|
Every
child in Germany or Denmark grows up with the unexpurgated
fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen. Bloody tales in
which Cinderella's stepsisters cut off their toes and
heels to fit into the dainty slipper; where a horse speaks
while its head is nailed to a gate; and where a little
mermaid gets her tongue cut off in exchange for human legs,
so she can perhaps be loved by a Prince. In Andersen's
very lyrical story it's heartbreaking that the little
Mermaid can't speak to tell the Prince about herself or
her sacrifice, or about having saved him from drowning. What
makes the story so compelling that even Walt Disney had to
retell it in a cleaned-up, sugar-coated version, is this
old-world archetype of a young woman in love. The
child-woman who has no voice, just innocence, beauty, grace,
and an inexhaustible capacity to suffer for love… in
silence. Andersen draws no curtain over her masochism:
every graceful step cuts through her like a knife, the
author reminds us at every turn. Once she fails to win the
Prince's love, she has to kill him if she wants to save
her own life. If she wants to regain her fishtail, she has
to let his blood run over her pretty legs… We all know
how such a story is going to end.
What we don't know is how a
mute art like ballet can render this drama of muted love.
Hamburg Ballet's long-time director and choreographer
John Neumeier has produced an answer in a big blockbuster
production of a ballet, created in 2005 for the Royal Danish
Ballet as an homage to Hans Christian Andersen. Celebrating
the writer's bicentenary, the music for the ballet was
commissioned from modern composer Lera Auerbach. It was
announced as a "Little Mermaid for adults," a
quite unnecessary warning if you read the original tale. All
of Andersen's fairy tales were consciously written for
both children and adults. But there is a difference in
reading a cruel story in a poetic language that veils and
uses inference, and being shown the cruelty in merciless
detail and with even more brutality than the story already
holds.
In Andersen's fairy tale, the
mermaid still retains her magical beauty and gracefulness,
out-dancing every human woman. Neumeier, however, leaves her
with nothing. Her human legs don't work for her; she is
a klutz, a crippled waif who sits in a wheelchair on deck of
the ocean cruiser where her rival cavorts with the Prince
and his merry entourage. The sailors stick her into a
sailor-boy's outfit and make fun of her clumsy attempts
to join in, but this is only the beginning of her
humiliation. It continues at the court and during the
Prince's wedding festivities. For the Prince, she is
only a child-toy, an oddity like some sort of dwarf or court
jester whom he loves to tease and then ignore.
In the course of her calvary à la Neumeier, this Little Mermaid learns
nothing. She never manages to walk and dance, she never becomes a
possible love interest, and she continues to the end to be an abject
beggar for even a glimpse from the callous Prince for whom she has her
deadly obsession. "I don't know of another story in literature,"
Neumeier is quoted as saying, "with such a vision of love." This
relentless pleading and clawing is supposed to be love? Why on earth
would the Prince choose her, a grotesque, sad, broken puppet?
And why on earth did John Neumeier choose to tell this brutal tale in a
ballet that robs its heroine of dance and grace and beauty?
|
