The Joffrey Ballet: Anna Karenina

 

Image found here

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.

Image found here

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…

Image found here

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.

Image found here

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!