Firebird

Watson:  Why are you being so stubborn, Holmes?...It's the final performance of the Imperial Russian Ballet -- the house has been sold out for months –

Holmes:  I suspect it's some sort of plot.

Watson:  You mean somebody wants to lure us into a trap...?

Holmes:   Somebody wants to kill me.

Watson:  Kill you?

Holmes:  That's right. It's a plot to bore me to death. I detest ballet.

                (“The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes” by Billy Wilder)

I more than empathize with Wilder’s Sherlock.  Fencing has enabled me to appreciate ballet on an athletic level and there have been a small number of occasions when it has affected me with the raw and startling ferocity that can characterize real art.  (Ironically, one of those few occasions was during a Mathematics Conference in upstate New York when a bunch of us, like so many confused, blinking badgers in eye glasses,  were bused to a performance at Saratoga of the New York City Ballet then under the directorship of George Balanchine.)  But such occasions have been rare.

Yet, this post is about a ballet, and a particular production, that I’ve only seen on DVD.

All of us are imaginary creatures.  Art can operate on our imaginations in three ways.  It can confine the imagination, force it to work in a precise and limited context, or it can inspire the imagination to amend, invent and improvise on the source, or it can provide essential but insufficient substance and demand  the imagination work to derive meaning or allusion.  Ballet necessarily involves all three.

The ballet in question is Stravinsky’s “Firebird” as performed by the Mariinsky Ballet with the orchestra under the direction of Valery Gergiev.  The choreography is Mikhail Fokine’s original.  With this particular ballet and production we’re in Angela Carter territory.  This is myth and fairy tale ripe with dark allusion and layered with sometimes conflicting meaning.

The Firebird’s first and only long solo insists we’re in a fantasy that requires us to work and will reward us if we do so.  Yekaterina Kondaurokova’s creature continually transfigures before us:  from dancing woman, to supernatural but physical animal and back again.  And as she dances, she is at once female, ethereal, earthy, subtly sexual.  And witty:  when she pauses with the stem of a golden apple in her mouth and stares at the audience is she pure wild animal or is she mocking our own conception? She is essentially mysterious, essentially unique, but undoubtedly symbolic of passion.

Then Ivan Tsarevich, who happens to be out hunting, climbs over the garden wall, (I told you we were in Angela Carter territory) and pursues her in a pas-de-deux with a resolution that poses an important question that’s easily missed.  Quite simply, after hunting her, why does he release her in exchange for a feather?  Has she captured him or revealed something in him that neither he nor we knew was there?  Pursuit rarely climaxes with empathy.

The garden, the tree of golden apples and the 12 imprisoned princesses, one of whom Ivan falls in love with, of course, are in the supernatural power of the necromancer Koschei the Deathless who cleverly has hidden his heart in a golden egg hidden in turn in a casket behind the tree.  Koschei’s imminent triumph over Ivan, aided by his company of demons, is forestalled when Ivan retrieves the feather, calling the Firebird.  She compels the demons, even old skeletal Koschei himself, to dance themselves to exhaustion.  She then reveals the casket containing the egg with Koschei’s evil heart.  Ivan shatters the egg breaking Koschei’s enchantment and destroys him.

The procession to Stranvinsky’s majestic music that concludes the ballet for all its grandeur is cleverly subtle.  The other princesses are ritually introduced and matched to dashing male counterparts, previously enchanted and bound within one of the garden walls.  The Tsarevich and future Tsarina stride haughtily on stage, perform the same deep, ritualistic bow and triple kiss, alternating cheeks, the company passes through the gates to climb stairs leading to the russet glow of a great Russian city.

Yet this apparently, conventional happy ending is dark and deeply original as a result of context and absence.  Coming so soon after the enforced franctic dance of the demons caused by the Firebird’s magic, it’s impossible not to compare the two, to see that the procession is a kind of enforced dance, too.  It’s natural to wonder, is everything then a dance?  Then there is the Firebird herself, conspicuous in her absence.   Have the Tsar, Tsarina and their court achieved a life without passion or is it now, invisible, within them?