May 25 & 26, 2024
Gaillard Center
Charleston, SC – USA
Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra, Timothy Myers, conductor; Benjamin Millepied, choreographer.
Sergey PROKOFIEV: Romeo and Juliet Suite (1936/2018)*
*selected and choreographed by Benjamin Millepied
May 24, 27, 29 & June 1, 2024
Sottile Theatre, College of Charleston
Charleston, SC – USA
Timothy Myers, conductor; Featured singers: Leroy Davis (Blue Dove/Dr. Undertow), Taylor-Alexis Dupont (Hannah), Teryn Kuzma (H’ala), Sharmay Musacchio (Swift), Sarah Shafer (Sophia), Karim Sulayman (Crow).
Layale CHAKER and Lisa SCHLESINGER: Ruinous Gods (2021)
Christopher Hill | 29 MAY 2024
Some cities are fun to walk, none more so than Charleston, South Carolina. Once the richest city in the US, its affluent residents built upon the city’s reclaimed landfill block upon block of charming and stately houses. And while, during the Civil War, Union shelling from the water and east reduced Charleston’s downtown to rubble, Union armies from the south and west chose not to burn down its neighborhoods. These stand today as a unique testament to the charm and gentility of life possible in the thriving antebellum economy.
Since 1977, the Spoleto Festival USA has been one of Charleston’s signature events. Indeed, over the years, it has become an event of more than local significance, and during the festival, hotels have filled to capacity. The city has built upon the Spoleto Festival USA by hosting its own Piccolo Spoleto Festival in parallel, a highlight of which is the large and highly popular outdoor art exhibit held in Marion Square. Mix in Charleston’s thriving downtown culture and a long list of fine food establishments (including Hyman’s Seafood, rated the #2 seafood restaurant in the world), and you get a very visitable city.
The Gaillard Center, Charleston, SC. (gaillardcenter.org)
There’s a lot of fun featured in Spoleto’s Charleston line-up this year: performances by international circus company Casus Creations, by “internationally celebrated” drag performer Sasha Velour, by “international icon” Trombone Shorty, by “internationally renowned” cabaret star Amber Martin with John Cameron Mitchell, and much much more. Looming among these like moralists at a love-in are a few productions with a dour dark side: Dark Noon, a “searing” South African theater piece about the United States, unmasking our nation’s history of “violence, genocide, and oppression” (Charleston’s history, too, of course); Shakespeare’s tragedy of adolescent lovers run afoul of their rich and powerful families, Romeo and Juliet, set to music by Prokofiev; and Ruinous Gods, a new opera about uppgivenhetssyndrom, suitably subtitled “Suites for Sleeping Children.”
Your reviewer, who admires courage, was in Charleston to see and hear the last two. Romeo and Juliet Suite was danced/screened at Gaillard Center, Charleston’s largest performing arts venue, which opened in 1968. Ruinous Gods was staged at the older Sottile Theatre, which first welcomed audiences in 1927, the year moving pictures got sound.
L.A. Dance Project: Romeo and Juliet
Sergey Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and Juliet was composed in the spring and summer of 1935, during the early years of his return to the Soviet Union, a time when he was eager to write pieces like Peter and the Wolf and Lt. Kijé Suite, pieces that could be enjoyed immediately by ordinary workers. He had reason in 1935 to expect that his new ballet would be produced in St. Petersburg during the next concert season, but this hope was dashed when Soviet bureaucrats, under ideological pressure, pronounced the work “undanceable.” In response, Prokofiev, in 1936, extracted two seven-movement orchestral suites from the two-and-one-half-hour ballet, each lasting about 30 minutes. His hope was to let the music from his seventh ballet find its audience, show how danceable it really is, and thereby stimulate productions of his full ballet. In 1937, he also extracted a ten-movement suite for piano from the ballet. And in 1946 he extracted a third, orchestral six-movement suite lasting about 20 minutes. By then the ballet itself had been produced to great acclaim and awarded the Stalin Prize.
Fast forward to the twenty-first century. Benjamin Millepied danced with the New York City Ballet for the last nine seasons as their principal dancer (1995–2011). In 2010, he came to even wider notice when he choreographed Natalie Portman’s part in the movie Black Swan—and later married her. In 2011, Millepied founded L.A. Dance Project, and in 2018, he assembled and choreographed an abridged version of Romeo and Juliet for them. Spoleto’s advertising refers to this production as Romeo and Juliet Suite, but this is incorrect. What is being presented at Spoleto USA is, in fact, the original ballet, abridged to reduce its original 2 1/2-hour length by about an hour.
Benjamin Millepied in 2015 (US Embassy, France; public domain)
Given Millepied’s background, it’s understandable that his production also incorporates cinema. Cinema enriches the dance experience, he says, because it “allows that kind of magic where violence can look more real and passion can seem more real.”
The Gaillard Center was packed on Sunday evening. Awaiting the beginning of the ballet and lacking any program to peruse (the Festival was unable to provide one), the audience could gaze at a nearly bare stage above which a large movie screen was suspended. As the first seductive strains of Prokofiev’s score met their ears, two dancers ventured onto the bare stage, then off it into camera/screen space to reveal two key things about this production.
The first reveal: the suspended screen would be used entirely for real-time visuals, sometimes mimicking the top-down shots Busby Berkeley used in film in the 1930s and June Taylor used on TV in the 1950s, sometimes presenting whole scenes staged in the wings, entirely outside the auditorium proper, and even entirely outside the theater building.
The second reveal: Romeo and Juliet would not be Shakespeare’s adolescents but two muscular, thirty-something males. Romeo, danced by David Adrian Freeland, Jr., would be the black, clean-shaven one. Juliet, danced by Mario Gonzalez, would be the white one with a full beard. Both dancers were superb in their solos and pas de deux, and in the long scenes where the two lay together, sensually caressing each other in close-up camera shots, there seemed little need to suspend disbelief. In this production, ponytailed Mercutio and clean-cut Tybalt—danced by Shu Kinouchi and Lorrin Brubaker, respectively—were the sole secondary characters featured. They, too, danced splendidly in their solo and ensemble scenes, and both glowered at each other convincingly throughout the production.
If the choice of bearded Juliet reminded your reviewer a bit of Brecht and Weill’s 1933 ballet Die sieben Todsünden, the portrayal of Friar Laurence by three nubile damsels did so even more strongly. Other influences (and possible influences) in Millepied’s choreography include Classical ballets, gestures associated specifically with Russian twentieth-century choreographers, the rich vocabulary of modern dance, and the aforementioned June Taylor. No doubt other homages passed by your reviewer unnoticed. Most importantly, the various components all blended well, as did the truly judicious, well-conceived use of cinema. The audience responded to all this with a genuinely fervent and sustained standing ovation, all the more moving for being motivated neither by hoped-for encores nor by a stampede out of some collective closet. Millepied and his ensemble had created a truly engaging, even moving experience, transcending any possible reactionary prejudice.
Timothy Myers (timothymyers.com)
Although L.A. Dance Project has previously performed this version of the Romeo and Juliet ballet in several cities over the years, the four Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra performances under Timothy Myers are claimed to have been the first ever with live orchestral accompaniment. Myers paced the more dramatic music briskly compared to many European performances of the score, and the music may have lost a measure of menace thereby. But your reviewer quite liked Myers’s way with score, and to hear the Festival Orchestra’s finish, you might think these (mostly) young musicians had been playing together for years instead of days.
After the performances/screenings at Spoleto Festival USA, Millepied and L.A. Dance Project are immediately taking their production to Sydney, Australia. It should fare well there.
Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra and Chorus
Lisa Schlesinger is a playwright who works in Iowa and takes particular interest in abused populations. For the last dozen years or so she has been working on her Iphigenia Project, a multi-year, multi-disciplinary series of theater pieces, many adapted from Euripides’ Iphigenia plays and all focused on the refugee diaspora.
Ruinous Gods belongs to this cycle, though it is not adapted from Euripedes but rather is (loosely) based on the story of Demeter and Persephone. Key elements of the Demeter/Persephone story echoed in Ruinous Gods include a strong mother/daughter relationship, a descent into hell, and abusive treatment of girls by patriarchal figures. If you happen to know this Demeter/Persephone story, you can appreciate the way its elements are echoed in some of the scenes and spoken lines of the theater piece, but this knowledge is by no means necessary to appreciate its story, the plot of which the author describes as follows:
Previous entries in Ms. Schlesinger’s Iphigenia Project have used film, music, theater, and digital arts; Ruinous Gods, billed by Spoleto Festival USA as an opera, limits itself to music and dance (of the type found in French Baroque opéra-ballets), though of course set design, lighting, and so on are important elements of the production, as with any other theater piece. As a aside it may be worth noting that Ruinous Gods is not the first attempt to adapt this Greek myth to modern sensibilities. Its premier follows exactly ninety years after that of another multimedia theater piece, Persephone, written by André Gide, with music by Igor Stravinsky.
The Monday matinee of Ruinous Gods, given at the Sottile Theatre at College of Charleston, was packed. Once again the Festival management did not feel the need to produce a program that would prepare the audience for the work they had come to see. Here follows a brief account of what they saw.
The first, say, three-fifths of the work’s duration are shaped by slow-moving meditative, ritualistic, and magical scenes, typically presented through a collaboration between a 12-person chorus and a soloist character. Sometimes this character is human, sometimes it is a magical animal or a god, but always it is a victim of circumstance—that is, a character mired in the sort of desperate straits so awful that none of us has the power to overcome them individually. An example would be a child in Tokyo during the 1945 US napalm fire-bombing when 100,000 mothers, fathers, and children burned to death in one night. That sort of victim.
What makes this theater piece about victims ritualistic is the author’s focus on repetitive phrases and short, conceptually direct, declarative sentences; what makes this ritual piece theatrical is the author’s success in conveying the existential angst of its character-victims. During the first three-fifths of the production their experiential voices come through loud and clear.
At this point, after six somber albeit affecting stories, the audience is given a dramatic break in the form of a contrasting, brightly lit dance scene. In this ostensibly humorous scene, the characters, formerly seen as victims, make fun of Jeff Bezos for wanting to enlarge his perspective on the planet by seeing Earth from orbit. In an effort, I suppose, to increase the effectiveness of this satire, the scene pretends that Jeff Bezos wants to live on the moon in order to escape the consequences of Western culture on Earth. Your reviewer cannot help but feel that this criticism seems to lack any meaningful awareness of the enormous difference between the cost of resources for maintaining an aggressive US military presence in scores of nations (up until this point, the script’s chief ethical/political complaint) and the cost of going to the moon—much less of going just once into Earth orbit.
In any event, from this scene onward, this formerly existential theater piece quickly becomes a diatribe against the audience attending to it. According to the playwright, the horrors experienced by the victims her characters represent could not occur without the indifference of the very people who are paying to see this theater piece. (Your reviewer agrees that indifference is detrimental to effective political discourse.) People such as her audience members, the playwright avers, actually eat wearing suits and ties while victims in the world are suffering. (Your reviewer has no doubt Ms. Schlesinger is correct, though it must be said that audience suits and ties were in short supply during the particular matinee your reviewer attended. In fact, suits and ties were far outnumbered by attractive dresses, including the one the playwright herself wore on stage as she took her bows.)
Curtain call for “Ruinous Gods,” Spoleto Festival USA. (credit: Christopher Hill)
At least one audience member took umbrage at the author’s criticism or at its tone and exited the theater during the long sermon. At the end of the theater piece two other audience members booed loudly as the final scene faded out. The rest of the audience took it all in stride and chose to applaud the performers warmly during their curtain calls. After all, it wasn’t like Lindsay Graham had been burned in effigy on stage, though there were moments when this seemed a possibility.
Layale Chaker (credit: Anna Rakhvalova)
A few words about the music. Layale Chaker is a Lebanese violinist and composer who founded Sarafand, a group that plays semi-improvisatory music in Arabic modes at venues such as European jazz festivals. In 2019 Sarafand released the album “Inner Rhyme,” pieces from which can be heard on YouTube. Two years later, Ms. Chaker wrote the initial version of Ruinous Gods for an ensemble rather like Sarafand with a handful of added strings. A quick glance at the Spoleto Festival USA pit on Monday showed that the opera’s instrumental group has since expanded to around 29 players.
The music heard Monday was well scored, well paced, and sensitively attuned to Ms. Schlesinger’s text. Arabic maqam could be heard frequently behind the numbers’ melodies and harmonies, but the influence of European 20th- and 21st-century classical scores was equally present, with repeated use of tone clusters, dramatic percussive gestures, and so on. If there was a weakness in the score, it concerned upper soprano registers, which are not fully married, musically, to registers of lower tessitura, so that sopranos seem to sing with two different and unrelated voices. It might also be said that while the strings are handled expertly, the woodwinds could be given more color. Not post-Rimsky color; Mozart color would be quite enough. These reservations aside, based on the quality of this score, your reviewer believes Ms. Chaker could become a real presence among contemporary composers of classical music. ■
EXTERNAL LINKS:
- Spoleto Festival USA: hspoletousa.org
- L.A. Dance Project: https://ladanceproject.org/
- Timothy Myers: timothymyers.com
- Layle Chaker: layalechaker.com
Read more by Christopher Hill.
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