Onegin
Royal Danish Ballet
April 17, 2008
John Cranko’s Onegin remains the perfect match for the Royal Danish Ballet. All company skills are on display and create the unique experience: a performance that enhances the original work.
It is fitting that Frank Andersen finished his second tenure as ballet master with one of his greatest successes. However one cannot help remembering that the RDB only aquired Onegin in 1989 because a highly published ballet based on a Hans Andersen fairy tale with music by Sebastian, a Danish pop icon and costumes by Jens Jacob Woorsaa was dropped by choreographer Heinz Sporli shortly before it planned premiere. Needing a quick replacement, Reid Anderson's production of Onegin came through with scenography and costumes borrowed from two different companies. Starring Arne Villumsen as a stunning Onegin it became the hit of the decade, and has delighted audiences ever since but it is only now almost 20 years later that the company has acquired its own copy of Jürgen Roses costumes and sets.
Cranko´s ballet is very well put together. Not particularly long, it includes a selection of great pas de deux, actions scenes and strong corps dances as well as telling an intriguing story of the four major characters. There is no long dry spells or irrelevant dancing numbers as in for instance Macmillan’s Manon. Everything is driving the plot forward and told in dance movements. Want to se a hysterical solo or an aggressive pirouette, visit Onegin and in particular the RDB version.
RDB has over the last years developed the strange habit of giving the premiere performance not to the strongest team but to a newer couple. It may be done with the motive of giving more dancers part in the exposure and be based on the belief that the well known stars will sell the performance anyway as long as they are on the rooster, and they do but only to the dedicated audiences. As a consequence the RDB do not sell a performance as well as they could have done and as most media only review one cast, RDB do not harvest all the accolades they could have and an important ingredient is missing in the pursuit of gaining a bigger and broader audience. Stars are stars and there are certain things that stars simply do better, and one of them is to transcend the choreography and in fact make a ballet better than it really is.
This production of Onegin is a good example of this. The first cast consisted of Yao Wei and Jean Lucien Massot, who both are very good dancers but not great dancers. All though they have danced many ballets they own only few. Onegin is a clever piece of choreography. Do the steps and most will be communicated to the audience. We saw strong good dancing, but when Yao Wei’s Tatiana traces Onegin on pointes you see a dancer with strong pointe work, but not a girl desperately in love. In the final pas de deux there is a certain element used both at the beginning and the end of the pas de deux. Onegin raises his arms over the standing Tatiana and traces the length of her body to the floor. The way Massot chose to dance this moment the second time when all is lost for his character is to make a complete replica of the first moment starting with a very classical pose, whereas Kenneth Greve´s interpretation of second moment simply slides down the ballerina to reach the end posture of total devastation in a heap on the floor, putting drama over prettiness.
Onegin is a godsend for the mature dancer who can use every experience of his career and really dance the dramatic role. Onegin is very cleverly build on what the mature dancer normally does best, strong partnering, presence and timing. Dramatically it present the dancer with the challenge of first making the audience hate him and then make them love him as phrased by the great Onegin interpreter Arne Villumsen, whose interpretation clearly is the inspiration for both casts I have seen so far.
Kenneth Greve commits himself totally to the drama and with his strong partnering skills and presence remains the focus of the performance. He has always been a credible hero but can now interpret the arrogance in Onegin as well as the lover. Massot is not blessed with as much range and presence and can therefore not perform on as broad a scale as Greve can. As Greve´s (and Blangstrup´s) Tatiana, Gudrun Bojesen has outgrown her ingénue persona to create a compelling portrait of a girl desperately in love. From the very beginning of the ballet her worship of Onegin is visible in every movement and especially in the second act solo, each movement communicate her desperation. Yao Wei dances the part very well and show great development as a dramatic dancer. Looking at her career the last couple of years, one could get the impression that she is groomed as the next Caroline Cavallo, dancing a large and varied repertoire, but never giving the opportunity to specialise or to find her own type as dancer, which will be important if her career should really blossom.
The career track of an all purpose ballerina is not the one to envy. A ballerina must develop a style unique to her and bring those qualities to each performance. That is why Gudrun Bojesen and Silja Schandorff have such a strong hold on the audience. They can flavour each part with their clearly defined interpretation of ballerinaship. They can expand and take chances, but you are never in doubt of their taking responsibility for the performance and they create real magic. The all purpose ballerina never gets to define her reign nor is she able to communicate her method of performing. Casting Yao Wei as broadly as Kitri, Odette/Odile, Tatiana, Eleonora and The Little Mermaid and in all possible divertissements do not help her develop a unique brand, but make her a very good filler. Maurice Bejart once said: “There is often a girl in the company who dances better than the ballerina, but this is not a ballerina”. A ballerina is more about presence, style and interpretation than technique. The company must by clever and considerate casting develop its potentials ballerinas: Yao Wei, Susanne Grinder and Christina Michanek (that is a girl with a strong presence) into real ballerinas. Not by throwing them into this and that but by choosing the right string of opportunities for the potential ballerinas.
Onegin also includes two smashing roles for upcoming dancers, the part of the secondary couples Olga and Lensky. On premiere night, Charles Andersen made a very impressive debut as the romantic Lensky. Second cast was Sebastian Kloborg who was particularly strong dramatically. Martin Kupinsky is also casts as Lensky. As Olga, Femke Mølbach Sloth was a pretty ingennue but proved not as effective in the role as bubbly Julie Valentin, who is more of a demi character dancer. It became very clear that you to have very different types of dancers for Olga and Tatiana, and Mølbach Sloth and Wei are too much of the same type to show the difference. The casts was rounded up by Julien Ringdahl and Byron Mildwater as Prince Gremin, Rose Gad and Mette Bøtcher as Tatiana´s mother and Lis Jeppesen and Jette Buchwald as the old nurse. Especially Lis Jeppesen stood out and as a minor detail I would recommend swapping the cast to make the blond Rose Gad the mother of the fair set of sisters and dark-haired Mette Bødtcher the mother of the dark-haired cast. A small detail, but a detail that would put the cherry on the finest show in town.
Comments