Directors as choreographers. choreographers as directors
Two of the past year’s most peculiar and provocative uses of dance occurred in dissimilar opera productions by Richard Jones. In his May 2021 Royal Opera production of Mozart’s “La Clemenza di Tito”, the silent role of Berenice was given to a Royal Ballet principal, Fumi Kaneko. Berenice is a character who never reached the stage in Mozart’s conception, but she’s been included in the “Clemenza” dramatic personae before. On paper, this seemed to recycle the idea of Anthony Besch’s famous 1974-1983 Covent Garden production, in which the Royal ballerina Deanne Bergsma brought physical elegance and eloquence to the part. (Bergsma had a second career in opera’s silent roles: she was also the Mother in Britten’s “Death in Venice” between 1973 and 1992, Stella in the 1980-1992 Covent Garden “Hoffmann”.) In the 2021 “Clemenza”, however, Kaneko kept her point shoes on. Although she didn’t dance in them, her ballet way of walking heightened Berenice’s alien presence in occidental Rome. (Possibly her Asian race did so for some viewers. Certainly I became more aware of the Romans’ racism/xenophobia in this “Clemenza”.)
Jones’s November-December production of “The Valkyrie”, for English National Opera, featured a silent imp who, jigging furiously on the spot, seemed literally to dance up the storms at the start of Acts One and Three. (The movement director was Sarah Fahie.) A semi-dance kind of further movement came from nine frisky pantomime human steeds (horse’s heads and all, but two-legged), one for each Valkyrie. Yes, these additions to Wagner’s dramatis personae are bonkers - and yet they’ve lodged memorably in my nervous system (though the geegees’ movements should have been better executed). I enjoy the element of subversive comedy they add to music that’s usually deadly serious and the release they give to the music’s pulsating energy.
It would be good to know about the decisions that led to the addition of these interestingly bizarre dance elements to these productions, but the value of such productions lies in the various meanings they have for us, not those we were intended to deduce. (As a footnote, I report that Lucy Burge, who has choreographed quite a number of other Jones stagings, observed in a 2021 interview that Jones, his designers, and she begin discussing their collaborations eighteen months before their premieres. Herself an eminent dancer with Ballet Rambert and other companies in the 1970s and 1980s, she remarked that she did not regard herself as a true choreographer, but that she brought a very large movement vocabulary to rehearsals, so that she could find the moves that suit singers best.) Above all, it’s fascinating that Jones, one of the liveliest and most valuably disconcerting of today’s directors, places dance among his theatrical resources even in such apparently non-dance works as “La Clemenza” and “The Valkyrie”.
Opera is staged drama. When its dimensions of both movement and stillness connect tellingly to music, the stage action becomes a form of choreography. Before dance ever got under my skin in the mid-1970s, the movement of certain opera singers and productions had already begun to haunt me, especially in its timing: it made me hear new details or layers of the music. After forty-six years, I can tell you how Josephine Barstow, as Octavian in John Copley’s 1975 English National Opera production of “The Rosenkavalier”, tensely clenched her hands to grip his/her frock coat while singing the words “As you command, Bichette”: the grip, like subtly making a fist, occurred on the harmonic and rhythmic stress of the syllable “-chet-.” A tiny gesture, it reached me in the London Coliseum’s Balcony like a knot in my stomach.
Any good Callas devotee will know Michael Scott’s accounts of how she ran back onto the stage in the 1958 Covent Garden revival of “La Traviata”, her steps on the semiquavers “like a ballerina’s”. He also evokes how, when she left the stage after her second scene in Act One of the Zeffirelli production of Tosca, she picked up her silk stole and let it billow behind her the air, perfectly catching the orchestral melody as she departed. Callas herself said that it was the conductor Tullio Serafin who taught her to stand still, listen to the music, and move only when the music told her what to do. Zeffirelli generously observed that the best direction ever given to Callas was from Karajan in his La Scala production of “Lucia di Lammermoor”. “He just arranged everything around her. She did the Mad Scene with a follow-spot like a ballerina against black. Nothing else. He let her be music, absolute music.” He let her stand still, placed the spotlight on her alone, and allowed her arms (rising and falling in winged sleeves), her lips, and her eyes carry all the visual theatrics.
As Zeffirelli observed, you can’t do that with every singer. Some singers are eloquent when standing still, others not. More bafflingly, some otherwise musical singers seem incapable of moving musically: Montserrat Caballé, a large woman, often struck gestures that were both bizarrely timed and meaningless, while Rita Hunter, who was yet larger and far less glamorous, was absolutely spot-on in timing, even in Donna Anna’s dance steps at Don Giovanni’s party.
Here lies what’s often the most insoluble challenge for opera directors: the varying ways that singers do or don’t feel music in their bodies. And, whereas dancers tend to develop muscle memories (sometimes remembering steps fifty years later when they hear the music), singers are far less likely to. Interviewing Barstow in 1992 about the physical details of the 1970s performances by her that I could not forget, I was startled to find that she had no recollection of specific movements she had made - though she knew the larger ideas that character and costume gave her for movement style. This, as she remarked, freed her to reconceive the stage business in each revival or new production without the baggage of past performance habits. (This also explained why, in the Copley ENO “Traviata”, she too completely different approaches to many passages in the three revivals I saw her sing between 1974 and 1982.)
There are numberless genres of choreography, and numberless of opera direction. It should be no surprise that eminent choreographers – Jean-Georges Noverre, George Balanchine, Frederick Ashton, Pina Bausch, Mark Morris, Wayne McGregor – have staged entire operas, sometimes keeping the singers offstage and giving the action all to dancers. It should also be no surprise, though, that such artists, accustomed to the physical detail and memory of dancers, can find it frustrating to work with those singers who are physically limited. (The frustration probably goes both ways: many of us have seen singers look “choreographed” in the bad sense, obediently - but with apparent reluctance - delivering their moves on time without bringing them to life.)
But any director will share some of the same concerns as a choreographer. The Pierpont Morgan Library in New York has a libretto for “Aida” with the notations Verdi made (during the opera’s early appearances in northern Italy) about stage directions for the first three acts. Concerned, in both public and intimate scenes, with who stands where, he uses some of the same basic methods of notations as some choreographers, such as little arrows to show which the lead characters are facing. I’ve seen many performances of “Aida” with less concern for physical eloquence than his markings suggest.
Choreographers, like directors, can take dissimilar approaches in successive productions of the same opera. When Frederick Ashton (1904-1988) directed and choreographed Gluck’s Orpheus for Covent Garden in 1953, he gave the Dance of the Blessed Spirit to the young Svetlana Beriosova, with a dove on her wrist. When he contributed dances to an 1958 Orfeo ed Euridice for La Scala, Milan, he did something similar for the young Carla Fracci. But when he tackled the music a third time, for an English National Opera gala in 1978, he gave the dance to the thirty-five-year-old bare-chested Anthony Dowell. Ballet had usually seen women as the embodiments of the ideal; Ashton here bent genders to make Dowell the image of blessed purity. (In the twenty-first century, this dance has been revived from Novosibirsk to New York, with a range of male stars.)
Ashton’s contemporary George Balanchine (1904-1988) has been widely and routinely hailed as the most musical of choreographers - and generally underrated as one of the great radical dramatists. His 1936 Metropolitan Opera Orpheus and Eurydice - a two-act arrangement of Gluck’s score that, weirdly, shared the bill with Cavalleria Rusticana - was one of the New York scandals of its day. Here, as in many of his ballets, Balanchine was an early exponent of Director’s Theatre or Regie. (Choreographing “La Valse” in 1951, for example, he used a scenario quite unlike that envisaged by Ravel.) His 1936 Met “Orpheus”, designed by the surrealist Pavel Tchelitchew, kept the singers off the stage, gave all the action to the dancers, and set Hell as a concentration camp. It had only two performances. Today its originality exists only in powerful photos by George Platt Lynes and Cecil Beaton.
Yet in 1963, Balanchine directed and choreographed “Orfeo ed Euridice” in Hamburg with ornate pseudo-baroque costumes, using the full celebratory divertissement of music in the final scene. He later adapted a dance suite from that production into the ballet “Chaconne”, but now using minimal costumes and décor. This has been a classic of New York City Ballet repertory since 1976; for that New York version, he added the Blessed Spirit music as a prelude. Although Balanchine spells out no narrative, this ballet – using only Gluck’s dance music - is widely felt to be his two-part refraction of the Orpheus myth: the artist who cannot bear to lose his muse and who manages to regain her. The Blessed Spirits flute solo becomes a dream pas de deux in which Eurydice, with romantically loose hair, is beautifully partnered by Orpheus without seeming to be at one with him; the final chaconnne ensemble becomes a celebration of Eurydice’s return to the upper world, with her, Orpheus, and their companions all aflame with poetic inspiration.
But how do you tell the Orpheus story? (Balanchine narrated yet anorhter version of it in his 1948 Stravinsky ballet, with Orpheus finally dismembered by maenads, as in Virgil.) Pina Bausch’s 1975 all-danced version of Gluck’s opera – still performed this century by the Paris Opera Ballet (singers offstage) - is all about grief. Orpheus is retitled Love; Love is re-named Youth; Eurydice is re-named Death. Orpheus dies after his aria; Eurydice does not regain life; Gluck’s happy ending is omitted. In 1996, Mark Morris staged the Vienna 1762 version of the opera in Grecian style for the Handel and Haydn Society (the production was seen at the Edinburgh Festival). In 2007, however, he presented it in modern dress and with postmodern campiness at the New York Met: the chorus is dressed as witnesses from history, as an array of celebs from Cleopatra and Henry VIII to Hiawatha and Liberace.
When dance in opera succeeds, even as an escapist divertissement, it’s surely because the dancing and the singers’ acting seem to share the same imaginative world, even bychanging its mood. A 1733 observer of Rameau’s original “Hippolyte et Aricie” loved the way that the dancing of the young virtuoso Marie Camargo dried the tears that Thésée (the bass Claude-Louis-Dominique Chassé de Chinais) had just made him shed. In the years 1829-1831 at the Paris Opera, the tenor Adolphe Nourrit and the ballerina Marie Taglioni shared the stage in three premieres: Rossini’s “Guillaume Tell” (1829), Auber’s “Le Dieu et la Bayadère” (1830), and Meyerbeer’s “Robert le Diable” (1831). In “Tell”, they not only won the most glowing reviews, they were praised for the same quality of “suave volupté.” It’s tempting to think of Nourrit and Taglioni as kindred spirits; certainly he saw that she had yet greater potential. While they were rehearsing the original “Robert” production, he wrote the scenario for the ballet “La Sylphide”, which became the archetypal Romantic ballet, changing ballet history, and whose title role was to make Taglioni one of the idols of Romanticism.
That’s not to say Nourrit and Taglioni moved like each other, or that Camargo moved like Rameau’s singers. But the disparity between them was surely one that the audience found stimulatingly harmonious and/or satisfying. This is the essence of Britten’s “Death in Venice”, establishing a Romantic dualism between singers and dancers: the dancers have a grace the hero Aschenbach cannot attain but that inspires him.
I often think back to the felicities of stance, spacing, and motion in many of the John Copley productions that were to be seen with both Royal Opera and English National Opera in the 1970s. Copley has often said that one of his chief stylistic inspirations was the ballets of Frederick Ashton, a central figure at Covent Garden from 1946 on; this makes complete sense. Ashton and Copley used the same designers for some of their most successful productions: Henry Barden, David Walker, Julia Trevelyan Oman. (Even Copley, however, could not always sustain movement and music-drama in harmony. The 1981 Royal Opera “Alceste”, famous as Janet Baker’s farewell to the Covent Garden stage, included a final dance divertissement that, as choreographed by Ronald Hynd with eminent ballet and modern dancers, caused laugh-out-loud derision.)
In which of this century’s opera stagings have we observed the greatest felicities of musically responsive stage action? One that comes to my mind is Phelim McDermott’s 2017 English National Opera production of Philip Glass’s “Akhnaten“, with its ingenious addition of Gandini Juggling, wonderfully acute in its musical realisation of those Glass ostinatos. The idea is utterly wacky, left-field - but it’s also a brilliant metaphor for the precarious, ingenious, and beautiful nature of Akhnaten’s regal-religious originality.
The title character of Julian Crouch’s production of Nico Muhly’s “Marnie” (premiered in 2017 by English National Opera - I saw it in 2018 at the New York Met) is often shadowed by four lookalike silent Marnies or by ten silent men, The Marnies are dressed in strikingly individual colours (couture c.1960), a wonderful touch; the men are in grey. This multiplication of Marnie amplifies the drama's central psychological mystery: who and what is Marnie? In a powerful fox-hunt scene, the graymen lift her up - a fall from her horse - and suspend her in the air in a moment out of time, like an aspect of psychological trauma. The choreography is by Lynne Page, the direction by Michael Mayer, but where does one start and the other stop? Here - as with Kate Flatt’s choreography for Andrei Serban’s 1984-2009 Royal Opera “Turandot”, Ian Spink’s for David Pountney’s surreal English National Opera “Macbeth” (1990), Carolyn Choa’s choreography for François Girard’s New York Met’s “Parsifal” (2013), and Lizzie Gee’s for the ENO “Iolanthe” (2018) - it was impossible to discern any real break in style. How on earth did the baritone Marcus Farnsworth, as Iolanthe’s Strephon, acquire that much skill in ballet steps and partnering? How did Gee get the whole female chorus doing that many moves from Romantic ballet with such enthusiasm?
Thinking over the movement/music idioms I’ve observed in the best opera productions over fifty years, I’m sometimes a golden-ager, nostalgic for kinds of physical eloquence not now to be found. Yet this century’s bravest productions - some of them fabulously odd - prompt me to a brave-new-world admiration. In every decade, several productions have made their worst blunders when it comes to dancing. But in the finest productions of both opera and dance theatre the same rule applies: you hear the music better for watching the movement.
@Alastair Macaulay 2022