Back to my usual programming - A glimpse into how I used to spend my weekends before all the kpop stuff happened.
Bejart Ballet Lausanne featuring Kim Kimin
Kim Kimin is one of two Korean ballet dancers who are at the Mariinsky Ballet, which to Korean balletomanes counts for a lot because it's one of the homegrounds of ballet. The other company we get super excited for when a Korean makes it big is Paris Opera Ballet. I have to confess that I bought this ticket because I confused him with Jeon Minchul who is younger, taller, and prettier (face and body). OOPSIE. Getting this ticket was exactly like getting a ticket for a kpop concert, where it was over in literally a minute after box office online open, and this is when the actual cost of the orchestra seat (which I got) is literally double the cost of the flat-rate Kpop tickets.
I've been sick (I'm so bored with saying I've been sick, but I have, and it won't end) so I didn't even bother looking up the program or anything so it was all a surprise. I didn't even know what was even going to be danced. I arrived barely in time to get in my seat before curtain up, for one thing.
What I know about Maurice Bejart is that a) he took in Suzanne Farrell from the NYCB after she and Balanchine had a terrible breakup of their working (never sexual) relationship and everyone in the mainstream ballet world was too terrified of Balanchine's power (and losing rights to perform his masterpieces) that nobody would hire the ballerina acknowledged to be the most important American one to ever exist even at the time) and b) that his ballets are about men, masculinity, male beauty, male power.
The first ballet
The first ballet seemed to have some sort of plot. Everyone is in black except for a Eurotrash looking dude in a cream Armani suit and aviator sunglasses like he's an extra in Miami Vice. He makes a very Kpop crown with his hands and tries to give it to his son who refuses or fights it off or something. There's a funeral, and then in the back shortly after there's also some sort of wedding. It was a sparse set with few props but someone goes on a trip with a rolling suitcase. There was a young Asian woman ballerina who was getting very sexually bullied by gigantic white male ballet dancers, where one or other of them kept pushing her at the a third one, the son of Mr. Eurotrash.
There was INCREDIBLE partnering, by the way, during these like, Are they fucking or fighting? pas de deux between the young Asian woman ballerina and her three male partners. She was absolutely fearless, launching herself and leaping on their shoulders and being swung upside down in these very violent looking throws, and they were all to the last incredibly fit and strong, so that they could actually toss their partners. This sort of upper body power is just not available in Korean ballet, and I got such a thrill. This is what's missing for me from Kpop - the thrills of watching men physically support women to fly around, to extend their body lines, to provide support for feats of impossible balance. I love this about ballet - in pas de deux, the woman dances, the man is the support and infrastructure.
Mr. Eurotrash kept coming back to force the increasingly miserable young man to dance with him and go where he wanted to go. There was a gun introduced at some point but the boy can't use it. There was a very tall white woman ballerina who was extremely muscular and powerful, and on pointe she just so impressively tall, who dominated all the men on stage but then would succumb to fits of hysteria and crumble.
I don't understand this story at all, I kept thinking.
Then the tall woman is trying to rest and the hysterical young man who keeps getting bullied by Mr. Eurotrash in the cream suit bursts in on her and the have a fight, where she keeps grabbing his head and she is much less powerful than he is, and then he shoots his gun at the wall in impotent rage and -
Polonius's corpse comes falling out of the wall.
OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH oh this is Hamlet. Ah. AHHHHHHHHHH Oh.
I almost burst into inappropriate laughter at my completely not clocking that this was Hamlet this whole time. So then once the Hamlet filter was on everything made a lot more sense.
So then you had, you know, the death of Ophelia, which was actually the one purely beautiful and innovative sequence in this whole ballet. They use a long piece of plastic and a wind machine to show 'the river.' Ophelia, the fearless Asian woman ballerina, wraps the 'fabric' of the 'river' around herself, at first joyfully, and then gets 'caught' in it. The more she struggles, the more wound up and obscured she gets in the plastic, until finally she 'dies.' It was so well done - moving, scary, beautiful. This ballerina - Lee Minkyung - also did an astonishingly accomplished job being a 'corpse' when Laertes comes back (with his suitcase!) just in time to find her funeral in progress. I want to see her do Juliet's corpse-dance with Romeo, because it's technically so hard to express the 'corpse' elements while your partner is dancing with your 'dead' body in a ballet.
The net effect of Hamlet as a ballet though is that Hamlet becomes very unimportant. This is inevitable since nothing much happens to Hamlet in the actual story. The person that everything happens to is actually ... Ophelia. So this "Hamlet" version, by a woman, Valentina Turcu actually should've been called Ophelia. The decision to have King Hamlet's ghost be youthful rather than elderly was a bad choice - why would getting poisoned by his younger brother restore his 'youth' to him in death? Anyway, even though Lee Minkyung was incredible, this ballet as a whole was a bit of a failure.
The Second Ballet
This one I recognized from the music - Firebird. But, oh jeez. It was a bit painful to sit through. The costumes were so ugly. I just could not get over how ugly the costumes were. You had all these physically perfect people (they're all ballet dancers), and yet Bejart or his costume designer managed to find a way to dress these men that made them look really ungainly and wrong somehow.
The movements were so ugly too. The final set piece, where the whole company is on stage and they create this complicated latticework of human bodies (in these hideous red costumes) with one male dancer being the "platform" and another male dancer hoisted on his back, belly-to-back while they both mime wing motions with their arms as the 'platform' dancers goes up and down in squats like he's a hydraulic pump was one of the most unfortunate man-on-man partnering I've seen in a WHILE.
Bolero
So the reason people bought tickets to this was to see Kim Kimin do Bolero. (He was the Firebird also, by the way). And see, Bejart just didn't have good taste in music, I think. There are certain things that just shouldn't be ballets, and Bolero is one of them.
So a shirtless Kim Kimin stood on a red platform in the center of the stage while the entire company of men, about, I don't know, 30? people - sat in a judgmental half circle around him, facing us. He starts out, in time with the music, doing little hand -wrist isolations, and then arm circles, and then basic front-back steps as the Ravel build up happens. He never gets off the platform, so he's kind of trapped on this stage within a stage. There was only space to do like, one jete in each direction and there's of course the risk of falling off this stage-on-a -stage so there isn't a lot of jumping.
It started to look like incompetent Kpop, actually. Kpop also changes steps every two or four beats, and most of the motions are not complicated to execute.
The other 'movement' that Kim could do was to walk in a hip-swaying half circle around his cage, making exhortations with his arms for the watching male dancers to join him. And they do, bit by bit, in fives and eights. They come to their feet and start to dance in a circle, facing the central dancer on the raised platform, mirroring his movements.
And in the end, everyone is up, doing something, in a big crowded circle as the central dancer's movements get more "extreme" (read, less balletic, more flopping himself around).
I don't know what this looked like to people when it was first done, but it has not aged well. I think the point of this was that the man in the center, on the red platform, is a sort of thought leader or like, shaman of dance or passion or art or something, and at first he's very lonely, starting gently, but as he gains in confidence (and boosted by the music) he gradually persuades 'the world' to join him in this ecstatic union of movement and passion.
I think that was the intent.
The net effect though, to me, in this time, is that there was a stripper who was working really hard to try to earn his money from his very bored patrons, and then at some point the drugs they took kicked in and it turned into an orgy, where thirty people were trying to top one poor bottom, who was trying not to get dragged off his 'stage' to have any chance of surviving till morning.
The woman next to me really loved it, and screamed so loud and I so SO SO wanted to tell her:
KPOP DOES THIS BETTER.
If you want to see men giving off testosterone and pheromones on stage for the female gaze, KPOP DOES THIS BETTER. The guys are hotter, the movements are better, the costumes are more gorgeous, and the music is more fun.
It was impressive to me that Kim Kimin could memorize this neverending series of arbitrary movements to very dance-unfriendly music for a mercilessly uninterrupted 13 minutes where all eyes were on him the entire time. It must've been exhausting and terrifying.
Overall, I regretted spending money on this, though. I didn't get what i wanted out of it, at all.
The Labeque Sisters playing Philip Glass: Cocteau Trilogy
The next day, I went to see the Labeque Sisters playing modern classical piano. This was much more interesting and enjoyable.
First of all, these ladies are in their 70s - so it felt like watching a prodigious feat of memory, stamina and talent, to see two sisters who have been performing together for 55 years play devilishly difficult and complicated music, and so well.
I also love Phillip Glass but there's some music of his that can only be listened to by me in concert, because much of his music doesn't really have a melody per se, that situates you in an easy place in the score. I need the forced concentration of a concert to fully let the music happen to me.
They made a very cool choice to have an almost blackened stage the whole time, with only the light needed for the pianists to see the score and for their playing to be visible to us, and instead to have the most gorgeous LED chandelier play a free-association inviting light show, with subtly changing colors, moving shadows, and sparkles, along with the music. Brilliant.
Elton John, Brian May, Roger Taylor, and John Deacon perform “The Show Must Go On” at the Béjart Ballet premiere, January 17th, 1997. This was the last time John performed live with Brian and Roger.
Les danseurs Alanna Archibald et Antoine Le Moal dans "Béjart Fête Maurice" spectacle et troupe créés par Maurice Béjart (1987) et dirigés depuis par Gil Roman (2007) au Palais des Congrès, février 2020.
