Richard KOSTELANETZ
From 1001 CONTEMPORARY BALLETS (for periodicals)
A good libretto, even an impressionist, double-exposed or portmanteaued one,
follows most of the rules of simple dramaturgy. Balanchine once said the
perfect type plot for a dramatic narrative ballet was the story of the
Prodigal Son. Once there was a man who had everything, then he had nothing;
finally he had everything again.
-Lincoln Kirstein, Ballet Alphabet (1939)
A deposed monarch, working in exile as a laborer under an assumed name,
befriends a draft deserter who falls in love with the sometime monarch's
beautiful daughter. Asked by the current monarch if his predecessor might be
hiding in Another Country, the chief of the secret police identifies the
draft deserter, falsely reasoning that any laboring man who successfully woos
such a beautiful woman must indeed be a king-in-disguise. The deserter is
arrested, in a flurry of publicity, while his sometime friend, the former
king, slips away.
The head of a pirate band disrupts an island wedding and forces the
Count's daughter to abandon her fiancée for him. As this new betrothal is
celebrated, the pirate leader places a ring on a small statue of his former
wife and is surprised to see her stone fingers close over the ring
possessively. Resisting all pleas to cancel the ceremony, the pirate reveals
that he is really the Count's brother and thus likewise of royal lineage.
The sometime pirate arrests the Count and orders the statue of his wife to be
thrown into the sea, while the daughter seeks sanctuary in a church sooner
than marry her long-lost uncle. Attempting to drag the daughter away from
the church, the pirate is instead dragged beneath the waves by the
indomitable statue that still holds the ring. The marriage originally
planned is consummated.
A favorite concubine of the dictator pities two imprisoned deserters and
secretly provides them with sufficient money to bribe their guards. A
disgruntled junior minister facilitates their escape. When the pair is
captured, they implicate the concubine instead of the man who saved them.
The dictator does what authoritarians customarily do with those who violate
their total rule.
A wealthy businessman has arranged to have knowledge of his daughter's
blindness kept from her by threatening to fire immediately any of the family
servants who reveal her disability to her. A psychic tells the businessman
that only if his daughter knows of her blindness and wills its removal can
she be cured. Into her garden come two men, one of whom falls in love with
the daughter and, it seems, she with him. Her father declares that the
marriage cannot take place unless his daughter regains her sight. That
threat succeeds in miraculously curing her.
The prima ballerina returns to the dressing room where the other female
dancers, angry about not only her show-stealing but her unexpected departures
from the script, set upon her viciously.
On a large blackboard three performers write messages of love to one
another one letter at a time, backwards.
Set in the control tower of a small airport, this ballet portrays the
anxieties and relationships of the flight controllers with the dancers flying
gliders or hooked into self-propelled harnesses.
A young man, engaged to a young woman of a higher class, goes abroad to
seek a sufficient fortune. Entering an alien underworld he finds attractive,
the young man forgets about his fiancé, who dies of neglect. When the young
man walks through a sleeping town that he comes to recognize as his home, he
inadvertently steps on her grave and is confronted by her ghost. Witches
dance around him as he drops dead at their feet.
An ordinary soldier is lectured by his Captain, who despises him.
Gathering sticks with his girlfriend, with whom he has fathered a young
daughter, the soldier is alarmed by strange sounds and visions. The
girlfriend flirts at a party with a passing military musician. The soldier
is examined by an incompetent doctor who, his professional insufficiencies
notwithstanding, seduces the soldier's girlfriend. The Captain teases the
soldier with accusations of his girlfriend's infidelity. The soldier finds
her kissing the musician and accuses her. When the musician boasts of his
success, the soldier beats him. Though his girlfriend is reading the Bible,
the soldier stabs her by a pond, into which he throws his murder weapon.
Wading into the pond to retrieve the murder weapon (and, by extension, the
memory of his lover), he accidentally drowns. The daughter born of their
union initially doesn't understand what is meant when older children tell her
that her parents are dead.
Contemporary Ballets consists only of a large message screen, probably a
liquid crystal display, on which appear the texts published here.
A neurotic young man loves a woman who reciprocates, though she is
officially engaged to his older friend. Stepping aside, the younger man
years later returns from business abroad to find the woman still married to
his older friend. She urges him again to leave her for life abroad. On
hearing from a gossip that he has purchased a gun, she rushes to his hotel
room and finds that he has killed himself.
The evening is spent waiting for someone named Godot and perhaps his
troupe to appear.
Onto an empty stage, up through the trap doors, come scores of performers,
filling the stage so densely that they begin to push one another into the
audience.
Finding that her lover, nominally a schoolmaster, has accidentally killed
a cat owned by a mafia capo, a woman volunteers to intercede for him, taking
responsibility for the accident. Though the schoolmaster at first
discourages her, she insists, because, unbeknownst to him, she is the capo's
niece. Entranced by the niece he has not seen in years, the capo wants to
introduce her to his henchman and excuse her from killing the cat in the
course of coercing her to become engaged to someone else. Hysterically
wanting to escape from a circumstance so distasteful, she tells the truth
about the cat's death; both she and her fiancée are killed by the henchman.
Onto the stage comes a man who leaps into the air, where he hangs
suspended for the duration of the performance.
A prince, falling in love with a blacksmith's daughter, courts her in both
his own person and disguised as an apprentice blacksmith. When she tells the
prince that she really loves the apprentice, the blacksmith disapproves,
because he wants his daughter to marry the prince's principal man-servant.
When the servant identifies himself as homosexual, the daughter is allowed to
marry the apprentice, who reveals his true royal identity.
A chorus of leprechauns poke at one another, apparently trying to discover
who among them might be an imposter, which is to say a man.
A young man, saved from death at the hands of three hoodlums, believes his
rescuer to be instead a garbage man, who is in turn harassed by the hoodlums
for lying. Happening to see a picture of the hoodlums' sister, the young man
falls in love. The hoodlums' mother tells of her daughter's capture by yet
another hoodlum. To facilitate her rescue, the young man is given a magic
flute and the garbage man magic bells. The daughter is guarded by a dumb
servant who, mistaking the garbage man for the devil, flees. The young man
learns that the purported kidnapper is really a good guy; it's the hoodlums'
mother who is evil. The garbage man and the girl are prevented from escaping
until the garbage man's bells, no joke, cause the kidnapper to dance
helplessly. Now free of encumbrances, the young people are able to marry.
A music-hall singer has an affair with a philanderer before returning to
her bartender lover.
A military officer makes his girlfriend a Vestal Virgin while he is
fighting abroad. Upon his return home, he breaks into the temple to win her
back. As she allows the holy fire to be extinguished, she is condemned to
death. When she is led to her execution, a flash of lightning rekindles the
fire. Spared from death, she rejoins her main man.
This ballet follows Homer's account of Odysseus's return after the Trojan
wars and tells, in a series of flashbacks, of his sexual encounters abroad.
An hereditary vampire can satisfy Satan only with the sacrifice of three
young women within twenty-four hours. He thinks the first killed, but does
not know that she is revived supernaturally in the moonlight through the help
of the vampire's assistant. He successfully seduces and kills a second,
whose fault is a fascination with vampires, and nearly succeeds in claiming
his third victim until she is successfully rescued by the first woman.
Two athletic male dancers do triple jetes in alternation until one of them
can jump no more.