Over Black Friday, the Kennedy
Center offered discounted tickets, so my friend and I bought tickets
to see the Joffrey
Ballet perform Anna
Karenina, which they
debuted in 2019. I read the book ten years ago, and I didn't really
understand a lot of the story. When I tried to recall what I could remember, I
drew a blank. So watching this ballet was like seeing the story for the first
time.
The show started off with the
orchestra playing music written by Ilya
Demutsky (which I really liked) and a video of smoke projected onto a
screen. I wasn’t sure what the smoke represented, but the more I watched, the
more I felt like I was “cloud painting,” finding faces and animals inside the moving
smoke. Towards the end they looked ghostly, like the skeletons in Fantasia’s
Night on Bald Mountain.
Foreshadowing, hmm?
Along with the music was some
singing of songs written by playwright Valeriy Pecheykin. The
songs were supposedly based on the Tolstoy novel, but the
lyrics make about as much sense as the book (you can read them in the
program). I suppose the singing added a little something (this was quite
the multi-media production!), but when you can’t understand the words, something
is left to be desired.
Speaking of multi-media, let’s go
back to the screen. There was the big one at the very beginning with the smoke,
but throughout the production there were many screens of different sizes that
would come down from the ceiling to help create the set (both as walls but also
as something to use for projections). I thought this was especially effective
when the characters were in the train station. Images of the rafters and tunnel
were projected onto the screens, so you really felt like you could see the
entire station in 3D. The screens also showed the horses legs during the horse race
(a scene from the book I don’t remember at all), while the male dancers
themselves represented the jockeys. Sometimes the images or videos played were
too literal: when the doctor visits Anna when she’s sick, a huge needle was
projected to give the reasoning behind her erratic behavior. I think her being
sick with a doctor visiting is enough of a hint to the audience that she may
not be thinking clearly…
I did love the costumes of this
show. Many of the outfits were quite opulent. And even when the dresses seemed
dark or somber on the outside (while others were iridescent), underneath they
had brightly colored tulle, which was a fun little surprise. I thought the tiny
parasols the women carried at the races were funny; the dancers looked like
Mary Poppins in a vision of white. With the creative set design and the
beautiful costumes, this was a very pretty show to watch.
My favorite part of the ballet
was the lovemaking scene between Anna (played by Amanda
Assucena) and her lover, Alexey Vronsky (played by José
Pablo Castro Cuevas, who was very well cast, by the way. So young!). The
way the two dancers moved together truly gave meaning to the phrase “getting
tangled up.” The lifts were very reminiscent of those from pairs ice skating
(although perhaps they had been used in dance first?), and it was so beautiful to
see the two play off each other. It reminded me of Christopher Wheeldon’s After the Rain, another
steamy, romantic ballet scene.
The other scene from this ballet
that I thought was really good was [SPOILER] when Anna walks onto the train
tracks to kill herself. Again, with the use of the screen, as she walked toward
the train (i.e. a bright light), her shadow got bigger and contorted. Her
clothes were blowing in the force of the train, even coming off her body, until
she was gone. It was a very artistic, not graphic, way to portray such a violent
scene.
There were some parts I didn’t
like about the show. While I understand that they wanted to stay true to the
book, the side love story between Kitty and Levin never made sense to me. How
does that tie into Anna’s story? While her suicide would have been an obvious
ending, instead there is the jarring segue into a joyful pastoral scene of
Kitty and Levin living happily ever after. It is such a non-sequitur and really
was a weak ending to the show. It reminded me of the extra half-hour tacked
onto the end of The Lord of the
Rings: The Return of the King to wrap up every single storyline
for each character. Just end it already! Speaking of ending, I would say many of
the scenes throughout the show went on for too long. I appreciate ballet, of
course, but sometimes it’s just best to end things before they drag on; less is
more.
I was thankful to have the notes
in the
program to follow along, because, while I liked what I was seeing, I didn’t
really know what was going on most of the time. There are so many characters,
and since ballet has no dialogue, I still was quite lost. Clearly I need to
re-watch the
movie (because I am NOT re-reading the ~900-page book!). Maybe the film
will somehow jog my memory? Or maybe after reading the book, watching the movie,
and seeing the ballet, if I don’t understand the story, I’m never going
to, and I should just let it go.
It's
not too late to see this show! Tickets are still on sale!
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