Jump to content
This Site Uses Cookies. If You Want to Disable Cookies, Please See Your Browser Documentation. ×

Hubbe's new Sylphide for Royal Danish Ballet


Recommended Posts

I think it's quite possible to create a Sylphide that had gender switching at the core of the story, and I'd be very curious to see it, but I would hope that, in Bournonville's theater, his production would still have the primary place.

Haven't any of them seen Matthew Bourne's version of the ballet?

Link to comment

As sandik notes, this raises a serious question. Once the Soviets began tinkering around with Petipa and Ivanov, we could rely on the Royal Ballet to maintain more authentic productions, and the company took great pride in doing it. Hübbe has already altered Napoli and now he's re-doing La Sylphide. So who, if anyone, will assume the task of preserving Bournonville as a central part of their artistic identity?

Link to comment

The only major company that seems to have embraced a bifurcated new work vs. old work structure is Paris Opera Ballet, and that was a company where preservation of their own core rep doesn't seem to have been a goal until relatively recently, with the Bejart rep and works that are only a generation old plus a few works like "Suite en blanc." Telling the Mariinsky and the Bolshoi and the Royal Ballet to maintain their core virtues in performance and rep hasn't been very successful: they chafe(d) at being told not to go to the next thing or the works they missed out on in Soviet times, and a lot of what they present shows the results of a change in style and choreography in the case of the Royal Ballet, and an increasing conflict between choreography and style for the Russian companies. Perhaps ironically, RDB managed to save and renew their own core rep several times along the way.

Besides the commercially released DVD's, hopefully RDB is preserving performances on video for there own use. (Were there TV broadcasts of live performances that weren't issued commercially?) I know video is not the panacea, but it offers a springboard and a point to debate. Given the multi-generation line of ballerinas who paid tribute to Thomas Lund on his retirement, and the dancers who danced the work as part of their heritage but are now elsewhere, hopefully, once this experiment is over, there will be an unbroken line of stagers and dancers to preserve the heritage, even if the home company jumps the shark temporarily. It doesn't sound like the kind of production that will devolve gradually until no one remembers the original. (I'm usually not this optimistic, but I'm hoping in this case it's true.)

Basing James' unease about his place in the world, his upcoming marriage, and his sense of self, it's an easy metaphor to use sexual orientation and being closeted and/or confused. It will likely appeal to the younger audiences that every ballet company in the world is trying to woo to replace Old People who attend the classical arts. In the US, Gen Y has almost as many people as the Baby Boomers, with a dip for Gen X in the middle (~60% of the population). The number of births/thousand population among the Gen X equivalent rebounded from a low in the Gen X equivalent in Denmark.

Link to comment
It’s interesting because it’s all about being human: good and evil. That’s why you can continue to find new ways of looking at it. It’s ultimately about something huge, about life itself, about being able to be with ourselves and accept ourselves, but also about being able to live in coexistence with other people and how difficult that sometimes is.

La Sylphide is about learning to co-exist with other people? For all the thought he says he’s given James, it looks like he can’t actually articulate what the ballet’s about. But given his training and experience, that's very hard to believe. He seems to be saying what he wants it to be about, and that comes out like some kind of latter day hippie platitude - 'it's huge, man.'
Link to comment

There is at least some precedent. As the first company to perform it, the POB takes its responsibility toward Giselle seriously, but it also performs Mats Ek's version. The latter is not performed as frequently as the former, but they do co-exist in the repertoire.

Of course, Hübbe is not Ek. It remains to be seen whether his Sylphide will be worth keeping.

Link to comment

There is at least some precedent. As the first company to perform it, the POB takes its responsibility toward Giselle seriously, but it also performs Mats Ek's version. The latter is not performed as frequently as the former, but they do co-exist in the repertoire.

Of course, Hübbe is not Ek. It remains to be seen whether his Sylphide will be worth keeping.

Thanks for the reminder of the POB Giselles.

My bank account being what it is, I likely will not see the new version of Sylphide, but I'm very curious about it. As I said above, I think it's a very plausible variation of the source materials. I just don't want to see the heritage work sacrificed for the chance to experiment.

Link to comment

I find a number of Hübbe's comments pretty interesting, but even so when I first saw this article posted online, I double checked for signs of "the onion" or a ballet equivalent unknown to me. (Actually...that's an idea...)

I suspect Hübbe is talking up his production's daring qualities, perhaps hoping to head off criticism and/or drum up interest, even as the production itself is likely to keep a lot of the Bournonville original intact--even if 'framed' differently.

At least, that's certainly what I'm hoping.

Link to comment

Everyone is saying "male Sylph" - I say female James! That I'd like to see.

The only example of female/female romance or anything close to it in ballet is Neumeier's Sylvia, which I'm quite fond of, though I may be biased... I'll take Aurelie Dupont and Marie Agnes Gillot together any day over the sausage fests that tend to happen when choreographers decide to introduce realistic diversity. I really don't understand why this area of romantic/sexual experience is ignored in ballet - there are so many reasons it could work: giving 2 ballerinas top billing, being "topical", the potential for selling tickets with titillation (which has never been something ballet has shied from, let's be honest...)

Are there any other works I'm missing that have even a hint of this?

Link to comment

I think it hasn't been done often because the partnering options are fairly limited. In the most basic terms, the pas de deux is built around the man being bigger and stronger, and the woman being lighter and bendier. Even the tall girl-short boy idea in ballets like Elite Syncopations is the exception that proves the rule and is pretty much always played for comedy. To some extent men can lift each other, but with two women partnering each other, I'm guessing about three-quarters of the partnering techniques that have been developed over time would be unusable. That's not to say that it can't be done, but it would require a thorough re-development of pas de deux "vocabulary."

However, it's also true that La Sylphide involves almost no partnering at all, so it wouldn't be much of an obstacle in this case. The question would be whether a female James could perform his variations. There aren't that many women out there doing double tours, and certainly not in both directions.

Link to comment

No.

1) Oh, call me an elitist, but I think it's legitimate to preserve as artifacts works that are explicitly -- and in this case, perfectly -- of their time so as to have a window onto the intellectual, spiritual, and moral framework of that time. Bournonville's great work tells us -- no, even better, shows us -- what ideas excited and troubled early 19th century Europe. That's something a thoughtful early 21st century person ought to know, and what better way to help us learn than by continuing to give us Bournonville's ballet more or less intact? (And please note that I wrote "more or less": I'm not demanding step-by-step, prop-by-prop, gesture-by-gesture fidelity.) Yes, that means developing audiences with both an informed taste and a curiosity about intellectual history. Simply changing James' and / or the Sylph's gender doesn't make Bournonville's concerns more "relevant" to a 21st century audience, although it does tell us what Hübbe thinks we're anxious about.

2) Simply substituting same sex attraction for James' fatal infatuation with the Sylph and what she represents creates something of a moral muddle. Bournonville's ballet explores the fraught tension between living in the world and longing for the ideal: James' desire to possess the Sylph leads to tragic consequences because it is in some sense wrong -- at the very least it is crudely human. (The Sylph herself is amoral in a very non-human way.) But there's nothing wrong with same-sex attraction; putting it at the center of La Sylphide doesn't amplify the work's meaning for us -- it makes it a different story altogether. So why not just make a new ballet?

3) I like works that riff on classic touchstones -- West Side Story and Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake, e.g. or, to take an example from literature, Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea -- but they're new creations in their own right despite their borrowing from / commenting on their precursors. As described, Hübbe's Sylphide seems to fall into the uneasy space between the kind of "updated" production one sees in opera and a genuinely new work.

Of course, I'm saying all this without the benefit of having actually seen RDB's new production. It could be that Hübbe and his team will handle the material with more deftness than I'm imagining they will.

Link to comment

Great post, Kathleen, especially point 2.

From point 1:
Yes, that means developing audiences with both an informed taste and a curiosity about intellectual history. Simply changing James' and / or the Sylph's gender doesn't make Bournonville's concerns more "relevant" to a 21st century audience, although it does tell us what Hübbe thinks we're anxious about.
I’m sure Hubbe’s decision to have James experience same-sex attraction will be called daring and imaginative, but for 2014 I think it’s an almost predictable, “transgressive” choice. I don’t know why a great work of art needs to be altered for it to be relevant. Art always requires, or at least rewards, some effort on the part of its audience. What’s wrong with asking the audience to show some intellectual curiosity, to think its way into the characters instead of having the characters ‘updated’ so that they’re ‘relatable”?
Link to comment

I'm entirely in agreement with Kathleen O'Connell. I have far more respect for choreographers who remake works entirely, even going so far as to rename them, like Bourne's Highland Fling or Neumeier's Illusions, like 'Swan Lake'. It's the messing around the edges I dislike intensely, when audiences go in expecting Swan Lake and instead get the hash that Yuri Grigorovich or James Kudelka, for example, made of it.

Link to comment

Perhaps this should be the male equivalent to the Odile's fouettés test. Should a dancer perform James if he can't do double tours in both directions? Clearly it's what Bournonville wanted. His choreography is chock full of steps performed in both directions, constantly forcing dancers to execute them on their weaker sides.

Link to comment

I think Kathleen has put multiple fingers on major ideas here -- I've started calling some of these ballets "heritage works," in part to emphasize that they have an artistic integrity in their (pretty much) original form. I'm fascinated by the variations and changes that people have rung on them, but we really only recognize these changes by their contrast to the original, benchmark version. In the perfect world, a company that presents an alternate version of a heritage work has easy access to the original version as well -- we're richer for that kind of experimentation. In the world we've got, it's looking like the heritage versions are getting shorter shrift, for a number of reasons. Crafting a repertory for a company is a dynamic process -- there does need to be change, there does need to be new materials, but there also needs to be an historical foundation to put your collective backs up against. For many companies now, that foundation is still in the technique, but that's mostly experienced in class -- the audience only sees the vibration from that. If someone is staging a "new" Swan Lake, how do those of us with limited knowledge of the work understand this to be new?

Link to comment
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...