In what looks like a dream, Treplev is staging a ballet for his mother. From within a billowing white tube (the world’s intestines?), ghoulish shapes rise up. Eventually Nina spills out in a white, or perhaps seagull-colored, leotard like the universal soul she portrays in the tragedy Treplev stages at the outset of Chekhov’s play. Irina falls asleep; Treplev stops the production; Nina is displeased. It’s a good insight from Eifman: Nina’s annoyed because the production that was supposed to be for her is really for mom.
Nina goes on to displace Irina in Trigorin’s affections; they have an affecting duet to the famous Variation #18 from Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini, but after that Eifman runs out of ideas and the drama gives way to melodrama. Every solo appearance is the signal for an agonized soliloquy. When the lights go up on Treplev lying on a park bench, he’s surrounded by hip-hop homies, but he doesn’t really take it to the studio. Instead, we get a Battle of the Ballerinas, though neither Irina nor Nina does anything you wouldn’t see in the corps of Boston Ballet. Irina gets the company’s vote and also Trigorin. The company does what looks like warmed-over William Forsythe to warmed-over Thom Willems. (The music was identified in the program as being by Rachmaninov, and some of it certainly was, though there was also soundscape banging and perhaps some Scriabin.) Nina turns up as a feathered creature on a table who’s shot at by men, the seagull as victim, or as prostitute. Later, we see her dancing again. Irina seems to have her life with Trigorin and Treplev in order until her son gets jealous and she starts slapping him. The plot threads continue to loosen — which wouldn’t matter if there were anything new in the dancing. Even the conclusion is a given: Treplev climbs back into the cube and pulls the rods into place. You can’t hear Chekhov’s gunshot but you can see it.
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Sergei Prokofiev’s two classical ballets invariably find Boston Ballet playing the dating game.
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Vanessa White, stage-name Sugar Dish, was lying on her couch this past spring, watching the Joffrey Ballet on TV, when "it just popped into my brain. The name came first."
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After a slow start, The Nutcracker went on to become the most-watched ballet of the 20th century.
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New ballets must be one of the world’s most expensive consumable products.
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Dance history reverberated across Boston during the past few weeks, affirming that how we live now owes a lot to how we’ve chosen to remember — and forget.
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The architectural team of Diller Scofidio + Renfro designed the Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater at the new Institute for Contemporary Art as a 325-seat jewel box, its transparent walls allowing the Boston harbor and skyline to serve as a scenic backdrop or turn opaque as the performance requires.
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