 |
   |
Royal BalletFebruary 2008 London, Covent Garden by Alison Penfold |
|||||||
|
As posted on our Postings pages... Well, despite all its obvious (and well-documented) flaws, I have to say I became more and more taken with Different Drummer as the run went on, based on the performances of the first cast, at least. (My evaluation of the second cast may have been affected by the fact that I was missing quite a fair part of the stage when I saw them). In fact, I was really wishing, as Clement Crisp suggested, that the performance could have been filmed, because even now I'm still only starting to come to grips with the work, and would like to be able to see it again. Perhaps it’s due to my relative fondness for German Expressionism anyway (although the original Büchner play preceded that movement by some 6 decades, I think, on re-reading it I was struck by just how much it foreshadows Expressionism in its style and subject-matter), but it strikes me that neither the music nor the style are inappropriate for the subject, even if it doesn’t make life at all easy for the audience trying to unravel it! What does become clear, I think, is that the work is not one to be interpreted literally (and, heaven knows, I'm probably one of the most literal-minded posters here at times!), but to be viewed as a series of episodes - fragments, really, like the play - sometimes dreamlike, but more usually hallucinatory or nightmarish, tracing the gradual breakdown of Woyzeck's mind and body: various motifs from the play are there, including the severed head, Woyzeck repeatedly listening for the Freemasons drumming beneath his feet, and so on. Yes, certainly it would have done better as a more compact, tauter work on a smaller scale – the scene with the whores and soldiers in gas masks being a prime example, when the suddenly large number of extraneous characters just distracts from the main action – and I spent much of the final performance mentally paring it down to something a lot more succinct, but then MacMillan was probably handicapped by needing to use the score of Verklärte Nacht uncut. After all, it's hardly the first time in a narrative ballet that he's had to resort to padding to fill out a score: in fact, in how many of his narrative works has it *not* happened? I really wish he'd lived long enough to revise it into more of a chamber ballet, when it would doubtless have been far more effective.
My initial assumptions about the ballet turned out to be totally erroneous: unsurprising, really - after all, faced with the combined basic elements of Schoenberg and Webern, MacMillan, Expressionism, betrayal, creeping insanity, murder and a play designed at least in part as a protest against the brutal treatment of common soldiers in the early 19th century, you wouldn't really have expected MacMillan to come up with a ballet which, at times at least, contained lyrical and expressive choreography of such beauty. The result made rather more sense of what I'd originally thought was an odd choice of two such contrasting casts for such a ballet. (On that note, may I comment in passing on how good it was to see Edward Watson getting something rather more lyrical to dance for a change – it's a facet of his dancing which hasn't had much exposure since he was promoted to principal, and I've been wishing someone would put him in something that would show it off more.)
 © John Ross
Finally, picking up on a couple of comments about the other two works on the bill: I'm not at all convinced that Chroma is quite as one-dimensional as some people seem to think – if you look at the dancers' faces rather than just their bodies, it seems to me that there is a lot more going on in that ballet than you might initially think.
Several people have indicated that the "scissors" section of Rite of Spring has become a bit tame this time round, with the Chosen One looking more as though she's playing hopscotch than being at risk of physical injury by getting her feet caught in the "blades". I've been watching this ballet rather a lot ever since Monica Mason set it on ENB in round about 2000, and I must say that I don't remember ever getting the feeling that the Chosen One was effectively dancing through a field of mantraps, just making her way through a continuously shifting landscape which required a good deal of care and attention. *Was* it ever otherwise?
|
||||||||
|
 |
||||||||
|
|
||||||||
|
|
||||||||
|
|
||||||||
|
|
||||||||
