Late Friday night Haglund finally got the official authorization to temporarily retrofit the Gisellemobile for a quick trip to Swan Lake. Thank goodness CVS is open 24 hours so we could hop on the H.H. company bicycle and spin down there to pick up some Scotch retrofitting tools. It took almost all night to finish, but we got on the road before dawn and pulled into La Colombe d’Or Hotel in Houston with an hour to play with before curtain time.
A word about La Colombe d’Or Hotel in Houston. What a gem. It was built in 1923 as a mansion for Humble Oil founder Walter W. Fondren. Today the Fondren Foundation is a generous supporter of Houston Ballet. In the 1980s, Houston businessman/art collector Steve Zimmerman bought the historic Fondren House with the idea of turning it into something like the original La Colombe d'Or in Saint-Paul de Vence, France. Today, the hotel has only five one-bedroom suites with a few additional rooms in an adjacent building. There’s a beautiful formal restaurant on the main floor and a full art gallery on the third floor. Within the guest rooms, hallways, and lobby, more than 300 original works of art (paintings, drawings, sculptures) are displayed for guests’ enjoyment. Everything is for sale. Zimmerman, who has another art gallery downtown as well, outfitted each room with antique furniture and restored many of the original architectural details. Saturday night Haglund started out booked in the Renoir guest room but subsequently moved to the Monet guest room because of a door issue. But you get the picture: Renoir room, Monet room, etc. La Colombe d’Or Hotel is not a place for someone looking for a lot of room service, a nail salon or even an elevator. But if you want to sleep amid an array of art and antiques, this is a great place to stay. Unfortunately, it’s a non-walkable distance to the Jones Center for the Performing Arts where Houston Ballet is presenting Swan Lake (generally a 15 minute/$20 cab ride once you’ve waited a long time for that cab to arrive), but Haglund will make La Colombe d’Or Hotel his first choice whenever visiting Houston. The art gallery hotel and the transportation issue will come up again later on in this review.
As regular readers know, Haglund enjoys traveling to Houston to check out the professional progress of two of his favorite dancers, Yuriko Kajiya and Jared Matthews, whose performance and growth opportunities at ABT were stalled for years during Kevin McKenzie’s infamous Star Strategy period. They were among a class of immensely talented dancers who were destined to be eternal flagship soloists, a dead-end position that entailed backing up the foreign guest artists who McKenzie imported. In a move that jolted ABT’s management to its senses and further inflamed balletomanes who were already mighty angry with McKenzie and his Star Strategy, Yuriko and Jared decamped to Houston Ballet toward the end of 2014 where they immediately began to thrive and were soon appointed as principal dancers.
A few months ago Yuriko danced her first Odette/Odile in Minneapolis; Saturday evening was her second performance of the role. For Jared – the only Houston Ballet principal to have been born and raised in Houston – Sunday was his role debut in front of his hometown crowd. For both, these opportunities have come late in the career. Principal roles like those in Swan Lake take time to develop and mature. There’s a layering of detail and nuance that is built over years of performing them with different partners. But now is better than the never at ABT. And as we saw over the weekend, both artists have made up for lost time and lost opportunities. They are both outstanding performers.
This particular Swan Lake, choreographed by Stanton Welch after Petipa and Ivanov, sketches in details intended to highlight the psychological complexities of the story. Both Odette and Odile are portrayed in two forms: as Swans in tutus and as young women clothed in either white or black long dresses with empire waistlines. In Odile’s case, a massive veil of black lace covers her head and shoulders.
The costume and scenic designs by Kristian Fredrikson and especially the women’s long, flowing Pre-Raphaelite fashioned hair were inspired by John William Waterhouse's 1888 painting "The Lady of Shalott” who was inspired by Tennyson’s poem of the same title. In the poem, a woman is imprisoned under threat of a curse to continually weave on her loom without ever being allowed to look directly at the world through the window. She must, instead, look at the world as reflected in her mirror. Through the mirror she sees a handsome prince outside her window and cannot resist turning around to look at him which then sets the curse in motion. She frantically escapes the tower where she was imprisoned, climbs in a boat and rows off in search of her prince. Sadly, she dies (her penalty under the curse) and the prince ultimately finds her dead, but still beautiful, in the boat.
Tennyson wrote his poem more than fifty years before Petipa and Ivanov created Swan Lake. Waterhouse’s famous Lady was painted only seven years before the Petipa/Ivanov Swan Lake premiered. Were Tennyson's or Waterhouse’s art possibly an inspiration for Ivanov and Petipa? Stanton Welch has us thinking about it.
Welch began his Act I with a prelude which showed the young woman Odette venturing into the edge of the forest via boat and then pushing the boat back out into the water. We’re not sure what she’s up to but when she encounters Rothbart and his offer, she clearly does not have this in mind. She says no; he says yes. He wraps his big black cape around her and suddenly, voilà, out bourrees a white swan.
The staging of Act I, Scene II was comprised of the royal hunt and the queen’s mandate that the prince choose a wife. The choreography emphasized the grand allegro skills of the talented men in the corps de ballet and soloist ranks. If there was a lot of tombe pas de bourree left and right, on balance, it was all high energy and cleanly danced. On Sunday, unfortunately, one of the Prince’s Friends, a soloist featured in the front of the male ensemble, encountered some trouble in a lengthy turning combination that fell apart like a house of cards. Only hours before in the Saturday evening performance, the same dancer had performed the sequence flawlessly. On Sunday, he returned to the stage a few minutes later and danced as if nothing had happened. Not easy to do, no matter what level one is in a company.
Act I, Scene III which was the first White Act had many traditional traits but dispensed with most mime and made some odd changes such as inserting casual finger pirouettes during points of high dramatic emotion in the music. Before that, Siegfried had a lovely solo while Odette in human form secretly watched from behind the trees.
Act II, the ballroom scene, again included many traditional traits with the addition of a confrontation between Odette in human form with Siegfried after she discovers his betrayal.
Act III may have devolved a bit from what Swan Lake should be when an animated dragon with burning red eyes snarled and then resumed resting with its scaly back becoming the steps up which Odette and Siegfried climb before leaping into the lake.
Upon returning to the hotel after the Saturday evening performance, Haglund was asked, “How was the ballet?” He replied that it was mostly very good but it was kind of like if someone acquired one of the original art pieces on the hotel’s walls and then inserted it in a new picture frame that would look better in the buyer’s home. The buyer then noticed that a little adjustment of the paint color on the canvas was needed to make it all work with the walls and furniture and proceeded to add a few of his own strokes to the painting — which may or may not be a fair characterization of what has been going on in Swan Lake productions for decades.
So let’s get to the dancing.
Yuriko Kajiya and Chun Wai Chan led a stellar performance on Saturday evening. Yuriko’s Odette trembled in distress from head to toe. Her lips quivered. Her limbs fluttered like wings so fragile that they might fracture as easily as Siegfried’s promise to be faithful. Chun Wai Chan’s Siegfried, a prince of dreams with handsome lines from his strong jaw through his eloquent arches, soared in easy jumps with cat-soft landings. At times, his noble demeanor seemed to mask his love for Odette, but there was no hiding his sense of guilt and regret when he realized that he had succumbed to the trickery of Odile and in doing so had shattered the soul of the one he truly loved. Yuriko’s Odile was a bewitching temptress who methodically lured poor Siegfried into her trap with seductive battements, crisp pirouettes, and arabesque balances that stunned him over the head with their strength and stillness. She finished him off with 32 counts of rapid-fire single fouettes and a final laugh in the face that was deliciously evil.
Sunday afternoon’s performance featured Jared Matthews and Victoria Jaiani, a guest from the Joffrey Ballet. Jaiani is originally from Tbilisi and trained at the famous V. Chabukiani Ballet School whose alumni include Nina Ananiashvili, Nikolay Tsiskaridze, Irma Nioradze, and Igor Zelinski. From her first step on stage, Jaiani’s stage authority and dark beauty evoked memories of Ananiashvili. She has huge soulful eyes, an expressive mouth, and strong, clear lines. Her dancing of Odette and Odile included many of the traits strongly identified with the Eastern European tradition including expansiveness through the back and shoulders and the ability to ripple the arms like small waves upon a lake.
Jared’s Siegfried was of calm authority that thinly disguised the prince’s frustration with trying to find the answers to life and love. The strength and accuracy of his partnering allowed Jaiani to dance with maximum freedom. His solo dancing was marked by blisteringly pirouettes that were like a fast flipping coin that went front-back-front-back-front-back as opposed to around in a a circle. At the conclusion of the Black Swan Pas de Deux, he launched a pirouette that spun at a speed that made counting the revolutions impossible. There were at least six, possibly seven revolutions that never slowed down. Rather, they came to a sudden and very dramatic stop when Jared threw a high developpe a la second and forcefully pulled it down ending with his knee to the floor. Given everything that had gone on in the Black Swan PdD in the preceding four minutes, this pirouette of Jared’s sent the crowd into the land of insanity. Actually, the reaction may have even stunned him for a brief second.
We were wondering a little bit why Jared’s arabesques weren’t as we remembered them. Clearly, he was intentionally keeping most of them quite low with the torso strongly erect. His jumps were sizable; tours were neat with plush landings. Now, about that eye makeup… The lower lids rimmed in black often had the unintended effect of making Siegfried appear insane whenever he looked up and around. Siegfried as a psychopath would certainly give the storyline an interesting twist; but let’s leave that to the next generation of stagers who feel compelled to make Swan Lake more “relevant” for themselves and hope that we’re all dead before they do.
As we mentioned at the outset, the transportation situation around the theater is challenging. After Saturday night’s difficulty getting back to the hotel, Haglund realized that if he didn’t leave the Sunday performance at the second intermission, he wouldn’t be able to meet his scheduled transport back to the airport. So as much as it killed Haglund to have to miss Jared’s Siegfried killing himself in the final act by launching himself back first into the lake under the beautiful star-filled sky, it was necessary to leave. Haglund has seen Jared “die” on stage before in other ballets and knows just how dramatic he can be.
Rothbart was performed by Christopher Coomer on Saturday night and Linnar Looris on Sunday. Both were convincing portraits of evil. The Princesses of Spain, Russia, Hungary, and Naples had extended solo opportunities. Both casts were impressive, but Sunday had the luxury casting of Karina Gonzalez (Spain), Jacquelyn Long (Hungary), Melody Mennite (Naples) and the mesmerizing Alyssa Springer (Russia) who is a highly polished demi-soloist.
The Swans, including the four cygnets who are referred to in this production as Pas de Quatre Swans, were all lovely. One got the sense that the entire flock were not just swans, but were captured lives being held against their wills.
All in all, this Swan Lake is a handsome production that can withstand the tinkering with the story. It was very obvious that the Houston Ballet audience loves it and adores this company of dancers. A young girl sitting directly in front of Haglund on Saturday had persuaded her mother to buy her one of Yuriko’s signed pointe shoes. The shoe, by the way, was displayed in a plastic collector’s case and beautifully accented with fabric stuffed inside the vamp and adorned with bows. Quite the souvenir.
Our H.H. Pump Bump Award, a pair of diamond encrusted stilettos in perfect first position from the House of Borgezie, is bestowed upon Jared and Yuriko for their very individual and accomplished portrayals of Siegfried and Odette/Odile.