Dancers Tori Mehaffey, left, and Daniel McArthur in ProArteDanza's Figaro 2.0.Aleksandar Antonijevic/Handout
- Title: Figaro 2.0
- Choreography by: Roberto Campanella and Robert Glumbek
- Performed by: Tori Mehaffey, Kelly Shaw, Daniel McArthur, Benjamin Landsberg, Ryan Lee, Robert Glumbek, Taylor Bojanowski and Heidi Lorenz
The Marriage of Figaro might not seem like the most obvious material for a contemporary dance adaptation. The plot of Mozart’s 18th-century opera is detailed and long-winded, deploying credulity-straining devices of disguise and mistaken identity. You’d be forgiven for assuming that any 21st-century version would come with a radical refocus – an ambitious vision as to which part of the story needs to be retold and why dance is the right language for it.
ProArteDanza’s Figaro 2.0, which opened at Toronto’s Fleck Dance Theatre last week, doesn’t have this sort of lucid ambition. The adaptation, which crams most of the plot into two acts, feels accessorized with relevant themes of gender, power and sexual objectification rather than actually reimagined by them. It’s an important distinction, the former approach being more akin to dressing up the original than rethinking it. Moreover, there’s a disorder of styles and conventions in this production that make the overall effect feel slapdash.
The main conflict remains intact: Servants Figaro and Suzanna – the Count’s valet and the Countess’ maid respectively – are engaged to be married. However, the Count has forced Suzanna into a non-consensual affair and wants to prevent the wedding from taking place. Suzanna tells the Countess about her exploitation, and they conspire to take the Count down together. Meanwhile, there’s a detailed subplot about Figaro’s parentage.
What setting has replaced Mozart’s 18th-century Spain? Well, it’s hard to be entirely sure. Sometimes the production seems to occupy a world of silent cinema, in which scene titles and the characters’ thoughts are projected onto an upstage screen. But other times, the dancers are able to speak to the audience, using fragments of pithy direct-address. In Act 1, the aesthetic feels modern and minimalist; in Act 2 the women don head scarves and sunglasses, and look like Fellini heroines. Then, the choreography often hovers between symbolic and literal movement in a manner that’s discordant with all these worlds. The worst example: to express their unremitting sexual desire, the men grab their crotches repeatedly.
There’s a disorder of styles and conventions in this production that make the overall effect feel slapdash.Aleksandar Antonijevic/Handout
It’s curious that choreographers Roberto Campanello and Robert Glumbek felt as though they needed to tell the entire story instead of homing in on a particular thread or theme. The best material, and strongest choreography, comes out the relationship between Suzanna (Tori Mehaffey) and the Countess (Kelly Shaw). Mehaffey is a regular with ProArteDanza and a dancer of impressive depth and maturity. She’s a sensitive and compelling performer who seems to author her own choreography as she goes along. The turned-in orientation of much of her movement helps create a sense of robotic submission that she inflects with resistance. As a humiliated wife, the athletic Shaw is powerful and stoic. There’s a nice duet as the women plot to entrap the Count, but I longed to see more development in the friendship between them – the sort of elaboration a #MeToo-era adaptation would seem poised to explore.
Lighting designer Arun Srinivasan creates some beautiful effects that evoke mood and weather, and Mozart’s lovely arias are complemented by transitional electronica music by Greg Harrison. But without a satisfying concept, these details – as well as some finer points in the ensemble choreography – don’t really land.
It’s hard not to compare the work to Campanella’s 2016 Fearful Symmetries, which – while not a narrative piece – felt aesthetically compact and consistent, a more satisfying example of his talent as choreographer. It’s also hard not compare this new ballet to other recent, and more successful, adaptations of old stories. In particular, I found my mind wandering to Michael Dolan-Keegan’s revisionist Swan Lake, which took a dated story, turned it on its head, and made something that was riveting, urgent and wholly contemporary.
I’ll happily believe that there’s a compelling modern adaptation to be made out of Figaro. But ProArteDanza needs a bolder execution of a better concept.
Figaro 2.0 continues at the Fleck Dance Theatre from Nov. 7-10.
Martha Schabas