Performance

Gary Tischler • April 18, 2016

Septime Webre — casual, blue jeans, pullover and checkered shirt and hair flying — was in his element. He was saying goodbye, sort of, to his last 17 years as artistic director of the Washington Ballet, but also hello “to my next 17 years, by which time I’ll be 70.”

Webre was his own star as the first spring headliner in Georgetown Media Group’s Cultural Leadership Breakfast Series, now at the Cappella hotel. An almost preternatural storyteller, he covered his progress through his years at the Washington Ballet, nurtured for many years by founder Mary Day, and the last days of his tenure (he steps down at the end of June).

“This sort of feels like a victory tour, like the baseball players do,” he said. “It’s so good to see so many supporters here, including my former chairman of our board Kay Kendall and others, and it’s wonderful to talk about the company. I’m really, really proud of what we’ve done here in this city, which, when I got here, didn’t have what you could call a diverse arts community. The city was still a little quiet then, and truth to tell, the food wasn’t much either.”

What he encountered was a company that did traditional programming, notably the yearly “Nutcracker” (which Webre expanded, and made expansive to the point that it included hundreds of young dancers). “I think, initially, we were thinking about new choreographers, new dancers, a new group of more diverse people, young dancers like Brooklyn Mack who grew into their persona and into being able to use all their gifts.”

“I loved Mary Day, she was the founder, she was our visionary person,” he said. “She was elegant in everything she did, she was something else.”

Webre arrived from Cuba with his family, the seventh son in a pretty creative bunch. “On a beach in the Bahamas, two of my brothers and I created an entire Versailles complex on the beach with sand.”

He recounted the phases in his time leading and choreographing for the company. “You start out with Balanchine. And, at that time, all the serious people were like art people: everything abstract, no narrative. But I discovered something about myself. I liked being a storyteller, I like doing the big ballets, new ones.”

To that end, he revolutionized things. He started a series of full-length narrative works that included “The Sun Also Rises,” “The Great Gatsby,” “Alice in Wonderland,” “Sleepy Hollow” — pretty big productions. And, by the way, “The Sun Also Rises” was “basically a great ballet about erectile dysfunction,” he noted.

“To me,” he said, “it was about building a company, young dancers, the school, THEARC [in Anacostia] and so on. And we discovered our niche. The Kennedy Center was bringing in all the great ballet companies, doing the big ballet pieces, and that was fine, but we could do something that identified us as a Washington company. It was a niche for a different kind of creativity. Sure we did some of the classics, but that was never all we did.” He referred to bringing choreographers such as Twyla Tharp and Mark Morris to Washington.

“And I believe in diversity of programming, of artists and dancers,” he said. “I recognize that when people come to a program that they want to be able to see themselves up there.”

As for the future? “I’m ready for the next thing. I want to concentrate on my work as a choreographer, a creator, and move on to work with other people — here, to be sure, but in Australia, in Istanbul, in Europe and other places. I’m looking forward to the next thing. I’m not moving, although my partner and I will be having a place in New York.”

He’s still a Washington guy, and something of treasure here: unique in his style, his outlook, that fizz and energy he brings to every encounter. “No question, I’m a workaholic, that’s where it all comes from.”

He’s Septime Webre, going out in style.
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Gary Tischler •

A number of years ago, I saw a play in which the author declared in the program that what we were about to see was not really a play, but a poem.

He was right. It was not a play, but a poem, which — while affecting — didn’t work as a piece of theater.

Something similar is at work at Theater J in the admirable, affecting and sometimes powerful production of “Falling Out of Time” by celebrated Israeli writer David Grossman, famous both for short stories and works of nonfiction. An exploration of human grief, “Falling Out of Time” feels and looks and is played and performed like a ritual. At times recalling the chorus in Greek tragedies, it could be a dramatic or cathartic church service, a memory of a dream or even a long poem. It resembles a recessional and processional with speaking parts.

I don’t mean to suggest that the production isn’t moving; it almost always is, once we get the hang of the people involved and what they are attempting to do. The people and their plight are the saving graces of “Falling out of Time,” because grief is the burden of being human. We will all suffer losses, along with the prospect of our own disappearance from time.

“Falling Out of Time” concerns itself with the acutely painful and terrible loss of children, as suffered by those left behind. It’s a personal issue for Grossman: his son, an Israeli soldier, was killed in the Lebanon War at a young age, and his loss is, if not the centerpiece, the jumping-off point for the work.

“I want to go there,” says the character identified as the man to his wife, meaning (as we learn through the course of this no-intermission work) he wants to fall out of time to be in proximity to his son — not dead, but not living in this time either. It’s not the simple desire to see the lost loved one, but the deeper need to have contact with the world in which he exists, to find meaning and relief from the fact of death, by entering its world.

There are others here — all of whom have suffered a similar loss, the death of a child, a death from an illness, an accident, a drowning, all of them sons and daughters now gone, the space they occupied in the lives of fathers and mothers hugely empty and full of unassuaged pain. There is a centaur, his body rooted below the surface, a chronicler of life in a village and his wife, a cobbler and his wife, a teacher, a count, a midwife.

As the man embarks on his journey, explaining the need to go, the others, one by one, tell their stories. And one by one they embark on the same journey, conducted by walking up the stairs and across a lane midway through the audience, down to the stage and back and around again. One by one, they “fall out of time” and join what sometimes resembles that dance of death from Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal.” They are joined together, holding hands, sometimes apart, until they come to the place, the “there” of there, to commune with what is left of their children in the other place and time, imitating death.

Mind you, you could get very involved in all this, and with the litany of sorrows and stories expressed by people onstage. They’re very individualized in terms of how they look, their clothes, their manner of moving, their voices, so that we feel for them. But they are not in the end either characters or people; they are, well, walking, touching, echoing poems of their own sufferings.

Because of this, the play is not really theater, it is literature. That’s very difficult for actors to play. There are some very fine actors doing their best with what they have, including Edward Christian as the ranting, raving centaur, the imposing John Lescault as the Duke, Michael Russotto as the ragged chronicler and the always impressive Nanna Ingvarsson as the chronicler’s wife, with Erika Rose giving the wife of the grieving man a down-to-earth freshness that the play badly needs.

Adapted and directed by Derek Goldman, “Falling into Time” is beautifully written, and it has the same power that some poems do, which is to make certain moments unforgettable. But it needs to be a play to truly complete the circle that it’s created.

Gary Tischler •

We are coming up on April, and April is the month of William Shakespeare — who was born on an April day in 1564 and died on an April day 52 years later, 400 years ago. (We know he died on April 23, which may or may not have been his birthday.)

Inevitably, we will talk about words, words, words. And, inevitably, we will talk about “The Tragedy of Hamlet,” Shakespeare’s most famous play, a play voluminously full of words.

Yet, right now, we have a “Hamlet” without words, and it’s not at Synetic Theater. It is instead the “Hamlet” of choreographer and Ballet Austin Artistic Director Stephen Mills. This “Hamlet” is an intense, under-two-hours ballet fueled by the driving, insistent music of Philip Glass and performed in grand, classic and very physical and emotional style by the Washington Ballet at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater. It runs through April 3.

Watching the production — beautifully and starkly danced in a modernistic set — is to get to the heart of the story, without necessarily getting the full effect of the layered, dense meaning within the play. Stripped of words, danced by a high-energy cast and jet-fueled by the music of Glass, the play becomes something of a staged action movie.

Dressed up in high contrast — peopled by not just one ghost, but apparitions that dance in visually effective unison with Hamlet — Mills’s version sets key moments in “Hamlet”: the celebration of the new king and queen, the play-within-a-play, an achingly beautiful duet by Hamlet and Ophelia, the confrontation between Gertrude and Hamlet, the killing of Polonius, the descent into madness, death and funeral of Ophelia and the climactic duels and deaths of, well, just about everyone.

This is dance as effective, affecting storytelling, highlighted by color: Hamlet is in red and most everyone else is in black and grey. In ensembles and solos, the dancers manage to convey the tensions — both toxic and intoxicating — of the court. It’s a speeded-up process that starts out with the sheen of outward beauty, but soon exposes the underlying struggle between guilt and anger, love and hate. The tools are not words, but muscle and bone, pointe and flight, wings and knuckles and leaps.

In this “Hamlet,” there is a certain amount of clarity about what’s what: very little of the what-to-do-what-to-do? grappling by Hamlet finds its way into the language of movement; everything is directed toward a resolution that builds and builds with a kind of inevitability. The music by Glass is nervous, string-filled, pushy, almost whip-like in its effect.

Nothing illustrates the power of this approach more than the role of Ophelia, danced in this production by the remarkable newcomer Venus Villa. Slight of build, she seems on the verge often of breaking into two. She’s vulnerable but also crazy-strong, well matched with Brooklyn Mack’s high-flying Hamlet. Her growing madness and her loss is devastating, in ways that few theatrical or cinematic versions have approached.

You lose some things in “Hamlet” as a dance, but the way that Mills recasts “Hamlet” as pure story is breathtaking in its own way. It’s remarkable how much can be said without words and how much can be done when words are whittled away cleanly in the play’s climax. You end up watching carefully, trying not to miss when Claudius puts poison in the chalice and when Gertrude drinks the wine, even as Hamlet and Laertes make the whole world a duel.

It reminded me of the time, a long time ago, when I was convinced to don tights and become an extra (Osric 2) in a local production of Tom Stoppard’s frantic “15-Minute Hamlet,” and how quickly the time passed. A three-hour play compressed itself into bodies and stories. The late British film director Lindsay Anderson once staged a version of the play that began with all the dead bodies on the stage and commenced the story from that point.

After a while, the ballet takes on a curious aspect: it is a ghost of itself, a skeleton of every “Hamlet” you’ve ever seen on stage or screen. All the Hamlets seem to flicker in the back of your head, filling in what you’re watching, captivated.

Gary Tischler •

“American Idiot,” the Green Day/Billie Joe Armstrong rock musical about a kinetic, confused and lost group of post-9/11 suburban small-town youths has already been extended through April 16 at the Keegan Theatre in Dupont. As semi-contemporary musicals go, it’s a current Washington must-see. It could probably run longer.

We’re talking not so much about my generation, but someone’s generation. And the show echoes forward and backward to them all, with rippling guitar riffs, painful ballads and an energy you won’t find on too many stages.

“American Idiot” actually was birthed and perhaps spawned in 2004. It became a super-album by the group Green Day and Armstrong, its charismatic leader, he of the zombie-like heavy eyeliner and lean, mean and boyish stage persona. With punkish as well as Who-ish “Tommy”-like roots, it became a surprise 2009 Broadway show and hit (although minus Green Day and Armstrong).

What’s affecting about the production at the Keegan — directed by founders Mark and Susan Marie Rhea — is the energy, the way it seems like a prolonged, authentic outburst of feeling and confusion, and the way it pays respect to the music. For artists sort of bagged in the punk-garage milieu, the music is surprisingly varied, mixing jump-off-the-stage guitar-god numbers with those plaintive ballads. A uniformly terrific cast aids and abets the proceedings with a full investment of physicality and emotion; the mix seems painfully wrought by tears, lighter fluid and dynamite sticks.

It seems to me, too, to be a generational musical from a period during which the sureties of youth were punked. There was no sure-thing after graduation, little time for adventure and a bag full of doubts about the end of the rainbow for many young people of the time, who are perhaps the same group that’s come to angry maturity now.

In “American Idiot,” they’re already angry. “Welcome to a new kind of tension/all across the nation,” the cast sings in the title song … don’t want to be an American Idiot/one nation controlled by the media.” It’s a far different notion than in the 1960s, when they were singing in the Bay Area “all across the nation/there’s a new vibration … people in motion.”

These kids, headed more or less by the “Jesus of Suburbia,” are eager to get out of suburbia into the open-armed “city,” only to find chaos, desire and nothing much to embrace. There’s Johnny, feverishly played, often like a zombie-clown, by Harrison Smith, in Billie Joe Armstrong apparition form; Heather, by Holly Janiga; the soaring-voiced Eben Logan as Whatshername, Johnny’s love, forever but not quite; and Christian Montgomery as the creepy-appealing St. Jimmy, the drug dealer who brings a box of bliss and sorrow and needles.

The music is terrific. Songs like “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” “Favorite Son,” “Give Me Novocaine,” “She’s a Rebel,” “Extraordinary Girl” and “Know Your Enemy” define the times and the young people.

You don’t have to a member of any particular generation to get this. The music and the musical echo like low-lying roadside bombs, or broken limbs and broken hearts. It reminded me of “Hair,” one of the first generational rock musicals, which Keegan, incidentally, did proud with an expansive production some years back. It appears from one visit that everyone has poured their hearts into this production; it sways and rocks and sometimes cracks in the smallish space here. And the audience, on this visit, rocked back.

If Baby Boomers can respond to this and see some other one of their own selves in it, then “American Idiot” may be more than just grounded in its own time and place. Maybe soon or sometime later we’ll have a definitive Millennial musical. In the meantime, we’ve got this production of “American Idiot.” Go see it. You’d be an idiot not to.

Gary Tischler •

Bruce Levingston — pianist, composer, founder and artistic director of the music foundation Premiere Commission — looks in his photographs like the essence of the concert pianist. He has the dramatic and handsome look of the artist as public figure: sensitive, serious, intellectual.

He’s been called one of “today’s most adventurous musicians” by the New York Times and “a poetic pianist with a gift for inventive and glamorous programming” by the New Yorker. The Times listed his album “Heavy Sleep” as one of the Best Classical Recordings of 2015.

But he’s also a man who understands and believes in the transformative power of music. And to that end this native of Mississippi has confronted issues surrounding the intersections of art, race and politics, premiering new compositions that echo those issues in America.

Levingston has been busy this week, with the premiere of new work at Carnegie Hall tonight (April 4) and, on Wednesday (April 6), an appearance at Georgetown University with President John DeGioia, premiering Nolan Gasser’s “An American Citizen.”

“The Carniegie Hall event features the remarkable bass-baritone Justin Hopkins performing Gasser’s ‘Repast,’ which honors the Civil Rights era leader Booker Wright,” Levingston said in a phone interview. “The Georgetown premiere is also by Gasser. It’s about a former slave, John Wesley Washington, and the portrait that was done of him by Southern artist Marie Hull.”

“Of course, my upbringing figured strongly in all this,” Levingston said. “Those issues evolve, but they’re also a part of who everyone is. These are strong parts of the lives of Southerners. There’s a reason that so many artists come from there — writers, musicians, composers, artists.”

Levingston also wrote a book about Hull, “Bright Fields: The Mastery of Marie Hull.” Along with performing “An American Citizen,” he will join in a discussion about the painting and its subject, which inspired the piece. It’s all part of a program called “Creating ‘An American Citizen,’” at 5 p.m. in Gaston Hall.

“I feel there’s a strong connection between visual art and music,” Levingston said. “Notes are like words, they contain emotions, they contain visual elements and imagery. We’ve had records of all these instances of movements and individuals — Picasso, Debussy and Matisse — the art inspiring music, the music inspiring art.”

“I think composers, and musicians are storytellers as well, and so are visual artists,” he said.

Georgetowner • April 6, 2016

In April, we celebrate both the Bard’s birth and his death. There is no official birth date for Shakespeare, the world’s most celebrated playwright and writer, but he was baptized April 26, 1564, and he died April 23, 1616, at the age of 52.

All of which makes the Folger Shakespeare Library a great place to be this month. Throughout 2016, the venerable American institution of all things Shakespearean is celebrating 400 years of Shakespeare with exhibitions, performances and other special programming under the umbrella of “The Wonder of Will.”

The whole country will be able to see the touring exhibition “First Folio! The Book That Gave Us Shakespeare.” Copies of the 1623 book — of which the Folger owns 82 of the surviving 233 in the world — will tour all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, landing at 23 museums, 20 universities, five public libraries, three historical societies and a theater. At selected sites, a touring production of “The Gravedigger’s Tale” will also be seen.

At the Folger, on Capitol Hill just past the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress, the big birthday party will be Sunday, April 24, with face painting, wandering minstrels, clowns, jugglers, a cake and the presence of Queen Elizabeth (the first, not the second) herself.

The day before, Saturday, April 23, the Folger will host a day of international live streaming, in which actors, scholars, artists and community leaders will share their connections to Shakespeare.

Having just completed the exhibition “Shakespeare, Life of an Icon,” on April 7 the Folger will open “America’s Shakespeare,” which will focus on how Shakespeare has become America’s Bard through letters, costumes, books, photographs and film. It closes July 24, to be followed by “Will & Jane: Shakespeare, Austen and the Cult of Celebrity,” beginning Aug. 6.

Musically, the Folger Consort will be performing “Shakespeare and Purcell: Music of The Fairy Queen and Other Works,” April 8 to 10.

The Folger gala will be Monday, April 18. A few days later, the wacky Reduced Shakespeare Company will return for the world premiere of “William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (abridged),” running April 21 to May 8. In May, the Folger will wrap up its theater season with Aaron Posner’s “District Merchants,” a contemporary version of “The Merchant of Venice,” directed by Michael John Garcés.

“We still pay attention to Shakespeare because, no matter how networked our world becomes, he remains one of the ultimate connectors,” said Michael Witmore, director of the Folger. “In a sense, Shakespeare wrote the preamble to modern life.”

Shakespeare remains, is, was and will always be the most contemporary of authors. Directors, adapters and performers try to find ways to contemporize Shakespeare’s plays, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, although — forsooth and in truth — they don’t need it. I may be irritated to hear the word “prithee” time and again in the plays, because it sounds like a forced anachronism, but then again we may yet feel the same way about David Mamet’s four-letter explosions someday. The Bard doesn’t date, the plays and the writing are a bottomless well from which our modern times continue to echo outward and upward.

People still make the argument that the Bard wasn’t really the Bard. Personally, I have no doubt that William Shakespeare wrote the plays — for money, for esteem, for profit and prosperity and perhaps for posterity. Someone once said that a man who doesn’t know he’s a genius probably isn’t. I think Shakespeare may have guessed that he was special in his talent but probably didn’t think of himself as a genius. I think he thought of himself as a man of the theater, the modern version of which he practically invented.

He not only invented theater, but profoundly influenced the performing arts. The words certainly were the point of it all — the stories he purloined from ready-made sources — but there are musical, operatic, and vaudeville versions of Hamlet (not to mention a wordless one recently at the Washington Ballet).

Shakespeare to this day does what show business does: entertains us and makes us laugh, saddens us and makes us cry buckets and, most of all, without trying, makes us think of our own humanity. In his plays, we are not just at the theater, but on stage ourselves. In every Shakespeare play, there is something for someone: a pratfall, a joke, a fairy queen, a monster, a magician losing his magic, a king losing his kingdom, the outsider trying to find his way in an alien society and a parade of hypnotic, strong, beautiful female characters, which their swains and male contemporaries never quite understand.

That is the wonder of Will, just like today.

Georgetowner • April 3, 2016

Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey’s “Circus Xtreme” has arrived at Verizon Center in downtown Washington, D.C., and with its famed elephants’ final show.

The show features artists, according to Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey, “who redefine the word extreme in everything they do, magnifying traditional elements of the circus and combining them with never-before-seen spectacles, original fast-paced performances and incredibly hilarious moments. Audiences will be dazzled and astounded by the beautiful Bengal tigers, double-humped dromedaries ridden by brave Mongolian women and, for the last time, the most popular members of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey family: the magnificent Asian elephants.”

“The ultimate family entertainment experience features high-wire wizards, spectacular strongmen, BMX trick riders, trampoline daredevils, inconceivable contortionists, a high-flying human cannonball, a bungee aerial skydiving display and an international assembly of more than 100 world-renowned artists.”
 
The company also noted, “The show is also the last opportunity for local residents to see the treasured Asian elephants before they are moved to their permanent home at the Ringling Bros. Center for Elephant Conservation in Florida in May 2016. The elephants’ move to Ringling Bros. Center for Elephant Conservation will allow the company to focus on its Asian elephant conservation program and the pediatric cancer research partnership with Dr. Joshua Schiffman of Primary Children’s Hospital and the Huntsman Cancer Institute in Salt Lake City, Utah.”

The circus is at Verizon Center through April 3 — and will be at EagleBank Arena in Fairfax, Virginia, April 6 through April 17. 
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Georgetowner •

When Septime Webre announced earlier this month that he was ending a highly successful and energizing 17-year run as the Washington Ballet’s artistic director to “focus on creating new ballets and to staging on other companies the many original works I have created for the Washington Ballet,” there was still some unfinished business to consider.

That would be the rest of the company’s season, a diverse quartet of four productions that exemplify Webre’s unique leadership. Webre gave the company more than a flash of the new, with his own stagings and works and by bringing the choreography of stars like Twyla Tharp, Christopher Wheeldon, Mark Morris, Paul Taylor, Hans van Manen and William Forsythe to Washington.

Over the remainder of the season, in the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater, we will see Webre’s style clearly illustrated, beginning this week (through Feb. 28) with “Director’s Cut,” which includes the evocatively titled “In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated,” with music composed by Thom Williams for Forsythe’s influential ballet of 1987. Also on the program is the remarkable “Prism,” choreographed by Annabelle Lopez Ochoa to improvisations by pianist Keith Jarrett.

Webre comes front and center with “State of Wonder,” 32 intricate dance translations set to Bach’s classic “Goldberg Variations,” with live music by S&R Foundation Artist in Residence Ryo Yanagitani.

March will see the arrival (through April 3) of “Hamlet” by Ballet Austin Choreographer and Artistic Director Stephen Mills, which features music by Philip Glass. Webre calls Mills’s “Hamlet” “sleek and dramatic — from the choreography to the sparse and contemporary scenic design, a performance that is like no Shakespeare work you’ve ever seen.”

Then there’s “Carmine Burana.” “This is personal to me,” says Webre, who did the choreography for Carl Orff’s retelling of 24 medieval poems. “The work inspired me, and it also was something I considered a highlight of my time here.” “Carmina Burana” will also feature the 100 voices of the Cathedral Choral Society under the direction of Dr. J. Reilly Lewis. Paired with George Balanchine’s “Themes and Variations,” it will run from April 13 to 17.

Finally, coincidentally if not fortuitously, there is “Bowie & Queen,” an evening of dance tributes to the rock legends David Bowie — whose recent death at the age of 69 hit several generations of admirers hard — and Freddy Mercury, the electric lead singer of Queen. It will run May 4 to 15.

Electric choreographer Trey McIntyre has created “Mercury Half-Life,” exploring the life and times of Mercury, who invented and reinvented himself often as the crowd-pleasing but pioneering rockmeister of Queen. Edwaard Liang pays tribute to Bowie and his chameleon persona and music with the help of violinist Machiko Ozawa in “Dancing in the Street.” Both works are company premieres.

Gary Tischler •

When most people think of ballet or call up memories of it, they do not think of dance.  They think in pictures and movement—a stage full of shimmering ballerinas in white en pointe or a prima ballerina lifted into the air as if preparing for flight,  solos and pax de deux and divertissements, those often spectacular splashes  of costumed dancers offering eye-popping entertainment that has little to do with the plot proceedings, but are there for the wow factor.

We’re talking about classical ballet — “Swan Lake,” “Giselle” or “The Sleeping Beauty” — powered by gorgeous music from the likes of Tchaikovsky and others, and danced right out of the inspirational, emotional and technical  toolbox of classical ballet.   This kind of ballet — pre-Balanchine, pre-Graham and certainly pre-Morris — is ballet as throwback, its sturdiest, most definable and recognizable and appealing, and also its most Russian, in many instances.

The Mariinsky Ballet out of St. Petersburg, Russia, which was turned into a major force by the legendary choreographer Marius Petipa in the late 1800s  is classical ballet at apex. If  you want to dive into that particularly hypnotic pool,  the Mariinsky production of Petipa’s “Raymonda” at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House through Feb. 28 is, if not entirely the most outstanding, certainly one of the most  characteristic examples of the form.

You have to want to swim in this ocean, and it’s a long, exhausting swim—three acts, roughly three hours. For the most part, it’s worth it because you get to see a kind of spectacular final product and the nuts and bolts of the process.  The ballet vocabulary of duets, of pose and poseur, of difficult athletic feats turned into delicate pictures and motions, into dance, the tutu skirts, so other worldly but also immediate identifiers of what world you are in. We view the display of arms and legs just so, acting in the midst of dancing tells you a lot about what it takes to live in that world and the ultimate reward of creating difficult and delicate beauty.

“Raymonda” — the name of the medieval Hungarian princess over whom a prince and knight and a Saracen intruder battle over — is still an example of the same old stories, a fight for love and glory in a kingdom far, far away (Hungary, as it happens), in a time long, long ago (the Late Middle Ages, as it happens).

Here, Raymonda (a lithe, at once steely and fragile Oxana Skorik) lives at the Hungarian court, awaiting her bethrothed, Rene de Brienne, (Soslan Kulaev), a dark-haired, bold knight whose portrait comes alive while Raymond dreams of him.  On hand also is Abderakhman, the visiting Saracen chief who plots to abduct Raymonda with his retinue of slaves and servant.

Act one is like a long introductory play—courtiers, solos by two energetic dancers, retinues marching, moving and dancing, Raymonda showing off her dancing chops and so on.  Act two ends in a decisive to-the-death duel between Rene de Brienne and Abderakhman, and act three is a celebration and one long series of wonderful danced divertissements which cater to Hungarian musical flavors and in which Oxana Skorik shows off all of Raymonda’s considerable qualities.

“Raymonda,” to me, is about elevation, trust—in her partner—the use of hands and fingers, the ability to make muscular strength seem as strong and moving as a leaf. The spectacle in the last act is spirited, its meant as eye candy and the dancers, instead of traditional ballet wraps, have what look like very contemporary-styled shoes.

Contemporary is not the watchword here. It’s the release of tradition of classical forms, classical music by Alexander Glazunov, which has its own stand-alone qualities. Here, it serves as a rich and pleasant part of the whole, if not an overpowering force.

This production of “Raymonda” serves the time-honored glories and pleasures of classical ballet.  It seemed perfect for the audience on hand, which included older couples, single moms with budding ballerinas in glittery outfits, all sorts of couples, the young and the old, the aficionados discussing both glaring and small errors, the joys of the principal dancers, as well as dealing with the length of things.

As Tevye sang: “Tradition. Tradition.”