"Don Quixote" & "Of Love and Rage": Kings & Windmills Take to the Stage

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Monday, 27 June 2022 13:56

Written by Jack Angstreich

Hee Seo and Joo Won Ahn in Don Quixote. Photo by Rosalie O’Connor.

At the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center, on the evening of Friday, June 17th, I had the enormous pleasure of attending an exquisite performance of the classic ballet, Don Quixote, presented by the wonderful American Ballet Theater, auspiciously inaugurating their spring season.

An epitome of comic escapism, much of the work is a fantasy—even utopian—vision of Spain, and thus an opportunity for brilliant pastiches of Spanish styles in dance, music, and costume—with dresses that evoke flamenco and soldiers dressed in elegant uniforms. (In the second act there is a reversion to an equally familiar genre with a dream-scene of ethereal nymphs, while the third act is a prototypical set of divertissements celebrating the wedding of the central couple.) The presiding genius here is the legendary Marius Petipa whose choreographic wizardry—restaged by Alexander Gorsky and in a production from 1995 by Kevin McKenzie (who retires as Artistic Director this year) and Susan Jones—delights from beginning to end. His enterprise is immeasurably aided by the tuneful Romantic score—here excellently conducted by the reliable Ormsby Wilkins—by Ludwig Minkus who, along with Ceasre Pugni and Riccardo Drigo, enlivened the Imperial Russian Ballet for decades with bewitching music. The charming scenery and costumes are by the eminent Santo Loquasto, whose remarkable versatility is seemingly proven by the fact that I can discern no connection between his work for the ballet and his distinguished art direction for innumerable films by Woody Allen.

The program featured a magnificent cast led by the superb Hee Seo—a shining star of the company—as Kitri, terrifically partnered by the ascendant Joo Won Ahn. (My greatest memory of this production was that with Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev.) The secondary cast was also outstanding: Luciana Paris as Mercedes, a street dancer, splendidly complemented by Andrii Ishchuk as Espada, the matador; Katherine Williams and Paulina Waski, enchanting as the Flower Girls; Betsy McBride and Garegin Pogossian as the Gypsy Couple; and above all, the dazzling Zhong-Jing Fang as the Queen of the Dryads, along with the remarkable Erica Lall as Amour. The deft character actors included Roman Zhurbin in the title role, Luis Ribagorda as Sancho Panza, and Duncan Lyle as Gamache, the rich nobleman betrothed to Kitri. The fabulous corps de ballet danced at their near best.

On the evening of Tuesday, June 21st, I was able to experience what will probably be the most momentous event of the current season: Of Love and Rage from 2020, the twenty-first full-length ballet—which receives its local premiere with these performances—by the Artist in Residence, Alexei Ratmansky, arguably the most important choreographer working today. The work was inspired by the artist’s vacation in Siracusa, Sicily, in the summer of 2018, a city which was a jewel of the ancient Greek world—and in which some extraordinary ruins from that period survive. The source for the ballet’s scenario is the first century Hellenistic romance, Chaereas and Callirhoë, which the Encyclopaedia Britannica describes as “probably the earliest fully extant romantic novel in Western literature.”

In the beautiful scenography and costume designs of Jean-Marc Puissant, one can detect the influence of the classicizing productions of the Ballets Russes, such as Vaslav Nijinsky and Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune and Maurice Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloë—itself based upon a Hellenestic romance—as well as Art Deco, especially in the first section of the ballet which is set in ancient Syracuse. (In the dream-scene in the second act—as well as at the end—one encounters what inevitably recalls one of the giant marble heads of the astounding Valley of Temples of Sicily’s ancient Agrigentum.) The art director commented:

We start in Siracusa with a more Greek look. But once the story goes to Miletus and the court of Dionysius, the costumes become much more early-20th century, more Ottoman. Then, with Mithridates, the style is much more Cossack, more Armenian—that’s artistic license, but it comes from the music.

The music in question—elegantly conducted here by David LaMarche—is Aram Khatchaturian’s fabulous score for his ballet, Gayné, which has many of the striking sonorities found in Soviet ballets by composers such as Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich, Boris Asafyev, and Rodion Shchedrin.

There are many lovely dances here that will be counted among the choreographer’s most amazing accomplishments and subsequent viewings will allow one to determine the true stature of the work as a whole. Petipa does seem to be an artistic precursor for Ratmansky with this ballet, but channeled through George Balanchine. (The latter’s formalism intersects interestingly and seamlessly with Ratmansky’s “postmodernism.”)  The fine cast was led by the incandescent Christine Shevchenko as Callirhoe, effectively partnered by matinee idol Thomas Forster as Chaereas. The main participants also included Blaine Hoven as Dionysius, Jarod Curley as Mithridates, Zhurbin again as the King of Babylon (and as Hermocrates), and Chloe Misseldine as the Queen of Babylon. The secondary cast featured Zimmi Coker as Callirhoe’s Maid, Eric Tamm as Polycharmus, Fang again as Plangon, and Lyle again as Ariston.

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