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Piotr
Il’yich TCHAIKOVSKY (1840-1893) The Nutcracker (1892) [99:00]
Choreography
by Maurice Béjart and Marius Petipa
Damaas
Thijs - Bim, the son
Elisabet Ros - Elle, the mother
Gil Roman - Marius Petipa / Méphisto
Juichi Kobayashi - Félix, the cat
Yvette Horner - Fairy Godmother / Waltz of the Flowers
Béjart Ballet Lausanne
Orchestre Colonne/Edmón Colomer
Director: Ross MacGibbon
rec. live performance, Théâtre Musical de Paris – Châtelet,
2000 EMI CLASSICS
2165869 [99:00]
Don’t expect a conventional Nutcracker with
this one. This is after all “Maurice
Béjart’s Nutcracker”. True, Tchaikovsky’s
score is still there … as well as a few rather unexpected
musical additions, of which more later. But, turning to
the story, you certainly won’t find feisty little Clara,
her family, the mysterious Herr Drosselmeyer, the enormously
expanding Christmas tree, the wicked Mouse King and his
cohorts or even a nutcracker on stage at the Châtelet.
What you will find, on the
other hand is a completely new surrealist fantasy; “story” would
most certainly be the wrong word. It is based around Maurice
Béjart’s memories of his real-life mother who died when
he was aged just seven years old. We are pointed in that
direction right at the opening when a screen descends over
the stage - a device that is used several times in the
production - and Bejart himself appears on film to reminisce
briefly about his childhood in Marseilles.
In a series of frankly bizarre
episodes in Act 1, we see, among other things, the young
boy Bim (Béjart’s alter ego) enticed into the world of
dance by the influence of Marius Petipa/Méphisto It’s an
episode inspired by Béjart’s own Faustian childhood games
when he and his sister played Méphisto and Marguerite.
Another scene derives from the choreographer’s early dreams
of his mother - accompanied by a troop of scantily-dressed
boy scouts! - wandering through an enchanted forest. There
they encounter two bearded drag queens - or angels, as
the end credits have it - and two high-kicking chorus girls:
fairies, apparently.
And, as if all that wasn’t enough,
at the first Act’s climax celebrated 78 years old French accordéoniste Yvette
Horner gamely makes an appearance from the wings to offer
a spirited ad lib accompaniment to the Waltz
of the snowflakes. Horner is campily dressed up by
Jean-Paul Gaultier as a sort of red-headed version of Dame
Barbara Cartland.
The second Act – introduced on
that screen descending over the stage by Béjart’s real-life
grandmother - abandons the idea of the chronological approach
based on Béjart’s childhood. It becomes instead a sort
of homage to motherhood in general. Even so, it has to
be pointed out that the sort of mother/son relationship
hinted at here is of the rather suspect variety more usually
encountered in Greek tragedy. Thus, the celebratory dances
are staged here for a Mother’s Day celebration. We learn
this when a large banner proclaiming Bonne Fête Maman is
paraded across the stage. The Spanish dance features bullfighters,
for it seems that the young Béjart actually aspired to
become one. The Chinese dance features that country’s familiar
bicyclists circling the stage in their Chairman Mao suits.
A magician thrusts swords into a cabinet holding an exotic
odalisque in the Arabian dance. The Russian dance features
a pair of dancers who appear to be dressed as Ancient Greeks,
even though they perform against the backdrop of a Soviet
hammer-and-sickle flag!
As if all that weren’t enough,
Béjart then adds another and entirely new dance – which,
it is announced from the stage, is a Parisian one. That’s
the cue for Madame Horner, in a French tricolour dress
this time, to serenade us with a Gallic popular song while
a couple of Apache dancers give a show. After this, nothing
if not versatile, she plays a piece in the baroque style
while Marius Petipa/Méphisto dances solo. We then hear
Bim singing (off-key!) for a few bars before we are back
in the familiar territory of the Waltz of the Flowers.
This is danced by Bim and his mother, the drag queens/angels,
chorus girls/fairies, a hitherto unseen woman in a tuxedo,
the men of the corps de ballet who have changed
by now out of their boy scout uniforms and into dinner
jackets and Marius Petipa/Méphisto. Yvette Horner merrily
plays along ad lib too.
Just to show, though, that cultural
iconoclasm hasn’t won the day entirely, Marius Petipa/Méphisto
then picks up a microphone to announce to the audience
that: The director didn’t want to alter the classical
choreography of the grand pas de deux in the “Nutcracker”.
So tonight it’ll be danced in the original version by Marius
Petipa. Quite why Béjart retained that one element
of tradition when the rest of the production had thrown
every other familiar element of Nutcracker out of
the window remains something of a mystery – unless, of
course, the sheer wilfulness of doing so was yet another
completely deliberately surreal touch!
You will know by now, I suspect,
whether this is a production for you. I actually rather
enjoyed it for its sheer weirdness. On the other hand,
I suspect that I won’t, in spite of some impressive dancing
from the company, be watching it again in a hurry. My own
copy of the DVD came with no accompanying booklet, leaving
the viewer to work out for himself what’s going on; at
least the members of the Châtelet audience could have bought
programmes. In its previous DVD incarnation, on the TDK
label in 2003, the production came with both an accompanying
booklet and, even more usefully, a 23 minutes documentary
which helped explain at least a few of the oddities. It’s
a great shame that something similar isn’t to be found
on EMI’s version for I’d hope that, if it were, we might
even get an idea of what exactly it is that those bearded
drag queens are doing in our beloved Nutcracker.
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