Ratmansky's "Whipped Cream": Can Too Much Candy Rot Your Soul?
Sucking too hard on your lollipop, oh love's gonna get you down.
[...]
Mama told me what I should know, too much candy's gonna rot your soul.
- Mika's "Lollipop"
I was pretty sure that Alexei Ratmansky choreographed to Strauss' music and yet, I was hearing a phrase from Mika's "Lollipop" over and over again, as I headed out the Lincoln Center. Ratmansky's Whipped Cream, unfortunately (or fortunately for dramaturgs' often meager purse), confirmed my belief that choreographers can greatly benefit from working with dramaturgs, especially when they are devising a story ballet.
Disclaimer: I recognize that I am, by no means, a choreography or music critic. My expertise is in neither. I relish the beauty in them when I go to the theater but my brain cannot critically process them.
The plot is--ahem--messy.
Act I
Our unnamed protagonist, a boy, goes to a sumptuous sweets shop after a church service. He loves whipped cream and can't help himself from eating too much of it. A patissier tries to stop the boy, only to fail. Stomachache ensues. He is taken to the hospital.
When humans disappear from the shop, the sweets come to life. (Read divertissement, literally "diversion." More time is given to the antics of these sweets than the boy.) Sugarplums, gingerbread men, and marzipan appear. They engage in a battle (Why? Just because they are different sweets?). Then, Prince Coffee and Prince Cocoa fight over Princess Tea Flower.
The patissier returns with a bowl of whipped cream. He churns whipped cream which overflows the stage (16 dancers dressed like whipped cream dance ballet blanc).
Act II
We go back to our protagonist. (Finally!) He has been hospitalized and is cared for by a sinister doctor and nurses with absurdly oversized needles. The boy is learning what harm sweets can do the hard way.
But the boy is not the only indulgent one. The doctor loves alcohols. (Read: another divertissement.) Three different types of booze, slivovitz, vodka, and chartreuse, appear on stage and dance.
Act III
The boy is invited to a fantasy land of sweets. (Divertissement, divertissement, divertissement.) Petit fours, praline, cotton candy, and all sorts of bonbons populate this candy land. The boy is coupled up with Princess Praline, never to return the human world.
If a writer uses this plot for a fiction, I don't think the readers would be enthralled by it. As Apolinaire Scherr of the Financial Times describes, Whipped Cream belongs to an "anachronistic ballet genre" named féerie, in which a "flimsy" plot is pardoned for its lavish visuals. According to Scherr, Ratmansky himself admitted: “It’s not Tolstoy.” The plot has a clear beginning, middle and end. A boy eats too much sweets, gets sick, and goes to the candy land (wait, if he is coupled up with Princess Praline, can he still eat the sweets that he loves?) There is not much nuance or complexity. Instead, our eyes indulge in seeing sweets dressed in Mark Ryden's costumes.
Divertissements in ballet are dramaturgically tricky. They rarely drive the plot. They merely entertain the audience for a few minutes or in certain cases, a few minutes too long. In the same season, the American Ballet Theater programed John Cranko's Onegin. In that piece, we see people at Tatiana's birthday party, dancing Russian folk dance; at the same time, we also see Onegin breaking Tatiana's heart by ripping apart the letter she wrote to him. There is a juxtaposition between the people dancing the folk dance, having fun, and Tatiana who is mortified and disheartened. By juxtaposing the two, Tatiana's desolation seems amplified. So it's possible to employ divertissement for storytelling.
Presenting one divertissement after another, Ratmansky's Whipped Cream seemed repetitive and diverted our attention from the main plot. Worse than that, the ballet is driven by divertissements. They permeates into the porous main plot and makes the second half of it confusing. It is not clear whether the candy land is in boy's hallucination or reality. In Act I, the audience already saw the humanized sweets, without any humans on stage. Does that mean that the sweets are real living beings? Or was it just a narrative hiccup? Did the boy never wake up from his hallucination? Does that mean that he has died and come to the heaven filled with the sweets that he loved so much? These questions may have been prevented if we did not have so much divertissement in Act I, after the humans left the candy shop. Alternatively, Ratmansky could have made it clearer that it still was the boy's fantasy. It did not feel like he intentionally left the plot ambiguous. It didn't seem like he spent much time thinking about the story he wanted to tell. It makes me ponder, if he did not want to invest his time thinking about the story, why create a story ballet?
I do not know what Ratmansky has dug up in the archive, while conceiving the Whipped Cream. If Strauss had exactly the same plot for his Schlagober, why ctrl+c and ctrl+v it? If I wanted to experience the exact story by Strauss, I would have gone to Harvard Theatre Collection myself. If indeed he was "faithful" to the original story, I wonder what would have happened if Ratmansky gave himself more license to move away from the original story.
It has been reported that Ratmansky will go back to the Harvard Theatre Collection to reconstruct “Les Millions d’Arlequin,” a Petipa ballet which is two decades older than Strauss' Schlagober. For this creation, I hope that he will not feel too married to the original.
