Giselle -- San Francisco Ballet Performance, Review Wayne McGregor/ Random Dance -- Review The Invisible Woman -- Movie Review

Giselle

San Francisco Ballet Performance

January 27, 2014

This is a very strange story that ultimately doesn't make sense.  Maybe I just don't understand it.  A prince disguises himself as a peasant and moves to a village to court a peasant girl of irresistible charm.  It would be like Jamie Dimon disguising himself as a bus boy to court a waitress in a restaurant.  A rather odd concept, don't you think?  Especially since the prince is already engaged to another woman -- but we don't find that out until later. 

It is a narrative, and I do like ballets that attempt to create a narrative line simply through dance without verbal support.  But the narrative here is convoluted and rather bizarre.  Without first reading the synopsis in the program, a viewer would be lost trying to figure out what is going on. 

The first act, after doing a passable job of establishing the story gives way to a long cadenza-like display of dancing virtuosity.  I had trouble grasping what all this athleticism had to do with the story.  There is nothing wrong with virtuosic dance.  This is, after all, the San Francisco Ballet.  But virtuosity for its own sake, is self indulgent and risks becoming dull if it is overworked.  I think this ballet, since it had so little substance in the story line, relied a little too much on dazzle. 

I don't like scenes where one or a small group of dancers perform while a multitude of bystanders sits idle on the stage just watching.  This technique is employed to excess in this ballet.  My feeling is that if someone is on the stage they should be doing something besides being part of the scenery.  I don't like spearholders.  If they are doing nothing, then they should be doing nothing for a good reason.  Inertness should speak.  But in this ballet it doesn't, and you've got these vast stationary multitudes on stage serving as an adjunct to the audience of paid ticket holders while a few dancers hold court. 

The prince's rival is Hilarion, a "woodsman," or hunter from the village.  He is a known quantity to Giselle and she finds him much less appealing than the disguised prince.  Hilarion exposes the prince's disguise, reveals his true identity, and the fact that he is already engaged to Bathilde, a woman of his own class.  This puts the kibosh on Giselle, and instead of taking it in stride and chalking it up to experience (or taking up with Hilarion), she runs herself through with the prince's sword and dies.  You can always tell a vacuous story by the need for phony melodrama to pump some life into it -- in this case, killing off the heroine at the end of the first act. 

The music is undistinguished and tends toward the banal and the schmaltzy. Visually, however, it is very beautiful.  The sets, costumes, configurations and choreography are interesting and make a pleasing impression.  The dancers are outstanding, as usual.  The San Francisco Ballet has done a superb job with mediocre material.  Apparently it is enough to seduce the audience.  The house was full and seemed to give a good response to this vapid nonsense. 

The second act was way too long.  It could have been cut in half to a much more pleasing effect.  It takes place at midnight in a forest where Giselle's grave is located.  Giselle returns as a ghost accompanied by a cohort of Wilis, forest spirits all decked out in pure white wedding dresses, to comport with the prince who has come to visit her grave -- in the middle of the night.  The tenor of the whole second act seems to imply no hard feelings on the part of Giselle toward the prince, even though she was upset with him enough to kill herself with his sword at the end of the first act.  Now that she is dead, all is forgiven and they dance like they are freshly love struck.  It's idiotic and extremely repetitious.  I was getting so tired of it, just waiting for it to end, and it went on and on.  The curtain call seemed overdone as well, but then, I didn't feel much like applauding and wanted to get out of there. 

The moral of the story seems to be: you should not look for love outside your own social class, and if you are a woman, you are bound to get the worst of any such liaison -- a reassuring, conservative, message for all the stodgy Republicans in the San Francisco audience.  

Wayne McGregor/ Random Dance

Dance Performance

Lam Research Center at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco

January 19, 2014

This is an abstract study in movement and agility.  It starts out with a male/female couple in a rather contentious vignette against a beautiful vocal sound track.  The opening segment was intriguing, however, the rest of the performance seemed to be a repudiation of this promising outset.  It was as if this opening represented something from the past that had given way to something much harsher, with less human connection and less emotional content.  Perhaps it is an oblique comment on modern life.  In any case the subsequent segments were set against  clashing, percussive electronic soundtracks that incorporated sounds like the din of a factory, passing trains, jet airplanes on an airport runway, cars with stereos thumping full blast.  Intrusive, noisy, discordant sounds.  Blaring strobe lights add to this grating atmosphere of unpleasantness in an aggressive frontal assault on the audience.  The dance that was set in front of all this was active, if not frenetic.  Movements are fluid, but staccato, disjointed, contorted and sometimes grotesque.  There is interaction between the dancers, but emotional connection seems shallow.  Bodies are emphasized by the almost nude costuming, but there is little eroticism.  The eroticism is fleeting and subdued.  There is a feeling of detachment and narcissism throughout, like the activity on the streets of a large city where people are busily and anxiously active, but completely self absorbed and indifferent to others with whom they might be sharing the street and even casually interacting.  This performance seemed determined to minimize emotional interaction.  The dancers did an admirable job with a physically demanding program.  It lasted one hour without an intermission -- which I appreciated.  The length was just about right, because this strident, relentless cacophony gets to be taxing.  It was not exactly to my taste, but it did have interest. 

The Invisible Woman

Directed by Ralph Fiennes

This movie is slow moving and hard to follow.  If you don't know much about Charles Dickens -- and most Americans don't, let's be real -- it is very hard, especially at the outset (that is, for about the first forty-five minutes) to tell what is going on, who the characters are, or what their relationships are to one another.  It takes a long time to wind up the propeller on this airplane and get it off the ground.  The plot is very simple:  an unhappily married man in midlife meets a fresh young woman and has an affair with her.  The affair goes badly, however, and they end up separating.  That is about all that happens.  So in a story like that the interest is going to be in the psychological intricacies of the characters and their relationships to one another.  But this film does not succeed in that aspect.  It is called "The Invisible Woman."  Presumably, that refers to Nellie (Felicity Jones), but it could more aptly refer to Charles Dickens' wife, Mary, (Susanna Hislop), who is given short shrift in the movie, and presumably also in life.  More broadly, everyone in this movie is invisible, including Charles Dickens (Ralph Fiennes).  None of the characters are well drawn.  We do see Charles Dickens' vitality, energy, and his love of celebrity and the acclaim he received for being a famous writer.  But we see nothing of what made him tick as a writer, why he wrote the things that he wrote, what inspired him, or the dynamics of his relationships with his women.  Nellie is an aloof, self-absorbed young woman, who seems oddly conservative for a man like Charles Dickens.  They seem to break up -- sort of -- after a train wreck in which Nellie is injured.  She goes on and establishes a life for herself after Dickens, but none of it has any rhyme or reason.  A lot of time and attention and expense has been spent on costumes, settings and creating the cinematic spectacle.  The result, I feel, is rather overstaged.  This striving for cinematic perfection gives the film an unreal, illusory quality.  Perhaps it mirrors the way the characters and the affair have been portrayed.  The whole thing comes off as sanitized and romanticized, which the nineteenth century definitely wasn't, nor was anything in Charles Dickens' books.  I don't believe anything in this movie, and it did not make me want to read the book.  It is the kind of movie where the more I think about it, the worse it gets.   I guess that is an indication that I should stop now, but you get the idea.