Impressing the Czar
If William Forsythe’s Artifact challenges the traditional conventions of ballet, his 1988 production Impressing
the Czar simply sweeps them aside. In this evening-length piece, which Kathryn Bennetts and the Royal Ballet of Flanders have been performing for three years to standing ovations internationally, Forsythe parodies the entire paradigm
of dance. This creation is an effervescent parade of every imaginable form of dance; it comments, deconstructs
and subsequently brings to life again in a flush of theatrical imagination. The result has been described by the New York Times as an “intricate patchwork of brilliant classical dancing, absurd antics and, in the work’s final section, quite possibly the best contemporary comment on the corps the ballet yet made: thirty-eight dancers, identically costumed as schoolgirls, in a riotous and rigorous display of tribal dance”.
Originally conceived for and created by Ballett Frankfurt, under the directorship of Forsythe, Impressing the Czar
was performed uninterruptedly until 1995, when the lifespan of the piece was assumed to have expired. Until the Royal Ballet of Flanders, led by Kathryn Bennetts – who for 15 years had been Forsythe’s right hand in Frankfurt – resurrected it
in all its glory. The impact has been quite amazing: standing ovations in Edinburgh, an audience "in a state of absolute vertigo" in Montpellier (Le Figaro), a knocked-out Mick Jagger, who insisted on being presented to the cast,
and similar responses across half of the globe.
The title is, in itself, a statement. To impress the Czar was what 19th-century (Russian) ballet was all about.
And Forsythe, Bennetts and the forty-nine dancers of the Royal Ballet of Flanders certainly do impress, albeit with a less conformist spectacle than audiences were accustomed to in the old St. Petersburg.
In fact, in this plotless three-act ballet without a narrative, Forsythe leaves no taboo untouched.
He offers us a vehement and sharp comment on classical ballet as it used to be performed at the court of the czar
and continues to constitute the canon for most “official” theatres.
In the opening act Potemkin’s Signature, he cites and perverts the entire legacy of ballet and post-Renaissance art
in general. Subsequently, in part three, entitled The House of Mezzo-Prezzo, he has one of the soloists auction the dancers and props. So what remains after this iconoclasm? Well, schoolgirls in pleated skirts performing a tribal dance in Bongo Bongo Nageela and a dizzy maître de plaisir in the stirring finale Mr Pnut Goes to the Big Top.
But amidst these wildly gesticulating acts, Forsythe – at once an iconoclast and a purist – preserves the throbbing heart of ballet: the pure dance of In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated, the piece that earned him global fame.
Impressing the Czar, in this version by Kathryn Bennetts and the Royal Ballet of Flanders, “glitters as new”, in the words
of the leading dance magazine Ballettanz. The dancers successfully take up the challenges set by this groundbreaking choreography – what’s more, they turn it into a “sensual game”. Audiences be warned!
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