PARIS — “Angels empty the pockets of a violinist. / A woman in red. A mound of filth.” So read lines written by Bobbi Jene Smith in a poetic evocation of her new work, “Pit,” for the Paris Opera Ballet.
Created with Or Schraiber, it’s the duo’s first work for the company, and its title, “Pit” has many connotations, some of which felt strangely apposite on Friday night, when the piece, set to Sibelius’s Violin Concerto and music by Celeste Oram, had its premiere at the Palais Garnier here. Paris was piled high with garbage, the result of a strike by the trash collectors, protesting — with many others — the pension reform plans that the president, Emmanuel Macron, had pushed into law a day earlier.
That coincidence seems fitting, since Smith and Schraiber insist in earnest program essays and interviews that life and art are inextricably entwined; that their choreography is an extension of our everyday experiences; and that the dancers are not idealized images of perfection but real, flawed beings whose hopes, fears and inadequacies are exposed to us through performance.
To that end, the solo violinist in “Pit,” the excellent Petteri Iivonen, is onstage — not just as a conduit for the music, but also as part of the dramatic action. The dancers offer a human face, shouting, collapsing, writhing, falling, fighting, embracing.
Unfortunately, those ideas are about the extent of the 75-minute-long “Pit,” which is, to put it technically, a hot mess.
The work begins with a low, squeaky susurration from the orchestra (conducted with finesse by Joana Carneiro), as the curtain rises to show a raised platform that occupies most of the stage, and a group seated below it, their backs to the audience. Christian Friedlander’s backdrop is slate-colored, vaguely evoking the wall of an old building; John Torres’s lighting is somber; Pieter Mulier’s gendered costumes are mostly black and white.
As Oram’s score, which is used before and between the concerto movements, growls more ominously, a dancer in a voluminous coat and high heels steps on to the stage, shouting. It’s the signal for movement; the others begin to slowly rise and file around the huge rectangle. Couples slow dance, and two men fight, scrambling onto and falling off the platform. A man in a long white coat throws something into the center, and everyone scrambles for it in a “Hunger Games” way.
When Iivonen steps forward to play the mysterious opening melody of the violin concerto, and a lone man begins to dance alone in the center, it seems for a moment that the piece is going to come alive. Shoulders hunching and angling, knees buckling into low crouches, feet scuttling, crablike, the movement bears the imprint of the choreographers’ time with the Batsheva Dance Company in Israel — where gaga, the dance language created by Ohad Naharin, emphasizes the process of experiencing the sensations and expansiveness of the body, connected to our ordinary, daily physicality.
But the movement in “Pit” — which also shows the influences of Martha Graham’s technique in its low, deep pliés in second position, and sharp contractions of the torso — is never given enough space or focus to register.
Smith and Schraiber clearly had a thousand ideas for “Pit,” and seem to have included them all. Dancers never stop rushing into groups and pairs, performing mini solos, separating out, walking or crawling round the platform, moving their chairs, sitting on their chairs, being subjugated or overcoming subjugation, throwing themselves into one another’s arms, emoting expressively to impassioned musical moments. (Awa Joannais bears the brunt of that.) Interestingly, the relationship dramas are almost entirely heterosexual.
It’s hard to keep track of what’s going on. “Did the man in the white coat chuck the pheasants on the floor? Or did they fall from above?” I wrote to a fellow critic after the show. “They fall from above after the violinist shoots in their direction,” was the response, with another clarification: “It’s a different person who carries all the shoes and drops them to the floor.”
Aside from the gun and the pheasants and the shoes, one of which is eaten, there is also earth thrown onto semi-naked bodies; an explicit sexual act; a sphinx-like woman in a figure-hugging red dress who abandons some magisterial posing to rush upstage while baring her bottom; and a stage-height door that opens at the back to let in shafts of light and suggestions of a heavenly sphere.
These surreal vignettes are Pina Bausch-lite, telling us that we are in the dark and muddled entrails of the unconscious, excavating the pit, or core, of the self. But more problematic than the dramatic metaphorical clutter is Smith and Schraiber’s inability to meet the complexity and power of the Sibelius score, with its lush mixture of lyricism, Romanticism and folk rhythms.
The 19 admirably committed dancers are largely the same group who this season have performed in Bausch’s “Kontakthof” and Alan Lucien Oyen’s “Cri de Coeur,” constituting a kind of contemporary company within the Paris Opera Ballet. None of these works are easy to perform, particularly for ballet dancers deeply unused to baring the self. Bravo to them.
Pit
Through March 30 at the Palais Garnier, Paris; operadeparis.fr.
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