PETIT'S `HEART' BEATS IN FLORENCE.

PETIT'S `HEART' BEATS
IN FLORENCE

MAGGIODANZA
TEATRO DELLA PERGOLA
FLORENCE, ITALY
JUNE 12-20, 2001

Roland Petit has been well loved by Italian audiences for decades: He and his wife, ballet star Zizi Jeanmaire, have been guest performers with his company in past seasons, and almost all the Italian opera ballet companies have performed one of his ballets over the years. Florence Opera MaggioDanza was an exception; although its repertoire was rich in twentieth-century titles, Petit's pieces were never among them.

Elisabetta Terabust, one of Petit's favorite ballerinas and now the artistic director of the Florentine Ballet, filled the gap at the Maggio Musicale Festival with Proust ou les intermittences du coeur (Proust, or the Vagaries of the Human Heart), set to a wonderful score with music by Saint-Saens, Wagner, Debussy, Faure, Franck, and Beethoven. Created in 1974 at Monte Carlo Opera, the ballet incorporates key episodes from Proust's masterpiece Remembrance of Things Past, which portrays Parisian society at the end of the nineteenth century and the secret, irrepressible ways of love and desire, often masked by social etiquette and here embodied by such complicated characters as Odette, Swann, Proust, Albertine, Morel, Charlus, and Saint-Loup.

Ambiguity, erotic passion, and elusiveness are Proust's principal themes, which Petit develops in thirteen scenes. The corps de ballet is often used as a tableau vivant, which quotes from famous paintings from the late nineteenth century: Renoir's poetic promenade of the young ladies with parasols or Toulouse-Lautrec's harsh episodes in the brothel. Petit mostly uses the pas de deux form to express the complexity of human relationships; in the duets, someone always tries to dominate. Petit effectively describes all the lovers' emotions through a pure classicism and sensual outbursts, as in "The Prisoner" pas de deux, where he wonderfully translates the jealousy that leads Marcel to question whether the sleeping Albertine's movements reveal her true feelings; or in the "Challenge of the Angels" duet, where a sober neoclassical vocabulary alludes to Morel's attempts to corrupt Saint-Loup. The choreographer addresses such potentially controversial subjects as homosexuality or masochistic impulses with a sophisticated elegance, and tastefully depicts Morel's nudity in the brothel.

Under Terabust's rule, MaggioDanza performed with gusto and the panache they had lost under Karole Armitage's direction, carefully depicting all the characters. Giampiero Galeotti was moving as Charlus. La Scala principal Massimo Murru showed elegance and passion as the young Marcel; Pads Opera etoile Manuel Legris took the audience by storm with his smart technique and his portrayal of Morel's irresistible temptation.