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SCRUTINY | National Ballet's Streetcar Named Desire Stands the Test of Time

By Stephan Bonfield on June 8, 2017

Guillaume Côté and Jillian Vanstone in A Streetcar Named Desire. (Photo: Aleksandar Antonijevic)
Guillaume Côté and Jillian Vanstone in A Streetcar Named Desire. (Photo: Aleksandar Antonijevic)

A Street Car Named Desire. The National Ballet of Canada with choreography by John Neumeier. At the Four Seasons Centre. Runs until June 10.

For Toronto fans of modern dance, it has been a heady delight taking in the past two National Ballet of Canada productions.  Audiences have been treated to some superb international contemporary choreographers of late — first was Wayne MacGregor, who brought his remarkable Genus amid a highly talented mixed bill in early March, and now we have the rare opportunity to view John Neumeier’s ballet adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play A Streetcar Named Desire.  Neumeier’s ballet, which opened at the Four Seasons Centre Saturday and plays for three more performances this upcoming weekend, is the next work he has entrusted to the National Ballet after the riotous success of Nijinsky in November.

Neumeier’s choreography, set and lighting design, costumes, and staging (with Tamas Dietrich and Laura Gazzaniga) blended the psychological colours and hues of a dream world in which the mentally dispossessed Blanche DuBois is permanently trapped.  Neumeier’s cinematographic feat compels the audience to live the ballet through Blanche’s perspective, kinesthetically experiencing the worlds she dances and drifts through as a flashback series that leads to her final unravelling.  Audience responses to this updated 1983 production were rapturous with thunderous approval for the company’s vibrant interpretations as soon as the curtain came down on both Saturday night and Sunday matinée performances.

Neumeier’s work has always been stamped with a trademark high degree of emotional involvement for his audiences.  In Streetcar, emotional characterization takes precedence over plot depth.  There is no obligation to attempting whole-scale importation of the original play here, and that is a relief.  The results of this decision were performances of great substance and immediacy that seemed to create extra-referential worlds capable of existing comfortably outside of the boundaries drawn by Williams’ play.  As a consequence, Neumeier and the National Ballet were free to treat us to a long and very rich series of character types in varied emotional combinations, elaborate tropes, in part on stock phrases, themes and ideas adapted from the original Streetcar which, in the ballet, are now taken to very different and substantive extents.  In other words, the ballet constitutes Neumeier’s own ideas about the play which are then given over to the dancers to extend with their unique creative power (albeit with continued directorial input).  Such a working premise succeeded well in creating a kind of shadow, parallel work of art, one capable of growing flexibly with each successive performance, ensuring that this version of Streetcar too, like the original play, will stand the test of time.

The work is beguilingly and deceptively difficult to dance.  Sonia Rodriguez and Svetlana Lunkina (Blanche) carried the ballet effectively well throughout their performances (Saturday night and Sunday matinée respectively).  Both performers explored the myriad of possibilities their character could afford in every scene, with each mood conveyed well through every action, stance and gesture, subtle motion and mime, all the while traversing a large number of acting types in their extensive characterization. Ms Rodriguez was commanding in her emotional range and flexibility while Ms Lunkina was rag-doll vulnerable throughout and played the softer side of Blanche’s delusions well.

Ms Rodriguez was open and emotionally available to her audience, not only en pointe but in all her movement, especially in Act I during her wedding scene and tragic rejection of Allan, a certain vulnerability falling with natural expression from her shoulders and body.  But in Act II she made a decided impact, whether as a woman who could put on innocuous airs of superiority that would eventually rile Stanley into violence, or someone still in search of her last hope of intimacy when she is receptive to Mitch’s starry-eyed advances.  Ms Lunkina for her part, was technically perfect, and that served her conspicuously well in Act II when she had to take on her role with a greater degree of vulnerability.  While Ms Rodriguez’s Blanche came to life in three-dimensional relief, Ms Lunkina gave her Blanche a more psychologically subtle, submerged persona, hidden from view, and better understood through glance and gesture.  Both performances were complementary to each other, highlighting all the varied levels of inner turmoil Blanche could scarcely confront.

My sense is that we need to see two performances to better understand what we can take away from this work and how to process our own experience of it. Like any Neumeier ballet, beautiful in composition, original in design and intention, the more you watch, the more you learn about what the human body is capable of conveying (whether in solo or corps work), especially in how dense strata of human emotive possibilities can be portrayed, summoning a complex web of the unverbalized and unverbalizable from the deepest recesses of the subconscious.  It helped to see both weekend performances so as to observe two aspects of Blanche that were well presented by both artists.

Equally important is how impressively loaded this ballet is with sheer physicalities, such as Act II’s opening boxing scene and the multiple quick, demanding physical changes for the role of Stanley throughout, danced strikingly well by both Guillaume Côté and Piotr Stanczyk (Saturday night and Sunday matinée respectively).  Both Stanley’s were powerful, impressive, ripped and roiling, and excruciatingly difficult to watch albeit for different reasons.  Mr Côté flexed crudely, bemuscled in body and movement, whereas Mr Stanczyk made a Cro-Magnon Stanley into a bully and a mini-man of mental immaturity.  They were both perfect as balletic and literary archetypes.

Neumeier’s Streetcar gives us movie-like vignettes of Blanche’s life particularly in Act I, a bulked-up prologue to the longer Act II.  Blanche functions less as a character in a story and more as psychological mindscape we are invited to enter.  Her capitulation to her own self-delusions, the multiple men she meets, her struggles with identity and partnership, all are lensed through the ballet’s central narrative arc, one that is perhaps best described as a prolonged psychological fugue, defined as the mental state in which one flees from reality into a tenuous dreamlike state.  When the ballet opens and we see Blanche sitting in her sanatorium bed, twitching her fingers nervously together, followed by the curtain being pulled back to reveal her past, we know we are in full flashback mode, reliving with her the best and worst moments of her life.

Even the characters with whom she interacts, such as Allan or Mitch, incompletely fleshed out within the story as they are, resonate more as phantoms of her projected neuroses.  Allan’s tragic suicide after Blanche has rejected him when his homosexuality is discovered, happens in multiple freeze-frame sequences, echoing in her mind.  The gunshots that ring out repeatedly, spaced apart by seconds with Allan falling dead each time only to spring back to life once more only to repeat the process, explicitly tell us of Blanche’s self-reinforced anxiety about a past from which she cannot escape,  And Mitch’s reactions of frustration with Blanche in Act II when Stanley reveals her sordid past, progressing from literal superpositions of other men between her and Mitch as they danced, to Mitch’s final violent confrontation with Blanche, thrusting the overhead lamp in her face as if to declare that she should see the light about her own self, all revealed an inner world shrouded in too much pain caused by Allan’s death for her to confront.

If Blanche were alive today she might be diagnosed and treated not solely for her delusions but also for a kind of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) as a result of shock from discovering her husband’s homosexuality, her guilt over renouncing her love for him, and finally discovering him dead from self-inflicted gunshot wounds — the repeated gunfire was a good device for conveying unending torment from her trauma-induced circular thoughts.  Blanche’s descent into sexual addiction (the three lovers depicted in Act I at the Flamingo Hotel; her seduction of a 17-year old student in the play) and her own self-reinforced delusions of grandiosity accord well with dysfunctional attempts toward trying to escape her PTSD.  (In several cursory ways, Streetcar uses psychological themes that resemble many found in Crystal Pite and Jonathan Young’s outstanding theatre-ballet work Betroffenheit, a cutting-edge work exploring PTSD, but that is also quite a different creative world from this one).  Her multiple recurrent neuroses and delusions, circular thoughts and finally a fugue state to evade reality culminate in the one act that robs her of dignity to the breaking point:  her violent rape by her brother-in-law.

The plantation mansion set in all its grandeur as the centrepiece scene of Act I is used to capital effect.  While certainly Belle Rêve might well have been that opulent, from a Jungian analytical point of view the mansion as she recalls it in her own mind looms larger still as the world she has lost, a vital cornerstone of her personal identity and a house of dreams she can never regain. In the end, the plantation she could not let go of becomes her doom, leading her to put on the airs of the sophisticate she thought she once was, all pointing to her inability to escape the trappings of an era dating back to an antebellum South long vanished.

The corps de ballet represented the collective social milieus of which Blanche believed she was an integral part, and in many ways, especially in the long dance sequences at her wedding in Act I.  Allan Gray (Skyler Campbell and Robert Stephen; Saturday night and Sunday matinée respectively), while not a major character, emerges almost as an apparition from out of the corps in the wedding scene to complex, emotive ends.  His lover (Francesco Gabriela Frola and Nan Wang; Saturday night and Sunday matinée respectively), dressed in white as a mysterious guest, instigates a kiss, which gives it all away in a perfect dramatic moment of excruciating theatrical crescendo, after a rapturous pas de deux of fine symmetries and subtly suffused appositions, denoting Allan’s apprehension to the whole situation.

Both Allan performances were stellar.  Mr Campbell’s strongly hewn characterization was impressive in posture and sweeping movement, austere yet convincingly theatrical and striking in every way, but Mr Stephen was sweetness personified to his Blanche (Ms Lunkina) and intimate, sentimental and emotional.  Mr Stephen made me believe how much Blanche and Allen loved each other, making it all the more a shock that she rejects him.  I loved both Allan performers, and again, couldn’t help but think I needed to see both characterizations in order to better understand the many complicated aspects of the entire production.

In Act II Streetcar becomes more a wandering through treacherous mental landscapes, cast less in tableaux form and more as a through-composed meander around the more prominent islands of Blanche’s guilt-ridden memory.  Scene by scene unfolds seamlessly, drifting with ease into another memory vignette throughout.  As a result, we are presented with a highly creative depiction of a mind in torture that has become a prisoner of its own self, seeking self-medication through a reckless search for love in all the wrong places and the worst psychological spaces.

Both casts were solid in Act II.  The emptiness of the sex between Stella (Jillian Vanstone, Chelsy Meiss; Saturday night and Sunday matinée, respectively) and Stanley took on different meanings at both performances.  Saturday night saw a stylized use of bodies in pre-coital positions during the opening bedroom scene, effectively showing the insubstantial world of their relationship beyond the merely physical, which in Williams’ play stands as a metaphor for the bankruptcy and alienation of the new industrial America. However, the Sunday matinée performance totally de-sexualized their copulation into a stoic emptiness, a completely unsexy depiction of the shallowness one might find in certain locales of the New Orleans French Quarter during that era.

When Mitch (Evan McKie and Donald Thom; Saturday night and Sunday matinée respectively) thinks he has found the right woman, he is eloquent and thoughtful with her, and in both performances of the role their dancing set their character apart from the other men we saw who courted Blanche, or in the cases of the men at the hotel, who simply used her.  Mitch is a different kind of role here, not as naïve dupe, but as last hope of decency and both Mr McKie and Mr Thom were cast well in body, acting and movement type, putting Mitch in stark relief as the penultimate set-up to Blanche’s final and tragic undoing.

The grisly moment of her assault at the hands of Stanley is hardly what anyone looks forward to seeing, but it is the ultimate confrontation we cannot escape.  Consequently, Blanche’s rape scene feels all the more violent and repulsive because of the way it is choreographed, clearly pointing to an action as one being lived and relived again and again inside a nightmare domain.  Neumeier achieves this through a combination of repetitive action and coarse movement, as though almost ‘filming’ it in his directorial style, particularly accentuating how Blanche would perceive Stanley’s sexual violence as being deeply pleasurable to him.  Her body is solely his conquest, his object to violate, and all convincingly camera-shot from her anguished perspective.  The choreography doesn’t particularly depict raw, brainstem violence of rape, rather of what it is like to endure such primitive emotions from an assailant, captured in every ugly detail.  While there is a temptation to think of the ballet as being about a grand crescendo to her ultimate victimization via a vile rape scene, neither Neumeier’s work nor the original story is about those things at all.  Instead, in the ballet, we are taken inside Blanche’s mind and body and made to feel what it would be like to suffer the ultimate horror of such a grotesque indignity.

Stanley’s pitiless domination culminates in a smashing force of Blanche’s illusions.  While both play and film adaptation imply that Stanley rapes her, in part as churlish revenge for Blanche’s antagonistic superiority she flaunts over him and also as final realization of the sexual tension between them, in the end the literary conceit carries much the same result.  Stanley’s assault is meant to destroy Blanche, with Neumeier’s artistic goal being not so much to depict the rape itself rather more to explicitly document the piece by piece removal of her delusions, resulting in devolution of the last strands of her sanity.

Perhaps the most overlooked element within the ballet’s depiction of Blanche’s delusional Act II dream world was Neumeier’s uncanny use of music and his meticulous setting of dance to the chaotic sound worlds of Alfred Schnittke’s Symphony No. 1.

As prologue to Schnittke’s polyphonic mayhem however, was Act I’s use of Prokofiev’s Visions Fugitives (literally, fugitive visions) from which we gained initial insight into the flashback world of Blanche’s fugue, a flight into a world of romantic wish-fulfillment set deep in her past.  A conspicuously well-aligned series of these piano and orchestrated vignettes, especially the use of number 12 (Assai Moderato) for the dance of Allan and his lover, and the contrasting urgency and agitation of 15 (Inquieto) in its orchestrated version, spoke volumes of Blanche’s turbulence after her marriage.

Some of the best parts of Streetcar’s polysemous multiple narratives are written for the corps, who were peerless and in top form, especially during the jazzy cacophonies of Act II.  These scenes were often set so as to create the image of deliberate cognitive dissonance within Blanche’s mind forming a large part of her representative subconscious, conveyed through tremendous varieties of highly kinetic corps work. Many messages superimpose on stage simultaneously:  someone jumps, another strides, an ensemble dances jazzily, people converse — it’s all a perfect representation not merely of New Orleans proper, but of Blanche’s struggle to integrate it all into something that can make sense to her after she is forced to leave her beloved home and move in to a cramped boxy apartment with her sister.

Many of the most dramatic elision points to this uncomfortable final phase of her life on the outside come during Schnittke’s use of quotation music, a common feature of many works composed in the sixties and seventies, in which, amid the polyphonic bedlam of these pieces, differing snippets in the classical music canon make their intrusive appearance.  Blanche’s predicted fall to Stanley early in Act II is timed to the dissonant arrival of the transition between the third and the triumphant fourth movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, a mockery in both cases.  The dream world she inhabits often resounds to Schnittke’s importation of stately Baroque music, a world of elegant aesthetics long gone.  Her unending chaos — represented again by Schnittke’s priceless multi-tonal clatter of New Orleans Jazz, or the muted strains of the dance section in the third movement of Chopin’s Sonata in B-flat minor against a haze of polytonal delirium demonstrate very well the contrasting worlds Blanche struggles to reconcile.

Cryptic and surreal pas de bourrée are timed perfectly — the so-called “Classical” music she puts on the radio to flaunt her faux-sophistication — when she attempts to retreat into delusions of her plantation past.  Or, quite often in Act II, the multiple activities for solos and small ensembles found in the background could come forward to thrust or stage corners, cast at times in symmetries and squares from the outside world representing Blanche’s fondest memories.  But then, unexpectedly crashing into that elegance, would come repeated juxtapositions of highly energetic, physicality intrusive, opposing asymmetries featuring thrashings, arm thrusts, and sharply drawn kinetics to depict the cognitive dissonance of her world, flooded with guilt over Allan’s suicide.

Schnittke’s flooding of his own score in biting satirical polytonal crashes, mercilessly abusing the Classical musical canon becomes representative, ironically, of the circular thoughts of guilt, remorse and loneliness Blanche cannot stop from entering her mind. As the ballet progresses, the dancing becomes harsher in movement, more diffident in its feeling, and more alienating as Blanche unravels further. The outcome is often a kind of contained madness, in which a corps de ballet executes in complex movement-polyphony the many ideas Neumeier can express brilliantly about an internal world of repressed chaos.

But there was one moment in particular that made the most striking impact, one which perhaps best summarised the ballet.  As Blanche slowly loses possession of the plantation and her moneyed family dies off, the music of both Prokofiev and Harold Arlen are heard together in haunting bi-tonal creepiness.  “It’s only a paper moon”, eerily sung by the multi-talented Dylan Tedaldi, who has to keep pitch and does so wonderfully while Prokofiev’s music enters mid-song in a totally different key, is a smashing extended moment.  While Blanche’s whole world dies around her, Mr Tedaldi’s voice ironically arcing from a tawdry bed in the Flamingo hotel and cresting on his phrase “it wouldn’t be make-believe if you believed in me”, was the coup de grâce of the entire first act.  Blanche loses her illusion of Southern gentry sophistication and also her tenuous grip on external reality, and devolves into the arms of Mr Tedaldi’s singing soldier (and the two other men waiting for her at the hotel).  It was a glorious superposition that summarised Blanche’s guilt with chilling finesse.  Kudos to all who pulled this off.

While certainly, such a scene conveys well why this Streetcar is not the same as the play or the movies, nor is it a clichéd re-telling in modern story-ballet panels, but rather the music and dance describe a series of through-composed memories as imaginative tropes on Blanche’s multiple psychological states.  The ballet is not just dance; it is a multiple-arts medium, a film of a dance of a memory of a life set deep inside the theatre of one woman’s mind. Perhaps the only way to represent such complexity is to have so much simultaneous action take place on stage that it ably demonstrates how overwhelmed each one of us can become when we try to disentangle the multiple narratives concurrently unfolding in our own lives — enough to make one lose hold of reality.

In Neumeier’s version of Streetcar, the central takeaway message is that Blanche is an avatar for every regret, haunting memory and personal neurosis we have ever experienced.  Each of us has known trauma in our many relationships with others.  But it takes a John Neumeier to show exactly what that looks like and the brilliance of the National Ballet to perform it.

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