The Royal Ballet of Flanders in William Forsythe's Impressing the Czar at its Lincoln Center Festival debut in July. Photo by Stephanie Berger.
Some readers will surely have seen part of William Forsythe’s Impressing the Czar, his evening-length spectacle of dance-theater from the late 1980s: the presentation piece of its five sections is a storyless dance , for nine classically trained performers in color-coordinated versions of rehearsal clothes called “In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated.” When taken as a self-contained work and placed on a program with ballets by other choreographers, this dance often has a jazzy, even throwaway look, with lots of juicy getting down and eye-popping extensions to the ear; it has been taken into the repertories of many ballet companies around the world, and dancers are said to enjoy performing it very much. However, sited amidst the chaotic and relentless activity that marks the rest of Impressing the Czar, the juice reads as choreographic fluency and the spectacular poses begin to look even, well, old masterly—not a phrase often associated with Forsythe’s oeuvre.
Commissioned for the Paris Opéra Ballet by Rudolf Nureyev in 1987—where its cast included the luminaries Isabel Guérin, Laurent Hilaire, and the gymnastic Sylvie Guillem (whom I saw perform it in New York around 1988)—“In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated” has a score of electronic sounds (by frequent Forsythe collaborator Thom Willems, assisted by Leslie Stuck). The crashes and pulses don’t quite adhere, and yet, like thunder and lightning, they seem related.
The setting is a stage bare except for two golden cherries, flirtatiously joined at the stems and depending from a wire, like mistletoe, over centerstage, at a height midway between the stage floor and the flies. (The title of the dance literally refers to the direction the choreographer gave to the Opéra stagehands concerning how the cherries are to be hung.) Some of the choreography unpacks itself under this enigmatic yet sensuous element: an early passage, for a pair of women, reminiscent of classroom routines; various little star turns for several soloists in succession; a long, athletic duet that’s not so much amorous or even erotic as businesslike in tone. At other moments, clusters of dancers can be spotted far upstage, or at the wing lines, and one becomes conscious of the way that distance, regardless of anything they do, affects the proportions of their bodies, alternately miniaturizing them or rendering them heroic.
The air seems heavy, material, a quality reinforced by the many big, slow assumptions of second position or the wide fourth-position preparations. Forsythe treats the proscenium here as if it were an aquarium overhung by a huge magnet (the golden cherries) that draws the dancers to it without their full understanding, yet with their full complicity. In theatrical terms it’s a joke; but when you transgress the choreographer’s plea (delivered at the end of a public panel in New York) not to think too hard about what Impressing the Czar might mean, and begin to figure out the butts of the humor, you may find yourself in very unpleasant waters. It’s the snickering level of Forsythe’s imagination, no less than the absence of any classical symmetry, that makes me resist the frequent comparisons of “In the Middle” to the ballets of George Balanchine; indeed, I’d even resist comparisons between it and the dances of Merce Cunningham, whose concept of the stage as a field—which Forsythe seems to borrow at moments—pointedly does not include emphasis on centerstage, which, for Forsythe, serves as a magic spot as much as it did for Doris Humphrey. Still, of the dozen or so Forsythe works I’ve experienced, “In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated” is certainly among the most lucid and offers perhaps the greatest opportunities for its performers to make their marks before the public.
The Royal Ballet of Flanders performing the “In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated” section of William Forsythe's Impressing the Czar. Photo by Stephanie Berger.
As it happened, at the Rose Theater—where the dance as a whole looked quite handsome—I saw the second of the Flanders Ballet’s two casts. Polished curators of the choreography, they didn’t seize the centerstage opportunities for stardom: they were always an ensemble, relating and deferring to one another, rather than pursuing their individual ambitions, obsessions, and eccentricities within a bubble of personal space. The result foregrounded the choreography, yet was lulling to try to follow. (Kathryn Bennetts, the artistic director of the Royal Ballet of Flanders since 2005, was, for 15 years before that, Forsythe’s ballet mistress at Ballett Frankfurt. The acquisition of Impressing the Czar was her first major artistic decision upon being appointed head of the Belgian company, and her production is clearly a labor of love.)
The other sections of Impressing the Czar, which flank “In the Middle,” were made by Forsythe for his own Ballett Frankfurt in 1988 to fill out a two-hour evening. Their titles, apparently nonsensical, in fact yoke together a number of languages, and when you study the theatrical events, you can recognize a certain sardonic logic to the nonsense: “Potemkin’s Unterschrift” (Potemkin’s Signature), “La Maison de Mezzo-Prezzo,” “Bongo Bongo Nageela,” and “Mr. Pnut Goes to the Big Top.” Two of these sections are not dances at all, but mime-theater pieces that cheerfully send up or insult various aspects of Western culture and art history. Dressed in variations on aristocratic fashions from the Enlightenment period, the men are clowns, for the most part, and the women, harridans, regardless of how they are subdivided into several cliques—the most populous being aristocrats and schoolgirls, each with its sprinkling of unclassifiable, wacko outsiders. Driven by cynical wit, with text that is spoken and often shrieked, these episodes have the insidery excitement of skits devised and performed by teenagers who got out of class to put on a show, and are going to exact their revenge on the faculty in a way too shrewdly-fashioned to be censored, but recognized by everyone.
The Royal Ballet of Flanders in William Forsythe's Impressing the Czar. Photo by Stephanie Berger.
One section, however—“Bongo Bongo Nageela,” for the entire cast of men and women, all transformed by white blouses and pleated skirts into Catholic school girls—has a darker, grittier aftertaste, as dancer Virginia Hendriksen pointed out on the company Web site. The title of the section refers to Harry Belafonte's famous recording, Hava Nageela, a Hebrew song associated with the Jewish folkdance, the Hora, a circle dance with a grapevine step and a kick, frequently performed at Bar Mitzvahs, weddings and other celebrations. However, as Hendriksen also explains, this section is meant to parody the restrictions and classical discipline of the choreography that dancers are usually required to do. They really hate the iconography of this dance, even though it is actually fun to execute. (The fact that the guys are dressed as girls refers to the special humiliation in the ballet world of dancers being powerless.) So the reference to the Jewish dance and song is meant to be associated with a pejorative idea. Yet, as with many of Forsythe's most popular parodic works, the actual dance steps and imagery are very exciting: the meaner the parody, the better the choreography. This massive circle dance with a tripping syncopation step, placed smack in the middle of centerstage under incendiary lighting, looks Martha Graham’s Celebration channeled through the brain of Rudolf von Laban into a movement choir. Nevertheless, despite the fact that it is by far the most dynamic dance image of Impressing the Czar, the section title adds an ethnic joke to it that makes me a bissell nauseated to remember.
It’s been nearly 20 years since I last saw Ballett Frankfurt perform Impressing the Czar at the now-defunct Pepsico Summerfare festival in Purchase, N.Y., and, although I’ve come to appreciate Forsythe’s quicksilver thinking and theatrical skills more than I did the first time around, I didn't miss what they add up to.
