Ooooooh chéri. There’s good news and not so good.
Martha Clarke’s multi-disciplinary dance-play based on Collette’s novella, Chéri, opened with its first preview performance at Signature Theatre last night. In the story, Chéri’s mother hands her son off to her best friend, the much older courtesan Léa, for extended ‘counseling and finishing’ on the finer physical aspects of being a man. The young son and older courtesan fall in love, are separated years later when mother arranges a marriage for Chéri to a much younger woman, are reunited briefly and unhappily, and then are permanently separated when Chéri commits suicide.
The run is nearly sold out – likely in response to this city’s desperate desire to see Herman Cornejo and Alessandra Ferri on stage. Like Ferri’s character Léa, who struggles with letting go of what she loves, many of us found it difficult to let Ferri go when she retired from ABT in 2007. Only a few dancers have been so loved and so appreciated and so deeply missed upon their departure. She left us wanting more and remembering. What we remember most was her passionate partnership with Julio Bocca, an artistic marriage arranged by Baryshnikov when he was ABT’s director. As it happened, Bocca was the one who discovered, groomed, and steered the young Herman Cornejo toward New York. Last night, the novella’s themes rang clear as Cornejo boldly brought his own brand of youthful passion to Bocca’s greatest onstage lover.
Okay okay, so maybe Haglund’s critical thinking has gone wild again. It happens.
This extraordinary cast includes the very fine actress Amy Irving. Gorgeous scenery by David Zinn depicts a comfortable household in France during the early 20th century with tall French doors, floor to ceiling mirrors, and light French blue walls. The very active bedroom is on the right side of the stage, a dining table and chairs are arranged on the left side of the stage, and the entry foyer is in the center where most of the dancing takes place. A piano stands to the extreme left where Sarah Rothenberg plays it throughout the performance.
Amy Irving is the only character who speaks throughout the play. Last night as Chéri’s mother, Charlotte, she superbly delivered soliloquies that calmly knit and purled the plot strands together. We heard the mother’s perspective in voice, and then like a shadow-knit fabric that changes color when viewed from another direction, we watched the scene evolve through Léa's and Chéri's movement. Some of the most interesting elements of Irving's performance were when she turned and directly addressed the characters of Chéri and Léa, neither of whom spoke a word. Mute, yes, but the exchanges of looks and the body language left no question as to what was being communicated.
Martha Clarke’s production is loaded with potential that is unrealized because of weak choreography, or to be more exact, lack of choreography. In a promotional video, Clarke compared being able to work with Ferri and Cornejo to having the opportunity to play a Stradivarius violin. While that is most certainly true, it is also true that in order to bring out the instrument’s most beautiful sounds, one must be an accomplished classical violinist playing the classical music for which the violin was specifically designed. Perhaps a more understandable analogy would be that Haglund’s golf game would not improve if he played with Tiger Woods' clubs.
So what exactly was the problem with the choreography? Too often, it all seemed like basic stage directions for which the dialog was simply omitted. Unfortunately, this was most evident for Ferri’s dance monologues wherein she moved little beyond the pedestrian movement one would expect if lines were spoken. Throughout the evening, one wondered when she would finally dance. There were so many moments when she could have better conveyed her emotion through dance vocabulary than simply leaning against a wall or walking to a chair. In fact, Ferri was the only one in the cast who didn’t have a featured solo. Amy Irving had several. Herman Cornejo had a powerful blast of choreography and drama during the last five minutes of the play. Even the pianist, Sarah Rothenberg, played a featured solo at the end. But in the case of Ferri, most of what she got to perform were facial expressions – which, let’s be clear, were quite moving and powerful and conveyed her character’s torment. But this was Ferri, and we needed to see her dance.
Much of the choreography consisted of similarly constructed PdDs, not without some interesting and inventive moments, but each one mostly had Cornejo lifting Ferri around and manipulating her. Basic to the PdD, there is a separation of the two dancers, if only a stepping apart, where each one breathes his/her own air. It’s not constant contact and manipulation – although some of today’s popular choreographers such as Christopher Wheeldon might not necessarily agree. Like Wheeldon, though, Clarke seems to have lost touch with or forgotten her dance vocabulary.
Haglund is not unfamiliar with Clarke’s earlier works and recalls that they contained much more actual dance movement than what was on display in Chéri. Even when Rob Besserer wrestled with an attacking (stuffed) white swan in one of her pieces back in the early 1990s, there was more dance vocabulary evident.
The good news is that this can all be fixed and fixed rather quickly. Adding more phrases of actual dance for Ferri’s character, and ideally for Cornejo's, too, will not only cure the production’s deficiencies but will better serve the music coming from the Stradivarius violins. Preview performances are given so that the artistic team can see what works and what doesn't work, and then make the necessary changes. Hopefully, the Chéri team will consider some revisions. Haglund has tickets to see three more performances over the course of the month, and it will be interesting to see how the production evolves.
The H.H. Pump Bump Award, an interesting fusion of lines, curves, and styles, is bestowed upon Herman Cornejo for his powerful I’ve-finally-hit-bottom-and-cannot-go-on-without-her dance monologue that concludes the play. The 60 minute wait was totally worth it.
