Winter 2002/2003 |
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In this issue...
by Nadine Lavi A ballerina whose career reveals all the facets of her personality
on stage, and who simultaneously becomes a symbol of a major ballet
company, is rare in dance. Part of American Ballet Theatre for the
past 20 years, Susan Jaffe has been beloved as much for her many incarnations
as for her signature style. |
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Sweetly innocent as Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty, she was a cold
Myrthe in Giselle. Spiteful, demanding, with perfect comic timing
as Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew, she was elegant and regal
as the Sugar Plum Fairy. She captured the insouciance of Jerome Robbins'
Other Dances and plumbed the depths of emotion and drama as Tatiana
in Onegin. Hilariously pretentious as the Italian Ballerina in Gala
Performance, she was tender and impassioned as Hana Glawari in The
Merry Widow. She portrayed the frightening onset of psychosis with
terrifying accuracy as The Accused in Fall River Legend and was disarmingly
seductive as Nikiya in La Bayadère.Jaffe was born in Washington,
D.C., and trained primarily with Hortensia Fonseca at the Maryland
School of Ballet. In 1978, she joined American Ballet Theatre's junior
company and the full company
As a child, Jaffe initially took a modern dance class at a YMCA. "I hated it, I didn't like dancing in bare feet and I didn't like pretending to be a dog or an ice cream cone. I had visions of being a singer, an actress or a princess." Upon seeing ballet students in pink tights and hair ribbons, Jaffe told her mother, "That's what I want to be. I want to be a ballet dancer."Jaffe's Þrst role, at 10, was as a beetle in Fonseca's ballet Coronation of the Dragonfly Queen. Fonseca "gave basic good training. She created all kinds of ballets, we performed all the time. She
infused us with inspiration and fun, and she always talked about American
Ballet Theatre." Fonseca took her most talented students to New
York every summer to audition. At 13, after attending
In the beginning, Jaffe found it difficult to take credit for being a success and was overwhelmed at being among dance's greatest stars. "All of a sudden I was in studios with Gelsey Kirkland, Alexander Godunov and Fernando Bujones. I had certainly not been featured in the junior company and had no clue that I had much talent. I was only 18, very weak, I didn't have a great technique but I was very good at surviving and I worked hard. But I always felt I was never going to catch up." Working with ABT's coaches enabled Jaffe to refine her technique and develop as a dancer. Elena Tchernicheva, from 1980 to 1989, "gave me a wonderful base, lots of strength." 1989, however, saw a falling out between them and an uncertain future for Jaffe when Jane Hermann became the company's artistic director. "I didn't know what it was like to fight for anything, I had a place in the company and Mischa featured me everywhere. All of a sudden he was gone, and in came a new director. So I had to take control of myself and say, "No, no, no, I'm here for a reason. I've had nine years in this company as the first ballerina or certainly the up-and-coming baby ballerina and I'm going to stay, this is my company, too." In 1990, she began to establish herself as a dance-actress, with the help of friend and acting coach, Byam Stevens. They analyzed roles by questioning the characters' motivations. "He helped me to see ballet from an actor's point of view." She began doing yoga, Juliu Corvath's White Cloud System, which she credits with teaching her "a lot about how to work, trying to dance with a more elastic quality." She found daily meditation, which she began two years later, had a transformative effect upon her life: "It enhances everything with sacredness."
In 1990, Jaffe began to work with Irina Kolpakova. "Kolpakova was the last of Vaganova's students and she was an unbelievable, sublime ballerina. I wanted to work with her and I pretty much threw out everything I knew and started all over again. The way she wanted the arms coordinated was completely different from the way I had worked on them. Where she wanted my torso placed was completely different, everything was different, so I had to start from scratch." By 1996, Jaffe had achieved a fluidity and technical excellence that
surpassed her previous work. In the spring of 2002, her last season
with the company, those qualities of plasticity and polish were still
beautifully visible, as was her gift for characterization, Jaffe danced with many partners in her long career - from Baryshnikov
to the newest generation of Latino dancers. Of all her partners, a
special chemistry was apparent when she danced with Jose Manuel Carreño,
which made their on-stage love truly believable."I think God's
greatest gift to me was Jose Carreño. When we started dancing
together, he was an amazing partner. I had this incredible confidence
that no matter what happened, he would always be there and I would
always look fine. Jose is like a rock, he's so grounded, and we had
such energy between us that it really allowed a whole new part of
me to come out. I think we helped each other grow and our energies
were just right for each other. There are lots of people whom I loved
dancing with but with Jose, there was something inexplicable."Seeing
Jaffe and Carreño in rehearsal for Giselle, their tenderness
is apparent; their eyes constantly meet in a palpable closeness and
a feeling of complete trust. The lifts seem easier, Jaffe seems more
relaxed than before, Carreño displays his usual confidence,
and somehow they meet in the middle. In Onegin, earlier in the season, Jaffe's Tatiana admired Onegin's worldliness, and through each step and expression, she conveyed her excitement, anticipation and longing for his approval and love. With choreography comprising striking horizontal lifts on the man's shoulder and dramatic falls with the ballerina nearly touching the floor in arabesque-type poses, Onegin can be tricky, even dangerous. The dancers must make the smoothness of these lifts paramount, or the ballerina can seem like a rag doll being tossed into the air. Jaffe's ease and abandon with partner Carlos Molina made the difÞcult sections of the ballet so þuid and natural that the longings of the character came across perfectly.Of Tatiana, Jaffe says, "Her love for Onegin is very dramatic; she found love with her husband, but it's not a passionate love. So there's temptation, even though Onegin's dishonoured. The emblem on the front of the curtain says, 'If I don't have honour, then honour doesn't exist.' And the end of the ballet really is about her honour, that's why she can't go back to Onegin."
Growing Pains Unless the board of Alberta Ballet was wearing blinkers at the time, it must have known when it hired Mikko Nissinen as artistic director in 1998 that he would not be around for long. It was the Finnish-born Nissinen's first post at the head of a professional dance troupe and the fearsomely ambitious former star of San Francisco Ballet was hardly discreet about viewing the Calgary-based Canadian troupe as a launch pad to greater things. The issue was not so much how long Nissinen would stay as what he would accomplish before he moved on - as Nissinen did in April 2002 - to Boston Ballet. Nissinen's predecessor, Ali Pourfarrokh, had given Alberta Ballet
a full decade of service during which the troupe acquired a distinctly
contemporary profile and began to make increasingly successful forays
beyond its home turf. Under the watchful management of Greg Epton,
the company succeeded in keeping its financial nose clean.Nissinen
abandoned neither Pourfarrokh's creative emphasis on new work nor
his urge to establish an international profile for Alberta Ballet.
What Nissinen did do was to advance the company by raising its standards
with challenging, more overtly classical choreography, notably that
of George Balanchine. By general consent Alberta Ballet - despite,
arguably because of, a heavy annual turnover of dancers -
The company's board of directors was not unreasonably seduced by Nissinen's bold vision into believing it could raise the money to support his plans. The budget grew, based on rosy fund-raising projections. Based on his experience, Greg Epton worried that board members were being overly optimistic. The end result was that Epton was let go as executive director in March 2001 and Nissinen temporarily took over his duties. After years of balanced budgets, the 2000-2001 season racked up a crippling deficit widely quoted as being in excess of $460,000, although according to Ann Lewis, when accruals are discounted, $274,000 is a more accurate representation.Alberta Ballet has a hard fund-raising nut to crack. In English Canada, ballet companies on average can expect to raise about 30 per cent of their revenue from all levels of government. For Alberta Ballet, the proportion is only 22 per cent, largely because the provincial government is stingy when it comes to supporting the arts. To make matters worse, Calgary itself is not an easy city in which to attract corporate support.After briflþy hiring then dumping a new executive director in September 2001, Alberta Ballet has since been managed by former board chair Lewis. It has been her job to trim sails and sink the deficit. Lewis has proved herself a deft helmswoman. Although final figures had not yet been announced when this issue went to press, Lewis said that the 2001-2002 season ended with a six-figure operating surplus, part of which at least will be assigned to write down the deficit.Even so, Nissinen's legacy to his successor is a mixed one. The company is artistically strong but the remaining deficit and the limitations this inevitably imposes make it harder to attract dancers and artistic staff. To Nissinen's credit, his accomplishments did apparently make Alberta Ballet sufficiently appealing to attract a strong field of candidates for his job. In February 2002, the company selected French-Canadian choreographer Jean Grand-Maître. Like Nissinen in 1998, it is Grand-Maître's first artistic directorship. With Nissinen's earlier than expected April departure for Boston, Grand-Maître had his hands full through the spring, juggling the hiring of dancers and artistic staff for the company with directing and choreographing a touring French mega-musical, Roméo et Juliette. Nissinen took three of Alberta Ballet's best dancers with him to
Boston and, along with the usual departures that accompany a change
of leadership; almost a third of the current company is made up of
new faces. Joseph Kirwin, Nissinen's ballet master, decided to return
to the United States, and long-serving ballet mistress, Leslie McBeth,
will be leaving in December. Grand-Maître has replaced Kirwin
with Edmund Stripe, a British-born choreographer and ballet master
most recently with Singapore Dance Theatre, and plans to engage Alberta
Ballet School teacher Wendy Wright as a ballet mistress when Grand-Maître, 38, is Alberta Ballet's sixth artistic director and the first Canadian to head the troupe since 1987. He was born in Hull, Quebec, and studied ballet at Montreal's École supérieure de danse du Québec. He presented his first choreography there in student workshops. Grand-Maître later danced with two now defunct companies, Theatre Ballet of Canada in Ottawa and Les Ballets de Montréal Eddie Toussaint, and also briefly with Vancouver's Ballet British Columbia. By his own admission, Grand-Maître was an undistinguished dancer. From early on, his real ambition was to become a choreographer. "I was more curious about the process of how you put steps together than in their interpretation."
Grand-Maître says Alberta Ballet attracted him especially because
of its relatively compact size - he has hired 12 women and 11 men
to the regular company as well as two female apprentices - and the
fact that there is still building work to be done. "We face real
challenges in terms of funding, in terms of developing an audience
that really understands and loves dance. I like that. I always enjoy
a challenge."The company's October/November mixed programme,
the first under Grand-Maître's direction, included restagings
of his Celestial Themes and The Winter Room, and he will be required
to create a one-act Carmen in February. Even so, Grand-Maître
insists that he does not intend to make Alberta Ballet a platform
for his own work. "Certainly Grand-Maître has signed a five-year contract. Although it includes an escape clause, the affable director speaks in terms that suggest he is in for the long haul. His ambitions include more touring to major cities in Central Canada - Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto. Grand-Maître still hopes to choreograph occasionally outside Alberta Ballet and sees these commissions as opportunities to forge co-production deals so that the new works can also be shown in Canada.Grand-Maître's more immediate challenge will be to maintain the high dancing standards set by Nissinen and continue to build a varied and challenging repertoire on what for the time being must be a tight financial rein.
At the Annual General Meeting on October 4, 2002, Alberta Ballet
informed its membership that the company had achieved a $44,500 accumulated
surplus.
Other articles: Meet the Maryinsky's Serge Bennathan's
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Throughout
Ballet Theatre's changeovers, Jaffe cast a lustrous glow, a principal
dancer who epitomized the refinement and elegance of the company's
original design. Internationally acclaimed, she performed as a guest
artist with companies all over the world. As a dancer and artist,
she undertook a journey of discovery in roles that displayed each
aspect of her personality. On the eve of her retirement, she stands
at the threshold of yet another incarnation, poised to enter a new
stage, as actress, author and advisor to the chairman and president
of her former company.
the
School of American Ballet's summer programme, Jaffe decided, "I
really wanted to dance Giselle and Swan Lake, ballets with stories."
Three years later, she joined American Ballet Theatre's junior company."Mischa
(Mikhail Baryshnikov) was about to take over and he saw me in Raymonda,
and he decided then, I guess, that he was going to make me a star."
Although she was Baryshnikov's protégé, the company
almost immediately tried to change her image. "They were going
to give me a conditional contract. They wanted me to lose 10 pounds,
so they sent me to a diet doctor; I had to get braces and they wanted
to change my name to something more exotic.
It
also enabled her see dance more philosophically. "I started to
see things on a much larger scale and to understand that dance is
very healing. The theatre is where we go to see something that we
either connect to, or are repelled by. It's a gigantic mirror. And
that's when I really started to understand, it's not about me, Susan
Jaffe standing on the stage and doing a pirouette, but that there
were much larger things happening and if I could just get out of my
own way, I could be part of something larger."
understanding
of the use of contrasts in the body's physical weight, imbuing the
steps with varying degrees of energy to create emotion and characterization.
Shefifirst created an image of Tatiana as a fresh, young girl, all
energy, fleet of foot, light and easy in her movements. Then she relaxed
into Onegin's embrace, lying in his arms, the weight of her body releasing
into a lift that displayed a state of utter trust, making the betrayal
and pain that followed that much more poignant.
Reflecting
on her career and on her retirement, Jaffe says, "Every 10 years,
I've had to transform; it was always so hard and if you asked me to
do it again, I couldn't. I'm ready to go; I've had such a full life.
On the night of her final performance with the company as Giselle,
there was the sense of being part of an historic moment; it was the
end of an era and the start of something new. With all the adulation
that accompanied the endless curtain calls and standing ovations,
the single white lilies strewn at her feet by each of the wilis who
had danced that night and extra bouquets of flowers from each of her
partners, even those who were not dancing that evening, to Jaffe's
own words to the audience, "I love you, I'll miss you,"
with a hand held over her heart, made her farewell, as was each performance,
a night to remember. 
Providing
Alberta Ballet with a store of narrative ballets to balance programmes
of riskier abstract works was also part of Nissinen's artistic strategy
and has posed a significant threat to the much older Royal Winnipeg
Ballet's traditional domination of the Western-Canadian touring market.
In the spring of 2001 Nissinen took Alberta Ballet to the Maritimes
for the first time and to Finland and Egypt. He figured that success
on tour might engender greater pride, and therefore greater financial
support from the company's home province. This is where Nissinen's
plans hit a roadblock.
Grand-Maître
was soon creating works for Toronto's Ballet Jörgen, a professional
company dedicated to fostering emerging choreographers, as well as
taking part in various choreographic workshops. Grand-Maître's
career breakthrough came in 1993 when the National Ballet of Canada
presented his disturbing deconstruction of classical ballet, Frames
of Mind. He still considers it his most avant-garde work. The National
Ballet toured it in Europe where it attracted the attention of a several
important ballet directors.Since then, although he has continued to
work in Canada and the United States, Grand-Maître's career
as an independent choreographer has been largely based in Europe.
He has created works for the Paris Opéra Ballet, La Scala Milan,
Stuttgart Ballet, Munich's Bavarian State Ballet and the National
Ballet of Norway.The obvious question is why he has chosen this stage
to abandon what has been a busy freelance career in favour of the
complex challenges of running a company. "I don't want to spend
my whole career living in hotel rooms with the TV remote in my hand,"
says Grand-Maître. "I've enjoyed and indeed benefited from
working with so many different and great companies but in the end
you want something more than a series of brief encounters. I feel
I've gained the experience and understanding now to actually make
a contribution as a director, to be there to serve the needs of a
company."
"In
the end it all comes down to the moment of the performance. It will
be my job to inspire the dancers to make something special happen
for the audience. To do that they must truly feel something. I want
classically well-trained dancers, of course, but I do not intend to
let them hide in their technique. I want them to be dancing on the
edge, emotionally and physically. That is what makes our art special
and exciting."