A Streetcar Named Desire From Hamburg

Tennessee Williams is a household name in theatre. His Streetcar named Desire, written in 1947, won the Pulitzer prize for drama the following year. It's a story about the life of a middle-aged belle Blache Dubois with fading charm tortured by loneliness, by desire for love and an "exaggerated" need for gentility who could not bear the harsh realities of life and who ended up in a mental asylum after her first husband, Alan Grey, a homosexual who committed suicide, died, had a number of meaningless affairs with men including a delivery boy and a 17-year-old student for which she was dismissed as an English teacher in the town she came from, Laurel and which was what brought her to meet her younger sister Stella in the French quarters of New Orleans, where the play began. There she was warmly welcomed by 25-year-old Stella, married to Stanley Kowlaski, a physically strong working class man with whom she had tempestuous sex, had her hopes for a second marriage dashed after Stanley revealed her past, which he learned from a co-worker who frequented Laurel, to a would be suitor Mitch. The roughness and uncouthness of Stanley bothered Blanche and in turn, he could not stand Blanche' affectation to old Southern gentility of a "belle". Eventually, the animal-like Stanley raped her after getting drunk but Stella refused to believe it. This completely shattered Blanche's life. When the play ends, she is being forcibly led away by a cold and business-like nurse to a mental institution but Stanley continued a poker game with his buddies, as if nothing had happened. It was a powerful drama of the tragedy of a woman buffeted by the uncontrollable forces of life, by conventional morality, by the violence of sexual desire and perhaps innate male aggression and her need for some sort of acceptable "self-image" in the immediately post-war society of the old American South. Stella lives in Elysian Fields Avenue where runs a local streetcar named "Desire". The play has since been adapted for Broadway, for cinema, for opera and television and since 1983 for ballet, choreographed by John Neumier, who had been with the Hamburg Ballet since 1973. His latest production include Purgatorio and Liliom, premiered last year. Neumier is also the founder of the first National Youth Ballet in Germany.
 
I saw Neumier's production of the ballet adaption of Tennessee's play at the Cultural Centre on Sunday evening. It was a rather mixed experience. I saw how in modern ballet, the stage is quite minimalist, how every thing is merely "suggested" by carefully placed "hints", e.g. window shutters, doors, cloth background and how mood is suggested by lighting and how all action e.g. embrace (affection), push (rejection), piling up of two bodies barely touching (the love act), is done through thoughtful but formalized "gestures" . The ballet is a typical postmodern mix of "images", of criss-crossing of different dancing styles from different periods and cultures: traditional "classical" ballet steps, jazz, modern dance and even some hip hop moves. There were solos, duets and plenty of group dancing running not merely as background but in parallel, presumably as a kind of cool and distancing juxtaposition to increase the dramatic tension.

Neumier chose to reverse the order of the play which he did in two acts, starting with Asylum scene first and then working backwards to New Orleans in the following order:
Act I: Belle Rêve (Beautiful Dream and Blanche's ancestral home which she sold) consisting of her snippets of Blanche's flash back memories, Men, Her Wedding at Belle Rêve, her husband Allan Gray, the tragic end of their wedding day, Belle Reve falls into decay, Flamingo Hotel
Act II  End of the line, Blanche remembers the visit to her sister Stella in New Orleans, Stella changed, Conflict with Stanley, A Rescue Attempt with Stanley's friend Mitch, Blanche's past is laid open by Stanley, Flight--to where?, Rape, Stepping out of reality, Asylum.
The ballet ends where it began and came full circle with a detour through Blanche's memories.

What I like best is the lighting and the way the director used color of the minimal costume ( principally black and white) in the scenes at Belle Reve. I also like the way Blanche reminisces her past by taking out stuffs from her suitcase and whenever she wants to feel particularly "cultured", the way she caresses her fluffy but cheap feather-like neck "ribbon". The dancers were also good, often following the mood and the rhythms of the relevant music, which conveys also a strange juxtapositioning of classical themes, modern discordant notes and even hints of "jazz". They were extracts taken from Prokofiev's Visions Fugitives, Op 22 and Alfred Schnittke's First Symphony.  The principal dancers were Carolina Aguero, Silvia Azzoni, Thiago Bordin, Hélène Bouchet, Otto Bubenicek, Carsten Jung, Anna Laudere, Anna Polikarpova, Edwin Revazov, Alexandre Riabko, Lloyd Riggins and Ivan Urban. It's always interesting to  experience how one artistic media may be dramatically transformed into another through different artistic perception and sensitivities and how drama may be turned into a kind of mime-ballet. I never cease to be amazed by the almost acrobatic skills required a modern ballet dancer. It's not a life which any one can follow, only those really dedicated. My salute to them for a very enjoyable evening, away from all the worries of work.!