Pennsylvania Ballet's "Messiah'

Improving on Jesus (and Handel, too)

JIM RUTTER

The Pennsylvania Ballet production of choreographer Robert Weiss’s Messiah loosely retells the story of Christ through Handel’s oratorio, but there’s no religious requirement to enjoy this visual feast. Indeed, the overwhelming sense of lamentation in the crucifixion scene, combined with choreography that takes full advantage of the “scenic breaks” in Handel’s score, imparts a powerful, surprisingly secular triumph.

From the opening— in designer Jeff A.R. Jones’s skeletal abstraction of a church— the Neoclassical dance style of the first act fuses visually exhilarating and emotive corps movements full of fluid turns with solo performances that explode with riveting acrobatic leaps. The touching pas de deux (wonderfully danced by Alexander Iziliaev and the ever-marvelous Martha Chamberlain) and the shimmering grace of the pas de quatre (Lauren Fadeley, Brooke Moore, Lindsay Purrington, Gabriella Yudenich) appear like sparks of joy and light as they act out Christ’s message and man’s struggle to uphold it.

More powerful than a sermon

Anyone who decries Christianity need only take a look at Weiss’s Messiah to realize the virtue, power and redemption that lie in this story. A sermon—even by Jesus himself—could never make the appeal of this religion more powerful.

As the Messiah, Sergio Torrado didn’t suffer the brutal physical violence of James Caviezel in The Passion of the Christ, but his silent suffering here felt far more real. And in a series of still-life images— Torrado kneeling before the corps that moves around him— his Christ figure becomes incredibly even more sacred. But why am I surprised? If Christ and his disciples had looked— or been able to move— like Torrado, Christianity would’ve been a no-brainer from the start, even for the Roman Centurions.

This is precisely how the power of a ballet can transform any mere religious story into a powerful secular message. Like the power of the modern cult of celebrity—where the vast majority of the people who purchase magazines like People and Us Weekly don’t resemble the stars they worship (statistically, they couldn’t)— this ballet makes me wonder what would have happened if Christianity ever decided to infuse the virtue of physical perfection into its quest to encourage moral perfection.

The teenager killed in the car crash

Because what’s clear in every ballet is that the tragedy is always amplified by the fact that whatever horrors occur, they fall upon people in the prime of their youth and beauty. A teenager killed in a car crash is always more of a tragedy than a senior citizen who falls asleep at the wheel, especially if that teenager was the high school prom queen or star quarterback. So when this young and graceful Christ suffers and his disciples lament, no sermon or miracle need be performed for an audience to realize the loss involved.

Indeed, when baritone Levi Hernandez sings, “Everybody should be exalted”— well, on this stage, they are. Whatever their religion, I think it’s safe to say that balletomanes everywhere worship at a church that celebrates this kind of Christ figure.

One near-disaster

The only thing that impressed me more than the choreography (and dancing) was how, in just one scene, Weiss nearly destroyed the sense of his entire piece.

Toward the end of his second act retelling of the life of Christ, Weiss all but ruins the coherence of his very expressionist piece by inserting a series of battle scenes. These scenes, replete with the realistic flags of the Southern Confederacy, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, etc., are set (of course) to the passage in Handel’s Messiah that asks, “Why do the nations battle?”

I could maybe understand hearing (instrumental) machine gun fire in a piece like Bernstein’s Vietnam-era Mass. But to suddenly see ballet dancers holding pretend machine gun sticks, hunched over like children on a playground, shaking their shoulders in motion to the rhythmic firing of the “gun,” did nothing but interrupt the entire flow of the piece.

And for what? To make the point— completely out of the timeline of the act— to show that “the wars of the world make Jesus sad” and run counter to his message of peace? Fair enough: Handel’s retelling does indeed ask the question. But Weiss need look no farther than (say) Kenneth MacMillan’s choreography of Romeo and Juliet to find out how to stage an unfolding battle scene on stage that doesn’t violate the aesthetic structure of the entire work.

Moreover, when Chamberlain’s dancing beautifully explores the notion that we’re all sinners in need of Christ’s redemption, why even try to move from Christ’s personal message to Christianity’s condemnation of society— something far more difficult to achieve on stage with only a handful of dancers? As it stands, this section felt like a piece of crudely inserted anti-war propaganda, and the overall semblance of Weiss’s work— and my attention— only slowly returned and recovered the feel of Act I after this interruption.

Who let Weiss get away?

But if I ignore this interruption, and the "Xmas pageant" aspects of Act I (Shepherds and a manger, no less), I must say that Messiah stands as the best work I’ve seen on the Pennsylvania Ballet’s stage in a long time. It’s thrilling to know that classical ballets of this caliber are still being created today. Weiss, now director of the Carolina Ballet, left the Pennsylvania Ballet in 1990 after eight years as its artistic director. Maybe it’s time the Pennsylvania lured him back.

The real tragedy here is that Pennsylvania Ballet will perform Messiah only six times, which means that perhaps in my lifetime (or at least my brief career as a Philadelphia critic), I might never get to see these dancers perform Messiah again. Now, that’s a sin. Let us hope the company will add at least one act of Messiah to its future repertory.



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