The audience welcomed the Bejart Ballet Lausanne back to Taipei on Thursday night with whoops — not “bravos” but real whooping and repeated demands for curtain calls. It was an auspicious ending to an evening that had started off more with a whimper than a bang.
The first of the three ballets on the program, L'Oiseau de Feu, company founder and choreographer Maurice Bejart's take on the traditional Russian folktale The Firebird, turned out to be the weakest, despite the occasional dramatic flare.
In Bejart's retelling, there is no prince who rescues an imprisoned princess with the help of the magical firebird, but a group of partisans or revolutionaries whose leader sacrifices himself for the good of the group.
The dance begins with nine dancers dressed in blue-grey pants and jackets, linked together so that they look like extras from 1984 or a factory in the Soviet gulag. They move as a group, looking fierce and determined, before dropping to the floor, writhing and crawling. A red circle of light appears and Domenico Levre rips off his proletarian garb to reveal himself as the red-clad “firebird.”
The others alternately grovel and worship before Levre and warm their hands over him before he sacrifices himself — through a dramatic solo — and the black backdrop is dramatically rent by a red “V” to reveal a second red-unitard-clad man, a phoenix. The phoenix revitalizes the flagging partisans and the piece ends with the phoenix bearing the fallen leader away on his back, flying the group toward freedom, or at least better clothes.
Technically, Levre was good as the leader, flexing his muscles, and executing Bejart's twisting balances, but his fire appeared rather lukewarm. Thierry Deballe as the phoenix had a bit more heat, but overall the ballet was showing its age — it was created in 1970.
Next up was Elton Berg, featuring Stephane Bourhis, Julien Favreau and the incredibly flexible Karline Marion. Bourhis and Favreau wore what looked like small black bathing suits while Marion began in a very-chunky looking short purple unitard, which only served to emphasize the length — and articulate flexibility — of her legs and arms.
They performed the same choreography, first to Alban Berg's Altenberg Lieder op. 4 and then to Elton John's Nikita, which gives one the chance to see what they missed the first time around. I found myself liking the Elton John segment more, perhaps because of the familiarity of the music, but also because the trio seemed a bit more animated.
Marion, Bourhis and Favreau showed just how much a dancer contributes to a choreographer's work, breathing life into an otherwise pedestrian number.
Elton-Berg used to be performed with a fourth dancer as part of the set decoration, standing in the background posing. Obviously nothing has been lost by cutting the dance down to a trio.
Also cut down to traveling size was the final work on the program, L'Amour, la Danse. This “Best of Bejart” anthology premiered last year as a two-hour “greatest hits” retrospective of Bejart's 50-plus years as a choreographer, with excerpts from 12 very diverse works. What Thursday night's audience saw was a one-hour collection from eight ballets.
It began with the 20 dancers on stage, most of them sitting on the floor looking like they were doing their stretches before a class, with the exception of the white-clad Favreau in front, stage left and Kateyrina Shalkina in back, stage right, as Romeo and Juliet. The pair then served as the link between the rest of the segments.
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