounted by the Kirov back in 2000, which had every court processional and every mime scene played out in full. And while it’s been designed in a very period style with a full panoply of wigs and plumes, velvet and lace, its design is actually based on the production mounted by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1921. What makes this production feel so much more authentic than any other I’ve seen is the intensity with which Ratmansky has immersed in the style and sensibility of Petipa’s choreography, bringing the steps back to life with a combination of knowledge and choreographic intuition that’s close to genius.
My first impression was how softly and how speedily the dancers moved, and how sweetly they meshed with the music. This is Petipa on a far less monumental scale than we’re accustomed to. The dancers’ legs never soar into ear-grazing extension but are held low, and often slightly bent; a surprising amount of the women’s footwork is executed on half rather than full pointe, and in contrast to the rigid vertical line of much contemporary classicism, the dancers’ bodies are curving and bending in a busy elegant counterpoint to action of their legs.
Meanwhile individual phrases are packed with detail: quick passing steps, lively gestures, small accents and rhythms. It’s the danciest Beauty I’ve ever seen, yet it’s also the most vividly narrated. When the action pauses for a solo or pas de deux there’s no sense of the theatre holding its breath – the dancing remains first and foremost connected with the pulse of the music and with the demands of the storytelling.
There are so many details that make this Beauty come alive. When men partner women in supported pirouettes, they hold them with just one hand – a far more courtly manoeuvre. When Aurora and the Prince dance together she sometimes leans her head against his shoulder in a moving acknowledgement of their intimacy. In Act 1, when the group of serving women break the Palace ban on knitting, they do so with a wonderfully convincing, giggling sense of the illicit. When Aurora pricks her finger on Carabosse’s spindle, Ratmanksy gives proper weight to the moment allowing all of the characters on stage to register disbelief, terror and proper agonising grief.
Every member of the Milan cast acts in style – with Massimo Murru taking his place as one of the great Carabosses – a cackling, malevolent lost soul. And part of the reason for their dramatic impact is that Ratmansky has given them a real story to act.
This Beauty is nonetheless a huge challenge. Although Petipa’s restored choreography looks much less athletic, it requires dancers to go against all their ingrained habits, to curb their extensions, to learn new ways of coordinating and phrasing. In Milan, the opening night Aurora was Svetlana Zakharova, a Bolshoi ballerina whose technique is famously predicated on a long, lean and very leggy line. At first she looked a long way out of her comfort zone, yet during the course of the show it was impressive to see how deeply Zakharova reached into the style; how her body seemed to become physically rounder and how, the more she restricted the height of her leg extensions, the more energy and lushness began to flow through her back and arms.
I hope Ratmansky was pleased, for when I spoke to him, three hours before the curtain went up, he’d been in a state of harassed despair. In contrast to the months of research and rehearsal he’d had American Ballet Theatre, the company on whom he first mounted this Beauty, he’d had just five weeks in Milan and – because of Italian union rules – his rehearsal time had been limited. “Some of the dancers are amazing here,” he acknowledged, “but it’s a very different work ethic. I wasn’t even allowed to see the dancers today, to give them corrections from our final rehearsal.”
Ratmansky had also been dogged by horrible luck in the casting of his Prince. His first choice, David Hallberg, was injured and last week his replacement Sergei Polunin suddenly withdrew. In Polunin’s place, Ratmansky had to rush in Jacopo Tissi, a dancer who has only recently graduated from school. “He has something for sure. He’s incredibly ambitious, and talented and hardworking. But he has very little experience, and we haven’t had time to work on the quality of the movement. We just have to hope he gets through.”
In fact Tissi did better than get through. His coordination was slightly off at times but he was a boundlessly ardent and gallant partner and there were moments when his fluttering beaten jumps, his quick and graceful épaulement made him look every inch the Petipa prince. Even where a couple of other dancers faltered the cast at La Scala did their collective utmost to honour their material, and from their performance it’s completely clear to me why Ratmansky has become so evangelical about this new/old Petipa and why he now “hates to see the work danced in any other way”.
“I’m loving it so much. It’s changed my idea of Petipa completely. His style is so much less rigid than the way it’s come to be performed, it has so many gradations of line, it makes the stage picture so much richer. My biggest excitement has been discovering that the choreographer who most inherited it was [Frederick] Ashton. It’s so clear to me now how much he imitated it in his own choreography, in all the little footwork and all the bending of the body.
So far Ratmanksy’s delight has been widely shared. His Beauty has had some excellent reviews, as has his production of Paquita, the 1881 Petipa ballet, which he staged for the Bayerishes Staatsballet in Munich. Next year he’s been invited to Zurich to mount a production of Swan Lake. But Ratmansky’s confidence in his project has also been deepened by the enthusiasm of a much younger choreographer, who’s been shadowing him during much of this Petipa project.
Ratmansky has been spending a lot of time with Myles Thatcher over the last two years because the two of them were paired together for the Mentor-Protégé Initiative, a scheme launched by Rolex in 2002 that allows young artists, in seven different disciplines, to work alongside established masters.
When Ratmansky agreed to participate in the scheme he was given a short list of three potential protégés, all of whom he says were “absolutely talented guys”. He chose Thatcher, a 25-year-old dancer with San Francisco Ballet, not only because he liked the work Thatcher had already made – “ I thought there was a talent there that I could care about” – but also because he had such a questioning and open mind.
During the first months of their association Ratmansky was working on Paquita and Thatcher came to every rehearsal. “It was a wonderful time, Myles was fascinated to learn about 19th century classicism. Every day we discussed how the project was going, what was right what was wrong, and he participated quite a lot in coaching the dancers.” In fact, far from being a master-pupil relationship, Ratmansky says that from the start it was “one of mutual companionship and respect”.
“You are usually alone when you choreograph. And I think the Rolex scheme is such a beautiful thing because it allows you to share things that you’re always desperate to talk about. You can both work through any doubts you have, you can communicate on a deep, professional basis.” Even when Ratmansky has been critiquing Thatcher’s choreography he feels he has learned as much from the process as he has taught. “As a choreographer you’re so focused on the little TV screen in your head where you try to picture movements and connect them with the music, so it was really an education to have to get inside Myles’s imagination to see how he approaches making his own work.”
Ratmansky says Thatcher’s work is “really well structured, he put steps together in such interesting ways”, and he isn’t surprised that already the young choreographer has received commissions to create new works for San Francisco, Joffrey and New York City Ballet. But he also regards it as a sign of the art form’s current good health that directors have become much more willing to take a punt on new or different talent. “When I was in Russia and in Kiev I felt I was knocking my head against a brick wall. There were so few new ballets to watch, so little opportunities to make work. Now repertories are so fantastically diverse. It’s so exciting to see the works of Wayne [McGregor], Chris [Wheeldon] Liam [Scarlett] and Mark Morris. Benjamin Millepied is making such great work now and Hans van Manen is still doing his beautiful fantastic pieces. Watching these works gives young choreographers such a range of tools to work with.”
Now, however, Ratmansky also hopes that his discoveries about Petipa might become an additional tool for choreographers like Thatcher. He knows that his own work will absorb much of what he’s learned specifically, from Petipa in terms of coordination, dynamics and musicality. But he hopes that Petipa might have a more generalised impact on the sensibility of the art form. “ His style is so interesting and so humane, particularly in the choreography for the women. There’s a fashion now for quite hard and aggressive movement and Petipa is so much the opposite. There’s a hundred shades of movement in his ballets, as in a great painting. We can all learn from that.”
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