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Tamara
Rojo's first season at
the helm of SF Ballet,
last year, was
forward-looking and
quite bold, culminating
in the commission of
Azure Barton's Mere Mortals, a full-length ballet about AI and Pandora's box–a magnet for young audiences (reviewed in these pages). Surprisingly, Rojo's second season returns to something like a ballet museum. Starting with Manon from 1974, we will plunge backwards to 19th century Raymonda and a reprisal of last season's Marguerite and Armand from 1965—all imports from her London years as a celebrated ballerina and ballet director.
Manon, by British choreographer Kenneth MacMillan, is a story
ballet based on the 1734 novel by Abbé Prévost. It's the story of
Manon Lescaut, a low-class "material girl" who falls in love with
the Chevalier des Grieux, a penniless young nobleman, and elopes
with him, but prefers the luxury life procured by rich older men.
While Manon thrives as a courtesan, Des Grieux continues to pine
for her and turns to a life of crime to compete with the men who
pay for her extravagances. When she falls out of favor and gets
deported as a prostitute, he follows her to the colonies and to her
death in the swamps of Louisiana.
The tale of a young man's obsession with a femme fatale has been
a cherished trope of patriarchal fantasies. Manon Lescaut inspired several operas (by Massenet, Puccini, et al), ballets,
theater plays, numerous movie adaptation (Catherine Deneuve)
and even a recent Japanese pop song. MacMillan made it a major
project at the Royal Ballet just as feminists stormed the
barricades in the Western world, but he didn't put much effort
into defending his heroine against the usual condemnation of her
character.
The ballet doesn't use Massenet's opera music but a collage of
other orchestral pieces by the composer (played by the SF Ballet
Orchestra under Martin West). Prévost's convoluted novel is
streamlined to just four characters, Manon, her immoral brother
Lascaut, the student Des Grieux and the rich patron, Monsieur de
G.M, to whom Lascaut pimps his sister. Around this simplified
cast a whole crowd of minor characters gets into action,
dominated by "harlots, prostitutes and actresses" (program notes)
who keep twirling and madly swirling their skirts around. The
dresses are sumptuous but due to the color scheme of autumn
browns with a backdrop of more brown, this is less jolly than it
sounds.
MacMillan is celebrated as the psychological choreographer in an
era of abstract styles of ballet (Balanchine). He did an outstanding
version of Romeo and Juliet and shocked the ballet world with The Invitation, the story of a young girl's rape. In Manon, one
would expect a subtle character study of ambiguities: Des Grieux's
blind, slavish love for a woman who is driven by her lust for more.
Massenet's opera Manon Lescaut comes closest to evoking these
ambiguities and torments. Although MacMillan wrote exquisite
steps for his protagonists, their characters are not given much
depth. So it's up to the dancers to fill the outlines with their
artistry.
Manon is danced by recent Principal Jasmine Jimison as
an innocent girl (even though she makes off with the purse of an
aged admirer when she elopes wit Des Grieux). Jimison casts a
charming figure with her earnest, lovely smile and lithe, graceful
movements. Her shy delight in Des Grieux's courtship is touching,
and so is her surprise when she slips into the first luscious silk
-and-fur gown, presented by her pimping brother (Soloist Cavan
Conley in excellent form) and her aristocratic "protector,"
Monsieur de G.M. (Myles Thatcher). It is convincing that she is
seduced in the brilliantly conceived trio that follows: the two men
groom her for a life of luxury and sex -- with Myles Thatcher
bringing the house down for a moment with the foot fetishism of
the perverse nobleman.
Jimison's Manon is a very narrow portrait, however, that leaves
out much of what would make Manon a femme fatale: her innate
spunk and naughtiness, her greedy sensual desires, and, most of
all, her sex appeal. (You have to turn to YouTube to Argentinian
ballerina Marianela Nuñez at the Royal Ballet to see how it can be
done.) The innocence of a new girl in town goes only so far. Once
she has been initiated, one expects a development, but Jimison
has the same shy, self-pleased smile in Act II, when she is handed
from one courtier to the next in a scandalous daisy-chain of
manipulations of her body.
Principal Max Cauthorn is Des Grieux. Cauthorn is a fine
technician. His "monologue" when he first meets Manon does
justice to MacMillan's exquisite movement language: a young
narcissist show-cases his noble and sensitive qualities for the
audience of a girl who sits and smiles… In the following bedroom
scene, he is a lovely partner for Jimison, shows playful
exuberance but I didn't feel passion in his performance. It's true,
MacMillan has Des Grieux repeat the same lyrical, self-involved
movements each time he faces Manon, but what is perhaps meant
as his "arrested development" should grow in intensity. Cauthorn
pines and tries to win back Manon with a bland, impasse face that
would be perfect for Balanchine
In Act II, during the over-long frolics at the bordello-party given by Monsieur de G.M., Cauthorn stands around, seemingly bored.
When Manon finally appears he tries to interfere and implore her
with timid awkwardness instead of ardor. She rejects him coldly
because he still has no money to spend… unless he takes on
Monsieur de G.M. at the card table and gets rich without delay.
She provides the fake cards from her brother and MacMillan lets
him cheat with the clumsiness of a ten year-old. He gets caught
and draws his epee, fights and wounds Monsieur de G.M. Is it the
passion that finally erupts in his movements? Manon elopes with
him again, only to be speedily arrested as a prostitute while her
hustler brother gets killed.
In the final act, a group of prostitutes arrives in New Orleans,
looking decrepit, holding their heads as if struck with brain fever.
Manon seems broken and in tatters when she finally arrives with
Des Grieux. He clings to her but is kicked aside by the
Gaoler–tall, imposing corps member Nathaniel Remez who excels
in the role. Des Grieux kills him but not before the almost life-less
Manon is humiliates and raped. Now ensues the death scene in
the swamps of Louisiana with fog on the stage floor. Manon, now
in a tattered mini skirt (?), is at the end of her road.
In the concluding pas de deux , both are technically admirable
although the prevailing mood resembles Manon's pas de deux
with the Gaoler too much for comfort. Manon is like a corpse that
Des Grieux lifts and drags around as if to force the last drop of life
out of her. These final acrobatics seem disturbing rather than
devastatingly romantic. It made me wonder if MacMillan really
wanted to expose the naked truth of the tale: the femme fatale is
not the only one to blame. Manon and Des Grieux share the same
narcissistic neediness, the same drive to self-destruction.
Photos: Lindsey Rallo © San Francisco Ballet
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