Pennsylvania Ballet's "La Sylphide' (2nd review)

The Pennsylvania Ballet ended its 45-performance season with a production of La Sylphide, the oldest ballet still in active repertory. Last year the company ended the season with Coppelia, another oldie. Next year they'll end with Romeo and Juliet.

Theoretically, we're all anxious to see our local troupe do new and experimental work. The truth is that nothing suits ballet, or the audience, better than these oldies but goodies with corny nonsensical stories, big sets, plenty of costumes, and character parts for witches and zombies and crazy folk of all kind, not to forget all the graceful swans, wood sprites and those poor maidens abandoned on their wedding day, the willis.

La Sylphide ought to be a yawn for a 21st-Century audience, yet people love the old production. Like most of the surviving story ballets from the 19th and early 20th Centuries, Sylphide's story borders on nonsense. We have a Scottish lad betrothed to a village lass, who spurns her in pursuit of an ethereal wood sprite who mysteriously appears in his house— blown in by the wind, apparently. The sylph is gorgeous, dressed in white tulle with tiny wings on her back and flowers in her hair. The role was originally danced by Marie Taglioni in 1832, and there is not a ballerina dancing who wouldn't love to step into Taglioni's toe shoes and re-create this seminal dance image.

DeGregory loved Dracula

Story ballets are dancer-friendly. Everyone in the company gets an opportunity to fly across the stage, do a folk dance, and disappear in heavy makeup as a witch or a courtier or an angry old man. Dancers love these roles. When Bill DeGregory retired as the company's principal dancer and became a ballet master, I asked him what role he loved most. I expected to hear him say something like Balanchine's this or Jerome Robbins that, but instead he immediately replied "Dracula!"

Wooo—no full-length story ballet is cornier. Why? I asked. Gregory just grinned ear-to-ear, saying it is so much fun to be a real character, to wear all those capes and fly around the stage. His wife, the former principal dancer Tamara Hadley, picked Giselle as her favorite role, especially the famous death scene. People often forget that dancers are also performers.

The essential 19th-Century ballerina

Every dancer on the stage for this month's La Sylphide was in character. They were dancing, yes, but they were also people in a story, and audiences caught the dancers' enthusiasm. Of the four casts, the one I caught was led by Julie Diana as Sylphide and Zachary Hench as James. Diana, who is tiny with delicate feet placement and gorgeous epaulement (that is, carriage of the shoulder and arms), was the embodiment of the ethereal iconic 19th-Century ballerina.

Hench as James, her suitor (and in real life Diana's husband), was the masculine antithesis of her dainty femininity. His leaps and turns as he pursued this vision of loveliness were magnificent, centered steady and fast. Francis Veyette did an excellent job with the character part of the evil witch. (Of course there's an evil witch— there's always an evil counterpart to the good characters in these old ballets.)

Roy Kaiser's oldies but goodies

So what's the story with Pennsylvania Ballet story ballets? They are grand, big theater entertainment performed in the bijoux setting of the Academy of Music with orchestral accompaniment. These are most usually stories of love lost and usually end with the beautiful, unobtainable female being carried off to heaven. As Roy Kaiser remarked to me years ago when I asked him why these oldies were still in the repertory, "We will always do these old ballets, because we are a ballet company. We'll do new work, but we'll always perform the older ballets. That's who we are."

No one is surprised that opera companies still perform Mozart or that the Philadelphia Orchestra plays Handel and Schubert. Ballet, like opera and orchestra, is an art form with a rich past as well as a future.

Pennsylvania Ballet opens its 46th season in October with a program that includes Theme and Variations by Balanchine (one of the company's godfathers), an as-yet-unannounced world premiere, and finally Agnes de Mille's saucy Rodeo from the 1940s, set to Aaron Copland music. Just hazarding a guess here"“ but I'd imagine that most of the ballerinas are hankering after the role of the leg- slapping cowgirl. â—†


To read another review by Jim Rutter, click here.