Afternoon:
8°c
Sarah Frater's rating
, Coolish Q from Cuba
By
Sarah Frater
6 Sep 2006
If you wanted aliens to understand human happiness, you'd show them the ballet Don Quixote. Admittedly, the music is pretty tumtetum, but the 19th-century romcom is sweet and sunny and bright and funny, with two young lovers happily joined after a not too rocky romance and some not too threatening adventures.
All is lightness and good cheer, with some show-off dancing and the chance to see sets and costumes that evoke the baking heat of the Spanish Med.
You'd expect this in spades from Alicia Alonso's Ballet Nacional de Cuba, yet the strange fact is you get no sense of place in her production of Don Q. This is truly baffling, given Cuba's history and the company's very considerable talents.
Last summer the company's Giselle won us over, not something you can say of this autumn's Don Q. A large chunk of the problem is the production, a quaint and incomplete affair, with feeble props, weedy sets and costumes that look like the work of a Bulgarian nylon factory some time around 1972.
Budget production values need not be fatal, provided the dancing and acting is tip-top. Here, unexpectedly, the Cubans were also below last year's par. Actually, the dancing of Viengsay Valdes (Kitri) and Joel Carreno (Basilio) was very special, she bright and strong with a staggering balance, he spinning like a top. Both are compact dancers, and their neatness and precision looked gorgeous.
Also excellent were Carlos Quenedit and Yolanda Correa, he as the bullfighter and she his heel-kicking girlfriend.
However, Don Q is a dance-drama, and everyone has to act. And the truth is that most of the dancers did not. Indeed, many of them looked rushed and careless. We all know that Cuba, a small communist island of just 11 million souls, produces some of the best ballet dancers in the world. The problem is that whizz-bang dancing and slipshod acting is dangerously close to circus.
Ballet Nacional de Cuba is not that, but on this evidence, it needs to be careful.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
Reader views (1)
Opening night of Quixote was marvellously buoyant. Alonso has discovered a fresh and direct way of telling the story without robbing it of its magic. The principals were phenomenal (Carreno - spins, leaps and lifts - and Valdes, world record holder for unsupported balances, surely?) and everyone worked hard to make the story involving.
The matadors were always in sync in their ensemble leaps and all the supporting roles were well taken. In another (welcome) revision, Camacho was not the usual effete fop but a handsome 'red blooded' and, therefore, credible suitor
for Kitri's hand: her father was also a well-delineated character role.
True, Alonso trimmed many of the showy gypsy dances that can make Bolshoi/Maryinsky productions so flambuoyant but we gained in storytelling as we learne from whom the lovers were fleeing and how they arrived in the (potentially hostile) gypsy camp.
Yes, the costumes were not 'in the best possible taste' but one has only has to recall the unfortunate mish mash of garish colours and cheap fabrics that the Bolshoi foisted on their Covent Garden audience (at twice the ticket price!) for their desultory Swan Lake to realise that this aspect of the show was not unique to the Cubans.
Scenery too was rudimentary and un-attractive (Swan Lake was equally guilty in this depertment) but I - and everyone else - was carried away by the charm and technique of this attractive company who should be welcomed back (almost) without reservation. Bravi!
- Clive Burton, London, 07/09/2006 20:36
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