Review- Anna Karenina- Hong Kong Arts Festival 2018
27-2-18
By Peter Gordon
How does one transform an eight-hundred-page novel with a dozen important characters and several major plot lines into a two-hour staging using only movement and music? You might well ask.
Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is one of literature’s most enduring works. Anna, married to the staid senior bureaucrat Karenin, falls in love with the dashing cavalry officer Alexei Vronsky, who is similarly smitten. The affair is doomed by the pressure exerted by social mores but just as much by the impossibility of the situation: Anna already has a son with Karenin. Anna famously throws herself under a train at the story’s climax. The turbulent, aristocratic love affair of Anna and Vronsky intersects and is contrasted with the ultimately more placid and rural love and marriage of Kitty and Levin.
Compared with Tolstoy’s other masterwork War and Peace, Anna Karenina has a relatively compact narrative, which has allowed several acclaimed and reasonably faithful films. A ballet, however, is a rather more daunting task.
This relatively new production from Ballet Zürich—it debuted in 2014—features choreography from Christian Spuck to music from, primarily, Sergei Rachmaninoff, with more modern additions from Polish composer Witold Lutosławski and bits and pieces from other composers. This combination of differing works from different composers in quite different styles is considerably more seamless that one might at first expect.
Lovers of classical ballet will warm to this production which opened the 46th Hong Kong Arts Festival: sumptuous costumes, a stage-filling corps de ballet and a large number of set pieces. In keeping with the text, perhaps, the dancing tends to the expressive rather than the athletic. Indeed, all spectacle aside—and there was a lot of spectacle—the ballet stands out for its ability to express the various psychological states of the protagonists.
Also a stand out was Russian ballerina Viktorina Kapitonova, who created the role and has returned to dance it in Hong Kong. Kapitonova danced with the same combination of elegance, restraint and abandon that must have captivated Vronsky (danced by William Moore) in the first place. Kapitonova was entirely believable. Expressions would flit across her face as clouds in front of the summer sun. Also believable was French ballerina Michelle Willems as the younger, naive Kitty, who pouted through a ball after losing Vronsky to Anna only to warm slowly and affectionately to Levin in his self-exile in the countryside.
The countryside scene in which Levin finds himself reincarnated as a farmer was particularly striking; beginning with farm workers freezing in a series of tableaux-vivants which seemed to reflect period artwork following by Levin (Tars Vendebeek) being taught to scythe in energetic passages which evoked, symbolically yet entirely realistically, the cutting of the grain.
Filipe Portugal was appropriately stiff as Anna’s husband Karenin, but perhaps not grey enough to entirely explain Anna’s attraction to the younger Count Vronsky. Giulia Tonelli was a vibrant Princess Betsy, contrasting with the angst displayed by Galina Mihaylova’s Princess Dolly—Russia at the time had many princesses and even more countesses—at the serial infidelities of her husband Prince Oblonsky (Daniel Mulligan). Anna’s young son Seryozha was played with considerable stoicism by Isaac Wong Hei, from the local Jean M. Wong School of Ballet.
Spuck’s decision to include the various secondary characters resulted in a great many scenes, some of them quite short and little more than vignettes. Without knowing the novel, the story would have been hard to follow. Further, the ballet leaves out several key scenes, such as the death of the railway worker at the beginning of the story which prefigures Anna’s own suicide. Unlike, say, Tchaikovsky's opera Eugène Onegin, which functions as an entirely stand-alone work of drama, this Anna Karenina acts more as a commentary on, or perhaps window into, the novel.
The staging was stark and effective, making effective use of simple props and occasional videos, all of which acted to focus attention on the dance. This was marred by a few anachronisms, such as a phonograph, Levin and Kitty on a bicycle, and a wedding photographer, which would have set the piece around 1930 when, ironically, a very different sort of society prevailed in Russia. The music was largely recorded except for some passages played live on the piano; the effect of having two different sources for the accompaniment could sometimes jar.
A few passages were sung by mezzo-soprano Lin Shi; while these did not seem to mesh entirely with the overall sense of the music, it did allow a haunting reprise of Rachmaninoff's Ne poy, krasavitsa! with to accompany Anna’s death.
Those who know the novel will find this production intriguing. Those who enjoy ballet will find much to admire. Those who do both will be treated to a fascinating merger of great literature, music, art and movement.
This production has now closed.
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