Word: ballets
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Michel Fokine's "Les Sylphides," one of two works performed last weekend by the Boston Ballet, is itself a loving tribute to a style and spirit already of the past when Fokine created his choreography in 1908. He distilled the essence of Romantic ballet--a series of dreamy reveries suffused with moonlight and white-clad sylphs floating to the music of Chopin. We might be witnessing the animation of an 1840s watercolor, so fluent is Fokine in his chosen language...
...Boston Ballet offered its own tribute to Romanticism in the authentic perfection of slight gestures: the demurely downcast eyes, the drooping curve of the arms, a dancer's hand to her cheek like a sprig of flowers. The four soloists on opening night (Thursday) were a study in the company's uneven strength. David Brown floundered, as though classical technique were a suit of clothes three sizes too big, while Anamarie Sarazin wandered dutifully through a colorless waltz. But dainty Stephanie Moy, who has improved noticeably over the past couple of years, darted about deft as a hummingbird. And Elaine...
...this choreography is as delicate as lacework, it is every bit as intricate. Fokine uses the ensemble dancers--the corps de ballet--with deft economy of rich imagination. At different times they function both as a choral commentary on the soloists, mirroring the angle of a ballerina's body, and as architecture, a fluid linkage of arches and trelliswork. The Boston Ballet's corps rose to the occasion, offering Fokine's masterpiece with devotion and care...
...ballet is basically a good-will-be-rewarded morality tale, and the characters are conceived on this level. There are the ugly stepsisters (David Drummond and Larry Robertson), cavorting with bovine vulgarity, the shrewish stepmother (Elaine Bauer), and Cinderella herself (Laura Young), a painfully angelic victim. We can't be expected to take these people seriously, and Cunningham doesn't either. Large chunks of the ballet are given over to slapstick--the stepsisters squabble tug-of-war fashion over a shawl, or trip over each other to greet the Prince (Woytek Lowski). The liveliest moments are high comedy having nothing...
Worse, the actual dancing is largely incidental to both story and spectacle. Like the ballet interludes in a 19th-century opera, dance merely embroiders diverting decorations. Dancers dance only when one would expect the characters to do so--Cinderella daydreaming with her broomstick, or the guests waltzing at the royal ball--and the content of the movement is a trite and anonymous classical pattern. Cunningham's choreographic vocabulary is limited, ignoring both the music (a beguiling Prokofiev score) and any place of space outside the lateral extension of center stage...