Manon (Royal Opera House, Thursday 28th April 2011.)
Manon, a narrative derived from the Abbé Prévost’s L’Historie du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaux, is set to Jules Massnet’s (1842-1912) score and choreographed by Kenneth MacMillan.
Much has been made of MacMillan’s ability to convey the human condition through dance. This was very evident from the impression this production seemed to leave on the audience. Having just seen Pina, I couldn’t help but draw comparisons and, although much more traditional in scope and less revolutionary than the Tanzhauser, there are some of the same stresses in MacMillan’s work, though set within a more traditional setting. This is not the same idealised world of most opera and ballets, which sometimes as a result can create the impression of sheer escapist drama. The human body becomes a vehicle, in most ballets for a striving towards perfection of the emotions and almost magical absence of gravity both in corporal and emotive terms. I am used to more traditional ballet being ethereal, a return to innocence and infancy, a world of villains and heroes. Manon as a plot lends itself to more complex physiological probing and it seems that MacMillan’s repertoire generally reflects the appeal of darker subject matters alongside the more traditional ballets (support). It is surely however the superb and slightly revolutionary style of his choreography that allows this ballet to deliver stunningly unexpected responses in the audience. Lescaux’s (danced by Ricardo Cervera) drunken dance with his mistress (danced by Laura Morera) at Madame ‘s hôtel particulier permits ballet to become comical, provoking laughter from much of the audience. Before Manon I had not realised ballet could prove comical (Elite Synocopations epitomising Macmillan’s sense of the comic in Ballet). The contrast of Morera’s grace as Lescaux’s mistress with the brilliantly timed and acted drunken movements of Cervera’s Lescaux was both a delight to behold, aesthetically and comically and also an intelligent use of ballet to explore both itself as a medium and what it can divulge about the human condition. Dance in a sense is the exploration of human relationships, the dynamics of courtship but its formulaic tradition had endangered the true spirit of dance as innate expression of human desire. It established too many conventions that idealised and enshrined an unrealistic concept of love as some sort of rite of passage ultimately resulting in the attainment of spiritual and sexual fulfilment. It was wonderful to see dance being a parody of itself, questioning and mocking the artificiality of such artifices. I enjoyed the psychological intensity of the ballet, its desire to use the human body to express the fluency of its silent language in a way that cannot be conveyed through words.
Roberta Marquez was a wonderful Manon and surely as principal her performance was mesmerising, fascinating and persuasive as the innocent seductress. Again the choreography conveyed what rests at the heart of many of the narrations inspired by Manon Lescaux, the concept of the innocent seductress. Patrick O’Connor explores the idea of Manon as such in his chapter for the Manon programme “The Lust of Fools and Slaves,” wherein he looks at similar female roles such as Lolita, Greta Garbo’s performance of the opera singer Rita Cavallini in Romance amongst others. Certainly Manon’s fate is tragic. Her reduction from the vibrant and gregarious beauty to the broken prostitute a terrible destiny emotively rendered and sympathetically portrayed. The Port Dance in Act III Scene 1 is the most poignant of the ballet, despite final scene of the Swamp and Manon’s death being its tragic climax. The final climax is arguably not as poignant as this port scene for the same reason that Dumas quoted by O’Connor, on the difference between Manon’s death and that of Marguérite in La dame aux Camélias, there is redemption in Manon’s death as though her final desert is literal “... the desert of the heart, a more barren, a vaster, a more pitiless desert than that which Manon had found her last resting place.” Arguably this death in the arms of her beloved is less terrible to behold than the moment in which she is bound as a prostitute, arrested and then raped by the gaoler. Act III Scene 2 at the gaoler’s expresses some of the savageness of MacMillan’s choreography (The Poltroon a work where this feature of Macmillan’s work is noted by Jann Parry, Manon Programme p.34) The rape scene in particular puts to shame the coy attitudes of Renaissance sculptural depictions of such physical violation that is surely more in keeping with traditional ballet. For this moment the gaoler (danced by Thomas Whitehead) stands menacingly over the cowering figure of Manon, slowly thrusts his groin forwards and then with his back to the audience enacts a sequence suggesting the violation of the young girl. It is a terrible moment to watch, happening so quickly and unexpectedly. It is savage without somehow being vulgar. At this point the Gaoler is murdered by Des Gieux and the two flee to the swamps, Manon denounces the material world. A bracelet is used both at the beginning, aptly resembling a shackle, to which she happily succumbs at the beginning of the ballet, signifying her willing compliance in effectively selling herself for material comforts. After the rape and her literal degradation as a prostitute the bracelet enforced upon her by the gaoler is ripped from her wrist in distaste and the two dancers melt towards the next scene and oblivion.
(Historical Context).
Despite its setting being both anachronistic (moved from regency to 18th/19th? century) and period what does its production mean to the contemporary audience? Said has made interesting points on the work of Sellar in regards to the way he staged Mozart Operas in very modern settings as well as tendencies to fossilise certain concepts. It is certainly to the detriment of any art to stagnate within any set of conformities and perhaps even impossible for it to remain untouched, whether that is through the way it will be interpreted through performance or through the observation. Manon is startling pertinent, despite being thought to possibly depict women with unmitigated misogyny I find it incredibly compassionate. It isn’t so much a struggle of gender, though certainly Manon deals with the complexes of Game Theory within relationships, this battle of seduction and the tension it necessitates between self-sacrifice and self-preservation is a dilemma to both sexes. Manon is both manipulated and manipulator, though both roles are conducted in innocence and the same is true of her courters, Monsieur G.M is manipulated through his lust and manipulates through employing his wealth, in a sense the dynamics are expressed through the card game of Act II scene 1. Des Grieux cheats in the game, but he does so out of love of Manon. Manon is manipulated because of her own hedonism and uses her sexual appeal to attain this. However, despite these darker human responses within the characters the ultimate message is one of liberation through learning to love. What constrains the characters is a common human fallibility, not the innate deviations of one gender leading the other astray, human beings lead each other astray but ultimately resolve in absolution. Love in Manon hence becomes not the traditional set piece of most idealised romances or poisoned love affair, it is about the suffering of humankind and finding what it means to love in an adverse cosmological order. In other words, love as originates from the human condition, a love that must contend with outside an inner constraints and imperfections both in the world and within the individual protagonists. Manon’s world will always be pertinent so long as social injustices exist, for her and her lover are arguably fore-mostly affected by a world eager to buy them off to satiated its own and their own fetishes for the material.
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