The Prague Post Online: Tempo: Male call

September 7th, 2008

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Male call

It's not drag; it's classical dance

By Brooke Edge
For The Prague Post
May 9th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO

Some pieces are played for laughs, but the troupe is serious about showing off its hard-earned classical ballet skills. enlarge

Upon viewing the talents of legendary Russian dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, New York City Ballet impresario Lincoln Kirstein called him “the sum of masculine possibility.”

Valery Mikhailovsky evidently shared the same sentiment toward a wider population of Russian males when, in 1992, he formed a ballet troupe made up entirely of men. It was a radical idea 15 years ago, when Russia was still slowly integrating Western ideas. And it still ruffles feathers among some classical dance fans today. Prague audiences will have a chance to judge for themselves when the St. Petersburg Male Ballet makes its debut in the Golden City next week.

St. Petersburg Male Ballet

When: Wednesday, May 16, at 8
Where: Congress Center
Tickets: 6901,190 Kč, available through Ticketpro, Tickestream and at the venue

The company is, first and foremost, a troupe of classically trained dancers serious about their art. The members realize they’re asking for laughs when they portray women, but want to ensure the frivolity is carried out with technique that would make Vaganova proud.

“Some parts are done for fun to make people laugh, but it still must be done with a high level of ballet,” explains Marina Tsydzik, East European representative for the St. Petersburg Male Ballet.

“We don’t pretend there’s no comic aspect in our shows,” Mikhailovsky says. “It would be really strange if people weren’t amused by watching grown-up men dancing obviously female roles. But you cannot create a quality performance with no prior experience or good knowledge of what you’re reinterpreting. All my dancers are hard-working and very talented professionals.”

He sums up the company’s approach to the classics this way: “Let’s keep all the beauty from classical dance and perform it with a bit of humor.”

In the current program, titled Man & …, the first half is devoted to a one-act work choreographed especially for the St. Petersburg Male Ballet by Russian-American choreographer Andrej Iwanow. Mikhailovsky describes it as “a unique composition of various rhythms and emotions. It’s creative, and really helps us feel dance fully and express many human feelings in this part of the program.”

The second half is the fun portion of the evening, and no doubt what many audience members will come to see: all-male interpretations of scenes and pas de deux from such famous ballets as Esmeralda and Don Quixote.

“It’s pretty funny to sit in the audience and watch people,” Tsydzik says. “First they are shocked, then they are interested, and finally they start laughing.”

Serious about fun
Reviews of the St. Petersburg Male Ballet performances have found the troupe’s original choreography light on substance and heavy on dramatization, and called the company out for an over-reliance on batting eyelashes and goofy hyperfemininity during the classical reinterpretations. All critics, though, have hailed the company for its strict adherence to flawless technique and mastery of classical ballet, whether the dancers are squeezed into tutus or not.

Getting into those tutus isn’t easy. A great deal of retraining is necessary for new members of the company, including months of work learning to dance en pointe and from a new view of partnering. The payoff, though, is more time onstage and not being outshone by glamorous ballerinas.

“We don’t want the public to laugh at dancers who are not capable of controlling their ballet shoes,” Mikhailovsky says. “We want them to be amazed and wonder how it is possible.”

Classical dance fans may be familiar with a well-known predecessor to the St. Petersburg troupe, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, an all-male ballet company founded in New York City in 1974. This group, in which members often create fake names and comic personas (including a ballerina/KGB agent), made a reputation for hokey versions of classical ballets, more like a drag show in South Beach than an outlet for traditional dance.

Tsydzik is quick to draw a distinction between the companies. Both are fun, she says, but the Russian troupe places great emphasis on not only entertaining audiences, but showcasing the best in Russian ballet training.

Mikhailovsky himself is a product of that revered ballet tradition. He graduated from the Kiev Choreographic Academy in 1971, and then danced with the National Opera and Ballet Theatre in Odessa. As social limits loosened after the fall of communism, he saw an opportunity to found his own company.

“Russian ballet was in stagnation, and I knew that if it was to change, I had to come up with something really original, something that had never been done before,” Mikhailovsky says. “Male ballet brought some fresh air into the world of ballet, showed a new approach to the classical repertoire and, at the same time, kept everything which is the most beautiful in classical dance.”

Not surprisingly, the concept took some time to catch on. “This is true of any art,” Tsydzik says with a shrug. In particular, Mikhailovsky and his cohorts took an exceptional amount of flack from their colleagues.

“The public liked the show from the beginning,” Tsydzik says. “But the professional world took more time.”

Tsydzik knows many audience members in Prague are knowledgeable about classical ballet and love the art form. That, she says, usually transcends the fact that the swan onstage has an Adam’s apple. In fact, the company’s debut appearances in new cities are usually so well-received that they lead to return engagements.

The St. Petersburg Male Ballet is hoping Prague audiences will be that open-minded, not to mention up for a good time.

Brooke Edge can be reached at tempo@praguepost.com

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