Oceans Apart  

The La Scala Experience

The Back Story:

When I arrive in Milan, the behind-the-scenes drama at the La Scala Opera House and the upcoming production of L’Altra Metà del Cielo (The Other Side of the Sky) has reached fever pitch. Italy’s premier national theater is plying for younger audiences in a production to parallel to Roland Petit’s Pink Floyd Ballet success of its 2010 season.  After a difficult six-month residency to produce a comparable evening work, choreographer, Martha Clarke’s tenure at La Scala is reaching a melodramatic conclusion.  

Venerated Italian ‘rocker’ Vasco Rossi is the attraction here. A collection of songs that he has produced over the years make up the musical score assigned to Clarke.  I gather from the students, cabbies, and waiters I ask, Vasco represents the essence of Italian contemporary pop culture, light years from the familiar La Scala’s classic opera fair.  Now, in an attempt to draw younger audiences into the fold, controversy is brewing.  One young woman tells me, “Vasco at La Scala is a total contradiction. All wrong.”  I wonder, can a Jewish girl from Baltimore, no matter how inventive, make La Scala’s newest enterprise ‘right?’ 

Martha Clarke is now in her mid-sixties, Rossi’s age.  Accustomed to creating dance theater works with dedicated performers over many months and sometimes years, her 1884 The Garden of Earthly Delights and the 1988 Vienna-Lusthaus are among her achievements.  Both of those productions have toured throughout Italy in past seasons, and Clarke is a solid, if somewhat unusual, choice for La Scala. The Clarke-Rossi match at this point is even more atypical because it so completely contrasts her Angel Reapers premiered in November 2011 at The Joyce Theater in New York City.  Based on the Shakers, a puritanical religious sect, that work draws exclusively on the chanted hymns and rhythmic foot patterns delivered by her performers to produce an organic undercurrent of integrated sound and movement. 

Among leading American choreographers today, Clarke’s strength at providing compelling imagistic narratives––to especially composed scores or working with pristine classics, is ‘euro-centric’ and theater-based by her own admission.  But whatever the locus of her work, Clarke has always excelled in presenting the human condition with all of its flaws, in gutsy sensuality, sometimes tormented, sometimes brutal portrayals.  Yes, this could be a match, I reason, although working with Vasco Rossi’s popular songs is an uneasy departure for Clarke, certainly.

“I’ve cried a lot over the last six months,” Martha admits to me as I begin to understand her frustration at matching the charismatic, solo yearnings, ranting, and story telling of ballads sung by a man, about women. This time, too, Clarke’s job is to extract deep levels of emotional content from the dancers of La Scala’s ballet corps, a company much more comfortable with combinations of steps than combinations of feelings.  

With Reapers, Clarke has explored the sublimated sexual tension derived from the separation of the sexes. If in Reapers, women are confined to stern boundaries, in L’altra they are subjected to excesses In contrast to the subtle undertones of Reapers, Clarke must now coalesce singer, Vasco Rossi’s vision for La Scala.  His raspy, half-spoken, half-sung words brazenly cry out women’s names. His songs harbor overt sexual encounters and psycho-dramatic attacks on femininity. Sensitive, always, to the role and independent nature of women, Clarke’s task is to find ways to find meaning behind Rossi’s gasping rage accompanied by throbbing club beats and contrasting scenes of quiet loving to lilting, folksy tunes and an accumulation of the sentimental orchestrations of harps and violins.  

Although works by Balanchine, Christopher Wheedon, and others have been standard repertory fair for ballet evenings at La Scala, I check back to see what other American choreographers have produced full-length work at La Scala before Clarke, and I uncover two earlier full-length productions by Italian-American, Louis Falco: The Eagle’s Nest produced in 1980 and in 1992, Night in a Spanish Garden to music by de Falla were “monumental fiascos” his assistant, Alan Sener recalls.  

Earlier, Clarke tells an interviewer in a February La Scala promotion video, “I say, I choreograph on actors.  I direct dancers. Many dancers have not been trained to have feelings about movement.  I’m looking for color and expression, with dancers working as actors with subtext as they make the movement, understand the line of each character, and finding the motivation of why the movement is occurring rather than what movement is. I am trying to do something with Vasco’s world, trying to be true to Vasco’s language. My primary responsibility [is] to find a way of visually expressing his thoughts through movement.” She is also aware that she is the first American woman choreographer invited to make a full-length work at La Scala, ever. 

Unaccustomed to such tight time constraints where ‘spot’ rehearsals for learning the steps of existing repertory are the norm, the creation of a complete evening length work, ‘Clarke-style,’ is a new experience not only for her cast, but for La Scala’s management.  Clarke’s frustration has grown with the limited availability of her cast, assigned to   Martha confesses, off-camera, that she has barely completed four of the thirteen songs at the point and can’t see how she is going to finish the work with the allotted time left without a major scheduling revision.  Extra sessions are reluctantly added and with an increasingly devoted cast, challenged and captivated by Clarke’s direction, a semblance of a finished work is reached by the opening date.  The performers’ emotions are in high gear, and with sturdy professionalism, all determine to make L’Altra the best it can be.  

I soon gather that productions at La Scala never come easily.  This one is no exception. La Scala employees with the SLC-CGIL trade union chose to stage a one-day strike on the scheduled Saturday March 31premiere date. (My understanding is that the reason had nothing to do with the production: weeks before a set piece had fallen on a stagehand. The administration had placed the blame on employees, compounding an on-going issue to prevent contacted artists from free-lancing. )

Taking the disruption in stride, La Scala’s Friday March 30th press conference is held as planned, and I am invited to attend.  With as many cameramen roving the quarters as La Scala as on-guard ‘attendants’ dressed nattily attired-as one might expect in fashion-forward Milan, they are meticulously dressed in black suits with huge golden medallions gracing their chests. A subdued director of ballet, Makhar Vaziev director of the corps de ballet since 2009, and former premier dancer with the Kirov is present. (I would soon learn to distinguish the often-spewed Vaziev and Vasco names as the miscreants in almost every dialog.) 

The more talkative Stefano Salvati, Vasco’s assistant dramaturge, gathers around the press office representative preparing to moderate the interview session. Yet the focus is on Clarke, positioned next to her interpreter, and her female dancers, Sabrina Brazzo (primi ballerina), along with Stefania Ballone, and Beatrice Carbone, both drawn from the corpo di ballo. The lovely, demure women enter the scene as ‘three graces’ chatting intimately with their American choreographer, as cameras crowd their paths, paparazzi-style.

Once seated with the others at a long table, complete with microphones and water, con gasse, Clarke is asked to describe how the collaboration began. She began communications with Vasco “across the ocean,” Clarke explains, touching upon their geographical distance as well as their artistic one.  Then, the focus of the discussion centers on Clarke’s words, quickly translated by an interpreter by her side, as she describes the personalities of each of the three leading female characters she portrays as ‘fragile,’ ‘vulnerable,’ and ‘brave.’ 

The content for the hour and twenty-minute ‘ballet’ is drawn from Rossi’s vocal explorations of “the female universe,” the press kit explains.  Divided into sections of adolescence, maturity, growth, and abandonment, “three types of ‘women’ are described.” “Three characters, three different figures are depicted in four moments of their lives.”  It is this scenario that Martha Clarke has had to wrestle into a viable evening work.  Her experience with opera houses and making original work are now tested to the nth degree.  There would be no altering of the libretto, scenario, or recorded and heavily orchestrated score behind Vasco’s cutting-edge pleas.  

Fortunate to have resident choreographer, Gianluca Schiavoni as her associate for the project to helping with nuances in meaning and disco steps when needed, he has proved to be an invaluable asset that Clarke is quick to credit.  But having just completed a dress rehearsal with many production problems unresolved, and the tension in this elegant foyer is palpable.  Yet, on the surface, the press conference brings about everyone’s best behavior.  Later, setting off another rush of photographers, mid-conference, the singer does appear along the sidelines briefly, speaking graciously of Clarke’s and the dancers’ artistry.

Questions from the press center on her concept for the staging of Vasco Rossi’s libretto and the thirteen songs for the La Scala stage. Essentially a couples work, Clarke has cast the women’s partners from the roster of fine male dancers: Antonino Sutera (prima ballerino) to match Brazzo’s stature, soloist, Matteo Buongiorno to work with Ballone, and Fabio Saglibene as Beatrice’s counterpart, who is also drawn from the corpo di ballo, she explains. “To see solo and duet figures on the huge stage is surprising at first, but I think, fresh.” She describes her collaborative relationship with Vasco, by first explaining that she has always collaborated with the other theater arts, and that this production’s set and lighting designers, Robert Israel and Christopher Akerlind, are her long-time associates, and unfortunately, are not present for this press conference.  But Italian costume designer, bilingual Nana Cecchi, does sit on the panel next to Martha, and with a thankfully strong command of English, remains at Clarke’s side as a confidante and steadfast supporter. 

If Balanchine pronounced that there are no mothers in laws in ballet, then certainly he would have recoiled at the changing cast of characters in this production’s scenario.  Albachiara, Silvia and Susanna acquire different names through these transformations.  The program’s libretto states, “Albachiara becomes Jenny (she is crazy) who withdraws into silence and sleep, betrayed by her dreams and illusions, weary of life and hurt by reality.  Silvia becomes Laura who is expecting a child at Christmas and who fulfills herself a woman, the mother of a family.  Susanna becomes Sally, a woman who is aware and alone, proud and disillusioned but as ever untamed.”  Got it?  And our Martha (Italians call her Marta) is the one whose task it is to make this all become transparent and a cohesive whole for the audience. 

At a follow-up interview that evening, as an RAI television camera closes in on the scruffy, dog-eyed rocker, Clarke quietly interjects, “I’ve lived with you for months now.” Rossi doesn’t pick up on the double meaning of Clarke’s words. At this point I know that the weight of the La Scala evening rests squarely on her shoulders, and she knows it. She is more exhausted then I have ever seen her.  As we embrace after it is all over, I notice that she is trembling, as she whispers cheery ‘bon mots,’ surely her way of keeping her cool in one of the most emotionally driven scenes I have ever witnessed.  When we meet the following morning, her last day on the job at La Scala, she hasn’t slept, and counts each second before her next day’s departure back to the United States.

Frustrations with limits pressed upon the set and lighting designers, are palatable. The last minute changes with blackouts, and the hue and cry for ‘more steps’ from the artistic director and Rossi himself revealing insecurities in mounting this production in the first place.   Standard fare for most last minute performance jitters, but this time the stakes are high:  this is a La Scala production, and Clarke has had a full six months to grapple with the situation.  

The announcement of a La Scala strike on the very day of the premiere only added to the high drama of the situation.  Clarke and her associates have plane tickets to return to the States on the day after the scheduled opening, and they are leaving for other commitments, no matter what.  Surreptitiously, Gianluca has been asked to make changes and add ‘more steps’ after Clarke leaves.  But Clarke’s extraordinarily faithful (and bilingual) rehearsal associate who would be left to tend the work and prepare a second cast for the second week of performances, reports this to Martha and the dancers waiting in the rehearsal hall.  Upset, they gather around their union representative, and vehemently stand by Clarke’s work, ‘as is.’   ‘No changes,’ they insist, emotions exploding.  

At the same moment an intense, unhappy exchange happens outside the studio. Vasco has confronted Martha in the corridor: “I hate you, Marta!”   “I hate you, Vasco!” she retorts, tears welling in her eyes.  “No, I love you, Marta!  But why you always cry like a woman?” Bob Israel overhears this, and explodes, “How dare you speak to Martha that way, Vasco?’  (This was the ‘firecracker’ moment, Clarke later reflects.) Rossi backs away, confused, and clearly having difficulty understanding the confrontation that has suddenly escalated.  

Now Martha enters the studio to say her final goodbye to the dancers.  “We won’t rehearse today,” Clarke tearfully tells her cast: “We have done the best we could possibly do with the time that we had.  It’s honest.  It is what it is, and I have the utmost admiration and respect for you as dancers. No changes.”  The dancers gather around her for emotional group hugs and heartfelt ‘Grazies.” 

 A month later with the week of performances finished,  and perhaps too soon to broach the subject, I ask her to sum up her La Scala experience.  She emails back: “Hmm . . . I like the risotto . . . loved the soloists. It was . . . challenging.” 

La Scala has just announced that L’Altra Meta del Cello will be on the roster for its 2012- 13 season.  Clarke is resigned to going back to remount the production, experienced now, and more prepared for the workings of La Scala, she is glad for the opportunity to fill in gaps and revise places that are not fully realized.  She will be welcomed by a cast that has expressed appreciation for method of working that she has given them more personal expressive techniques at first so uncomfortable, now an exciting addition to their abilities. One dancer exclaimed, “ I was so caught up with my character, I suddenly didn’t know where I was in the dance, with no enchainment of ‘steps’ to rely upon.  It was wonderful and freeing!” Despite the myriad misadventures of the project, and if the mutual affection and respect she experienced with her soloists were the most personally rewarding for Clarke, her work on L’Altra will leave an significant mark on Italy’s dance legacy.   Back stories, however heart-rending and trouble-filled, really don’t matter in the end.  

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The Front Story

For me, what happened on stage for the April first opening of L’Altra Metà del Ceilo: The other side of the sky was almost anti-climactic to the behind-the-scenes creation of this production.  But the performance itself proves the strength of its contributors as delivered to a thrilled audience in the revered theater of La Scala. 

The prelude startles the audience, with sound decibels above what the humans in La Scala’s posh audience expects.  Vasco’s raspy voice is backed by what sounds like a massive chorus.  Whispering, sounds, dreamy piano, held notes are overtaken by rolling and thumping rocker beats. Abiding to the scenario’s structure of four sections of three songs with one for each of the characters, the first scene reveals a teal sofa mid-stage right, housed in Israel’s elegant white boxed room with windows and doors.  

The exquisite Albachiara is discovered in a white negligee lying on a white sheet down stage left.  On her back, legs akimbo, with alternating high chest arches with curled contractions, she makes her way toward the sofa, downstage right.  A male figure enters for a dream ballet of sorts; she is, as the song describes, “ Alone, inside the room, with all the world outside.” A charming Clarke moment is visible, as two little girls peer through the back window, viewing a kind of premonition of their future. The exquisite dancers, Sabrina Brazo, and Andrea Volpintesta (as Claudio) establish a sensitive partnership here that they sustain throughout the evening. There is a long moody, sensuous duet: the couple sleeps on the white sheet, she wraps herself in it.  There is embracing on the blue couch, sustaining the feel of a dream state, as Vasco croons “cami, it ca more” over and over in his Anima Fragile (fragile soul).  There is story telling here. Lovers quarrel.  There is a struggle.  He leaves.  She grabs him, and they are back on the sofa.  Two men enter, and he leaves with the ‘boys.”  

When we see them again in the seventh scene, Incredibile romantic, Brazo (now Susanna) is stunning as she leans against the back wall in a pale overcoat.  Again, her partner enters and sensitively supports her startling ear-height developpes, boureéing on pointe, and guides her gently for the duration of the song.  Here Clarke has joined the simplest ballet vocabulary, with spinning lifts central to the underlying emotional content, reminiscent of Antony Tudor’s characteristic interplay, yet with the yearning and inner turmoil Clarke readily attributes to her work with Anna Sokolow.  This is a dynamite duet. The audience, unusually quiet until now, explodes with ‘bravas’ in high reverence for the dancing and the emotional impact of seeing one of their favorite ballerinas in so dramatically different and impressive a role.  Everything works in this scene.

By Brazo’s appearance in the tenth scene to ‘Jenny à pazza,’ a repetitive melody builds into a frightening, drumming explosion, as her  ‘Jenny’ character deteriorates mentally and she takes on Clarke’s ‘Sokolow informed’ way of moving absolutely out of her comfort zone: her dancing becomes more disoriented as the scene becomes more chaotic: giant mirrors seem to attack, balloons burst, women hold lamps like human art deco torches.  The part swallows her up as a performer.  (Later, tears are visible as she takes her formal bow at the program’s end.)  Clarke has worked on preliminary ideas for this section at the American Dance Festival, and presented her Etudes for La Scala, at Duke in July 2011. The odd posturing with commedia d’arte masks attached to the back of their heads, those studies have found their way into this scene, with minimum effect.  If the idea worked at the time, it somehow looses its punch in this Italian production.

The second song, as well as the fourth, and eighth, belongs to Silvia, the feistiest and most animated woman of the three, dancing with unpredictable verve by Stefania Ballone, partnered by Matteo Gavazzi as Fabrio. In her first appearance, she wears a blue top with pants (thankfully color-coded) loves to throw her clothes off, teasing, abusive, quarreling, independent.  Here Vasco intimate talk desolves into a more tender folk melody of 6/8, building up into over the top cresendos. In the fourth scene to Brava Guilia, a score heavy with men’s and women’s thick choral arrangement, there is a lilting women’s unison quartet on the diagonal sometimes joined by an ensemble of men playing with a soccer ball on the periphery. A more satisfying resolution is apparent by the eleventh song, Jenny é passa as this figure finds love, marriage, and a baby. (Clarke’s signature touches are more apparent in Silvia’s sections.  There is a key-light lovemaking, and later a ‘pregnant’ duet, compete with belly padding.  In a culminating skating scene the ensemble resembles Currier and Ives figures, complete with snow, skating partners and snowball roughhousing.  Silvia and her partner stroll across the stage with a baby carriage. Nestled inside, is Gianluca’s real-life infant son, who wails on cue, adding an especially intimate touch. 

Susanna, danced by statuesque Beatrice Carbone (whose costume always flashes a glimpse of red) is the central figure for the songs Gabri, Delusa, and Sally.  She has the sexiest, most out-going role to play: with able Antonino Sutera as her sometime partner, Mario.  For the song, Gabri, Vasco again talks through his story. We hear chugging train sounds that collide with jazzy rock, piano chords, drumming that crashes and burns, and an insistent techno disco beat that overwhelms.  Another passionate bed scene takes place with spinning lifts and flying hair, before a last image facing the mirror when she peels her dress off.  Her next scene takes place in a disco where she works at ‘getting noticed’ in Delusa, in this unrelenting, “head-banging rock “loser boozer” section that disintegrates as violins swirl. Here, Clarke inserts a stop-tape moment, as the manic taskmaster screams out counts 5, 6, 7, 8.  

For the ninth song, Gally, Clarke assigns fuller casts.  There is an audition, complete with a row of chairs and numbers in hand, lifted from the Zack/Chorus Line formula, and photographers (like a Clockwork Orange episode,) menacing each woman, demanding poses.  Susanna loses out in the end: another takes ‘her’ man off, she leaves, resigned.  In the twelfth section, Sally, she flirts and pushes away men on cell phones, smoking cigarettes, as her partner rolls, tormented, across stage, stopped only by the far wall. 

A brief “Divertimento” before the last section reveals a calliope, and strolling organ grinder, another Clark-ism opening a subtle crack in the scenario. 

This sets the tone for the entrance of the three couples coming together on stage leading into the final song, Un Senso, roughly translated, “I want to find meaning to this evening, even if this evening does not have a meaning,” and ends, “I want to find a meaning to many things even if many things do not have a meaning. “ Despite the mournful prediction of isolation, and dissolution, Clarke is able to redeem dignity and continuity as the ensemble feeds into a circling pattern, a kind of life cycle statement, studded with unfolding spins by the three partners, giving continuum and a sense of joy.  The final moments give the feel of renewal, as the three little girls joyfully weave in and out of the crowd that now disperses, as calmly and as easily as they entered.  A satisfying, if prolonged, conclusion to the mysteries and revelatory moments that have transpired.

Three sets of cast bows for the ensemble with applause multiplying each time for the three couples, and capped by the subdued appearance of Vasco Rossi joining the cast, along with costume designer Cecchi, that some might easily have mistaken for the absent choreographer, Clarke), and the resident lighting designer. 

An email the next day from Antonio Gnecchi to Clarke reads, “Teatro esaurito ma, soprattutto, pubblico impazzito:15' di applausi e, alla fine, letteralmente, una grande standing ovation. Corpo di Ballo in estasi!” A standing ovation and six curtain calls: not bad for starters.