'Onegin', Rare and Ravishing at American Ballet Theatre

Chloe Misseldine and Thomas Forster in Onegin. Photo: Kyle Froman.

Balletic works based on literature often prove that what arises from music and movement has the ability to enter our beings on a much more unfiltered, direct pathway than words ever could. John Cranko’s 1965 Onegin is such a ballet; a sweeping drama of turbulent nature, rich in endeavor and effect. Returning to American Ballet Theatre’s Summer Season at the Metropolitan Opera House after a blissfully short two-year hiatus, Onegin is a narrative ballet unlike any other. Our heroines don’t die or get married; there is no outside force or death commanding their separation, no supernatural element or fairy tale at all. The tragedy is simply the heartaches of timing, missed chances, moral conflict, and regret. In both dramatic stillness and flurried intoxications of choreography, Cranko retains Alexander Pushkin’s poetry, not only literally transcribing lines of verse upon the body, but pushing it into the realm of unspeakable beauty. And what is a dancer if not a poet of the physical form?

While creating the dances for Tchaikovsky’s opera, Eugene Onegin, for Sadler Wells, Cranko discovered that despite being built upon a literary source, the story struck him “as being much more suitable for ballet” than for the opera. When he proposed the idea of transforming Tchaikovsky’s score for a ballet, the board of directors at Covent Garden would not hear of such a proposal. But years later, the idea of stitching together a score without a single bar of Tchaikovsky’s opera made a premiere for Stuttgart Ballet possible. Kurt Heinz Stolze, then the Kapellmeister for the company, selected lesser-known works of Tchaikovsky and drastically arranged, shifted, and orchestrated rhythmic and harmonic changes in order to create a cohesive score. What arose from such skillful alteration is an entirely new Tchaikovsky ballet, an artistic triumph in itself.

Spurred on by this rich score, Cranko brings Pushkin’s novel in verse to life with grandeur and a raw humanity that seeps from his choreography and storytelling choices. In keeping with classical ballet tradition, the dramatic focus is shifted to the female protagonist, and so it is Tatiana upon whom the curtain first rises (poised so unballetically on her stomach with her nose in a book) and falls hours later on the image of her solitary, grieving figure. The tale of Onegin is a study of missed timing–Onegin drawing his hand away unknowingly while Tatiana reaches for him; the mirrored events of first Tatiana’s unmet yearning, and then Onegin’s similar plea; the letters professing love, both torn to shreds, one arriving too early, the other too late. In the smallest of gestures and repeated themes, Cranko paints the perils of existence, both minuscule and monstrous, until it's impossible to imagine words ever reaching such a boiling height.

As John Percival remarks in his biography of Cranko, “Onegin is perhaps the most successful original example of storytelling made in the present century.” At a time when Balanchine was revealing the intricacies of stripped-down, plotless ballets, on the other side of the world, Cranko strove to make story ballets more relevant. His masterpiece, Onegin, is a successful surging of the psychological complexities of Pushkin’s characters into physical and visceral form. 

Onegin is filled with moments where Cranko lets the dancing fall away in favor of the most simple, universal expressions. The scope of mood and character that he builds through where he places his dancers (such as Tatiana reading on the ground), the homely nature of his scenes (like Tatiana’s bedroom scene, where a sweet interaction with her nurse reveals her youthful playfulness), and the defining moments that propel the story further (a letter ripped to shreds, the brilliant mirror scene, the devastating image of both sisters lying amidst the snowy woods, Tatiana still as stone as Onegin encircles her) prove Cranko to be a dramatist of grand proportion.

The turning point of Onegin is the duel, which strips the sisters of their innocence and forces Onegin to confront the faults of his nature amidst the poetic beauty of a bare birch forest in the dead of winter. In the aftermath of the duel, just the look that passes between Onegin and Tatiana says more than words ever could. Without a single step, they reveal nuances of their character with nothing more than a taut meeting of the eye and a brilliantly poignant lift of the chin. 

There is nothing profound about his choreography for the corps de ballet other than that in Onegin, he charts the trajectory of Tatiana’s life with three distinct classes of choreography: peasant dancing in the first act, middle-class finery in the second, and an aristocratic ball in the third. Like Kenneth MacMillan, Cranko is at his best in the inventive evocations of his pas de deuxs. This is where the magic of his mind gleams, and the heightened emotions rising from his ability to entangle two characters at a deeply human place of connection, or to reveal the inner workings of a character in lyrical and inventive ways, is often poetry itself. There is something particularly poignant about choreography that becomes less focused on technique or aesthetics, and is instead overcome by the sheer height of emotion that must be professed in any form it can. The steps disappear, turning to unspooling innate compulsions that rage through swells of passion with athletic verve.

Two pas de deuxs stand as mileposts in the ballet, namely the dream pas de deux (it takes more than one viewing to realize that what we witness as Onegin and Tatiana’s happiest moment together is nothing more than a dream), and the final pas de deux, a push and pull of heart and mind. In the past, critics have called Cranko’s choreography “brutal”, “ugly”, or dismissed it entirely for its dramatic freedom, but this unprescribed quality is Cranko’s biggest gift. When the tale’s tension rises, there is no restraint, only a dramatically gratifying release that so beautifully embodies Tchaikovsky’s rising intensity.

The dream pas de deux is all swooning ecstasy in musical and physical realization, a torrent of passion growing in that bewitching evening hour. This scene, with Onegin appearing eerily in the mirror, is not a Pushkin creation, but one imagined by Cranko to give Tatiana’s love letter a visible form. It works potently, with Cranko at his most lyrical: wild, flurried lifts–twisted, wrangled, folded, flown–racing like passionate hearts themselves. There, Tatiana sails in his arms like a white crescent sail upon a midnight sea, falling into his arms again and again in an ultimate pronouncement of trust and abandon. It is pure bliss where we leave them, with Tatiana’s arms encircling Onegin’s being until her arms reach the ground, and he steps from the ring of her limbs and disappears.

Devon Teuscher and Aran Bell in Onegin. Photo: Steven Pisano.

Brilliantly, how this dream ends is how their final pas de deux begins, only now the roles are reversed, and Onegin is the one professing his heart before her. Though the air between them is taut with ice, he passes the ring of his arms over her unreactive body until he’s curled around her ankles (in Pushkin’s verse, Onegin declares “then to swoon before your feet…and at your feet/ to sob out prayer, complaint, confession/ and every plea that lips can treat”). The majesty of the ball, only a moment ago, is gone; there is only the intimacy of these two, trapped within their own faulted humanity. 

Clad in mourning black and colossal remorse, Tatiana and Onegin’s final pas de deux is a crushing realization of what could have been; a terrifying feeling of time having slipped between their fingers. Knotted, intertwined, tossed, caught, and fraught with desperation, the physical embodiment of confliction that Cranko creates here is expressively ambitious. It is kaleidoscopic in its relentless intricacy, with the most inventive lifts ever envisioned that strip the characters to vulnerable layers. In the intimacy of that ebony night, Cranko weaves a pas de deux that, perhaps more than any other, reveals each molecule of thought and decision that these two characters face.

Tatiana continuously pulls away, and Onegin, reduced to his most unpolished humility, sinks to the ground repeatedly before her until she cannot help but free her hand from logical restraint and reach for him. Knotted and intertwined (again, most unballetically, and yet perfectly poetic), the flighty flutes carry them off to a dream-like place of hazy, breathless, tantalizing unity. It is a pas de deux that breaks both involved and reveals just how far Cranko has carried them from where they began.

One of the most moving sections isn’t ballet at all, or at least not like anything we’ve seen before, as they painstakingly wade through the pinnacle of Tchaikovsky’s score. With Tatiana turned from Onegin, dragging him behind her only to turn on a dime and fling herself into his arms repeatedly like a teeter-tottered argument with self, it’s a phrase that highlights the enormity of what is declared in this pas de deux.

The final pas is a moral conflict of head over heart. Pushkin writes, “The simple maiden/ whose heart on dreams was wont to thrive/ in her once more has come alive,” and it is not only a conflict of the heart, but of class as well. For in Onegin, Tatiana sees the quiet countryside where he first caught her eye, rather than the “flashy masquerading” of the lavish but lacking world her husband has drawn her into. 

Reflecting on the plot of Onegin, Cranko said, “You have a blasé man of the world who can’t feel anymore, who misses the point of the ugly duckling. When she turns into a swan, he suddenly wants her back, and she realizes how empty and bored he really is. And while her emotional side says ‘Take him’, her rational side says ‘Don’t.’” And thus, Onegin becomes one of the few narrative ballets where our female protagonist is given a choice.

The ballet may be named after its male protagonist, but at the pulsing heart of the work is the psychology of one woman, and Chloe Misseldine lets us see every fleck of Tatiana’s soul. Watching Misseldine take on a role is often like hearing a native speaker and realizing that everyone else before was speaking a second language. Two years ago at her debut, the lucidity of her character made her promotion to Principal just two weeks later abundantly necessary, and her return to the role is a ravishing feat of even further developed dramatic capacity and astonishing beauty.

From the start, simply her carriage of self is filled with clarity of who Tatiana is. Her every thought, desire, and hesitation simmers on the surface. She is deeply ingrained in the intrinsic complexities of character that let her Tatiana transform from the tender epitome of youth to where we find her in Act Three at an almost noble place of self-knowledge and worth. In her Act Two variation, Misseldine bares Tatiana’s inner drive so well that it feels as though each small bowing bend and hopeful presentation is a palpable swell of her young heart. Small nuances of intentionality paint her Tatiana most authentically: her airy disposition; her musical sensitivity; the haunting emptiness that fills her eyes as her torn letter flutters to the ground; her panicked, flared hands when Onegin erupts at her profession; the duel that ends so sourly and finds her face-to-face with Onegin: steely-eyed with the most perfect, declarative lift of her chin. She is so fully present within the character that there is no thought of prescription or choice; it all just unravels instinctually with her heart laid bare.

Misseldine has a rare quality, a purity of line and expression that, even in the ballet’s most homely moments, gift her an air of unearthly grace. I cannot emphasize enough the effect of her physical freedom that, particularly in Cranko’s glorious pas de deuxs, compels emotion just by the range and reach and bend of her physical form. She relishes air and space, consuming them like her life’s oxygen, and when she arches back to let her hand nearly graze her foot in a grande jeté, it's enough to halt a breath at the effect of such physically emotive drama.

Her defining gifts are the ability to imbue each step, glance, and breath with entirely intuitive emotion, the complete abandon with which she throws herself into character, and the way that her pristine, long lines and pliability extend these emotions to unforeseen heights. In the sixty-one years since Onegin’s premiere, the role of Tatiana has been taken on by some of the biggest names of the 20th and 21st centuries, but Chloe Misseldine brings a depth of character to the role that reaches a ravishing intensity in the final pas de deux. 

Chloe Misseldine and Thomas Forster in Onegin. Photo: Kyle Froman.

Her riveting Tatiana is distinguished by her suppleness, the complete abandon with which she throws herself into these vulnerable declarations, and her use of breath that leaves her gasping for air and suffocating under Onegin’s touch. She makes the distinctions of Tatiana’s inner fight particularly clear, until every heart thread is visible. And oh, when Onegin’s letter must be ripped to shreds, the unbridled fury and fire that rages through her is so shockingly sincere that it hits like a wall: a biting, spitfire anger that has been held in for far too long.

This final moment of the ballet, with Tatiana, grief-stricken and stripped of everything but her morals, is, as Elizabeth Kaye puts it “a uniquely complex moment, and it requires the most complex artistry”. In Pushkin’s novel, it is Tatiana who leaves Onegin’s side, but in the ballet, it is Tatiana’s fuming arrow of a finger that sends him away, although every fiber of her being seems shattered by her own action. When carried with such genuineness, Tatiana cannot wither when the curtain falls. A roaring crowd, a jostling subway ride, days pass, and yet, there Misseldine’s Tatiana still lingers: distilled tempest blazing in the haunting devastation of her eyes.

The problem with Onegin is that its title character is often impossible to love or understand. After his brute nature in the first two acts, he has an enormous task to redeem himself, or else he, along with the tale’s weight, is lost to us. It wasn’t until Aran Bell’s debut beside Devon Teuscher that the full arc of Onegin’s character crystallized before me. Bell is, from the first step, so deeply rooted within this pensive character that he’s nearly unrecognizable. He seems destined to fill those deep-feeling shoes, brooding with a relentless darkness that imbues all he does. And yet, within that gloomy arrogance, Bell’s emotional presence lets us see the shadow of Onegin’s inner life. The way he’s lost in thought, the hands drawn to his brow with the tenderness of a poet, the way an arabesque can sing with yearning, and the judgment he feels from others that makes him push Tatiana away. The depth of this emotional clarity, as well as the volatile anger that seems to burn from true inner fire (leaving his coat tail snapping in the air), only once again confirms that Bell is a consummate artist.

When the duel ends with Lensky dead, there’s a singular moment where Onegin can either turn the ship and let us feel for him, or he can remain shallow in Cranko’s stylized evocation of grief. This remorse turns first in Bell’s eyes, and the rest of him follows, overcome by a haunting torrent of regret that floods from within. We must feel for him here, or else the end has no weight, and Bell’s sinking heart was enough to reshape him before us.

Onegin is a ballet of character metamorphosis, and a dancer portraying Onegin faces the task of transforming his haughty arrogance and indifference into an unrelievable remorse. In the final pas de deux, Onegin must further redeem himself amidst all the athletic demands, and boy, did Bell earn every inch and then some. He is utterly transformed, pleading with his entire being, desperation raging in his eyes, and a kind of wild, animal despair so profound it could rewrite the tale.

Never was there a more perfectly spritely Olga than in Catherine Hurlin’s bright inflection. Just to witness her attention and care for each granular detail, her interest in the small pleasures of choreography, is a pure delight. She is absolute delicacy and eagerness spun into one; a bright-eyed whippersnapper whose nimble vivacity and spring gleam with fire. With sly wit, Hurlin dances with the most glorious freedom and a precision that sails effortlessly from such willful physical liberty. 

Beside her, Calvin Royal III, matches Hurlin’s eagerness brilliantly. He has the ability to capture and propel the fierce drama of the moment, boiling at the seams, and enunciating the moments that let us see Lensky's bright-eyed nature. Royal is pure cashmere in his footing, and the care he takes in his landings alone is something straight out of Pushkin himself. Alone amidst the birch trees in Act II, as he sinks into remorse with elongated, legato grief with his arms spread wide, one has the feeling that his soul is shining through, lifted to the tearful sky in such a manner. In this solo, we see again how Cranko veers from classical vocabulary in order to express what must be professed. Lensky, kneeling, arches back again and again until his hand grazes the ground and he slumps into raw humanness upon the forest floor. Poetry in itself.

In 2001, American Ballet Theatre became the first company in the United States to perform Cranko’s Onegin, and twenty-five years later, it is still proving itself as one of the greatest narrative ballets of the 20th century. Though it has been belittled from countless angles and torn to bits by critics of the past, in the end, its intoxicating power overwhelms any fault. For Cranko, Tchaikovsky, and the dancers who seem to become a force of nature in their endless conviction, work hand in hand to leave that final note and grief-striken form etched upon a heart thread long after the golden curtain falls.

Until next time, dear Onegin…

Catherine Hurlin in Onegin. Photo: Rosalie O’Connor Photography.