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February 28, 2004, Vancouver Sun
By Deborah Meyers
The Magic Flute
Royal Winnipeg Ballet
Queen Elizabeth Theatre, Feb. 26 to 28
Mark Godden's The Magic Flute, his second full-length work for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, is joke-ridden, scatological, delicious -- a thoroughly Mozartean affair. And while the libretto is published in a lengthy program note (that artistic director Andre Lewis, in a curtain speech, urged the audience to read), the ballet works best when you forget about the plot line and give yourself over to its surreal montage of images.
Mozart's librettist, Emanuel Schikaneder, was a noted German Shakespearean actor just coming off an appearance in The Tempest. He transplanted many of the characters (names only slightly changed) from that play to The Magic Flute, and linked it all together within an immensely complicated narrative framework (which boils down to Chaos, followed by a Quest, and finally Order Restored and Love Celebrated.) It's an incoherent fairy tale with a happy ending.
But Godden's defining inspiration for his balletic Magic Flute, which premiered in Winnipeg last October, is not allegorical but visual: Ingmar Bergman's 1975 The Magic Flute, considered by many to be the finest operatic film ever made. It's not surprising, really: it was Godden's first evening-long work for the Winnipeg company in 1998, Dracula, that served as the starting point for filmmaker Guy Maddin's much acclaimed Dracula: Tales from a Virgin's Diary. Godden's a maker of dances blessed with a cinematic eye.
He's also someone who knows how to move dancers to music, in this instance Mozart's shimmering score, in a taped performance conducted by Sir Neville Mariner. To it Godden has devised a resolutely contemporary two-hour ballet. It plays out within a stripped down, black box environment, studded with oversized iconic props (including a giant night light and a set of triplet dolls) and glowing with long-time Godden collaborator Paul Daigle's dazzlingly witty costumes, in colours like acid green and robin's egg turquoise.
Godden's dance style has always been essentially lyrical, with classical legs and feet and a deeply ironic, vernacular use of the upper body and arms. At times the music and the dancing seem to run parallel to one another, but in the ballet's best moments they are gloriously fused. Godden's ensemble dances explode with energy, and his culminating, resolving pas de deux for Tamino (Johnny Wright) and Pamina (Cindy Marie Small) is a strange, beautiful, serpentine concoction.
This Magic Flute fits the Royal Winnipeg Ballet like a glove. The cast of 18 is uniformly grand, with Jesus Corrales eating up the stage as Papageno and Sarah Murphy-Dyson a delight as his love interest. It has been some years since the company has looked so integrated, so strong -- an indication that it is emerging from its years as a foil for the very particular talents of Evelyn Hart.
Or maybe it's because Godden, now based in Montreal and working independently, was for many years choreographer-in-residence at the RWB: clearly this dancemaker and these dancers are in sync. A true marriage of sensibilities is evident throughout this big, crazy salad of a Magic Flute. This is never more evident than in the ballet's final moments, which have this very Canadian company dancing in white fur coats on a stage piled with snow, while two tiny, jewelled figures turn in a music box downstage-centre.
It's the kind of wacky, witty juxtaposition Mozart would have loved.
Deborah Meyers is a Vancouver dance writer.
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