Melodramatic 'Karenina' lacks depth
In his new ''Anna Karenina," choreographer Boris Eifman rides on the reputations of his fellow Russians, Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky, desecrating their works in the interest of his own. It's a tasteless act with tasteless results.
The Eifman Ballet presented the US premiere of the piece in Boston on Wednesday evening as the first performance in a monthlong American tour. From the get-go, the production destroys the coherence of Tolstoy's plot. An example: Anna's small son is more cipher than real child, and her love for him is alluded to only in passing. Eifman has Anna, danced with passion and panache by Maria Abashova, lurch between her husband, Karenin, and her lover, Vronsky, alternately throwing herself at the feet of one, then of the other.
The program says that Karenin, played by Albert Galichanin, is supposed to be a more sympathetic character in the ballet than in the book, but Eifman merely makes him a watered-down wimp.
Yuri Smekalov's Vronsky is a classic irresistible cad. It doesn't hurt that all three principals could walk out of the ballet world and into the highest echelons of modeling. They're that gorgeous.
Between the tormented duets are crowd scenes in which the corps is dressed as if for a masked ball in Venice, or for a military parade, or as robotic sci-fi figures. Their costumes are a lot more interesting than the hard-sell, splashy choreography, which might be more at home in Las Vegas than it is on a ballet stage.
Histrionics abound in this hyperbolic work, but dancers hurling themselves through space, clutching at one another, or dropping to their knees don't add up to emotional depth.
What Eifman does to Tchaikovsky is worse than his treatment of Tolstoy. Taking the approach to music that figure skaters use, he patches together the most overwrought passages of scores including some that in the West are automatically identified with Balanchine. The opening music in ''Anna Karenina," for instance, is the sonatina movement from the ''Serenade for Strings" that Balanchine used in ''Serenade," the first ballet he made in America and an unassailable icon in the history of dance. Hearing it in Eifman's work is jolting, all the more so because it's on a scratchy, grainy recording.
The rhythm of ''Anna Karenina" is pendulum-like and predictable. For all of Eifman's modernism -- the steps that flow into one another, the free-swinging hips, the acrobatic partnering -- when it comes to overall structure, ''Anna Karenina" is like one of those 19th-century warhorses in which the hero rescues the fair maiden from the hands of villains in the first act. And in the second. And again in the third. If you saw the ballet before reading the novel, God forbid, you might wonder why it took Tolstoy so many pages to tell a tale that Eifman reduces to a series of simplistic symbols.
