THEATRICALITY, thy name is Eifman! After its success last year, Boris Eifman brought his Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg back to City Center on Tuesday night for the start of a two-week season. And whatever you can say about the opening it was certainly, triumphantly, theatrical. But what else?
Eifman gave the New York premiere of his “The Karamazovs,” with visually spectacular and often viscerally exciting results. But the links with Feodor Dostoyevsky’s novel, “The Brothers Karamazov” appeared tenuous in the extreme.
Eifman seems to believe that the Dostoyevsky story is as familiar to English-speaking audiences as would be, say, “Romeo and Juliet,” or indeed as the shattering Karamazov saga would be to Russians – as a result there is not even a whiff of a program note in the playbill. A mistake.
The story of the ballet is extraordinarily difficult to make sense of in any logical or literary sense. That wicked old sensualist and savage patriarch, Fyodor Karamazov (Andrei Gordeev), and his three sons by different mothers, the spiritual Alexei (Igor Markov), the intellectual Ivan (Albert Galichanin), and the worldly Dmitri (Yuri Ananyan), are first seen caught (literally) in a web suggesting the bad blood ties of the doomed Karamazovs. The important figure of the fourth brother, the bastard Smerdyakov is omitted.
We are only a few minutes into the ballet when we realize that Dostoyevsky’s actual story is not really Eifman’s concern.
He is trying to express on stage Dostoyevsky’s mystical concepts of good and evil, of God and Earth, and his view of the dual nature of man, saint and sinner, and, for that matter, man’s dual manner of regarding women as madonnas or whores.
Moreover the ballet tries to extend Dostoyevsky, moving from the novelist’s thoughts on God and free will (during a duet between Ivan and Alexei, where Dostoyevsky’s actual words are given as a disembodied narration) to some kind of parable parallel with contemporary Russia.
Unfortunately philosophy makes choreography a poor bedfellow. But cutting through Eifman’s attempts at striking to the very heart of Dostoyevsky’s fantasticated spiritual psychodrama, you are left with the ballet’s extraordinary, if almost unfocused, dramatic power.
Eifman is a choreographer on the sensationalist theatrical lines of France’s Maurice Bejart, but he has more skill than Bejart in handling large ensembles, if rather less in pure dance invention.
His use of lighting, his manner of melding the role with the dancer, and the sheer knockout power of his spectacle, virtually compensates for any muddiness of theme or obscurity of purpose. This is a type of ballet where the valid approach is to feel rather than think.