sarma

I can understand why Bela Bartok in 1918 might have found Menyhert Langyel's libretto for The Miraculous Mandarin provocative enough to spin some really splendid music around. I cannot understand why so many choreographers - including now the young Swede, Ulf Gadd - have been drawn to it. The scenario is all but unplayable, but perhaps some copyright law demands that music and libretto not be separated. I cannot quite understand why Ballet Theatre chose to mount Gadd's version, except that it is a good vehicle for a strong male actor-dancer like Erik Bruhn, who danced in it on opening night.

Here is the story: three thieves employ a prostitute to decoy the men that they plan to rob. Two prospective victims - a drunken sailor and a young boy - escape. Enter the Mandarin. According to the program, the girl arouses his "savage nature," and no matter how the three gangsters beat him up, choke, and stab him, he refuses to die until she crawls into his arms. According to the press release, she falls in love with the Mandarin at the last moment and is forgiven for her life of sin. Strong stuff.

According to the ballet, however ... well, I just don't know. Everything is a little illogical. Some actions take disproportionately long; others are accomplished in the wink of an eye. The three robbers are far too randy to make efficient pimps; they'd wear the girl out before she could get started. The drunken sailor stays drunk for about eight bars, then bangs the girl competently and escapes the three toughs with absolutely no trouble. The program says that they chase him away because he has no money, but I don't think this happened either. They just make ineffectual grabs at him as he whisks into the wings and then climb sulkily back up their ladder. (I should mention that the ballet set by Hermann Sichter is a splendidly forbidding grid affair that looks a little like a boom-town skyscraper.) The young boy is too tender and sweet to take quick advantage of the girl, but after the thugs let him escape too, they unfairly beat her up. Another example of what inefficient pimps they are. However she makes another attempt. The Mandarin is mysterious from the start; he just stands there in profile while she does a long tired solo around him. Once he opens his jacket at her, showing her a handsome chest and an even more handsome blue sequined lining. In this ballet, he doesn't get much chance to show how savage his nature is, because the three thieves for once pull themselves together and attack-even though this one obviously knows a bit of karate. Well, they really maul him, carry on in a most unpleasant manner. And each time they leave him for dead, he slowly rises and heads for the girl. The most persistent erection in stage history. After a while, this stops being ghoulish and starts being funny. Anyway, naked and cuddled up to the girl, he finally dies. So does she, I think.

This production aims at being modern. The costumes are rather German expressionist, with bald head-pieces for the thieves and the Mandarin. And at the end, a host of black-robed figures holding white masks assembles to stare at the collapsing prostitute. The style of the dancing is flashy, muscular "modern ballet" with explicit sex stuff. The cast I saw consisted of Royes Fernandez as the Mandarin, Diana Weber as the girl, David Coil as the Sailor, Warren Conover as the Young Boy, and Alexander Filipov, Ian Horvath, and Gaudio Vacacio as the Three Gangsters. They all did their best, but the work is not really choreographed to show you these characters; instead it seems as if Gadd wanted to make sure that you would know that they were dancers. The poor, weary, beat-up whore is never too tired to jump up and whip off another pirouette. How, given this approach, can Diana Weber convince you that she is anything but a superbly lithe young athlete who could probably knock out all three of her bosses with one well-aimed kick? And these three, by the way, do a lot of their threatening and mugging in controlled unison passages. Interesting that in 1760 Noverre wrote that in a scene d'action "symmetrical and formal figures cannot be employed without transgressing truth and shocking probability, without enfeebling the action and chilling the interest. There, I say, is a scene which should offer a ravishing disorder.

Ballets like The Miraculous Mandarin obviously bring out the worst in me.

Some of the elements I was sniping at in this ballet are discussed more fully in an article titled The Hybrid: Very Showy, Will Root in Any Soil. However, in that article too, I never came right out with the problem, which I now think has to do with a dance technique becoming an aesthetic in itself, instead of simply a means to express something else.