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Staging and
choreography
Maguy Marin
Music
Serge Prokofiev
Set design
and costumes
Montserrat
Casanova
Masks
Monique Luyton
Music recorded
by
Lyon Opera
Orchestra
Conducted by
Yakov Kreizberg
Cinderella
Ksenia
Kastalskaia
The Prince
Andrew
Boddington
Matriarch
Julie Tardy
Ugly Sisters
Meredith Doncolo
Amandine Francois
Fairy Godmother
Marketa Plzakova
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Sadler's
Wells
18
- 20 February 2003 |
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Using influences
from mime and puppetry, and even what
looks very much like the occasional
trope from Chinese opera movement, along
with exquisite observation of the way
children move and react, and the beautiful
ballet skills of his dancers - and still
more: an immense reservoir of imagination
- Maguy Marin has created an extraordinary
piece of dance theatre. It combines
enchantment and strange menace - under
the romance of the tale as Marin tells
it run very dark skeins, unsettling
and surreal, hinting at cruelties and
disappointments, at terrors and loneliness,
of the kinds peculiar to childhood.
But the charm not just of the story
but of Marin's remarkable telling of
it wins triumphantly, just as it should,
driving away the shadows, and with them
the ugliness and cruelty which blights.
Marin
squarely faces the challenge of the
Cinderella tale's saccharin possibilities,
and defeats them hands down. For with
the darkness implicit in the tale, and
the stroke-of-genius use of masks to
introduce poignancy, enchantment, beauty,
and an amazing degree of expressiveness,
Marin has searched into the corners
of Prokofiev's powerful narrative score
and found ways of giving the central
emotions a remarkably exact symbolisation.
There is much humour in the process,
and each of the main characters is given
a gestural motif to characterise him
or her. Thus the matriarch settles her
bosoms before taking any action, the
Prince steps everywhere with infinite
grace, the Fairy Godmother exercises
her illuminated wand like a mechanical
doll.
Cinderella
herself is completely realised in character,
from the way she wakes up in her kitchen
corner at the beginning to the way she
accepts the Prince's embraces at the
end. Although this is a grown-up tale
whose themes need no explanation from
any Bruno Bettleheim, Marin has woven
the richly-conceived Cinderella persona
out of a child's mannerisms, a brilliant
stroke because it simultaneously captures
innocence and awakening, and makes it
obvious that the glass slipper could
fit no one but her.
The set
is striking and fully integrated into
the action, each element necessary for
advancing or commenting on the tale.
The use of toys and tricks characteristic
of an Edwardian nursery is another of
many contributory strokes of imaginative
genius; they not only fit the story
perfectly, but double the potency of
its telling.
If the
staging and choreography constitute
work of the highest imaginative order,
no praise can do justice to the brilliant
realisation of Marin's intentions by
his troupe. Lyon Opera Ballet is a collection
of fine dancers, for whom the highest
classical standards are taken as read,
to which they add an admirable repertoire
of skills in mime and acting. They combined
to produce a wonderful evening of theatrical
dance, and an object lesson in the limitless
possibilities of ballet to entrance.
AC
Grayling |
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