Or not. Frederick Wiseman's transportive documentary,
La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet, didn't tell me anything new about French ballet qua ballet. To sum up: superb, brilliant, beautifully schooled dancers; adagios vaster than the Russians' and more slow; style so correct and dry as to make the Mariinsky look like circus clowns; Nureyev choreography that makes my calves ache just to watch it; and, finally, terminally, really, really dreadful contemporary ballet. There are few phrases that can turn my bowels to water as quickly as "an evening of contemporary ballet." The mere thought of attending such an evening at the POB makes me wish instead that I might sleep with the fishes Wiseman so marvelously shows us swimming in the dark streams that run far beneath the Opera.
I suppose it was inevitable that Wiseman's camera lingered more lovingly and lengthily on monstrosities like Angelin Preljocaj's scenery-chewing paintball massacre of a
Medea (worse than Yuri Possokhov's, and I didn't think that was possible) or the screaming mimis of some nightmare perpetrated by Mats Ek, of which I won't look up the name as it might lead me to remember the damn thing. Compared to these, work by Wayne McGregor seemed like Balanchine's, and by Pina Bausch, Robbins. That's not to say that those latter two were anything to write home about, except as a warning.
I'm not going to go into Wiseman's brilliant unmoving-fly-on-the-wall cinematic style. There are plenty of movie critics who can do that better than me. Wiseman's camera seldom pans or zooms; it presents you with whatever panorama you'd face were you indeed that fly. Only gradually do you sense his invisible, guiding hand, as in his brief meditations on black members of the Opera's massive support staff that sooner-or-later prompt the epiphany that the only blacks in this film are wielding mops, trowels or cash registers. There are a few Asians among the lily-white POB dancers, but no blacks (that Wiseman sees, at any rate).
The many glimpses of dancers without their performance faces were fascinating, as in a ballerina (who I should've recognized but didn't) half-marking, alone, the steps of a role she's learning. Her intense concentration on the unseeable -- the ideal dance in her head -- seemed as much a prayer as a rehearsal. No wonder Balanchine said his celebrated, enigmatic aphorism ("La Danse, madame...").
I enjoyed the bits of Paquita we saw (who was that guy with the orbital sissones in the pas de trois? I remember him from the video), but the grand adagio was slow, slow, slow. So slow Makarova would've been looking at her watch and tapping her foot. Speaking of religion, the lead ballerina unleashed some truly biblical fouettes -- singles and doubles centered upstage, then moving deliberately downstage with single after single. Whew!
The corps, the leads in the Paquita excerpt were perfection, but so perfect, so dry, that I felt I couldn't breathe watching, or that I suddenly needed a LOT of moisturizer on my face. I'm not used to thinking of the Kirov as a wild and crazy lot, but in my memory of their wonderful Paquitas at City Center last year they seemed that way, compared with the academicians of the POB. Hell, I found myself longing for Balanchine's messy, brilliant Amazons of the Seventies.
Oh how I wish Wiseman had seen fit to show us less of that execrable Medea and more of poor, nearly forgotten Graduation Ball. I haven't seen that for decades, and it would've been a treat.
There were aluminum buckets all over everywhere in that Medea; the soulful ballerina who played the lead killed Jason's children by dousing them with red paint, er, blood from a couple of buckets. Oh how I wanted someone make like Jimmy Durante in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad (etc.) World, and expire while kicking one of those stupid buckets. But, no, I guess that would've been ridiculous.
There were some amazing shots of the corps rehearsing Nureyev's staging of the death-defying Russian snowflakes from his Nutcracker, and a bit of Nureyev's own brutally hard and brutally unmusical work. I admire what he did for the POB, but he was a dreadful choreographer.
Getting back to the "contemporary" stuff. There was an interesting meeting between Brigette Lefevre (who is the epitome of the old saying, "Diplomacy is the art of telling someone to go to hell in such a manner that he'll look forward to the trip") and some lead dancers (or teachers?). She talks about how younger dancers don't like to dance the contemporary works, and that she wants them to start taking a modern class once a week, so they'll know the technique and not hate it so much (I'm paraphrasing). She also mentions that when the POB puts on "contemporary" programs, the attendance is very bad.
So, if nobody wants to dance it, and nobody wants to see it, why are you doing it?
Maybe the answer isn't scolding the dancers into taking more "modern" classes (do they have a special bucket-tossing day?), but in doing dances that don't suck?
Anyway, go see La Danse. But sit on the aisle so you can duck out when the red paint starts flying....
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