The Bavarian State Ballet and I are distant lovers. Coming to visit from America quite often, I have seen the prestigious dance company shift its leadership and artistic direction adjacent to astounding performers entering and exiting its doors over the past decade. I am ecstatic to see Munich care about its local dance company, and I am especially happy to see the company achieving such high calibered standards. Its fantastic production elements, impressive virtuosity among the performers, and the elegant ambiance of Munich’s opera house are all of world renowned comparisons.
Nonetheless, I would say my once obsessive love for this company has shifted to become more critical.
This past Monday night performance, December 20th, 2021, of “Der Schneesturm” was a lovely evening, but the ballet itself fell short. Being a fellow choreographer, I found the performance to be inspiring from the viewpoint that I wanted to look at this choreography as a draft and consider what advice I would give it for its next iteration. Constantly, I felt like it needed more finesse, care, and time before it was presented to the stage for the audience. This ballet was premiered prior to the lockdown and I feel it could have been altered and reworked more during the time away from the stage.
The dancers needed more rehearsal time with the musical score by Lorenz Dangel that was an original composition for this ballet. You could see the bone structure of the choreography and how it was most likely intended to communicate with the movement, but the dancers were often behind and playing catch up; almost reacting constantly in surprise than predicting the upcoming correlations. Maybe this was due to the conducting of Gavin Sutherland, although I quite enjoyed his conducting for the evening
The piece begun with the stereotypical family portrait scene seen in many other ballets, paintings, and art in general and sadly was not elaborated on, progressed, or used in any ironic or intentional way besides to portray, for 10 minutes, that these three people are related. We could have done it quicker.
Following this long opening trope, the corps de ballet in the iconic opening ball scene, referential to the ballroom scene in Romeo and Juliet, contained a lot of timing errors between pairs of dancers. Since the choreographer, Andrey Kaydanovskiy, and his choreography clearly place a high value system on unison and togetherness, the corps’ attempt was not successful or not coached properly. This was echoed in other scenes throughout the two acts. Could the music have been a system to aid this togetherness during its creation instead of only providing ambient ambiance?
Coaching the dancers generically throughout the ballet to include nuances of performance qualities, acting skills, emotions, and thoughts generating the ‘why’ as to what their movements in this story mean, seemed uncommunicated, especially to the corps de ballet.
The main female lead character, Marja played by Maria Baranova, was a dazzling performer, but I questioned why her costuming and character needed to be so youthful and her choreography strongly based in pantomiming. In general, I found her choreography lacking depth and only resonating surface level virtuosity and storytelling about-ness. Could we not find a different way to portray expression and emotions besides gestural acts blended with virtuosic complexity?
Overall, I would say that Kardanovskiy has a great knack for movement invention as the dancing and partnering was surprising in its transitions, shifting directions in unexpected ways, and was a sequential combination that I found enticing and very referential to contemporary choreography generated in Europe by groups like Netherlands Dans Theatre. A great example of this (and some of my favorite choreography executed in the evening) was performed by Jonah Cook who played Vladimir. His solo, where he was enlisted in the military preceding his eminent death was a mixture of quickly nuanced movements that filled the entire mainstage as Cook was by far fully in his element coalescing emotional conveyance with technical proficiency. In opposition with this, a final love encounter with Marja (Maria Baranova) and Burmin, played by Jinhao Zhang, as the two embrace in a relationships beginning infatuations and discover that they are each others already married partners, contained a friction between the two that was not desirable and seemed incompatible. There were moments of partnering between the two that seem uneasy, labored, and miscommunicated. Not to mention, that I found Zhang’s suit-jacket costume, with an exuberance of sequence as its exterior, highly unflattering from the ninth row seat I was placed in.
Some great highlights in the ballet was choreography that resembled a conveyor belt of duets in the background during the opening ballroom scene. This moment stole my attention more than the trio in front of it. This could have been developed and given more of a focus. There also was dream sequence where Marja is haunted multiple times by her own thoughts and worries where she steps into her slippers and defies the laws of gravity. It too was over casted by shadows of other performers being the demons of her mind that took away from this exciting moment. Their could have been some play with focus and lighting that highlighted Marja as the main attention.
In the snow storm scene, demonic snow covered figures abstractly tormented and showcased the struggle Vladimir had to endure to get to the church. This was a bit kitschy for me and from a technical standpoint, needed some assessing as the performers covered in head-to-toe white outfits, struggled to enter in and out of the groundwork fluidly and ran very funny above the floor as if they were sliding beneath their feet and their shoes contained no traction with the marley dance floor below them.
The accordion in the musical score was stunning and from an audience aural stand point, we could have used more of these moments of musical simplicity. Overall, the musical score was monotone in timbre, which I think was a strategic way of complimenting the dancing, but really never left its world of heaviness and depression. The overture was my favorite moment in the orchestra’s playing and the composition itself. It expressed the most ebbs and flows in musical phrasing and variety despite it taking the first four measures of the piece for the orchestra to get fully in sync with one another.
Although I have mostly used the first act for examples, the second act was a little better. The corp de ballet’s choreography redirected itself into more individualistic choreography instead of large phrases of unison. The performers excelled here. I wondered if the Bavarian State Ballet is more a company of soloists and not a group of performers capable of being cookie cutter versions of each other in unison phrases. Maybe the company should restructure what work it performs to highlight this natural essence within itself.
The second act had moments that are hard to forget. One was a moment where Osiel Gouneo playing Belkin screams onstage from his overwhelming experience suffering from some form of PTSD from his time in the army. It was a little much and unwarranted by what came before although it was great execution from Gouneo. I also found the moments in Gouneo's choreography, where he stepped off of the make shift center stage and onto the real stage, only to perform astounding pirouettes and other classical ballet staples, kind of humorous. A kind of, 'let me break character to show you how great of a dancer I am and to show you that I can do amazing things'. I appreciated the subtle humor.
I leave you with the ending scene where Marja is with her second love, Burmin, and goes to the snow globe once more to shake its contents and reinitiate the snow storm in her own kind of pandora’s box innocence. I found this ending scene unsatisfying and reminded me of movies or shows ending with a cliffhanger that make you want to watch the next episode except it didn’t leave me wanting more. I hope that Kaydanovskiy isn’t setting himself up for a sequel ballet to this work, but will instead go back and issue another draft of the piece to showcase at a later date.
