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A Buried Past Springing Into the Light
‘Paquita’ at the National Theater in Munich
Alexei Ratmansky’s restaging of Marius Petipa’s “Paquita,” at the National Theater in Munich.
By ROSLYN SULCAS
DECEMBER 15, 2014
MUNICH — Alexei Ratmansky’s restaging of Marius Petipa’s “Paquita” for the Bayerisches Staatsballett is a labor of love and a homage to the master. “We do not make dances like this now, perhaps,” George Balanchine said of “Paquita” in his “Complete Stories of the Great Ballets,” “but we could make nothing if we had not had dances like these by Petipa to teach us.”
Mr. Ratmansky evidently agrees. Together with Doug Fullington, an expert in Stepanov notation, he has painstakingly pieced together this 1881 Petipa ballet, created for the Mariinsky Ballet of St. Petersburg. The amount of work, love for his craft and detail that Mr. Ratmansky and his team (including the musicologist Marian Smith, the costume and scenery designer Jérôme Kaplan and the lighting designer Vincent Millet) have lavished on this production is heartwarming. The results are fascinating, charming, surprising.
The French-born Petipa (1818-1910) was the great choreographer of the 19th century. The mainstays of the ballet repertoire — “Sleeping Beauty,” “Swan Lake,” “Don Quixote,” “La Bayadère,” “Le Corsaire,” “Giselle” and “Coppélia” — were created or definitively revised by him; what we understand as “classical” ballet is more or less his work. We don’t know much, though, about what is still authentic in the ballets that bear his name. Relatively little of his oeuvre has survived; the existing ballets have been extensively altered over the years.
“Paquita,” which opened on Saturday at the National Theater, was the first work that Petipa staged when he arrived at the Mariinsky in 1847. He used the version he knew, the 1846 Paris Opera Ballet production by the choreographer Joseph Mazilier, to a score by Édouard-Marie-Ernest Delvedez. In 1881, he produced a new version, using additional music by Ludwig Minkus and other composers, including Adam, Barmin, Delibes, Drigo and Pugni. Of the 1881 production, only a short, pure-dance work, comprising a series of divertissements, has been preserved.
That’s the “Paquita” that the ballet world currently knows. Mr. Ratmansky, working from notation recorded in 1902 and 1903, shows us, as best he can, what it was. Startlingly, it turns out that almost the entire work was notated. (There is just one short solo for “Paquita,” in Act II, that is original choreography.) Why has no one reconstructed it before? Perhaps simply because it’s an enormous amount of work.
Of course, the result isn’t exactly what would have been seen at the turn of the century. In a program interview, Mr. Ratmansky notes that the final poses of dances were often omitted and that in solo variations, the positions of the arms are undefined, suggesting that the dancers had some liberty to choose. But he is a keen dance historian who has been collecting photographs and drawings of 19th-century ballets for years, and the choices he makes have the ring of authenticity.
So does the dancing. There is no shying away from mime sequences. Legs do not rise much above hip height, contrary to prevailing balletic fashion, which likes extensions around the ear. (“Unimaginable while you are wearing a tutu,” Mr. Ratmansky said in the interview. “You can’t show your underwear.”) Supported arabesques have a forward-inclined upper body. Curved lines permeate almost all of the dancing. Everything is rounded, pliant, angled. A number of solos end in a bent-legged stance. Small-scale, beaten footwork is extensively deployed; the dynamics of speed and accent keep changing, even when a sequence of steps is repeated.
The movement is thrillingly full of detail. Épaulement, the use of contrasting angles of the head, shoulders and hips, is paramount. The upper body is constantly twisting in opposition to the legs, and the use of the head and eyes is ravishing, as is the attention paid to the hands, which are often inverted so that palms angle upward. The result is to make most 19th-century dance that we see today look as two-dimensional as a photograph.
What seems dated is the story. Set in Napoleonic Spain, the ballet has the Spanish governor (Norbert Graf) plotting with the Gypsy Inigo (Cyril Pierre) to kill the French Lucien d’Hervilly (Tigran Mikayelyan), who is in love with the beautiful Gypsy Paquita (Daria Sukhorukova). Various antics ensue, including a scene in which Paquita thwarts Inigo’s plot to poison and stab Lucien along the slapstick comedic lines of Basilio’s fake death in “Don Quixote.” (The Munich dancers, not natural comedians, could have made more of this.)
The ballet ends with the wedding celebrations that incorporate the “Grand Pas,” the wonderful pas de deux with its geometric lines of echoing movement from the corps de ballet, and six solo variations, some taken from other Petipa productions, including “Le Roi Candaule” and “Coppélia.”
The Munich dancers did a fine job of showing the detail and life of the choreography. The long-limbed Ms. Sukhorukova has gorgeously arched feet, a pliant back and beautifully articulated hands. She is elegant and charming; it’s easy to believe the denouement that reveals her to be of aristocratic birth, thus able to marry Lucien. But she doesn’t dominate the stage, nor snap and crackle as she might in the Spanish-inflected sections. Despite a few awkward moments in the final pas de deux, Mr. Mikayelyan was generally a competent partner and an appropriately dashing Lucien, while Mr. Pierre made a nicely cartoonish villain.
Is “Paquita” a masterpiece? No. But by revealing the original Petipa choreography and mediating it through his own sophistication and knowledge, Mr. Ratmansky has offered ballet a lost portion of its history that contains plenty of ideas for its future.
“Paquita” runs through Jan. 11 at the National Theater in Munich, and then returns April 25, May 16 and 23 and July 4; staatsoper.de/en/staatsballett. There is a live stream on Jan. 11 at staatsoper.de/tv.
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