50 years on from its creation and marking the end of La Scala’s Summer ballet repertoire, Kenneth MacMillan’s piece puts the audience in the midst of a troubling exploration of interaction and connection—where love, avarice and contradictions rule supreme.
THERE’s something utterly bewitching about watching dance at a distance when everything seems so effortless. But arguably it’s more interesting to experience ballet up close, to witness the beads of sweat, the potent vein of endurance and the heat gleaming from the dancer’s bodies as they push themselves on. MacMillan’s moving creation for the Royal Ballet, now a timeless classic part of La Scala’s repertoire since 1994, makes the most of that proximity.
Claudio Coviello. Photo: Brescia e Amisano
For those who remember theatrical settings years back, there’s something of the same sense of thrill in L’histoire de Manon that strips human motivation to its core, revealing intention through the language of drama. The switch from casual to dramatic underpinnings is revealed from the start, with a depiction of a society built on the principles of avarice swathed by its miseries. But there’s more to the story.
Nutty aristocrats, eccentric dealers, capricious thieves and beggars: the ballet may be set in 18th-century France, but one could easily note the wealth of characters as a contemporary mimicry of the state of our times. Still, the ballet (like many of us, oftentimes) takes this ambience for granted.
Myriam Ould-Braham and Claudio Coviello. Photo: Brescia e Amisano
To wit: Manon is sixteen years of age, loves life and cannot resist the pleasure it offers her. Charming yet troubled, there’s something childlike about her, as she’s made up of nothing but instinct. Lingering on this louche momentum, two men will decide Manon’s destiny: the handsome scholar Des Grieux, and the rich, revolting Monsieur GM (interpreted by the alluring Massimo Garon).
Falling in love with Des Grieux, she remains truly attached to him, but she is incapable of living this love in destitution, while the manifold temptations of a luxurious life are at her fingertips. But GM won’t get his perverse pleasures denied and uses his wealth to lure her. Without even being aware of it, she leads a young man to degradation who then becomes a coward, a thief, and who kills for her.
Myriam Ould-Braham and Claudio Coviello. Photo: Brescia e Amisano
The depth and complexity of her character are no mean feat: in fact, one of the most fascinating aspects of Manon’s character is that there seems to be a constant thread of irrationality in her behavior. With a soulfully charged delicacy and nuance, at one moment she goes to live with Des Grieux, whom she loves, and the moment next she leaves him behind.
As MacMillan notes, the key to her behaviour lies in her background: a dignified family, but modest and soon reduced to poverty in the 18th century when fortunes are made and unmade with an increasingly capricious pace. Because in misery, one ends up losing all dignity–and Manon is extremely afraid of the latter. And the piece epitomises such ambivalence: The disparity between great wealth and poverty, in the France of the Age of Enlightenment.
Photo: Brescia e Amisano
The reckless, moving virtuosity of the duets is breathtaking, and the scene in which the female protagonist is lifted with an intricate texture of movement is also searingly powerful when the characters come into their very own fragility while condensing a plethora of ambivalences into a single tableau. Plight, indeed, is the salient component.
For the closing night, Paris Opera Ballet étoile Myriam Ould-Braham brilliantly keeps her contradictions in place: innocent and seductive; realist and escapist; threat and a victim. With a freeing movement, delicate epaulements and intense control, she illuminates the men she partners (Claudio Coviello’s Des Grieux comes to life with her, though some technical steps—like the grand battement derrièrs—looked less secure than they often do), and is well supported by Christian Fagetti’s jaunty but despicable Lescaut, and the exceptional Caterina Bianchi as his spirited kept mistress, who imbued elegance, poise and frisky poetry in her role.
Myriam Ould-Braham and Claudio Coviello. Photo: Brescia e Amisano
If the ballet’s narrative is engineered to cast its characters into a perennial void of darkness, dominated by a sexual villain, the foreign world it portrays pretty much mirrors the one it started from, only with a new spin.
All three Manons, at different stages, touch greatness. Ould-Braham’s performance achieved radiance in Acts 2 and 3, conjuring a vast imaginative world of passion and pragmatism in which to love ourselves ever so dramatically.
La Scala’s performance was, then, a compounded mix of vision and myopia. As potent as it was patchy, simultaneously expressive and escapist, it was exquisitely performed and made for an adventurous entertainment. Seek it out.
by Chidozie Obasi