The Art Is in the Storytelling

Storytelling is often the most underrated of a choreographer’s gifts, but frequently it’s the most crucial. The music for “The Firebird” (1910) — the first classic composition by Igor Stravinsky — is a masterpiece of musical narration. The narrative, though, changes with each choreographic interpreter. Yet the score retains the feeling of myth. Compelling and mysterious, the story Stravinsky tells is about magic, love, danger and liberation.

The score has also prompted a wide range of remarkably picturesque stage designs. Next week the production by Alexei Ratmansky returns to American Ballet Theater repertory at the Metropolitan Opera House. One of its most marvelous features is Simon Pastukh’s décor: The first exterior scene is a bizarre but poetic dreamscape in which forked objects, like fire-tipped cactuses but changing in contour, emit puffs of smoke.

Ratmansky’s production features the same characters — taken from Russian folklore — as more traditional versions. The hero, Ivan, catches the Firebird and takes from her a magic feather that will summon her when he is in need. Soon he meets and falls in love with a Maiden, only to find she is in thrall to an evil sorcerer, Kaschei. Using the feather, he summons the Firebird, who helps him destroy Kaschei. Freed, Ivan and earlier victims of Kaschei’s curses are reunited with the women they love.

Stravinsky’s score was composed in close collaboration with Michel Fokine, whose “Firebird” — in repertory at the Royal Ballet in London and reconstructed at the Mariinsky in St. Petersburg — remains the best example of the theatrical principles that made him the most influential ballet-maker of the first half of the 20th century. Every character has a strikingly different movement idiom. His Firebird, a bravura role with jumps and turns, is the only dancer on point in the whole ballet. Her head movements are staccato; her arms are like powerful wings; her hands vibrate as if their fingers shake off sparks.

Ivan, in contrast, is a pedestrian folk hero, a man of the people. His bride and her companions are demurely elegant beauties in heeled shoes. And Kaschei, amusingly and frighteningly grotesque, is an aged ghoul.

Ratmansky transforms all four. His Firebird is just one of a flock of firebirds of both sexes. His Maiden and her friends are spiky, conflicted, impulsive, odd. And Kaschei is glamorous, lithe, vain, creepy.

George Balanchine’s staging, for New York City Ballet, follows the general shape of Fokine’s drama, making his title role a yet more full-throttle example of dance power. She spins on point with one leg outstretched; she naturally and often moves off balance. Always a master of exits and entrances, Balanchine gives her an unforgettable final departure: In profile to us, she arches backward as if spreading her wings and — mission accomplished — slowly travels backward on point into the wings.

Balanchine uses Stravinsky’s “Firebird” suite, which cuts some of the original score. Though this makes the story more high-concentrate, I always miss the music where Fokine stages the best kiss in all of choreography. In the moonlit garden, Ivan and his beloved join lips, while her companions all gaze in wonder. Then alarm bells sound: Kaschei’s coming! The other girls grow agitated. The two lovers, however, hear and see nothing. They stand locked in the same kiss until the others tear them apart.

Ratmansky’s story is stranger and darker. Gradually it emerges that Kaschei’s control over the Maiden and her friends is sexually possessive and abusive. To love Ivan, she must conquer complex inhibitions and fears.

For Fokine and Balanchine, the “Firebird” tale has a political dimension. With Kaschei’s fall, Ivan becomes sovereign of the realm. As the music’s finale builds to glory, Ivan’s coronation reaches its climax: Almost nobody onstage moves.

Ratmansky takes the opposite route: He uses that surging music to release all the human lovers’ pent-up energies in dance steps, jumps and lifts. So his story becomes one of sexual transformation. You should argue about it — don’t the Maidens lose their individuality when they turn into uniformly platinum-blond brides? — but his production shows he’s yet another master of the storyteller’s art.