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Luckily, the buzz was not just on one side of the curtain, as the first of the two Ballets Russes celebration programmes was also glamorous and generally well performed. Thanks to an intelligent approach, none of the ‘old’ items reeked of mothballs; not even the hyper-camp, though enjoyable, Schéhérazade, which concluded the evening on a fizzy note with its pseudo-orientalist overtones, tamed eroticism and flashy pyrotechnics.
The modernist take on Diaghilev’s repertoire became evident as soon as the curtain went up on Apollo, presented here in Balanchine’s own ‘edited’ 1970s revisitation of the 1928 original Apollon Musagète. Thomas Edur, Agnes Oaks, Erina Takahashi and Daria Klimentova danced perfectly and with impeccable stylistic accuracy — even though the adopted tempi were often drearily slow. Indeed, stylistic accuracy was also the dominant factor in Schéhérazade and in Les Sylphides, the opening piece of the second programme. It was refreshing to see the latter performed with such attention to detail.
The only item that suffered greatly from lack of accuracy was, alas, Le Spectre de la Rose. At the core of this 1911 duet is the androgyny of the eponymous character, the spirit of a rose — something Nijinsky and some of his successors brought magically to life. Alas, these days the character’s androgyny is often misunderstood and misinterpreted. Instead of a masculine figure, we tend to get an ephebe, whose presence vitiates the Art Nouveau essence of the work, based on the contrast between an overt display of virility and the soft petals of the costume. Neither of the two performers I saw, Australian Ballet’s Daniel Gaudiello and ENB’s Anton Lukovkin, looked the part, and their disappointing interpretation affected that of their partners, Gina Brescianini and Ksenia Ovsyanick, whose young romantic debutantes never came to life.
On the opening night, Elena Glurdjidze appeared as the Dying Swan with a tutu designed by Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel. Predictably, the tutu, more than Glurdjidze’s good performance, became the object of discussion. Personally, I found it confirmed what I have always thought about modern-day couturiers having a go at theatre costumes: it simply does not work. Stunning as it may be, the Lagerfeld tutu detracts greatly from the modernist choreography that Michael Fokine devised for Anna Pavlova. Take, for instance, the feathery choke or ruff that breaks the line of the neck, thus affecting the lyrical lines that renders this brief solo unique. On Saturday, Anaïs Chalendard’s superb performance benefited greatly from a reproduction of Pavlova’s original costume.
The other new touch in the first programme came with David Dawson’s Faun(e), a contemporary revisitation of Nijinsky’s L’après-midi d’un faune (1912). This powerful duet for male dancers, set to Debussy’s haunting score played on two pianos by Kevin Darvas and Chris Swithinbank, can be read in myriad ways. In my view, what stands out is the captivating fluidity of the movement vocabulary, a truly apt neo-impressionist reading of the Impressionist score. I am sure Debussy would have loved it, for he never liked what Nijinsky had done to his music.
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