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Al-Ahram Weekly 20 - 26 May 1999 Issue No. 430 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 20 - 26 May 1999 Issue No. 430
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Supplement Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Where have all the flowers gone?
By David Blake
Cairo Opera House; The Joffrey Ballet of Chicago; 11 and 14 May
photo: Sherif Sonbol
The Joffreys are travellers, globe-flying entities of the dance. Some special deity, the Buddha of the green voyage for everlasting freshness, takes care of them. Or perhaps it is Gerald Arpino. Anyway, they have more than magic to offer.
They are a result of toil, discipline, belief and endurance. And after these things comes art and revelation. A stern road, but bordered by green grass, trees and emeralds. They offer joy. And we should offer reverence and not complain about the price of the seats. The Joffrey is not a Mars bar, it is the best. And the best costs. That is the economic Chinese algebra of the performing arts.
Why do ballet companies come to pieces, anyway, or fall apart? Every balletomane has his favourite disasters -- what happened when the awesome ballet theatre of New York disintegrated; where did the Royal Ballet Company of London go to; why did the Bolshoi take the suicidal leap, followed by the once impregnable Kirov? But the Joffrey has stayed the course for over 40 years.
It seems to have been immaculately conceived in 1957 in Chicago. Robert Joffrey, the founder, died in 1988, and the volcanic choreographer, Gerald Arpino, became its artistic manager. But these facts do not explain a thing. How has it survived? It globalised itself years ago, long before the term globalisation became a disreputable cult word.
It is in constant action in hundreds of cities, with dozens of ballets. It has premiered some of its best work in Damascus and Jordan, thus doing the Oriental front. And when confronted by its warmth and professionalism, most other ballets look cold and formal. This company is not exactly American, Russian or Parisian, but it has one enduring strength, its own brand of the sometimes annoying American autodidacticism, channelled through the arts from most parts of the globe. Like the lamented Ballet Theatre, the other great mangeuse, it eats up all those sources that can possibly nourish its view of the dance. And being the best it lasts the longest.
There is not much of such a product around any more. Some of the ballets seen here are already history, such as Light Rain, the music and physical projection of which are out of time. Like a dress by Schiaparelli, it will last forever and never go out of fashion.
Who teaches the Joffrey dancers, night after night, to do Arpino's often fiendish choreography, without a hitch or a slip -- and to recorded music? Terpischore herself probably. There is nothing pretentious about all this art and craft -- they are brisk and practical, almost aloof. It is their method which breathes youth and virtuosity into everything. And they are honest, they work like hell.
Their first programme opened with Kettentanz to music by J Strauss, a complex romp around the Viennese waltz. It has the usual polkas, gallops and waltz figures. But it has hardly ever received such dancing as was provided. It never stops but whirls and twists into incredible difficulties. Two dancers stand out in these special sections -- Davis Robertson, who goes through the air like a ballistic projectile and is never earth bound, and Maya Wilkins, a strong, mysterious and challenging creature.
A pause and then an Arpino ballet, Sea Shadow, with Ravel music, and these two dancers in a long pas de deux. It is the Undine myth in an underwater take. Most of the time the dancers are alone in a closely knit, body-stretching and torso-twisting embrace. Robertson shines like a dolphin, Wilkins displays a sinuous detachment, uninvolved but soliciting. There is very little decor throughout the entire evening, but wonders are invoked with colour and lighting.
After another romp called La Vivandiere, which permits couples to display spinning virtuosity, comes the big gesture of the first programme, Creative Force. Its choreography and costumes are by Laura Dean of Seattle, and the lighting effects are by Kevin Dreyer. The clothes are all the same colour -- incandescent raspberry red, gleaming satin jumpsuits.
It beings with jumps and turns and never stops. It is insistently repetitive. The turns get quicker, the jumps higher. In the Joffrey, the girls are expected to jump as high as the men. And the effect is electric, like an exploding fuse. The music is by John Zeretzke. So ends Night One, a boiling turmoil of raspberry satin demons.
Night Two: even if you have had enough of Vivaldi's Four Seasons to last you forever, you will fall for this ballet by Arpino. Kevin Dreyer's lighting is a sort of diffused fruit juice; the costumes by Peter Anthony are brown, luminous, maroon-shadowed. Lit by mulberry juice they are mouth watering and unforgettable. The dancers do hair-raising steps and the effect is of a nightmarish Couture show.
This is followed by Lair d'esprit. The elegance of Vivaldi gives way to a Memory Tribute to Olga Spessivtzeva. She was like Nijinsky, the dancer you never forgot. Above all others she was weird. Her beauty, genius and special quality of craze made her awesome to behold. No one understood her or described her. She belonged to those spirits who visit the earth sometimes, creepy and totally divine.
Maya Wilkins had a hard job. She seemed withdrawn to such an extent she forgot she had a partner, Davis Robertson. She smothered him. Well -- Olga never did this. But the difficult pas de deux with Robertson, whose heroic lifts took her high in the air like a crane taking off from a rooftop, is worth the memory in itself.
The final ballet, Light Rain, with music by Adams and Gauthier, is a slice of history. It was made by Arpino to show off the talent of his young stars. This it does. They seem to dance over a circuitous river, maybe the Amazon. The rain has fallen, everything glistens and shivers with damp and light. The music is triumphant. Anyway it passed into history on its own account.
This was the end of the second evening. But one other ballet, Monotones One and Two (choreography by Frederick Ashton with music by Eric Satie, arranged by Debussy and John Lanshberry) struck a note so intense it sent away from the Opera House bewitched and troubled people.
Two sections of the ballet, danced in each by three dancers (two women and one man), clad identically in body stockings, white but somehow not. As threesomes they dance united -- a naked substance, men or women or both or nothing at all.
The music, as so often with Satie, is silent music. There are holes in it. And the dancers step in and out of them. These souls are bewitched, hypnotised, immaculate and balanced over the abysm.
Generous of the Joffrey to do this difficult Ashton so perfectly. It devastates. The company have that final intangible panache. Having been brought up on the best, they know how to dispense it to those capable of experiencing it. Dangerous.
The elitism of the media places them on a planet of their own. Maybe, happily, they will inhabit it for another 40 years.
The Cairo Choral Society; Joseph Haydn, The Creation; American University in Cairo, Ewart Hall;12 May
However glowing the future, mankind is in a hell of a mess today. And it was in the same mess in Haydn's day. Napoleon entered Vienna as conqueror in early May, 1809, sitting in the Hoffburg as its master, the dictator of the awesome Hapsburg empire.
This empire would never be the same again, nor would Europe. But they evolved. Haydn died on 31 May, 1809. But his music, unlike the empire from which it sprang, did not. The big crash musically was casting its strange light, though Haydn clung to a structure that was giving way.
Around the corner was Bach-Wagner, Beethoven-Brahms, and the 20th century. Today, by the end of the 20th century, we have all become micro-bel canto space dust. Composers after Haydn gave heaven and hell as a thing we can comprehend.
The Creation is strictly classic on line, simplistic and self-satisfied. Haydn is in Eden and that's that -- all the rest is stainless, balanced and quietly sure of itself. Why can't he just let himself go in the Chaos opening? Just a bit of vulgarity, a few avalanches and lightning would do. As it is we pass from Chaos to the emergence of man -- a twittering Adam and Eve. And we have never left Toyland since the beginning.
Michelangelo handled it all better in the Sistine ceiling. Where are the awesome sibyls and prophets hurling damnation at an erring mankind?
The Creation is not an oratorio or a requiem. It has none of Handel's sense of drama or narrative force. It lacks the Word and the moment of the interrogation. The music and libretto strolled through the Old Testament and it became a pastoral symphony of colours, flowers, leaves and smiles. It is hard to accept this vision, so attached to dying era, when the fall of music, our own, has produced such wonderful terrors. It has lost pitch, structure and order. But the 20th century lives and kicks. This creation was already in the tomb.
The orchestra, under Larry Catlin, had its usual warmth and clarity, but seemed to lack momentum, as though Catlin himself felt Haydn was hamstrung. The Cairo Choral Society sang so clearly and tunefully they almost scattered happy endings. It took the third day of the creation, with chorus, orchestra and the Archangel Rafael -- Ashraf Sweilam -- to suddenly ignite the whole evening.
Each time Sweilam is heard he has improved. Of all The Creations singers, Rafael was the most truly impressive. He felt who he was -- a tall, glowering, handsome being with a bass voice which is developing into a sound of which one must take note.
Throughout the entire work his every utterance was meaningful. And God created great whales found exactly the right note of tenderness and simplicity without irony. Sweilam let himself go, making the finny tribes and watery deeps living but legendary. True fairy tales expounded by a prophetic angel.
Raouf Zeidan, baritone, was silver, Denise Nesbitt, soprano, indistinct but pleasant, Mohamed Abul-Kheir attentive but worried, Nevine Allouba good-humoured, smiling and singing accurately as Eve maybe would have livened up Eden a bit. But Haydn was past practical matters. For sure, he would go to the heavenly pastures. And we today, his heirs, where are we now, as the unpolluted strains of Haydn offer us green leaves and fresh running waters.
