When guest stars rule dance
It sometimes seems today as if every ballet company in the world is fronted by a representative sampling of about a dozen perpetual guest stars. Each has a company that they at least nominally call home, but they are continuously orbiting out on their own.
Sometimes they need no more firmament or context than their own reflected glitter, which is what brings five of ballet’s busiest men to City Center later this month for the Kings of the Dance. Reigning this year are David Hallberg (ABT and the Bolshoi), Marcelo Gomes (ABT), Ivan Vasiliev (Mikhailovsky Ballet in St. Petersburg, Russia), Guillaume Coté (National Ballet of Canada) and Denis Matvienko (Mariinsky).
The current roster dominance of guest stars certainly robs performance opportunities from a company’s full-time members. It also works against the possibility of establishing a homogenous company style, which at one time was the overriding artistic ambition of the world’s major companies. On the other hand, it quells within the host company what is one of the worst occupational hazards: complacency.
Largely trained in the state-supported ballet academies of Europe and the former Soviet Union, the guesting globe-trotters almost invariably manifest stage-readiness and confidence, a certain worldliness and glamour. Companies can benefit from their knowledge, professionalism and experience. But the guest-star treadmill as a rule is not a range or artistry widening exercise.
Principal dancers get the most solo stage time, so administrations tend to pick people who are likely to appeal to the widest demographic. Guest stars are on stage in more places than “mere” principal dancers, and they tend to market easily comprehended physical and performance temperament. It’s easy for them to get into bad habits, become self-indulgent or rely on special effects.
The stamina needed to survive their itineraries mark them as superhuman, but of course they are not. Jet lag and fatigue are ever-present impediments to quality.
When the Berlin Ballet’s Polina Semionova—a prominent ballerina in the guest tribe—made her ABT debut as Kitri in a Saturday matinee of Don Quixote last May, her performance was less stellar than it might have been. For me, her schedule loomed as the likely culprit, all the more so when I later read in the New York Times that she had left the theater after her debut and gone directly to the airport to catch a flight to La Scala in Milan for her next gig. (She missed the flight.)
It’s a short career, and planning a comfortable retirement is nothing to be ashamed of, but I would appreciate a bit more frankness about it. When Hallberg joined the Bolshoi, what you probably didn’t hear (I didn’t) amid the press hoopla was the salient fact that, as well as artistic satisfaction, pecuniary rewards had to have been a major factor in his decision.
Certainly, Kings of the Dance has been lucrative for the kings as well as for impresario Sergei Danilian. But Kings aims for a degree of creative accomplishment as well by commissioning new works for the reigning monarchs; this month, there will be no less than eight New York premieres shown.
Read more by Joel Lobenthal at Lobenthal.com.
