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Princess Mumtaz:Tina Kay Bohnstedt
Old Shah Jahan: Andrew Allagree
Young Shah Jahan:Jekyns Pelaez
Angel of Death: David Fonnegra
Friends of the Princess:Amy Foster Bertein, Lauren Main de Lucia
Salesman: David Fonnegra

When Asraf Habibullah, President of Diablo Ballet, came on stage before the curtain November 19 to comment on Daiblo Ballet’s distinction in reaching half way around the world to recount the legendary love story of Emperor Shah Jahan and his favorite wife Mumtaz and what a salient exchange it represented for Indians and the eight-person ensemble, Habibullah may not have been aware such Asiatc themes are part of Russian ballet history.

Associate Artistic Director Nicolai Kabanaiev, choreographer of this cross-cultural essay, received his ballet education at the Vaganova Institute when St. Petersburg was still Leningrad. The traditions of the Russian Imperial Theater had remained intact with continued productions of Petipa classics and twentieth century choreography on the enduring Russian fascination, the exoticism of Asia; it lingers on, however. In 1966 India in Madras, I saw a Bolshoi-Leningrad ballet contingent in an extended pas de deux based on the Sanskrit classic, Shakuntala, perhaps created just to acknowledge India’s remarkable cultural heritage. A male Tamil member of the audience was heard to remark in the melodic English Indians seem to possess, “Good dancing; Shakuntala it was not.”

It is not as though Western Europe had eschewed a like interest: Jules Perrot had created Lalla Rooke for Fanny Cerrito, premiered in London in 1846,I believe based on a novel of the same name, with the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb as one of the characters. This was prior to the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion. It took three decades before Marius Petipa essayed La Bayadere in 1877 and in 1889 The Talisman, both based on Hindu themes.

During Russia’s Soviet era there was Fedor Lopukhov’s The Red Poppy, produced in Moscow in 1927, followed by R. V. Zakharov’s Fountain of Bakhschisarav, based on Pushkin’s poem,in 1934; so the large-scale productions with India or the Far East were part of production meat and potatoes to which Russian-trained dancers are exposed. The exposure has fostered an anthropologic mashed potato approach to staging which I wish to God could stricken from some mythical Ten Commandments of ballet production. However, I doubt sufficient curiosity exists amongst ballet personnel to attempt accurate historical adaptations.

Diablo dances and dance well, sometimes brilliantly, but does allow imagination to surmount anthropological correctness. When this ballet was first announced, I was tempted to send Kabanaiev Indu Sundaresan’s Twentieth Wife and Feast of Roses, two historical novels based on the life of Nur Jahan, the aunt of Mumtaz, responsible for the initial meeting of Shah Jahan and Mumtaz when both were young. Kabanaiev might consider this meddling. It’s a pity I restrained myself; the cultural license Kabanaiev exhibited in this ballet goes beyond Bollywood with the costumes. I may be naive, but I don’t think Hindi films distort customs or costuming quite so flagrantly.

Google provides the curious with a variety of Web sites relating to traditional Hindu-Muslim/Indian garments. Granted Mlles Bohnstadt, Bernsten and de Lucia possess torsos which are paragons of muscled slenderness and gorgeous to behold, whether in pose or moving in interesting spiky pointe passages. The fact remains harem pants with slits revealing the thighs are neither a Hindu or Muslim garment with due respect to La Bayadere. The garments in Indian miniatures show the voluminous ghaghra, or skirt, worn over pajama-like pants topped by a choli; no gilded bras; the odhni, or shawl, is generous enough to cover the head and shoulders modestly. There may have been a debate whether the leg length to the crotch was the proper aesthetic silhouette; it certainly won out.

The set itself was an adroit combination of gauzy curtains, spumes of dry ice, a box which looked as if it served as a sales booth, a wedding bed and Mumtaz' tomb, three suspended carpets of obvious Oriental inspirations and a backdrop of the Taj itself. The only missing element was the Red Fort where Shah Jahan was imprisoned by his son Aurangzebin 1658 for the last eight years of his life, his confinement situated where he could gaze across the Jumna River to the beautiful tomb he ordered constructed in memory of his wife Mumtaz. How fascinating it would be if Old Shah Jahan were magically transported from his elegant confinement wearing a proper turban, to the bier of Mumtaz, where the Angel of Death, in something like a seventeenth century Indian garment (handsome as recorded in Indian miniature painting, legs wrapped enabling a dancer’s freedom) obliged him with the gorgeous corpse of the woman who bore fourteen children.

Muslim women in purdah were never allowed on the streets outside a curtained litter or palanquin; in the Sundaresan novels the initial encounter occurred in the women’s zenniah; historically, the tradesman needs out, despite the skill of David Fonnegra, doubling also as the angel of death, sporting a cape rather than a voluminous sherwani or scarf.

The lighting was evocative and the musical mixture added to the charm. The technical and movement devices employed to tell the story lent ambience to the tale, the choreography as such flowed smoothly creating an appropriate mood. Jekyns Pelaez and Tina Kay Bohnstedt’s pas de deux provided believability to the romance in structure and interpretation. It astonished me in this Web site age apparently no one bothered to consult some of the sites which could provide sartorial background for the ballet. To paraphrase that Tamil summary of nearly forty years ago: Fine dancing: The legend of the Taj, not quite.

Walk Before Talk
Music: Michael Nyman
Choreography: K.T. Nelson
Costumes: Ananada Willaims
Lighting Design:Jack Carpenter

Tina Kay Bohnstedt, Amy Foster Bernsten, Lauren Jonas, Lauren Main de Lucia, Andrew Allagree, David Fonnegra, Vicktor Kabanaiev, Jekyns Pelaez.

Diablo Ballet rarely, if ever, dances a program for more than two nights, only once in a while it revives a previously created work, so one rarely can appraise a ballet’s possible durability,and even more rarely watch cast changes. K. T. Nelson’s Walk Before You Talk is a interesting exception; one could see what the current dancers, cut from the original dozen to eight probably for budgetary reasons, did with it. Three former stalwarts are gone: Kyongho Kim is dead, Kelly Teo retired and Erika Johnston has taken up nursing studies.

Nelson, who is Associate Artistic Director of ODC/San Francisco, creates accents within her entrances and exits of two, three and four dancers - same or assorted sexes; I sometimes wonder whether to fill the phrase totally; she enjoys visual quips to an otherwise lineal and architectural format, like a forward tilt of the body suddenly executing a grinding motion in the hips, a gargoyle to what otherwise might be an unaccented ensemble and musical phrase. She provided jerky beginnings for the men, an impersonal inspection of Andrew Allagree’s prone body by Amy Foster Bernsten, a striking tall blonde new this season with substantial performing credits behind her name. Between the appraisal and the women’s active cavorting are some lively challenges for the men, two or three six-pirouette executions by Viktor Kabanaiev, men hauled into space by other men, all garbed in trunks, soft shoes and reddish tees with black cuffs. From Eastern poetics to American workouts, that’s Diablo Ballet’s aesthetic.