Elfman Ballet of St. Petersburg

Virginia Johnson | September 10, 2007

The overt physicality of Boris Eifman’s interpretation of The Seagull can be immensely satisfying. Eifman’s insistent, restless choreography is the perfect medium for Anton Chekhov’s play about high-strung artists struggling to make sense of what they do. The Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg included the New York première of the full-evening work at City Center, April 13–29.

Eifman’s invention occasionally veers over the top, but his stagecraft is exquisite. This is theater. With sets by Zinovy Margolin, and his own (with Gleb Filshtinsky) evocative lighting, the ballet achieves a seamless unity of expression. Music by Rachmaninov and Scriabin drives the action and defines it with just the right mix of intellect and feeling.

When a choreographer shifts the action of a play into the dance studio, as Eifman has done with The Seagull, it is tempting to see the resulting work as autobiographical—especially after the soliloquy-like solo Eifman has created for Trigorin, the “fashionable choreographer” against whom the young dance maker, Treplev, rebels. Trigorin is alone, fishing by the lakeside. As he dances, we feel his aloneness and doubt and see that he, too, still dreams. It is the ballet’s beating heart.

Eifman has created in Trigorin a fully three-dimensional character.

Eifman’s choreography is both literal and symbolic. An example is the moment when the young rebel actually runs up—from foot to shoulder—the standing body of the master. A more vivid representation of generational conflict is hardly possible. With their attenuated, hypermobile bodies, the dancers in this company can do anything, although sometimes they are asked to do too much. The ingénue, Zarechnaya, is turned into a pretzel, her legs braided like dough as the two men who desire her sling her around.

Yet, in the midst of extreme athleticism, nuanced emotion is made clear, especially when Maria Abashova dances as Zarechnaya and Yuri Smekalov is Trigorin. The ingénue’s surrender shimmers between trepidation and avid sensuality. In the same cast, Nina Zmievets, as the aging star Arkadina, possesses her role with an authority that confirms her as the point around which the universe spins.

The Seagull is not flawless. A gratuitous hip-hop section quickly becomes annoying, Treplev’s “innovation” is tedious and the scene of Zarechnaya’s degradation in a gentlemen’s nightclub goes on too long.

But The Seagull is at its most compelling when it is about dancing itself. We see the formality and intensity of the company in class. Eifman uses the fourth wall as the studio’s mirror, and the dancers hurl challenging combinations with fierce concentration directly at the audience, making us feel what Chekhov hints is the goal of art: “Life must be presented not as it is, nor as it ought to be, but as it appears in our dreams.”