In this ballet we see Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s emotions one minute on simmer and then oscillate between violent extremes and slip into his dream-world the next. We, the audience are privy to seeing through a key-hole in the wings – his naked emotional character- in his autobiographical music that mirrors his tormented self.
In the opening scene Tchaikovsky is in bed and reminiscing turbulent events of his adolescence with his Double or alter-ego present. Dramatic lavender and crimson chiffon costumes are given more lustre by lighting effects. We see symbolic pall-bearers that reflect Tchaikovsky’s phobia about death. There is a gilded frame of the Domes and Spires of a St. Petersburg landscape.
But within this social and cultural milieu it is important to note that in the society he moved in, whilst homosexuality was regarded with horror, Tchaikovsky’s attachments remained with members of his own sex.
Tchaikovsky made desperate attempts to conceal his real feelings, and this agonising over his interior life was reflected in the turbulence of his musical compositions, such as Act 1 Symphony No 5, and Act 2 Serenade for Strings in C Major, which saw the Eifman Ballet’s conductor’s baton being flung offstage, and in his creation of characters such as Rothbart the Sorcerer in Swan Lake.
He was haunted by his fear of death and by the emotional trauma of his hallucinations. Tchaikovsky, as an adolescent, attended the school of Jurisprudence in St. Petersburg. His biographer Edwin Evans in 1907 writes, “that the seeds of his homosexual tendencies were sown at the school.”
Evans’s glib and naive conjecture is obliterated by the choreography of the St. Petersburg Eifman Ballet Company. The choreography of TCHAIKOVSKY is sensual and celebrates male eroticism with masculine strength in a provocative and stunning all male pas de deux complete with a mock-up duel and Svengali sequence – that pulsates with Russian liturgical music and folkloric-style dancing.
With Tchaikovsky repressing of his real and prohibited feelings, and his outward striving to lead a ‘normal’ emotional life, led him to hover on the abyss of constant emotional chaos. It also pressured him into a disastrous marriage symbolised by the unraveling of Antonina’s ragged, long scarf.
How does a contemporary ballet buff explain the link between the history of ballet and homosexuality? In 2007
Peter Stoneley in a ‘Queer History of the Ballet’ says “If, for much of the twentieth century, there was a strong popular perception of a link between ballet and homosexuality, that link was usually denied, suppressed, or ignored by the
dance world.” At last, that link reverberates with Boris Eifman’s passionate production of ‘Tchaikovsky.’ And the powerful sensuality of the bath-house scene, tinged in crimson, lingers…….long after the final encore.
The Eifman Ballet’s productions of ANNA KARENINA and TCHAIKOVSKY shared Sydney’s Capitol theatre between the 15th and 26th August, and moved to Melbourne’s Regent Theatre where the productions will share the main-stage between the 29th August and the 9th September, 2012.
© Esther Rothfield
29th August, 2012
Tags: Sydney Dance Reviews- TCHAIKOVSKY, Eifman Ballet, Boris Eifman, Capitol Theatre Sydney, Regent Theatre Melbourne, Sydney Arts Guide, Esther Rothfield.