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Oh, what fun it was to ride on a bus with our students to New York City for the Crime and Punishment ballet at the American Ballet Theater.
The only thing which I knew about this production (choreographer Helen Pickett, director James Bonas) was that the role of the murderer Raskolnikov would be performed by a ballerina. The night before, I got carried away and imagined, while drifting into a self-inflicted hallucination, how I would stage a ballet based on this bloody novel. The main question in my semi-sleep was the same question that Ivan Karamazov asked of the Devil in another one of Dostoevsky’s novels: “What would become of an axe?” How can one dance the axe and all that? I thought it would be best to give the axe to the conductor instead of the baton. Just imagine: the audience sees his armored hand: right – left – violins – cellos. The music of the axe and the bloody mess on stage (and in the modern world).
But this wasn’t the case. Instead, there was stylish music, reminiscent of old silent cinema, by Isobel Waller-Bridge (the sister of the brilliant actress-writer from Fleabag), and a good, stage-by-stage summary of the novel by means of dance (paradoxically, Dostoevsky himself, like his realist contemporaries, did not like ballet at all, considering it an aristocratic art form and criticizing it for conveying emotions “by means of hands and feet”; as if in his own novels, the melodramatic gestures that nauseated Nabokov did not serve the same purpose!).
I liked that each character had her or his own ballet persona, a set of individual movements akin to the monologue in a novel that dizzily revolves around its own axis.
The egotistic and hypocritical attorney Luzhin was dancing like a marionette, comically puffing himself up and jumping in self-awe.
The drunkard Marmeladov staggered like a drunkard. His unfortunate wife was magnificently decaying. Her convulsive movements, melodramatic, like those of a star of the early Russian cinema Vera Kholodnaya, accompanied by coughing sounds, created a vivid image of unbearable suffering. TB is not to be.
The sleuth Porfiry circled around Raskolnikov, weaving spider webs.
Raskolnikov’s noble sister, Dunya (the best, in my opinion, in this ensemble) danced noble indignation and offended virtue. With a pistol, she shot at the lascivious, twitching, and contorted Svidrigailov in his expensive jacket – bang-bang, – but, like in the novel, missed. The villain (or rather, his silhouette, illuminated through a drawn door somewhere at the top of the stage) shot himself later, and good riddance! His bundle of cynical movements turned out to be alien to the feast of dancers passionately seeking reformation through articulated (gesticulated) suffering.
On the other hand, Raskolnikov’s hardworking friend Razumikhin was great: generous, athletic, solid, and reliable as the Statue of Liberty. His lyrical pas de deux with Dunya toward the end received deserved applause. Yet it was a somewhat unexpected intrusion of the classical aesthetics of the Bolshoi into a modernist production in New York City.
It’s actually curious how the experimental ballet ultimately steered toward that conditional fairy-tale – “the art of better days when grog went hissing down with kisses ten a penny,” in Joseph Brodsky’s words from a poem dedicated to Baryshnikov. Raskolnikov not only split apart under investigation (“raskol” in Russian means “schism,” or “split”) but, thank God, repented, emerging from a small dog’s cage in Siberia. He was redeemed by Sonia, the religious prostitute to whom the murderer had earlier brought his bloodstained shirt. Svidrigailov stole this shirt from her to blackmail Dunya, but she took it back from the villain and brought it to her mother and Razumikhin (this somehow reminded me of the red overcoat [svitka] in Mykola Gogol’s work – by the way, Dunya was played by the wonderful Ukrainian ballerina Kristina Shevchenko, – but, most likely, the audience didn’t know about this and might have associated the piece of cloth with something from a bullfight in Carmen).
Speaking of color. Marmeladov’s daughter, the prostitute, danced in a yellow dress (a “yellow ticket” was a license for sexual work in Imperial Russia) – at first, in front of a crowd, whose uniform caps and scarves, as my colleague pointed out, resembled the crowd in Doctor Zhivago with Omar Sharif, then – in Raskolnikov’s tiny room, and finally – in Siberia in the cold.
Snowflakes, by the way, were projected onto a transparent screen, which played an important role in the production, consciously imitating silent cinema. At the very beginning, a typewriter appeared, typing out the awkward word “ПРЕСТУПНОСТИ” (lit. CRIMINALITIES), which presumably meant “преступления” or “crimes,” but they did not consult a native speaker for some reason.
And what about the axe? Quelle idée! It was projected onto the screen as well, along with terrifying fragments of some transformation of the old pawnbroker’s hideous face, which reminded me of the sentence from an introductory essay from the Perestroika era, “clean and bright pieces of Captain’s Daughter.”
As for the role of Raskolnikov, I really liked the idea of presenting him as a female character, and the dancer Cassandra Trenary turned out to be excellent. But, in my opinion, the result was something else: the small ballerina with the agile shoulders and sharp movements of restless hands played more of a fluttering Gavroche on the barricades than the possessed student-rebel, haunted by a terrifying idea, who never repented in the novel.
“There is hope,” – the explanatory text in the libretto explained the end. Indeed, as we know, hope always dies last, dancing us “through the panic” “’til we gathered safely in.”
A disclaimer. I am by no means a ballet expert, although in the late 1970s, I did dance the sailors’ dance as a child in the folk-dance ensemble at the Palace of Culture of the Likhachev Factory in Moscow.