by Leigh Witchel
It’s great that Alexei Ratmansky made a new full-length ballet. That he chose to make “Of Love and Rage” is another matter. The tale of love, betrayal, kidnapping and repentance set in Ancient Greece is filled with action and Soviet-style bravura. But instead of just taking the good parts of old-fashioned narrative ballet, Ratmansky brought forward some aspects that would have been better left behind.
The production is a big deal. Co-produced by the National Ballet of Canada, the story was adapted by Guillaume Gallienne from an Ancient Greek narrative by Chariton of Aphrodisias that could be considered the first historical novel. Along with “Daphnis and Chloe,” another narrative with a pirate capture, it is one of the five Ancient Greek novels that have survived to the present day. For the score, Ratmansky turned to Aram Khatchaturian’s music for “Gayaneh.” Khachaturian had also composed Spartacus. The designs by Jean-Marc Puissant imagine a Greece more faience blue than the sunbaked Greece of John Craxton’s for Ashton’s “Daphnis.”
Originally made in 2020 and premiered in Los Angeles, the New York premiere of “Of Love and Rage” was delayed by the pandemic for two years. On arrival with mostly the original cast (Daniel Camargo and Jarod Curley stepped in for James Whiteside and Cory Stearns) it looked like the usual for new-ish Ratmansky ballets: a skeleton that will inevitably get better with repetition, both for the dancers and the viewers.
The action took place circa 400 BC, and told the adventures of Callirhoe and Chaereas, a woman so beautiful that every man who laid eyes on her wanted her, and her lover who in a fit of jealousy almost killed her, but fought armies to win her back.
The stage was set near Syracuse, and opened on a Greek temple with maidens invoking the gods. Ratmansky’s Greek dances look familiar; the men locked arms in a line, as in Maurice Béjart’s “Seven Greek Dances.” After Callirhoe, Catherine Hurlin, and her maid, Luciana Paris, partnered, the other women made Grecian urn poses.
When Chaereas, danced by Aran Bell, entered with the men, the vocabulary became more specific Ratmanskyness, including a runner’s step with fists. The combination of Greek-ish and personal moves looked almost as if “Serenade after Plato’s Symposium.” was a preliminary sketch. Bell danced a big solo, including en dedans saut de basques to attitude.
There was so much going on in the new ballet that it was hard to parse the individual performances, but Hurlin was capable with long lines. Ratmansky has worked with Hurlin since she was a child; she created the role of Young Clara in his version of “The Nutcracker.” She grew up beautiful and leggy; this part was surely the stepping-stone to her recent promotion to principal dancer. Bell, as always, was a solid dancer and hard-working partner.
The two ran into one another onstage in a collision of blondness: it was a coup de foudre as in “Romeo and Juliet.” The partnering wasn’t tentative; he lifted, flipped and finally kissed her before suspending her midair. Their parents showed up, disapproving, and Callirhoe’s father dragged and threw her to the ground, the first of so many problem moments. Lord Capulet often does the same to Juliet, yet ABT has had more than one great dance actor who made that character sympathetic. Still, does the ballet repertory really need to to defend another abusive father?
The couple’s friends pleaded with the parents until they relented and the couple danced again. The Khachaturian score was brassy, big, Soviet and very Ratmansky. Each father gave the children arm bangles and the two men embraced.
For all that was happening, though you could figure it out, like most Ratmansky ballets early on in their lives, you didn’t feel it. There was a happy village wedding dance and then the couple did a speedy duet: he raced her laterally on pointe into brilliant whipping turns and sideways jumps. It was the first memorable bit of choreography that stuck with you.
Of course this happiness couldn’t last even to nightfall. Three frustrated suitors conspired with the maid to steal Callirhoe’s bangle and have the maid imitate her: shades of “Othello” when they convinced Chaereas he’d been cuckolded. We had already seen Chaereas get mad at her rather than them when one of them made a pass at her, so we knew it wasn’t going to go well.
The sky darkened as Chaereas rushed indoors to attack Callirhoe. Guilt-stricken, the maid explained the ruse. Chaereas realized he’d been tricked and begged her father to stab him but the older man couldn’t bring himself to. Hurlin was borne off aloft – in fifth position, natch. This is ballet.
After a Juliet moment of mourners in procession and Callirhoe waking up inside her tomb, pirates showed up, robbed the tomb, but also found and abducted her à la “Daphnis” or “Sylvia.” Yes, there’s invention but the ballet is also a Frankenstein’s monster of so many tropes.
That’s about a third of the plot. Describing the rest would take several pages. Quickly though: Callirhoe was brought to Dionysius, a noble grieving the loss of his wife. Struck by her beauty, he purchased her, and asked her to be his wife. Camargo managed to make Dionysius kind and sympathetic. Callirhoe, who was pregnant by Chaereas (things happen fast in ballet-time) and unaware that he was searching for her, married Dionysius to protect herself and her unborn child.
Chaereas met Mithridates, a rival noble played by Curley, who allied with Chaereas, but also fell in love with Callirhoe. He danced with his concubines while Callirhoe and Dionysius had an audience with the King of Babylon, Roman Zhurbin. Who wanted her too. That felt like the moment in a Bugs Bunny cartoon when, after being pursued in drag, he stopped, did a take to the audience and asked, “Do all you goils have to go trough dis?”
Callirhoe danced unwillingly with King, whose wife, Katherine Williams, was not pleased. Callirhoe also endured a pas de trois with the King and Mithridates, as Dionysius looked on, angry but outranked. Was becoming a nun an option?
There was a lot of talk in the program about studying ancient sources, but when it came to choreography, Ratmansky’s primary sources seemed to be his Russian ballet training and its conventions of character dance. The numbers for the men were faux-Greek or straight out of “Spartacus.” The concubines or courtesans get Orientalist numbers that seem lifted from “La Bayadère.”
The King adjudicated the dispute between Mithridates and Dionysius by having each dance dueling solos. Yes, another convention, but this one was interesting and worked. The King decided Mithridates had no claim and told him to leave, but then the King went after Callirhoe himself, flinging her about to the distress of both the Queen and Dionysius, who because of fealty assented.
War was declared and frenzy erupted. Chaereas gathered soldiers and fought Dionysius. Yes, it was to the Sabre Dance. Ratmansky grew up with that music, and gets a pass for taking it seriously instead of associating it with cartoon chase scenes. Still, he created a battle packed with so much dancing and so many entrances and exits that it was part “Spartacus,” part “What’s Up, Doc?”
Chaereas was lifted up by the soldiers in excelsis Bolshoi; the King and Queen were vanquished and captured. Chaereas searched for Callirhoe among the women. Like Odette, she was at the back. Bell and Hurlin danced a Stakhanovite reconciliation pas de deux; he carried her at the shoulders, and pushed her up into a press. Slowly the others came to watch, the two embraced, and she ended with her head in Chaereas’ lap. Still, and this was the problem throughout the ballet, Chaereas did all the work and made all the moves. Callirhoe only got to react.
In an ambivalent ending, similar to the self-sacrificing moment at the end of Ratmansky’s “On the Dnieper,” Dionysius brought out Callirhoe’s child. She was devastated as he passed, but the child broke away and Dionysius let the boy run to her. Dionysius walked off, dejected, as the curtain fell.
Evidently someone in corporate was worried about this ballet, because the program tried to do damage control. Improbably, the performance of a ballet with matter-of-fact slavery and no real response to the issue was dedicated to the commemoration of Juneteenth. And before the synopsis there was a program note that was more of a trigger warning.
“Of Love and Rage” didn’t need a trigger warning, and neither does “La Bayadère” or “Le Corsaire.” They need context. And in this case, not only for the viewer, but the creator. The problem with “Of Love and Rage,” and it was a whopper, was the suitability of how Callirhoe was presented in 2020. Despite Ratmansky’s attraction to her ability to forgive, he made about as regressive a heroine as possible. She’s the object every man wants, with has no control over her own story. The only choices she gets to make are yes or no.
What fascinated Ratmansky about a woman who was defined by the men who wanted to possess her? Fidelity to a narrative almost no modern reader is familiar with wasn’t necessary. Surely the libretto and dramaturgy could have given Callirhoe some scenes where she acted rather than reacted? We could happily consign to the dustbin of history heroines who have no power in their own story.
We can and should defend a reactive heroine like Giselle to the death (and beyond), but she was created in 1841 and over the years her inner strength became as much a part of her character as librettist Théophile Gautier’s desire to give her a “pretty death.”
Perhaps that will happen to Callirhoe with repetition as well, but after all the shit Ratmansky has taken for his foot-in-mouth comments on gender and race, he came up with this? Yet earlier this year he rightfully emerged a hero for his courageous and selfless response to the invasion of Ukraine. Consistency is not a requirement of an artist, but so often it feels as if Ratmansky has been gaslighting us, or desperately needs a handler.
copyright © 2022 by Leigh Witchel
“Of Love and Rage” – American Ballet Theatre
Metropolitan Opera House, New York, NY
June 20, 2022
Cover: Aran Bell in “Of Love and Rage.” Photo © Gene Schiavone.
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