2023-10-23 16:30:10
Christian Spuck has had “Madame Bovary” in his intellectual baggage since he was 17 years old, ever since “a certain incident” occurred in his life “where the topic popped up.” The new director and chief choreographer of the Berlin State Ballet won’t be more specific.
But now he has decided to create a full-length “dance piece” from the Flaubert novel as an introduction with exclamation marks, not a story ballet, but not just a circling of the material either. Without Flaubert’s famous dictum, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi”, with the necessary distance and historical distance.
But almost two hours of playing time. With sparkling ball gowns, glamorous cabaret costumes and simple country dresses designed by Emma Ryott in a sophisticated, diffusely colored manner; barefoot, in slippers, in pointe shoes and in chunky boots. In a standard room that can be separated at the back with double doors and is made up of streaky gray walls, three neon tubes, dry grass, light chains, a few pieces of furniture (by Rufus Didwiszus).
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With a multi-layered background music from festive Saint-Saëns piano concerto movements for the cheerful moments in the country, a contemporary piano orchestra work by Thierry Pecou for Emma’s descent into lust, waste and faithlessness, György Ligeti for disturbance, Arvo Pärt for suffering and dying as well as the already in The Sisi cinema variation “Corsage” uses Camille’s “She was” chanson for vain moments of consolation.
This is very complex thought out and brought to the stage. Marina Frank’s unsentimental, cold voice repeatedly reads passages from the novel: “Her existence was cold like an attic whose little window faces north.”
It goes backwards from her lonely, cruel death from arsenic; at the end, Emma, the bitter Weronika Frodyma, who is captivating because of her seemingly average appearance, sits in bright light in front of a giant pharmacy bottle and shovels the white-dust powder into her mouth. Not a nice ending. The curtain falls recklessly.
Always Emma B.
A 450-page novel from 1856 as a ballet. Of course that doesn’t really work. But the title is well-known and attractive, and of course the dance world also reaches for it – like “Anna Karenina” or “The Lady of the Camellias”. “Emma B.” was launched by Jean Grand-Maître at the Munich National Theater in 1999, “Madame Bovary” by Jörg Mannes in Hanover in 2012, and in November Helen Pickett created “Emma Bovary” at the National Ballet of Canada.
Christian Spuck calls his piece “Bovary”. But of course these are all just approximations in motion. Outlines of the literary original remain. And moods.
Christian Spuck refuses to resort to clumsy retelling. He selects a few dramatic moments from the novel and focuses on them. These are social events, Emma’s wedding to the hard-working but dull and stiff doctor Charles Bovary (with noble pallor: Alexei Orlenco), an aristocratic ball in which she is fascinated by waltzing, a dazzling variety evening in Rouen.
Neat beginning: scene from the spitting choreography
Source: Serghei Gherciu
And of course these are the encounters with the two lovers Léon (reserved and shy: Alexandre Cagnat) and Rodolphe (demanding and condescending: David Soares). In her marriage, which quickly grew cold, Emma appeared tense and angular, usually with her feet flexed; in the other men, she looked for the great feelings and passions that so quickly flickered empty in a supple, fluid manner.
Collective perspectives and individual feelings overlap. Spit repeats and varies certain sequences. The important people in the small town, especially the bent-legged dealer Lheureux (Domink White Slavkovsky), who drives it to ruin, appear as a grotesquely scurrying quintet of pale Grosz figures.
In between, the busy, attractive group dances their dances and Ländler. There are also black mourners on chairs at the beginning and end. And a mixed, neutrally dressed troupe called “Gift”, which shows happy couples as a counterpoint and repeatedly distracts Emma’s perception.
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Christian Spuck is a team player. He relies on his core of proven employees. Jonathan Stockhammer, who energetically led the Deutsche Oper’s sonorous orchestra through the various tones, was also there in Zurich. Spuck breaks off his narrative again and again, takes up developments, reflects them through videos that show yesterday’s country life, lovers from cinema history, and Emma staring blankly into the camera live. He actually uses every possible narrative option.
And yet he runs the risk that his complex construct will fall apart, that the sequences of movements will become interchangeable, that “Bovary” will resemble pretty much every love story between jubilant and sad that is told using today’s ballet means. Because he is more of a skillful stager than an inventor of movement.
You know his repertoire of steps, and if it seems original, then you’ll find John Cranko very varied – that’s his origin. So he constantly has to show something new and different, push the material forward, reflect it, break it. He skillfully pulls the strings at all levels.
Second hand construct
“Bovary” looks good with its gripping gestures, is entertaining and varied. But it doesn’t make you rave or move. It hardly has to be, the main character is too unsympathetic, and the really complex Weronika Frodyma (here a long-time soloist, never a ballerina, a clever casting coup too) fits into this template with great verve and nuanced performance.
But in the end, “Bovary” as a dance-based examination of adultery is a felt, unfulfilled, powerful second-hand construct. Which whets the appetite for re-reading the novel.
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Adaptation to the zeitgeist
However, the result seems to be much more than the Berlin Ballet has experienced in the past dozen years. “Bovary” is a decent creation, it takes its enthusiastic audience with it, it lets the newly formed troupe shine advantageously in all its grayish gloom.
And Christian Spuck himself knows very well that other, greater spirits will be there for the really great dance events. He’s already invited her. So he can share. This “Bovary” is very suitable as a hopeful new beginning, as the first calling card of a strengthening Berlin State Ballet that does not only have to dance. You can see where you stand. And may increase from now on.
“Bovary” is available to stream free of charge on Arte/Concert for three months
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