The Bolt,
choreographed by Alexei Ratmansky
to music by Dmitri Shostakovich,
Bolshoi Ballet, September 2006
(film version screened at Symphony Space, New York, in April 2009;
available on DVD).
Concerto DSCH,
choreographed by Alexei Ratmansky
to music by Dmitri Shostakovich,
New York City Ballet, May 2009.
Every once in a while you run across a choreographer who is so in tune with a particular composer that they seem to have been born for each other. We can all think of our favorite examples: Paul Taylor and Bach in Esplanade, Mark Morris and Handel in L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein in West Side Story. (Other people would cite Balanchine and Stravinsky, but of that pairing I’m less sure.) And now we can add Alexei Ratmansky and Dmitri Shostakovich to the list. It’s true that I’ve only seen two Ratmansky ballets to date, both of them choreographed to music by Shostakovich; and it’s also true that one of them, the more important one, was on film rather than live. But that was still enough to persuade me that these two artists’ natural alliance went far beyond their shared Russian nationality. The perfection of the match had to do with everything else they held in common—among other things, an ironic sense of humor, a sharp awareness of history, and a distinctly personal notion of politics.
East Coast audiences have been gabbling excitedly about Ratmansky’s Concerto DSCH since the New York City Ballet premiered it last year, and when I finally caught up with it this spring, I could well understand why. At the Sunday matinee I attended in May, the packed house was aquiver with anticipation, and indeed the Ratmansky dance, which came last, was by far the liveliest, smartest, and most rewarding piece on the program. Set to Shostakovich’s Second Piano Concerto (a showy and not terribly complex piece that he wrote in 1957 for his nineteen-year-old son Maxim to perform), Concerto DSCH cleverly duplicates the emotional register of each of the concerto’s three movements. The opening is witty and silkily deceptive, with a cluster of orange-clad dancers opening like a flower to reveal a trio of blue-toned figures in their midst. Gestures that derive variously from Soviet parade-ground gymnastics and Busby Berkeley musicals are sprinkled through the all-group sequences, in which waves of dancers move across the stage in intriguing patterns. This rather frenzied tone is interrupted by the pensive second movement, where Ratmansky echoes the piano’s slow, quiet, hesitant notes by choreographing a love duet for a male and a female dancer. But even the duet movement is not solely a duet, for at the end of that section the couple are separated by their “friends”: she is whisked off to the left by a line of women dancers, while he is taken off to the right by an equivalent group of men. The third movement then becomes, in part, a game of keep-away in which the full group playfully but also a bit sinisterly works to keep the lovers apart; there is also a charming subplot involving the blue trio, which leads us, somehow, to an upbeat ending.
“Plot,” though, is too strong a word for what Ratmansky is doing here. He has repeatedly been described, sometimes even by himself, as a choreographer who is interested in narrative, but what he is really interested in is character. Plot, for him, is only a way to get at character, and he doesn’t particularly care whether it all adds up in a linear fashion or not. What he cares about is having each dancer—even in the corps, but especially in the solo roles—convey a very particular, strongly felt personality, an intense, individual character that seems to be made up in equal parts of the dancer’s own personal style and the choreographer’s carefully designed gestures. I say “seems” because, without knowing the company and its methods in detail, one can have no sense of how to allocate responsibility: it is part of a great choreographer’s achievement to make his own inventions seem like the dancer’s innate movement style, and vice versa.
To accomplish this is hard enough in any dance form, but to do it in ballet, where the strict conventionality of the method generally effaces all but the most generic personalities (like “suffering woman” or “brave man”), is well-nigh impossible. Ratmansky has, it appears, achieved this impossibility, drawing expressionism, idiosyncracy, and even a kind of wild abandon out of an art form that was designed to suppress these characteristics in favor of a marmoreal splendor. And in this, too, he has been enormously faithful to Shostakovich, who throughout his adult career managed to buck the Soviet Union’s quirk-annihilating musical requirements even as he pretended to capitulate to them.
You can enjoy Concerto DSCH on its own, but I don’t think you can really sense its darker, more ironic resonances unless you have also seen The Bolt, which Ratmansky made a few years earlier for the Bolshoi Ballet. If this is not Ratmansky’s masterpiece, it ought to be. For an hour and a half you sit gripped by the whole production, a complicated four-scene, multi-set narrative in which you are repeatedly wowed by the individual dancers and overwhelmed by the range of cultural references. It is as if the piece were created by some superhuman Methuselah who enthusiastically participated in the Soviet Union’s early revolutionary fervor, suffered through the harsh repression of Stalinism and its dreary aftermath, and then emerged into a cosmopolitan twenty-first-century perspective from which he could view the whole preceding era with a certain amount of rueful distance. This unnaturally long-lived creator results, I suppose, from the eerily seamless merging of the composer (who died in 1975) and the choreographer (who was born in 1968).
Dmitri Shostakovich certainly accounts for the first two figures in the mix. At the time he composed the music for this ballet, he was still in the enthusiastic category, though his sensitive artistic antennae may have suggested to him how soon he and his countrymen would be plunged into the subsequent terrors. In 1930, when he started working on The Bolt, Shostakovich was only twenty-four years old, the fresh-faced darling of the new Soviet music world. He had all sorts of commissions to fill—orchestral, theatrical, cinematic, operatic—and this ballet was simply one of many such assignments he energetically took on. “Comrad Smirnov has read me the libretto for a ballet, The New Machine. Its theme is extremely relevant,” he wrote sardonically to his best friend, Ivan Sollertinsky, in February of 1930. “There was once a machine. Then it broke down (problem of material decay). Then it was mended (problem of amortization), and at the same time they bought a new one. Then everybody dances around the new machine. Apotheosis. This all takes up three acts.”
The tone may have been mocking (the tone was almost always mocking, when Shostakovich and Sollertinsky put their intelligent heads together), but the music that emerged from this boring assignment was anything but routine. The score for The Bolt, as it eventually came to be called—after the big metal bolt that the dastardly saboteur throws into the machine, or perhaps pulls out of it: the plot gets a little vague at this point—had all the zany thrills and scary undercurrents of Shostakovich’s best work from the period. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the ballet died a rapid death. The opening-night audience loved it, apparently, but the socialist-realist press condemned the music as “too flippant to deal seriously with the proletarian theme.” (This and most of my other quotes come from Elizabeth Wilson’s marvelous Shostakovich: A Life Remembered.) And indeed, as you watch the ballet and listen to its score, you can hardly believe that Shostakovich had the nerve to do something like this in the increasingly repressive 1930s. “The Bolt was a flop and should serve as a last warning to the composer,” one reviewer ominously threatened. But with his usual foolhardiness—or bravery, or obliviousness: such tendencies were all mixed up in Shostakovich’s contradictory character—he failed to heed the warning, for in 1934 he went on to produce the even more skeptical, unnerving, and cacophonous Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, the brilliant opera whose negative review in Pravda derailed his career and, in a sense, his life.
How did Ratmansky get all of this and more into his choreography for The Bolt? Seventy years after the piece was left for dead, he resurrected it with new dances, new sets, an entirely new take on the Soviet period—and yet something of that initial Shostakovich feeling, that dangerous combination of humor and astuteness, is still quite noticeably at the heart of the work. The ridiculous old plot is still there, with its “bad” individualist character who sabotages the machine and its “good” communist functionary who fixes it. There is the requisite girl, too, whom the bad guy loses and the good guy wins (natch). And the plot also includes a wastrel “child of the streets,” played in the Bolshoi version by the absolutely astonishing dancer Morikhiro Iwata, who first joins forces with the bad guy and then betrays him to the good guy, thus demonstrating his conversion to acceptable communal norms.
The problem, though, is that the dance tradition, and for that matter the entire theatrical tradition, favors the lone individualist, the broken-hearted, rejected lover, over the successful company man. I call this the problem, but it is really the secret to Ratmansky’s success. Even as he is following the explicit plot laid down in Smirnov’s smarmy libretto, he is also luring us into the dark depths of Shostakovich’s witty resistance. And part of what enables him to do this is his own resistance to the ballet form.
Ballet cares, above all, about the couple. That is its essential unit, and all traditional choreographies are built around it. Ratmansky can do couples if he has to, but he is much less interested in them than he is in the odder numbers: the singular loner, the trio of friends, or the strange multi-sided construct that is made up of interlocking unrequited triangles. He prefers unresolved feeling to resolved feeling; he likes unevenness, commotion, and disturbance. But he covers over these tendencies with a kind of superficial sunniness of disposition that appears to quell the doubts he himself is raising. “Who, me?” he asks with a smile. “Why would I want to rock the boat, when it is so clearly carrying me along quite nicely?” Still, the doubts are never fully quelled, and the attempted reassurance adds to our queasy sense that all is not as it seems. Strangely enough, that very queasiness enhances our pleasure rather than subtracting from it, as if we were all zooming along together on a thrilling and only slightly terrifying roller-coaster ride.
Because he favors the individual over the couple, Ratmansky is also very interested in group choreography, for the group and the individual are related, at the very least as antagonists, in a way that the group and the couple generally are not. (The standard balletic pas de deux pair couldn’t care less what the corps is doing: they exist onstage in and of themselves, as a tiny empire of two.) Thus the hilarious group calisthenics in The Bolt may be there to evoke old Soviet documentaries—in that sense, they are doing essential historical work—but they also offer us an aesthetic low mark against which to measure the superb artistry of the renegade soloists.
And here we begin to sense the moral dimension to Ratmansky’s feeling for character. In a world that favors uniformity, whether it be a Soviet factory or a ballet corps, the expression of and delight in idiosyncratic individuality is itself an ethical stance, and perhaps even a political one. The Bolt’s structure, with all its silliness, sets up a powerful undercurrent, for the man who breaks the machine is almost by definition the artistic hero. So despite the best efforts of the libretto to unconcernedly cast off this character in the middle of the second act, the “bad man” who lies at the center of The Bolt cannot be easily discarded, for he is the person we identify with. He is very much himself—the character Denis, danced by the very distinctive and beautiful dancer Denis Savin—but in addition he is Ratmansky, he is Shostakovich, and he is us.
Wendy Lesser is presently working on a book about Shostakovich and his string quartets. Her latest book is a Vintage paperback, Room for Doubt.
