by Leigh Witchel
What if you had been sleepwalking through life? What would happen if you suddenly awakened, to find out who you were? If that knowledge would kill you, was it worth it?
That’s part of the story of “La Sylphide,” one of the great 19th century ballets that’s also the least common – at least outside of Denmark. Though a version of the ballet was first made in France, the most famous version by August Bournonville made its debut in 1836 in Denmark. Mastery of ballon – the light, resilient jumping – and the particulars of its style is a prerequisite most companies shy away from.
Sarasota Ballet is an interesting candidate for the work; Englishness is its specialty. But Johan Kobborg’s staging was originally done for the Royal Ballet in 2005. Now, as in London, Sarasota went Danish. And did it well.
Sarasota has worked to be a sanctuary for endangered ballet heritage. Søren Frandsen’s beautiful, sylvan designs and Henrik Bloch’s costumes were originally made for the Royal Theater in Copenhagen, then were sold to the Royal Ballet in London. They have a home in Sarasota now. There’s already a good orchestra there, and the company brought in an experienced conductor, Ormsby Wilkins.
This version of “La Sylphide” has become one of the preeminent traditional stagings. Sarasota saw Kobborg’s version in 2012, but only on film. It was also done at the Bolshoi (where Kobborg also played Madge) and in 2016 at the National Ballet of Canada. Kobborg hasn’t gone down the road of getting bored with his predecessors. When he makes a change, you could disagree with it, but he’s doing it for the ballet, not to the ballet.
Where the production excelled was in letting the contradictions blossom in front of us. James is a man drawn to his destiny, and unfaithful. Gurn is faithful, and a liar. Madge is murderous and kind. The morally ambiguous landscape was painfully real, a garden both beautiful and poisonous.
There were two casts. James is Luke Schaufuss’ birthright. He trained at the Royal Danish Ballet and danced with them, as did his father, as did his father’s father. He had a beautiful arabesque line, and if his air turns were less secure, he excelled in small jumps.
Yet the first night started out with the volume too low. Every moment, discovering the Sylph, speaking to Effie, was correct and intelligent but Schaufuss wasn’t holding the stage. You might not have been sure of him. Until he did his variation in Act 1. Then you would have been really sure.
His continuity of phrasing, using the landing of one jump to take him right into the next, was right in the style: chains of movement as well as poses. He showed off the necklace as well as the pearls.
He got his sea legs on night two; the volume of his performance was right from the curtain. When he was startled from his slumber on the chair, his mime to the Sylph, “You, here, HOW?” was as if he woke up from a dream he wasn’t sure he actually woke up from.
Kobborg sees the ballet through James’ eyes. He balanced it not on James’ errors, but on his conflict: duty versus destiny. When the sylph beckoned James and he was pulled back step by step, you saw the look on his face: of both potential rapture and awakening.
The matinee cast only got a single shot, and Maximiliano Iglesias made the most of it; it wasn’t a dress rehearsal. When he asked his friends if they also saw the Sylph, he smudged the mime for beautiful woman and wings. It felt as if he didn’t want to overdo them and get a laugh, but the emotional effect was that as if he mumbled because he knew no one was going to believe him.
Despite some differences in emphasis, both Schaufuss and Iglesias, through Kobborg’s lens, saw James largely the same way. Kobborg pointed up the moment James was waiting for the Sylph to be revealed by the wedding guests after he’d hidden her under the tartan. Both men steeled themselves for a moment they would have to tell the truth. Schaufuss connected with James’ conflict and the mask of his smile. Iglesias questioned his sanity, his fidelity, his whole life ahead of him.
Iglesias danced the famous first act divertissement, a reel, as a dance of status and possession, claiming his place and his bride. After, he took out the ring and looked at it, as if it were his last hope of life staying normal. Yet when the sylph laid his cap for him to pick up, he raised it in triumph. It wasn’t a discovery, it was an admission. This is who I am, as if the most irresistible seducer is your true self.
Schaufuss didn’t seem to want that moment. The first night, he was swept out the door as if by the tide. We almost didn’t notice him leave. The second night, he did raise his cap, but faced away from us, and followed the sylph towards his fate.
The two sylphs couldn’t have been more different. The best thing about Macarena Giménez’s Sylph was the tone: her child-like happiness, her dangerous innocence. Taunting Schaufuss as she stole Effie’s wedding ring, she seemed to inhabit a world free of cause and effect or consequences: follow me up the chimney, leave your wedding and join me in the forest. In Act 2, her playfulness worked especially well in Kobborg’s interpolated duet that expanded on the idea that the Sylph can’t be touched.
Giménez is a ballerina, but not a Danish one. She has lovely arms and épaulement and is brilliant at using them, as well as a soft melting plié, to distract you from noticing that she doesn’t have much jump. Some aspects gave her trouble. On pointe and more familiar turf, her footwork was a blur, speedy yet precise. But turning in pointe shoes in the tricky no-ballerina’s-land of half-toe was rocky.
Her mime tended to be more decorative than conversational. Instead of speech, Giménez made pretty hand gestures and struck a lovely arabesque. Her dancing showed how well she could fashion delicate shapes seemingly out of smoke and tulle. But that’s not Bournonville. This is like carping at a cat for not barking well, but the style is more modest, about phrases rather than poses.
Her hair in a mass of ringlets, Danielle Brown looked as ethereal as any romantic ballerina, and her subtle pointe work rolled through her feet as well as nibbled the floor. But her sylph was a woman, with human feelings. Her mime was clear speech: “I watched you grow. I watched you hunt. Don’t marry!” More than anything, her shyness looking at James, then turning away, showed you the Sylph’s hurt. Brown seemed to argue that James was actually unfaithful to her.
In Act 2, Brown added a small detail, but interesting because it was so personal: The Sylph offers James birds and nests as a gift, which he asks her to set free. Brown kissed the birds as she freed them, showing her connection to nature and her domain.
Both Schaufuss and Iglesias put their souls into their Act 2 solos, showing you every hope of happiness James had. Schaufuss had particularly beautiful batterie; that’s his training. His beats slashed; his legs opening sharply out just enough to show the slice inwards.
The unities are cruel in “La Sylphide.” We are there for the best moment of James’ life, crystallized in his soaring jeté to leave after the ballet blanc. And minutes later, the worst. There are few moments that use dramatic tension better than the scarf scene in “La Sylphide.” The Sylph, as greedy as innocence, chased the deadly scarf, while James held it floating slowly above them, ghostly and virginal like a poisoned medusa.
Schaufuss was so wound up in what he thought the story would be he didn’t bother to look at what was happening to Giménez even as he wrapped the scarf round her arms, lifted her up and finally was able to lean his head on her chest.
Then he looked. And finally he saw. As the Sylph’s wings fell off in her final paroxysm, Kobborg directed the men to look at their hands through tears of shame and rage. They knew it wasn’t the scarf that killed her, and both seemed to think the same thing. “I only wanted to touch her.”
Giménez smiled even as she was dying; her Sylph’s life outside of consequence made sense of the strange scale of her gesture at being fatally betrayed, a light finger wag that wasn’t even an accusation and was somehow a thousand times worse.
And immediately, the wedding procession of Gurn and Effie passed behind. The next moment can be very individual, but again, both men did almost the same thing. They cried and let the wedding ring the Sylph returned to them fall. They were beaten.
In his own way, Ricki Bertoni’s Madge was up there with Sorella Englund’s. That’s not a statement to make lightly. You could sense something special was happening from Madge’s first entry.
Bertoni’s the character principal for the company. He’s a very good and reliable actor, but he’s got more than one trick up his sleeve. In “Dante Sonata” he went over the top with piercing glances and pots of eye shadow, and it worked. He could have easily repeated that here, but instead, he dialed Madge back to something human and understandable. It made her even more dangerous.
Madge entered unnoticed and appeared, both to James and us, at the fireplace, warming herself. Kobborg understands Madge within the Danish tradition: that she’s a force of nature who is somehow beyond morality. At the fortune telling scene, she played cat and mouse with the protagonists, beckoning Effie or Gurn over like prey. It made it more understandable why James was frightened of her. Was his hostility what set the story in motion, or was this always meant to happen?
Bertoni affected a slight limp and kept his makeup more natural than caricatured, looking more weathered than ancient. He varied details slightly between the two performances, different ways of drinking the liquor Gurn offered Madge.
It was thought-out, but still spontaneous. At the second performance, in the cauldron scene at the opening of Act 2, Bertoni turned it up a notch to a more broadly comic tone, but he was perfect the night before. He pulled back, happily.
Both nights the scene with James and the scarf was bang on. All Madge’s contradictions were there, her elemental nature, her kindness and brutality, in the right proportions. When Madge played with the scarf as she left, tossing it, but also caressing it against her face, alternately vengeful and sensual, it felt like a stroll through a poisoned garden in full bloom.
Lauren Ostrander is a young, beautiful soloist, but she didn’t age herself much in the alternate cast, which is a harder road. Her Madge was a young, damaged woman and the moment she appeared, you started trying to figure out her backstory. What kind of young woman would have been single in that society? Yes, a witch, but also a holy woman, an outcast, a lunatic, a disfigured cripple, some mix of all?
In her scarf scene Ostrander came forward and there was a moment you could imagine what she had endured, and the almost adolescent rage and resentment. Carabosse is another stretch for young women in the part, and Ostrander had some Carabosse moments, her laugh after she predicted whom Effie will marry. Another similarity: the action that set the calamity in motion was a petty offense.
In Act 2, Bertoni started Gurn on the road to hell with a small lie of omission. Ricardo Rhodes played Gurn as a participant. His head may have hung, but he lied on his own about not seeing James’ cap. Madge only stood behind him, waiting. Ostrander coached Samuel Gest, and seemed proud of him as she touched him reassuringly. She was investment casting; she’ll be great in a few years.
Both of them made Madge’s motivation more apparent. She made a flourish that never seemed as clear in intent. It happened before James tried to give her a few coins. She spat on them and tossed them away, then had him kneel before her. “Respect me! Recognize me for who I am!” Bertoni touched Schaufuss’ face and he flinched. Nothing was overplayed; it was all there to discover.
The same ambiguity carried over to the end, as Madge revived James and got him on his feet, then pried his hands from his eyes so he could see the Sylph dead, ascending to heaven. James asked her why, and here Kobborg slightly changed the mime. On a recording of the ballet with Englund and Nikolaj Hübbe from 1992, Englund just gestured to herself – and she’s changed that to different things.
Bertoni also made the same gesture, but as a question, and then Madge pointed back at James. “I didn’t do this. It was you.” But that wasn’t Hilarion’s retort to Albrecht after Giselle’s death. Asking Madge “why?” is like asking a river why it flooded your house. James set an infernal wheel into motion and there was no way to stop it until it had rumbled over its target and crushed him. She spat on his lifeless body and raised her arms as the curtain fell. Bertoni nailed the ambiguities and the tone of the character, natural enough to be clear and real, theatrical enough to be gripping.
In other supporting roles, both Rhodes and Gest did fine work as Gurn. Rhodes invested him with dignity, but also ambition, giving James a telling look after Madge’s prediction. Both men did a lovely job with Gurn’s Act 1 variation: Gest had a nice way of pulling out the end of the movement, rather than punching a pose, to get lush phrasing. Dancing his solo right after Gest, Iglesias did the same.
Effie may seem like a one-note character – the concerned fiancée – but it allows for subtle latitude. Both Anna Pellegrino and Marijana Dominis played Effie as sympathetic, but Pellegrino recovered from the decision to marry Gurn quicker than Dominis. Dominis seemed to be looking for more than just marriage, but love and happiness. After Iglesias abandoned her, Dominis made a moment of taking off her bridal veil. Rejected at her own wedding, she was now facing being marked by her community as damaged goods. When Gurn proposed to her, she accepted with hesitation, but when she left with him, it was with a mixture of sadness, fear and relief.
There are two great ensemble numbers in the ballet, the reel in the first act, and the ballet blanc in the second. The reel was well danced, towards the end the dancers divided into trios and spun in a way that was vertiginous, violent, and almost out-of-control.
The choreography for the ballet blanc stays largely under itself, and might feel static if you compare apples to Petipa. But style is where Sarasota excels, and it was picture perfect in the look of the arms, the tilt of the head. As with the company’s Ashton, it looked lovingly drilled.
There were small issues. On opening night, the three women leading the ballet blanc did pointe work that was strong, beautiful . . . and loud. It also could have been more pliable; they were either up on pointe or off it. All the women’s shoes were way too loud on opening night; but that got fixed. The matinee trio in the ballet blanc had a lovely air, making it clear to us that they could see things in the forest we could not.
The group of men in the Act 1 divertissement needed subtlety on the first night, overjumping everything. Yuki Nonaka danced this with the same impressive elevation as he danced “Rhapsody” in November. But this is Bournonville. He punctuated every jump with an exclamation point where there should have been a comma, and alas, it got worse rather than better. The three men at the matinee had more continuous phrasing.
The ensemble also acted well, with conversational mime. Ivan Spitale, as one of James’ two friends at the opening had expressive and broad hand gestures that were almost a meme of how to say that you’re Italian without actually saying you’re Italian.
Kobborg’s interpolations are brief; a pas de deux for James and Effie, followed by a pas de six in Act 1, and a pas d’action in Act 2 for James and the Sylph that makes the dangers of touching her more evident. Even with his additions, Kobborg’s production puts Bournonville before himself. “Giselle,” done as a co-production with Ethan Stiefel, was also recognizably the ballet, but more was rethought there, sometimes because it had to be.
His “La Sylphide” was closer to conservation. When he opened the ballet out, like a filmmaker adapting a stage play, it was either to emphasize a point or to provide more dancing opportunities for a corps that would otherwise be restive.
Like a restorer, Kobborg often repurposed material from other repertory of the time when he was making a patch. In the Act 2 pas d’action he had James swear his love to the Sylph. Echoes both of Act 1 when he promises Effie something similar, but also of “Giselle.”
When he got creative it could be quite deft. Once James realizes he can’t touch the Sylph, Kobborg set a moment where the breeze from her motions became how he felt her. None of his touches did any harm.
The production’s clarity made it possible to dig deeper into the ballet, to discover motifs. Two things kept returning: a walk, usually of three steps and a broad kneeling gesture.
James and the Sylph often walk three steps together, almost always forward. But when James reappears after Madge gives him the scarf, the Sylph takes the steps back, away from him. She sensed a problem, and so did we.
James is the first to kneel, when the Sylph appears at the window. Then Madge demands he kneel for her, and again to show him how to trap the Sylph. Shortly after, James makes the same demand of the Sylph, with horrifying results.
Luck provided a subtle way this version in ‘23 was better than in both ‘05 and ‘16. Kobborg’s additions were originally orchestrations from a piano score. Orchestrations by Løvenskjold were unearthed recently, these made the new sections feel more seamless.
Without removing ambivalence and complexity from the end, Kobborg made some things more clear. It was evident that the scarf didn’t kill the sylph – touching her did. The final piece of that puzzle was Madge’s retort when James asks “why?” “Me? It was you.”
One of the biggest drawbacks with the run is always the same in Sarasota. It was too short. Three performances aren’t enough, divided among two casts with the matinee cast getting only that single chance was almost cruel. Watching what the evening cast discovered at the second show made you regretfully imagine what either cast could have done with a third or fourth shot.
Like “Giselle,” Kobborg sees “La Sylphide” as mattering, with a story that still resonates. And it does. Anyone who has a heart knows what it feels like to question it.
copyright © 2023 by Leigh Witchel
“La Sylphide” – March 24-5, 2023
The Sarasota Ballet
Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall, Sarasota, FL
Cover: Luke Schaufuss and Macarena Giménez in “La Sylphide.” Photo © Frank Atura.
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