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American Ballet Theatre11th July 2005 New York City, Metropolitan Opera House by Eric Taub |
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As ABT's mammoth Spring season thunders into its final week, it was to have begun with a reprise of the unforgettable pairing of Alessandra Ferri and Julio Bocca in 'Giselle.' Instead, injuries caused Ferri's withdrawl for the remainder of the season, and instead Bocca danced with ABT's reigning ballerina, Julie Kent. I don't usually consider myself a great fan of Kent's. Too often I've seen her obliterate choreography with a blithe smile, as if happily confident that her porcelain beauty counts for more than trifles like, say, finishing pirouettes. Dramatically, she often flounders when she can't cast a role into a variation on her favorite, indeed, only theme, that of a good girl done wrong. Fortunately for Kent, most of the female ballerina repertory falls, or can be made to fall, in this category. If her Caroline in Tudor's "Jardin au Lilas" seems an overly broad, insecure caricature, her portrayals of Giselle, Nikiya and Odette can all be profoundly moving, although less so after you realize they're all one and the same, and either blissfully happy or tear-jerkingly sad. But if the gamut of Kent's dramatic emotion seldom runs farther than from A to B, she's buffed those letters to a surprising gleaming. Last night, Kent dusted off her prom-Queen Giselle, and completely overpowered my jaded sensibility. Again I was struck by the sophistication beneath the pretty exterior of her portrayal. This Giselle was ever focussed on her Albrecht, the suave and dangerous Bocca: dancing to please him in the first act, and, with desperation and regret, to save and forgive him in the second. Kent's dancing seldom pushed the limits of comfort. She made of the first act's tricky Spessitseva solo study of safe and demure single pirouettes, and in the second act even her tutu's billowing tulle seemed as carefully placed as her port de bras in evoking the Romantic spirit. Such studiousness might've been stultifying, if not for the, dare I say it, subtlety beneath her simplicity. She didn't dance brilliantly, but the rightness of her small artistic choices, in phrasing, direction, emphasis, built a convincing, even compelling portrait. Although initially resisting, I ended up believing in Kent's ghostly Giselle; and, at the day's end, that's all that counts, isn't it? I've never seen a better, more appealingly evil cad than Bocca's Albrecht. In the pas d'action, his declarations of love are so effusively fragrant, only a love-struck Giselle would miss their insincerity. When the two dance together with the village's peasants, he stalks her like a panther going after a rabbit she playfully avoids his bone-crushing embraces, oblivious of the very physical intentions he's just made crystal clear to the audience. Miraculously, Bocca brings off the transition from thwarted cad to heartbroken lover without a hitch, his Act II fireworks driven equally by passion and remorse. At this stage of his career, he doesn't leap quite as high as once, nor do his knees straighten as before, but he still smolders and explodes with carnivorous force, the animal magnetism never far beneath his aristocratic facade.
ABT brought together a stunning Ghostly Trio of Wilis: Gillian Murphy's icy, aerial Myrtha, attended by the statuesque Michele Wiles and Veronika Part. Xiomara Reyes and Herman Cornejo were more ebullient than precise in the Peasant pas de deux, but Cornejo's near-orbital double cabrioles were so much fun to watch, I hardly minded. After all, they're peasants, right? In a last-minute substitution, ABT's ballet mistress Susan Jones reprised Berthe, Giselle's mother, miming her warning about the Wilis with awesome fearfulness.
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