Crystal Pite’s ambitious new work is premiered at the Palais Garnier, Paris
Paris Opera Ballet performed Body and Soul, a piece that ranges from unforgettable to puzzling
Few choreographers have captured grief like Crystal Pite, who gave us the shattering Betroffenheit. That sense of loss is evident again in Body and Soul, just given its world premiere at the Paris Opera Ballet. A bereaved woman, Muriel Zusperreguy, and the partner just beyond her grasp, Alessio Carbone, haunt the sombre first and second acts.
More often than not, however, what happens around them is less than crystal clear. Pite scored a notable success at the Paris Opera with 2016’s The Seasons’ Canon. This follow-up is her first three-act production for a major ballet company — a daunting format that has defeated many dance-makers. While much of Body and Soul points to Pite’s immense talent, and elicits ardent performances from the cast, it is also structurally flawed.
The first act would make a convincing standalone piece. It is set to a short text, a physical description of a scene between two characters, penned by Pite and read over and over again by the actress Marina Hands (with additional music by Owen Belton). “Figure one lies on the ground. Figure two paces back and forth,” the voiceover dictates to two male dancers when the curtain rises.
We see conflict at this point, but Body and Soul proceeds to spin multiple dance encounters out of that blueprint. Both figures are alternately embodied by individuals and large, rippling groups of dancers in black coats, allowing for the large-scale effects that are Pite’s speciality. As Hands’ inflections change subtly, so does the emotional arc of the scene: “head against chest” (as recited in the text) morphs from a headbutt into a gesture of intimate surrender and, in the final scene, the cradling of Carbone’s lifeless body.
It’s a subtle tribute to the dancers’ ability to take a generic situation and identify endless ways to interpret and colour it. Unfortunately, the second act does the exact opposite. The text is replaced by Chopin’s 24 Preludes (as recorded by Martha Argerich), a work of such emotional specificity that it practically demands to be followed note by note.
It doesn’t quite lend itself to Pite’s sweeping style, and she responds predominantly with pas de deux, a weak point in her dance arsenal. Chopin offers the musical equivalent of a full sonnet in the time it takes for many sequences of Jiri Kylian-esque partnering and spiralling lifts to be completed, leaving them feeling generic.
As for the third act, it is a puzzling trip to a galaxy far, far away from dramaturgical common sense. Oversize, textured golden panels descend to frame the dancers, who return as faceless insects in skin-tight black bodysuits. They spend much of the scene prowling and leaning on prosthetic appendages attached to their arms, while a hairy character resembling Cousin Itt from The Addams Family roams nearby.
Pite has explored hive-like groups as a metaphor for the ballet world before, in the thoughtfully constructed Emergence, but this is all body and no soul. Perhaps that was the goal: it is also the only act in which female dancers wear pointe shoes. The finale, set to Teddy Geiger’s song “Body and Soul”, is rousingly silly, and sees vogueing thrown in with unimaginative classical steps. The audience roared; I longed for the humanity of the first act, which won’t be so quickly forgotten.