A Fallen Star: Reflections on a reimagined “La Bayadère”
One by one, ballerinas of the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music step onto the stage in flat pancake tutus, elongating their legs in graceful arabesques. Inspired by Gustave Doré’s illustrations of womanly spirits emerging from the mist of Dante’s “Paradiso”, this most famous of ballet scenes is the “Kingdom of the Shades” - a choreographic highlight of Marius Petipa’s 1877 ballet “La Bayadère.” Originally created by the French choreographer for Russia’s Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg, this classic ballet has come under fire in recent years in the United States - some would even say “canceled.”
Set recently by stagers Phil Chan and Doug Fullington on the expansive stage of the Musical Arts Centre at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music for a March 29 world premiere, “Star on the Rise: La Bayadère Reimagined”, retrofits the original Ludwig Minkus score, swinging with ebullient Gershwin-esque orchestration by Larry Moore as the backdrop sparkles with art deco buildings reminiscent of 1930s New York. The audience is transported to a dream scene in a classic Hollywood musical.
In the last few years, ballet companies in the United States have shied away from performing “La Bayadère.” Chan, co-founder of Final Bow for Yellow Face, posits that the original ballet has little to do with accurate representation of the India it was set in, and some productions (particularly in Russia) still incorporate the traditional use of blackface, inaccurate depictions of Hindu religion and servile depictions of characters. Chan told Pointe Magazine that “nothing about La Bayadère is actually Indian—not the music, the story, the characters, the choreography, the collaborators.”
This controversy has been festering for several years. In 2020, Philadelphia Ballet drew fire for their production even as they brought in a classical Indian dance expert to purportedly lend the ballet more authenticity. In 2022, American Ballet Theatre announced it had shelved this long standing part of its repertoire until further notice. Productions of other ballets have faced similar challenges; for instance, “The Nutcracker” has drawn fire for depicting Chinese and Arabian cultures from a traditional “Eurocentric” point of view - even the iconic George Balanchine version as performed by Pacific Northwest Ballet has been altered. The trend of productions deconstructed in one way or another is not exclusive to ballet, having affected opera performances of Turandot, The Mikado, and Madame Butterfly.
Chan and Fullington’s ambitious new production of “Bayadère” comes with a catch - with the exception of the aforementioned “Kingdom of the Shades” sequence, it bears little resemblance to the traditional.
“Bayadère’s” original libretto concerns a dazzling Hindu temple dancer Nikita - a “bayadère” - and the noble warrior Solor. After the jealous High Brahmin discovers the two vowing their love, he pledges to kill Solor. Meanwhile, the Rajah decides to reward Solor by having him marry his own beautiful daughter Gamzatti, to which Solor agrees. When the High Brahmin tells Rajah of Nikita, the Rajah vows revenge, but it is Gamzatti who kills Nikita. Overcome with remorse, Solor sees Nikita in an opium dream in the Kingdom of the Shades.
Chan and Fullington’s new production sets the ballet away from the exotic India of its original making and into the razzle dazzle of classical Hollywood musicals. According to the program, the plot takes a cue from the backstage foibles of Singing in the Rain, while the American western aesthetic comes from a 1943 George Gershwin musical film Girl Crazy. The rivalry between Nikita and Gamzatti gives way to a spat between starstruck ingénue Nikki and aging diva Pam over starring roles in a new Busby Berkeley-esque musical opposite handsome leading man Sol. The high Brahmin is replaced with a lusting movie director, the iconic Golden Idol variation is replaced with the “Golden Oscar,” and the Rajah is substituted with a Louis B. Mayer producer-type. The famed “Danse Infernal” tribal dance has been replaced with the “Bronco Busters.”
In apparent concession to ballet purists, Fullington and Chan resurrected Petipa’s original choreography from the now defunct Stepanov notation, coated in the idiom of the Hollywood version of the American West. The difficulty of resurrecting a ballet from a series of century-old notes means that the creative inclinations of the stager may rival even Petipa’s role in authorship. When done well, reconstructions can reveal long buried stylistic nuances, breathing new life into old works.
To be sure, reimagining this ballet as a Hollywood musical comedy is a novel and promising idea. Fullington and Chan adapted lengthy pantomime sections to pay respect to the original, recreating the original love triangle as a musical comedy, a genre which carries the promise of relatability to younger audiences.
However these stylistic nuances of Petipa’s choreography felt lost in translation of the cowboy revamp. The overall result risks trivializing the emotional resonance of the original libretto which helped make the ballet’s dance sequences powerful to begin with. Signature dance sequences that have nothing to do with “cultural appropriation” seem constricted by an overabundance of literalism. Nikki’s tragic death variation is hamstrung by a giant guitar prop she strums à la Gene Autry in front of a western backdrop, restricting the dramatic back-bending and port-de-bras of the beloved variation. Aside from the movement limitations, Nikki no longer dances to express lost love for Sol but for an undefined ennui.
If Star on the Rise were its own ballet, none of this would perhaps bother, but with “Bayadère” in the name, it feels disingenuous. While the production aims to correct various historically ill–informed depictions of India, the stagers took their share of liberties with classic Hollywood. For instance, the chorus costumes are from anywhere between the 1930s to the 1960s - gauging from the neon color palette. Meanwhile, the director's puffy pants and Pam’s flapper look suggest the silent film era of the 1920s. Again, alone this is much ado, but with the dancers thumbs tucked into their belts as they chug around to Ludwig Minkus, one wonders if the stagers haven’t themselves “appropriated” Petipa and caricatured the Hollywood musical and symbols of the American west.
Is the original “Bayadère” truly so irredeemably problematic? Petipa reflected a 19th century European fascination with the Near East and figures such as the “Bayadère,” which were inspired by some basis in fact. For instance, the Indian classical dance anthropologist Pallabi Chakravorty writes, “the temple dancer was not an imperial orientalist fantasy…She was real…We read about them from British colonial travelogues and Indian court records.” Chakravorty was the classical Indian dance consultant for the 2020 Philadelphia Ballet version of “La Bayadère.” In response to claims that the production’s depiction of India was offensive, Chakravorty wrote “the Indian diaspora is too diverse and we only reflect our own positions and interests in what we say. In the globalized world of the 21st century, I don’t think a 19th century ballet will be seen as representative of India even to the most uninterested outsider.” This might be especially true of today’s audiences at pains to be culturally sensitive.
Appealing to sound judgment to rid “Bayadère” of its more unsavory aspects - such as its historical use of blackface - is one thing, but to assert that merely setting it in India is problematic seems quite another. Is the India of “Bayadère” truly that much more mythical than the Wild West of classic Hollywood or the caricatured picture of old Hollywood itself that makes up the mis-en-scene of Star on the Rise? Is it not part of the magic of ballet to be transported to imagined landscapes?
But if Chan and Fullington have “appropriated” symbols of American culture, does art often not require some level of appropriation and even caricature? Artists often borrow from different cultures - the sum work of many individual artists within a culture who themselves often borrow aspects from other or previous cultures - to create something new. Likewise, caricature is also part of the art we enjoy in everyday life. Any time we see Germans in lederhosen in a United Airlines safety video or a mustached Italian chef chasing around a mangy mutt, we react not to a realistic depiction of a culture but a caricature, a trivial aspect of a culture we make light of as a comic artist may make light of Kelsey Grammer’s forehead. How can we distinguish between the exchange of cultural knowledge that moves us forward or even simply entertains us and the backward depictions that reflect our own negative bias? Making these distinctions clear is necessary to do justice to the art forms we care about. So too perhaps is putting seemingly insensitive but often harmless portrayals in their proper context.
In the program notes for this reimagined “Bayadère,” Chan invites us to ask “what else could it be?” and that is a question we should keep asking. Chan, Fullington and the Jacobs School of Music have undertaken an earnest experiment in reimagining this ballet, posing important questions that future choreographers can contemplate. Sometimes classics do not accord with today's cultural mores, but that does not take away from the timeless qualities worth enjoying as they are. Is the problem truly that these ballets are antiquated in their cultural portrayals or that our modern conceits prevent us from putting those aspects into their context and enjoying the overwhelmingly positive qualities of a classic such as “La Bayadère”?
Robert Steven Mack is a professional ballet dancer and filmmaker who has written for American Purpose, The New Criterion, and Arts Fuse. An alumnus of the Jacobs School of Music, he also holds a BA in History and a Master of Public Affairs from the Indiana University O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs.