Eifman Ballet fascinates @ PlayhouseSquare
This weekend the Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg performs Don Quixote or Fantasies of a Madman at PlayhouseSquare. Jaws must have dropped when the news reached Cleveland’s ballet-starved dance audiences. After a near-total 6-year famine*, a big, Russian ballet company is coming to the State Theatre for three performances.
(*Yes, we know that some professional ballet companies still come through Northeast Ohio. The Joffrey Ballet returns to Blossom Music Center this August. Various Nutcrackers play during the winter holidays. Some professional-level ballet dancers live in Northeast Ohio, perform regularly in local professional companies, and sometimes get to perform actual ballet. Nevertheless, we stick with what we said, “a near-total 6-year famine,” especially compared to the embarrassment of riches Cleveland enjoyed for years before that. Read on.)
This can’t be happening in Cleveland!
We arranged an interview with Gina Vernaci, Vice President of Theatricals for PlayhouseSquare, to wake us from this impossible dream.
CoolCleveland: This is a huge change of policy for PlayhouseSquare.
Gina Vernaci: It’s not so much a change of policy as a continuation of the ballet series. After the (Cleveland / San Jose) Ballet left Cleveland, we wanted to do something so we started dabbling with the ballet series and we brought in some really spectacular dancing.
Did you ever!
I was really proud of that series, some of the most beautiful stuff I’ve ever seen onstage — Les Ballets de Monte Carlo’s production of La Belle — her entrance in that bubble — I don’t think I’ll ever forget that. And the Kirov and American Ballet Theater!
Yes! (Les Ballets de Monte Carlo’s very original, very satisfying contemporary take on Sleeping Beauty. The Kirov’s Bayadere, five Cleveland performances with 120 dancers and 66 members of the Kirov Orchestra in 2003. ABT’s over-the-top Corsaire in 2006. Just to name a few.)
Arguably it was a good series but it was also an expensive series and we didn’t know to what degree the community would support something like that. We learned that there’s a group that supports ballet — but it’s smaller than we’d anticipated.
So, it wasn’t so much that we gave up on ballet as we re-examined the broad subject of dance — something we’re still exploring right now. What dance is happening in the community, and how do we fit into that?
Out of that experimentation of presenting a series we have had a number of other companies we were looking at during the intervening time, but the timing or the rep never worked out. Presenting a large company with mixed repertory is very expensive and mixed rep has a limited audience.
So you find that it’s better to go with a story ballet. Does the fact that Eifman Ballet hails from St. Petersburg play a part in your calculations? Do you feel that there’s a large and loyal ballet audience among Russian-Americans in Cleveland?
We hope so. Eifman Ballet was last here in 2003 and standing in the lobby, hearing all the languages, you felt you were in an international setting.
We remember that concert; another good show. So the audience came out in 2003 for Eifman’s Tchaikovsky – The Mystery of Life and Death even though it was midweek?
Yes. Now we have Eifman for a weekend and Don Q is a part of it. The nail-biter is that the dance community and the Russian community are two very late buying audiences. You sweat bullets until the curtain goes up; it’s only then you know what you have.
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It is not for us to speculate on the size of the audience; our job is to describe the entertainment in question so that our readers can make an informed choice to attend or not.
Short answer? Go to see Eifman’s Don Q at PlayhouseSquare. It is virtually the first opportunity to see professional ballet in six years and who knows how long before the next opportunity.
The long answer goes like this:
Miguel de Cervantes’ novel, The Ingenious Gentleman, Don Quixote of La Mancha, has inspired many ballets but the version we know best today is the Petipa / Minkus version (premiered in Moscow [1869] and St. Petersburg [1871]).
Despite its title, the Petipa / Minkus scenario has little to do with Cervantes’ character, Don Quixote, who makes occasional cameo appearances in the ballet; its focus instead is on Kitri and Basilio, young lovers whose comic progress in and around Barcelona eventually leads to their happy marriage. Whether as a full-length ballet or in excerpted showpieces, the Petipa / Minkus Don Quixote remains a touchstone for bravura classical performance among both male and female ballet dancers.
Eifman’s Don Quixote is a contemporary riff on the Petipa / Minkus choreography and music, but it weaves these elements into an original scenario in which an asylum inmate who believes himself to be the Ingenious Don entertains the other inmates much as the title character of the Broadway musical, Man of La Mancha, entertains his fellow prisoners, conjuring up Petipa’s colorful dances in Barcelona’s streets and the misadventures of Cervantes’ Don Quixote.
Critics are alternately fascinated and infuriated by Eifman’s ballets, Don Quixote included, but all agree that he is original and imaginative, never formulaic, always a skilled craftsman.
When we watched Eifman’s Tchaikovsky ballet in PlayhouseSquare in 2003, we could see what upset the critics. Great composer that he was, Tchaikovsky lived a tortured life as a closeted homosexual and Eifman’s ballet went a long way toward telling a theatrical version of that biographical fact. Conservative critics were scandalized but we found it a satisfying contemporary take.
Reviewers seldom fail to praise the outstanding dancers Eifman continues to attract from the former Soviet Union’s seemingly endless supply of impossibly long-limbed, technically proficient dancers. Even negative reviews like this one (FinancialTimes) give unqualified praise to the performances of Sergey Volbuev as the patient who imagines himself as Don Quixote, Anastasia Sitnikova as the doctor in the madhouse, and Natalia Matsak as Kitri, all of whom will be performing those roles in Cleveland.
This is not your grandparents’ Don Quixote, but whether you’re a jaded balletomane or a newcomer to ballet, a Russian-American or a Daughter of the American Revolution, it’s the best live ballet you’ll see in Cleveland until gosh knows when.
Eifman Ballet’s Don Quixote, or Fantasies of a Madman will be performed at the State Theatre at 8PM on Fri 5/13, 8PM on Sat 5/14, and 2PM on Sun 5/15/2011. Tickets $10 – $65. Phone 216-241-6000, visit Playhouse Sq Box Office, or go to http://PlayhouseSquare.org.
From Cool Cleveland contributors Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas. Elsa and Vic are both longtime Clevelanders. Elsa is a landscape designer. She studied ballet as an avocation for 2 decades. Vic has been a dancer and dance teacher for most of his working life, performing in a number of dance companies in NYC and Cleveland. They write about dance as a way to learn more and keep in touch with the dance community. E-mail them at vicnelsaATearthlink.net.
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