“Stretch your chest, stretch your backs!” a rehearsal director cried out over the music in a studio at American Ballet Theater recently. “Remember, you are warriors!”
A group of female dancers leaped forward, again and again, each wielding a large bow. Soon, another ballerina appeared at the apex of a V formation, raising a bow overhead in a gesture of power and pride.
The dancers were rehearsing the arrival of the huntresses at the start of Frederick Ashton’s “Sylvia” (1952). Set to the gleaming sound of hunting horns over pulsating strings, it is one of the most exciting entrances in ballet, with an operatic breadth reminiscent of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” in “Die Walküre.” Unsurprisingly, Léo Delibes, the French composer who wrote the score for the original production of “Sylvia” at the Paris Opera Ballet in 1876, was a Wagner fan.
“Sylvia,” last performed by Ballet Theater in 2016, returns to the repertory on July 8 at the Metropolitan Opera House, to an almost completely new generation of dancers. Only one, Isabella Boylston, has performed the title role before. Gillian Murphy, who brought the house down at the company premiere in 2005 — a New York Times critic wrote that she “looked as if she was born to dance this role” — has opted out this time around. (She retires at the end of the season.) In her place, four ballerinas will be making their debuts in the role of the fiery Sylvia: Catherine Hurlin, Christine Shevchenko, Chloe Misseldine and Skylar Brandt. Each is strikingly different in physique and performance quality.
It is a special role, they all agree, a welcome departure from familiar characters like the Swan Queen in “Swan Lake” and the young heroine of “Giselle.” Sylvia “is radiant, like a sort of Wonder Woman,” Murphy said in an interview.
“I feel like I’ll be able to be my Hurricane self in that part,” said Hurlin, referring to a nickname she has acquired because of her speed, attack and soaring jump.
The skills required to perform the ballet are varied. “There’s a ton of range in the actual steps,” Boylston said. “There are these huge, powerful jumps, as well as very delicate and refined technique. And Act III is the pinnacle of classical technique. You’re in a tutu, showing off your lines.”
The choreography in each scene denotes Sylvia’s state of mind. Proud, wounded, wily, radiant. Many have traced this multiplicity back to Margot Fonteyn, the great British ballerina for whom Ashton created the role. “The part has everything for Fonteyn,” the critic Clive Barnes wrote after the premiere of “Sylvia” at the Royal Ballet. “It gives us Fonteyn triumphant, Fonteyn bewildered, Fonteyn exotic, Fonteyn pathetic, Fonteyn in excelsis.”
Then there is Delibes’s score, dance friendly and extremely catchy, filled with distinctive orchestral colors that set each scene, like the horns in the opening, a translucent flute melody for Sylvia’s love interest, a young shepherd, and the saxophone, a novel instrument at the time whose mellow timbre Delibes used in the final act to suggest an atmosphere of bucolic calm.
The ballet’s mythological plot is drawn from a 16th-century pastoral play by the Italian poet Torquato Tasso. Ashton described its convoluted plot simply: “Boy loves girl, girl captured by bad man, girl restored to boy by God.”
More precisely, Sylvia is a nymph who has sworn off love. She and her fellow huntresses gather in the forest, where they are surprised by a young shepherd who professes his love. She rejects him, and shoots him with an arrow. Eros, the god of love, who has been hiding in plain sight as a statue, then shoots her with an arrow, with predictable results: She falls for the shepherd.
Abducted by a villain lurking in the forest, she manages to break free. In the final scene, she and the magically revived shepherd are finally united and perform a pas de deux of pure rapture. The shepherd plays no role in her rescue; for once, it is the heroine who advances the plot herself (with some help from Eros).
In the final pas de deux that seals the pair’s union, Ashton found an odd but poignant visual metaphor for the blossoming of love. As the ballerina stands in arabesque on pointe, her partner, behind her, places his hands on her temples, ever so gently raising her head up toward the light. In response, she melts back against his open chest and arms. The way the gesture matches a swelling phrase in Delibes’s score makes the movement resonate even more.
“Honestly what I feel at that moment is harmony and joy — it’s the fullest expression of Sylvia,” Boylston said during a break in rehearsals.
But it’s not easy to pull it off with the required degree of blissful ease. Balance, control, timing, lack of tension — all play their part. “It takes a minute to figure out how to do it without making it look like you’re getting a face-lift or something,” Hurlin said. “We call it the headache in rehearsal,” Misseldine said, alluding to the positioning of the hands at the temples.
Ashton combined emotion-filled moments like these with humorous and colorful interludes. In Act II Sylvia, wearing a midriff-baring outfit like a showgirl — “there’s a lot of skin in that scene,” Murphy said — teases her captor by plying him with drink and dancing a sexy dancehall-like number. It ends with her held aloft in a reclining pose, hands behind her head like an odalisque.
Because of these juxtapositions, there is a winning quirkiness to the whole ballet, in which the choreography and characterizations alternate between sincerity and tongue-in-cheek playfulness. “Ashton clearly had a sense of humor,” Murphy said. “I would say to the audience, don’t try to take it too seriously. Just let yourself be taken on this mythical journey.”
Which is not to say that Ashton wasn’t serious about the crafting of the steps. “It’s a monster, technically,” said Susan Jones, a rehearsal director and stager at Ballet Theater, who has revived the work for the company and collaborated on a revival at the Mariinsky in St. Petersburg.
Misseldine, who at 23 is the youngest of the new Sylvias, agreed. “The first scene is really heavy on the legs with all that jumping,” she said after a rehearsal. “After that, your legs feel a little bit like Jell-O, and you still have the whole ballet ahead of you.” Immediately after, there is a lilting waltz, filled with delicate footwork, requiring finesse.
As in the music, big effects are contrasted with small ones, like a stuttering step executed by Sylvia when she finds herself falling in love after being hit with Eros’s arrow. She advances toward the fallen shepherd, her foot tapping against the floor as if she were resisting the force that keeps drawing her forward.
“It’s all about those little moments,” said Misseldine. In rehearsal, she tried to get this stutter just right. Leg straight or slightly bent? Fewer stutters, or more? More urgency or more resistance? When she mastered it, it spoke for itself, conveying the character’s hesitation at the birth of an unfamiliar sensation: vulnerability.
Over time the ballet’s interpreters have taken small liberties in shaping how they approach this or that step, the placement of a hand, or the timing of a particular passage. Jones encourages that variety. “There are a few different versions of little things,” she said, “and that’s part of keeping the ballet alive.”
Each dancer will shape the role around her strengths and personality. No two Sylvias at Ballet Theater will look alike.
In that variety lies freedom. “It doesn’t feel like you have to check any boxes,” Boylston said, comparing this ballet to more familiar works like “Swan Lake” and “Giselle,” in which every step is under a microscope. “As long as you’re connected to the music and the character, it should just feel like pure dancing.”
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