TALES OF LOHR: PITTSBURGH BALLET THEATRE PRESENTS MICHAEL PINK'S "DRACULA"
Also, "This Week in Warhol" finds women revolting
Amazing but true: Until yesterday, in my just over 45 years of living, I had never before attended a ballet. So, when it became time to break in my spectatorial pointe shoes, I opted for the strategy I used for my first outings to the opera, and selected a show with a story with which I was already intimately familiar. That way, tracking the narrative in an unfamiliar artistic form could take a secondary role to pure aesthetic appreciation. Thankfully, there was much artistry and technical skill on display in the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre’s production of Michael Pink’s Dracula, of which I attended the company’s final performance yesterday afternoon at the Benedum Center in the city’s downtown Cultural District.
Director / choreographer Pink, who is currently artistic director of the Milwaukee Ballet, has said of this piece, which originally premiered in 1997 to coincide with the 100th anniversary of Bram Stoker’s original novel, that the goal was to be as faithful to the book as possible. And as the three-act ballet progressed, I was indeed struck by how much fidelity to the original story Pink manages to maintain, while still tailoring the events of the novel to a dance-driven delivery. Of course, Dracula’s hypnotic methods for drawing in his human prey are ideally suited to filtration through the device of the pas de deux, which makes those set pieces slip into the narrative framework like fangs into a virginal throat.
The Ballet Theatre’s corps of dancers takes to this juicily legendary material with aplomb and clear joy of performance. Hannah Carter brings a suitably regal sense of reserve to Mina Harker’s early scenes, then taps into a more fluidly seductive grace as she begins to fall under the vampire’s spell. Mina’s opposite number, the free-spirited, all-too-eagerly tempted Lucy Westenra, is given spice and vigor by Tommie Lin O’Hanlon, whose skirts notably flounce a little higher than every other dancer’s as she pirouettes into the arms of her range of potential suitors (a nice touch of character-through-costume, abetted by designer Lez Brotherston’s lush, period-authentic wardrobe).
As Renfield, the solicitor who loses his mind to the vampire’s thrall, Joseph Parr adeptly incorporates elements of mime and silent-film dramatics into his twitching, lurching portrayal. Corey Bourbonniere’s Jonathan Harker compellingly conveys his character’s fear and desperation as he struggles to combat the terrors of Castle Dracula, and Pink’s choreography astutely gives some Coplandesque high kicks to Lucy’s American suitor Quincy, which Masahiro Haneji pulls off with flair. The ensemble highlights include a rousing Transylvanian peasant dance that turns threatening when a wolf stalks and kills a villager’s infant, and a climactic grave-cracking get-together of an army of Dracula’s undead minions. Special notice should likewise be granted to Grace Rookstool, Diana Yohe, and Marisa Grywalski, who find a chilling triplicate physical persona as Dracula’s lusty yet vicious brides.
As the Count, Colin McCaslin naturally strikes a very different figure from his fellow dancers. His elongated limbs give him a sinister, spiderlike quality, and he makes strong use of his swooping crimson cape to supplement the long arcs and flourishes of his approaches. Though capable of great athletic leaps and of carrying his castmates around the floor with ease, McCaslin’s movements are generally more deliberate than that of any other performer, an appropriate choreographic choice for a character who literally has all of eternity to do his devilry. Pink uses this differentiation of dance style to potent dramatic effect, when O’Hanlon, falling under Dracula’s sway, ratchets down her pace to match the languid gestures of the count. Carter likewise alternates arrestingly between locking into McCaslin’s gliding-through-water gestalt and fighting against his will, the tension showing in both her increasingly frenzied turns and shifts and in her distressed expressions as Dracula buffets her to and fro.
The dancers’ gifts are abetted here by a handsomely mounted production that feels both epic-scaled and lavish. Brotherston also supervises the scenic design, and the sets alternate between the expressionist minimalism of Lucy’s fatal bedchamber and the Gothic sweep of Dracula’s crumbling fortress. David Grill’s atmospheric lighting design creates powerful vistas of shadows and beams of salvific, monster-menacing sunlight. Screens and back-projections bring to life swirling swarms of bats and the doomed hurtle of Harker’s Carpathian train journey, calling eagerly to mind the numerous grand cinematic imaginings of this tale. Driving it all relentlessly onward is Philip Feeney’s original score, a thunderous yet never overly melodramatic mix of churning strings, roaring brass, and exhilarating interpolations of Eastern European instrumentation and occasional creepy wordless chants.
Feeney’s score serves another centrally important purpose, in never letting the viewer forget that what they are watching is indeed a horror story. My biggest concern going into this production of Dracula was that the naturally sensual qualities of ballet (not to mention the company’s decision to mount the production on Valentine’s Day weekend) would cause the show to lean too heavily into the “vampires are sexy” trope, one which I largely reject. You can chisel his jaw and shred his abs all you want, but he’s still a walking corpse that drinks human blood, and that may get me bothered, but it never gets me hot. This goes a long way towards explaining why Nosferatu remains my favorite telling of the Dracula story, as it is the one that perhaps makes its monster the most truly monstrous. Thankfully, this Dracula keeps the tale fairly firmly grounded in the macabre. There is some inevitable erotic heat generated by Dracula’s enchantment of Lucy, and McCaslin and Bourbonniere’s intense physicality (not to mention Bourbonniere’s shirtless, muscular torso) give Harker and Dracula’s confrontation a more sexual charge than usual. But by and large, Dracula is portrayed here as what he truly is. When he finally bares his chest, it’s to let Mina drink blood from his slashed-open pectoral, and the effect is disturbing, not titillating.
If I have one gripe with Pink’s Dracula, it’s that it arguably peaks a bit early. The first act is a near-frenetic runaway engine of spectacular effects, bold visual moments, and music that seems to always be rising to ever more thrilling crescendos. The second act is a much more languorous affair by comparison, commencing with a long seaside party scene that introduces a number of new characters, but runs on too long for the little concrete advancement it brings to the story. Lucy’s claiming by the vampire is likewise a slow, dreamlike affair, and the lulling effect of the dancers’ movements, combined with the subtlest music in Feeney’s score, threatens to bring the second act to a close on a somewhat torpid note. But then Lucy’s vampiric turn kicks things into high voltage again, and the third act rockets forward to a final confrontation that is thrillingly staged and genuinely exciting.
Of course, a key question remains unanswered: Does this mean that I like ballet, or merely that I liked this ballet version of a story I already enjoy? Only the viewing of additional ballet stagings is likely to hold the answer. But the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre’s Dracula brought me ample enough rewards that I am definitely ready to explore this, for me, heretofore uncharted performing arts form in new detail…and with fire in my blood.
THIS WEEK IN WARHOL
FEBRUARY 16, 1972
At New York’s Cine Malibu, following several screenings on the West Coast, Paul Morrissey’s Women in Revolt, “presented” by Andy Warhol, opens for official release.
Women in Revolt is originally conceived as a satire of second-wave and radical feminism, perhaps sparked by Warhol’s near-death at the hands of troubled feminist crusader Valerie Solanas (who is mentioned by name in the film, as is her notorious self-distributed misandrist primer, The SCUM Manifesto). To play the film’s titular trio of variously liberated and insurrectionist ladies, Warhol and Morrissey enlist three remarkable transgender performers: The brash, drug-addicted Holly Woodlawn, who earned strong reviews for her work in Morrissey’s previous film Trash; Jackie Curtis, a quick-witted writer of acclaimed avant-garde plays; and Candy Darling, who aspires to inherit the mantle of Kim Novak and other classic Hollywood ice-blonde glamour sirens. (Darling has previously appeared in Curtis’s plays Vain Victory and Glamour, Glory and Gold, the latter of which also features Robert DeNiro in the first stage role of his career.) Additional cast members include kabuki-stylish fashion model Jane Forth and, in an early appearance, Martin Kove, who goes on to feature in everything from The Karate Kid to Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood. Women in Revolt will be the final film which Warhol will personally supervise from behind the camera, as Curtis insists that unless Warhol lenses the picture himself, she will not lend her presence to the production.
The film has a long, drawn-out shoot that lasts well over a year, and its difficult birthing process is reflected in its frequent changes of title, being referred to in documents found in the Warhol archives as Make Date, Pearls Before Swine, and Andy Warhol’s Earthwomen, among numerous others. Its premiere screening, at the Filmex Film Festival in Los Angeles in 1971, gives the film the sledgehammer-blunt title Sex. When it opens a month later in L.A. for a regular commercial screening, it is now titled Andy Warhol’s Women.
Perhaps due to its inflammatory subject matter (but more likely owing to the transgenderism of its principal cast), Warhol is unable to secure a distribution deal for Women in Revolt, ultimately personally funding a four-walling-style release strategy out of his own pocket. Despite the film’s ultimately disappointing box office returns, it does garner some positive notice among the critical establishment, including from the New York Times’ Vincent Canby, who declares: “Probably no man, not even Norman Mailer, will ever have the last word on women’s liberation, but until one does, perhaps…Women in Revolt will do.”
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