Royal Ballet of Flanders
One of the highlights of the annual Athens and Epidaurus Festival, directed by Lyon Opera Ballet Artistic Director Yorgos Loukos, was its homage to choreographer William Forsythe. Among some 100 theater, music and dance programs given in June and July, including Sylvie Guillem and Akram Khan performing in the spectacular outdoor Odeon of Herodes Atticus, the Forsythe evenings magnified this choreographer’s genius.
Lyon Opera Ballet performed his Limb’s Theorem. The Forsythe Company presented his devastatingly brilliant anti-war work Three Atmospheric Studies (called Forsythe’s Guernica), and also his more recent Heterotopia. Yet it was the Royal Ballet of Flanders’s splendid interpretation of Forsythe’s 1988 Impressing the Czar at Athens’s sleek concert hall, the Megaron, that had people in terpsichorean heaven.
And why not? Kathryn Bennetts, ballet mistress of Forsythe’s now-defunct Ballett Frankfurt for 15 years, has directed the Antwerp-based company since 2005, the year it first reconstructed the five-part Czar. With technical precision and marvelous dancing and characterizations from the 49-member company, Bennetts has brought renewed life to Forsythe’s vision.
Drawing on Western history and codes of movement that are themselves deconstructed, Impressing the Czar is larger than life, ironic and utterly irresistible, with a spoken text in which words such as “Viagra” and “Botox” are thrown in for up-to-the-minute hipness.
The opening tableau, a skewed Baroque court scene called “Potemkin’s Signature,” is akin to Alice in Wonderland, with dancers—some geeks, some archers shooting golden arrows (Jim De Block is bare-chested and skirt-clad in winsome St. Sebastian mode)—all prancing about on a chaotic stage to bits of Beethoven and Thom Willems, Forsythe’s longtime composer. Classical ballet butts up against art history, contemporary ballet and even some break dancing, as Agnes, the auctioneer (Virginia Hendricksen), madly spews verbiage amid the controlled chaos.
The central section, “In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated,” created for Paris Opera Ballet in 1987 and immediately dubbed a contemporary classic, is heart-stoppingly pure, spectacular dance. Performed at breakneck speed to Willems’s banging electronic soundtrack, nine dancers swagger, strut and explode into movement in duets, solos and small groups on a stage from which two golden cherries hang. A truly wondrous 28 minutes.
In “La Maison de Mezzo-Prezzo,” the third section, gilded characters are auctioned off as eccentric objects by Agnes, before the work goes out with a major bang in the raucous, riotous final sections. “Bongo Bongo Nageela” and “Mr. Pnut Goes to the Big Top” merge: A brigade of nasty little schoolgirls—some 40-plus dancers clad in bobbed wigs, pleated skirts and white shirts stampeding in tribe-like circles—engage in an orgiastic dance of sheer spectacle, where sociological and psychological implications are as powerful as a runaway train.
Impressing the Czar more than impresses—it blows one away.
Victoria Looseleaf is an award-winning arts journalist and regular contributor to The Los Angeles Times, La Opinion and Dance Magazine.
