manon
about today’s performance A world that embraces both luxury and poverty, passion and misfortune… Since its world premiere in 1974 at London’s Royal Ballet, Manon by the British dance dramatist Sir Kenneth MacMillan has been regarded as a masterly example of the evening-length narrative ballet. To represent the love story between the titular heroine and Des Grieux, that descends from the highest joy to the most hopeless misery, the choreographer and his musical arrangers chose compositions by Jules Massenet, though without including any music from his opera setting of the same story. MacMillan’s libretto is based on Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut from volume seven of Mémoires et aventures d’un homme de qualité qui s’est retiré du monde by Abbé Prévost, published in 1731. As in previous ballet versions – Manon first appeared on the ballet stage in 1830, long before she became an operatic heroine – in MacMillan’s adaptation the theme proves to be particularly well suited to representation in purely physical terms. This is exemplified in the highly emotional pas de deux for the leading couple that have become highlights of the ballet. The work, which has become one of the most popular in the world repertoire primarily through its highly dramatic depiction of the principal characters, was first danced at the Vienna State Opera in 1993 in a new design by Peter Farmer. Ballet Director Alessandra Ferri also enjoys a long history with MacMillan’s Manon, having made a brilliant debut in the title role with the Royal Ballet in London: “I danced my first Manon with the Royal Ballet when I was 19. The role has been with me from the very beginning and has had the most profound influence on me. Manon is a ballet that I love most deeply, one that is of great importance to me and which I believe should definitely be passed on to subsequent generations. It is one of the great classics of the second half of the 20th century and at the same time a story that invites us to reflect on the position of women in the 18th century – and to a certain extent also today.”
ABOUT TODAY’S PERFORMANCE
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ALASTAIR MACAULAY
“The choreographer Kenneth MacMillan was famous in his day for taking ballet where it had not previously gone. (...) In his six full-length ballets, he created sophisticated societies on stage, only to show why the leading characters would reject or be rejected by them. (...) So how much did MacMillan make Manon a projection of self-deceiving masculine desire (‘she drove me to my ruin’)? How much is she a gold-digger, an active agent in her own ascent to bejeweled finery? And how much is she the victim of a profoundly sexist society in that rise and then in her fall? Her story is not interesting unless all these questions keep arising – as MacMillan intended they should.”
ABBÉ PRÉVOST
“Manon was a creature of most extraordinary disposition. Never had mortal a greater contempt for money, and yet she was haunted by perpetual dread of wanting it. Her only desire was for pleasure and amusement. She would never have wished to possess a sou, if pleasure could be procured without money. She never even cared what our purse contained, provided she could pass the day agreeably. Being neither fond of play nor at all dazzled by the desire of great wealth, nothing was more easy than to satisfy her, by daily finding out amusements suited to her moderate wishes. But it became by habit a thing so absolutely necessary for her to have her mind thus occupied, that, without it, it was impossible to exercise the smallest influence over her temper or inclinations. Although she loved me tenderly, and I was the only person, as she often declared, in whose society she could ever find the pure enjoyments of love, yet I felt thoroughly convinced that her attachment could not withstand certain apprehensions. She would have preferred me, even with a moderate fortune, to the whole world; but I had no kind of doubt that she would, on the other hand, abandon me for some new M. de B–, when I had nothing more to offer her than fidelity and love.”
the story of manon lescaut and the chevalier des grieux
The Meeting I was seventeen years old, and was finishing my studies at Amiens, whither my parents, who belonged to one of the first families in P..., had sent me. (...) I had fixed the day for my departure from Amiens. Alas! That I had not fixed it one day sooner! I should then have carried to my father’s house my innocence untarnished! The very evening before my expected departure, as I was walking with my friend, whose name was Tiberge, we saw the Arras diligence arrive, and sauntered after it to the inn, at which these coaches stop. We had no other motive than curiosity. Some women alighted, and immediately retired into the inn. One remained behind: she was very young, and stood by herself in the court, while a man of advanced age, who appeared to have charge of her, was busy in getting her luggage from the vehicle. She struck me as being so extremely beautiful, that I, who had never before thought of the difference 11
THE STORY OF MANON LESCAUT AND THE CHEVALIER DES GRIEUX
on the aesthetics of literary ballet ANNA BEKE
It is now fifty years ago that Kenneth MacMillan’s evening-length narrative ballet Manon (1974) received its world premiere – and it has long been considered one of the canonical works of literary ballet. At the same time, that production marked the high point of the genre in the second half of the 20th century. MacMillan himself, a central figure in the revival of narrative ballet and Scotland’s most important choreographer – along with Frederick Ashton, John Cranko and John Neumeier – represents the generation of choreographers who re-established the dramatic story ballet after a phase of aesthetic upheaval and developed it significantly. In their works the productive tension between the literary original and the nature of dance is especially clear and transposed into an independent artistic form. One characteristic feature of MacMillan’s personal choreographic oeuvre is the thorough psychological grounding of his characters. These do not appear as idealised stage heroes or heroines – as they usually did in the story ballets of the 19th century – but as ambivalent, internally conflicted individuals, whose actions occupy territory where personal desires transgress social norms. Central themes here are the search for intense – and often passionately physical – experience and the existential isolation of the individual. In Manon, based on Abbé Prévost’s novel from 1731, these aspects combine in a dance drama of high emotional and dramaturgical intensity that clearly demonstrates the original literary text’s fusion of the adventure novel with a drama of high feeling. Manon has a paradigmatic place within MacMillan’s work as a whole – comparable literary adaptions can be found in, for example, Las Hermanas (1963) after Federico
ON THE AESTHETICS OF LITERARY BALLET
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García Lorca’s La casa de Bernarda Alba, Different Drummer (1984) after Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck and above all in his adaptation of Romeo and Juliet (1965) after William Shakespeare, which remains extremely successful to this day – as the ultimate literary ballet. Each of these pieces demonstrates that works in this genre are not mere scenic retellings of literary texts, which would lead into an artistic void, but represent a holistic process of transformation between media. As a consequence, literary ballet can be understood as a specific form of choreographic adaptation in which an underlying work composed in linguistic form is transposed into a primarily non-verbal, physically based semiotic system. The semantic structure of the literary text is not reproduced but is transformed into a new aesthetic arrangement composed of movement, music, space and light. The challenge that every choreographer must face consists in enabling the narrative, psychological and affective dimensions to be appreciated without recourse to language – a complex undertaking. On this topic John Neumeier repeatedly emphasises in interviews that in the last resort it is necessary for the creator of dance to free themselves from the original work to be able to transfer its “spirit” into an autonomous choreographic form and produce a new and original artwork. Viewed historically, literary ballet is closely linked with the development of narrative ballet and the establishment of stage dance after 1661: as early as the 17th century, the prominent high baroque team of Jean-Baptiste Lully and Molière aimed to integrate dance and storytelling with their genre of comédie-ballet. In the early 18th century in London, John Weaver demonstrated the beginnings of a narrative dance that conveyed affects solely through mime and gesture in works such as The Tavern Bilkers (1702) and The Loves of Mars and Venus (1717). The decisive practical and theoretical impulse was delivered from 1760 onwards by dance reformer Jean-Georges Noverre with his concept of “ballet en action” that demanded a coherent plot and the expressive representation of inner states in the form of credible “human representation”. At the same time his rival Gasparo Angiolini devised a pantomime ballet in Vienna in close collaboration with Christoph Willibald Gluck that also espoused ideals of natural actions and emotional truth: “If the public does not wish to deprive itself of the greatest beauties of our art, then it must become accustomed to being moved to tears by our ballets,” the choreographer wrote in his passionate preface to Don Juan in 1761. As ballet became progressively more literary and increasingly took spoken theatre as a model, it began by adapting classical texts, along with the works of authors such as Molière and Voltaire. At the same time, with Antoine et Cléopâtre (1765) and Les Amours d’Henri IV (1763/66) Noverre became one of the first to choreograph Shakespeare ballets. An enduring paradigm shift came with La Fille mal gardée (1789) by Jean Dauberval, that marked a change from mythological to contemporary bourgeois settings while also representing one of the few comic ballets in the history of dance. The focus shifted again in the 19th century when romantic ballets transferred literary motifs to a dual poetic and fantastic structure, ideally represented for example in La Sylphide or the classic Giselle (1841) based on Heinrich Heine’s Elementargeister (1834). Classic narrative ballet would attain formal perfection in Tsarist Russia under Marius 21
ON THE AESTHETICS OF LITERARY BALLET
Madison Young (Manon), Alessandro Frola (Des Grieux)
Alice McArthur (Manon), António Casalinho (Des Grieux)