![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alibi_shopThe Little Mermaid, choreographed and designed by John Neumeier, music by Lera Auerbach - seen on 4/23/19 at the War Memorial Opera House
Dance is a language I don't really speak; I usually don't write about it, because it's hard to say what I saw. But I can say that SF Ballet's The Little Mermaid is something special.
This isn't Disney, it's Hans Christian Andersen—so the mermaid has no chance with the prince, and her only hope of even surviving in her original form is to murder him. It's a faithful though simplified adaptation, with the addition of a frame story that I have mixed feelings about; more about that later. The stage design and costumes are gorgeous; I liked the music a lot, although again that's something I find it hard to comment on. I think it's a bit long, but that may just be because I tend to tune out during big group numbers. Mainly it has the best mermaid I've ever seen.
Yuan Yuan Tan embodies the mermaid, a role she's been dancing for 14 years, unforgettably. Undersea, she moves in ways that aren't necessarily fish-based (although there's a great effect where black-clad puppeteers carry her and her tail around in weaving paths) but emphasize total freedom of movement, with a lot of isolations and contortion; she's alien, but she's at ease. When the Sea Witch (Wei Wang, an unsettling primal presence) transforms her, by tearing off her tail (actually silk pants), it's a totally expected moment but it's still weird and horrifying: the legs she's waving awkwardly around don't look like they could possibly hold her up, and the human skin on them doesn't match the chalky white color of the rest of her. Her process of learning to walk on land emphasizes not just the pain she feels, but her curiosity and confusion about her own body, so she's awkward in a human way and graceful in an alien way at the same time; I was sometimes reminded of how Elsa Lanchester played the Bride of Frankenstein as sort of a fierce bird/cat. Later when she's considering stabbing the prince with the Sea Witch's knife, it's like she's trying to imagine how a violent person would move, and the result is hard to describe but very funny.
The basic brutality of the story becomes clear a little earlier here than in Andersen, in the scene where the mermaid first walks and dances in front of the prince. She's having difficulty, but she's keeping it together. But at the same time, someone is slowly wheeling a wheelchair onto the stage; and eventually the prince and the others guide her into it, as if to say: "That's nice, and I know you think you're doing well, but really you're going to need this." She stays in it during most of her introduction to humanity, and eventually leaves it behind but is always treated by others as someone with a known infirmity, which for the prince means basically treating her as a cute child. In this version, it's not just that the prince happens to prefer a different human woman; it's that the mermaid isn't even in the running, because she isn't able to be human well enough or in the right way, by the standards of these athletic and conventionally beautiful people. For anyone who's ever felt defective or excluded, this is horribly familiar, and it's not sweetened by giving her any other way to find her place in this world. The only way out is either literally killing her love, or taking a leap into the unknown.
The human characters don't look interesting or do anything interesting, they're sort of Ken and Barbie dolls, but their dancing is a lot of fun: they basically represent being at home in their world, understanding gravity, and being good with their legs. The question of why the mermaid likes the prince (Aaron Robison) so much is sort of answered by giving him a kind of hunky goofball quality, a sprinkling of physical comedy in a Nathan Fillion style, that sets him slightly apart from the more serious humans. A couple of times Robison cracked me up by, in the middle of some grand gesture, checking out his own impressive leg as if he'd never seen it before.
About the frame story: the whole ballet is a story being imagined by "the Poet" (Ulrik Birkkjaer), as he tries to deal with his feelings for his unavailable friend Edvard, who's about to be married; the prince and princess in the story are played by the same dancers as Edvard and his bride. In other words, this is a literal presentation of the theory that Andersen wrote "The Little Mermaid" out of unrequited love for Edvard Collin. Turning that queer subtext into text is a reasonable idea, and it provides a visually and emotionally very strong moment at the end, when Andersen's ending (the mermaid transforms into an air spirit) becomes the writer merging with his own creation and ascending into legend. My problem with it is that the Poet keeps appearing throughout the ballet just to sort of check in on his own story, which for me was like someone constantly nudging me to say "This isn't really happening, remember?"—and he doesn't really have anything to do at most of those times (although there are a couple of interesting moments when he sort of tells the Sea Witch "Back off, you're too scary", and it works). It's worth it for that ending, though.
Dance is a language I don't really speak; I usually don't write about it, because it's hard to say what I saw. But I can say that SF Ballet's The Little Mermaid is something special.
This isn't Disney, it's Hans Christian Andersen—so the mermaid has no chance with the prince, and her only hope of even surviving in her original form is to murder him. It's a faithful though simplified adaptation, with the addition of a frame story that I have mixed feelings about; more about that later. The stage design and costumes are gorgeous; I liked the music a lot, although again that's something I find it hard to comment on. I think it's a bit long, but that may just be because I tend to tune out during big group numbers. Mainly it has the best mermaid I've ever seen.
Yuan Yuan Tan embodies the mermaid, a role she's been dancing for 14 years, unforgettably. Undersea, she moves in ways that aren't necessarily fish-based (although there's a great effect where black-clad puppeteers carry her and her tail around in weaving paths) but emphasize total freedom of movement, with a lot of isolations and contortion; she's alien, but she's at ease. When the Sea Witch (Wei Wang, an unsettling primal presence) transforms her, by tearing off her tail (actually silk pants), it's a totally expected moment but it's still weird and horrifying: the legs she's waving awkwardly around don't look like they could possibly hold her up, and the human skin on them doesn't match the chalky white color of the rest of her. Her process of learning to walk on land emphasizes not just the pain she feels, but her curiosity and confusion about her own body, so she's awkward in a human way and graceful in an alien way at the same time; I was sometimes reminded of how Elsa Lanchester played the Bride of Frankenstein as sort of a fierce bird/cat. Later when she's considering stabbing the prince with the Sea Witch's knife, it's like she's trying to imagine how a violent person would move, and the result is hard to describe but very funny.
The basic brutality of the story becomes clear a little earlier here than in Andersen, in the scene where the mermaid first walks and dances in front of the prince. She's having difficulty, but she's keeping it together. But at the same time, someone is slowly wheeling a wheelchair onto the stage; and eventually the prince and the others guide her into it, as if to say: "That's nice, and I know you think you're doing well, but really you're going to need this." She stays in it during most of her introduction to humanity, and eventually leaves it behind but is always treated by others as someone with a known infirmity, which for the prince means basically treating her as a cute child. In this version, it's not just that the prince happens to prefer a different human woman; it's that the mermaid isn't even in the running, because she isn't able to be human well enough or in the right way, by the standards of these athletic and conventionally beautiful people. For anyone who's ever felt defective or excluded, this is horribly familiar, and it's not sweetened by giving her any other way to find her place in this world. The only way out is either literally killing her love, or taking a leap into the unknown.
The human characters don't look interesting or do anything interesting, they're sort of Ken and Barbie dolls, but their dancing is a lot of fun: they basically represent being at home in their world, understanding gravity, and being good with their legs. The question of why the mermaid likes the prince (Aaron Robison) so much is sort of answered by giving him a kind of hunky goofball quality, a sprinkling of physical comedy in a Nathan Fillion style, that sets him slightly apart from the more serious humans. A couple of times Robison cracked me up by, in the middle of some grand gesture, checking out his own impressive leg as if he'd never seen it before.
About the frame story: the whole ballet is a story being imagined by "the Poet" (Ulrik Birkkjaer), as he tries to deal with his feelings for his unavailable friend Edvard, who's about to be married; the prince and princess in the story are played by the same dancers as Edvard and his bride. In other words, this is a literal presentation of the theory that Andersen wrote "The Little Mermaid" out of unrequited love for Edvard Collin. Turning that queer subtext into text is a reasonable idea, and it provides a visually and emotionally very strong moment at the end, when Andersen's ending (the mermaid transforms into an air spirit) becomes the writer merging with his own creation and ascending into legend. My problem with it is that the Poet keeps appearing throughout the ballet just to sort of check in on his own story, which for me was like someone constantly nudging me to say "This isn't really happening, remember?"—and he doesn't really have anything to do at most of those times (although there are a couple of interesting moments when he sort of tells the Sea Witch "Back off, you're too scary", and it works). It's worth it for that ending, though.
