Petrushka: Game, Set, Match

Scott Elstermann
Studio Underground, State Theatre Centre of Western Australia

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

Petrushka was one of the first ballets I ever saw. It was on a double bill with Sheherazade presented by the Vienna State Opera Ballet in the winter of 1981–82. I remember the snow in the Ringstrasse when I emerged from the Opernhaus. It made me think of the opening and closing scenes of the ballet showing the Shrovetide Fair in St Petersburg, and the Magician packing up his little puppet theatre at the end of the show and disappearing into the night.

Both productions were choreographed by the Russian Jewish émigré dancer-choreographer Valery Panov. His wife Galina Panova danced the role of The Ballerina. Panov himself had famously danced the lead role of Petrushka for the Kirov Ballet (in Fokine's original choreography) in the 1960s. He and Galina were later expelled from the Kirov after they applied for an exit visa to Israel. Panov was harassed and imprisoned by the KGB; and they were finally allowed to leave the country only after protests and interventions from around the world. Not surprisingly, I remember the production in Vienna having decidedly political and personal overtones, especially the scene in Petrushka's cell when the puppet raged against the portrait of his oppressor the Magician.

 

Petrushka was written by Stravinsky in Paris for the Ballet Russes and first performed there in 1911. The original libretto is about three puppets – Petrushka the clown, and two other puppets known simply as ‘the Ballerina’ and ‘the Moor’ – and their master ‘the Magician’ (also known as 'the Charlatan'). Petrushka rebels against his captivity and ill-treatment by the Magician, and is in love with the Ballerina, who prefers the Moor. At the climax of the ballet, the Moor kills Petrushka with his scimitar; in a mysterious coda, the ghost of Petrushka appears above the puppet theatre to threaten the Magician, who flees in terror. 

Musically and dramatically Petrushka is a transitional work from the late-romantic Russian folkloric nationalism of The Firebird – which is still under the influence of Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov – to the modernist primitivism of The Rite of Spring. Similarly, Fokine’s choreography marked a transition from the traditional French/Russian classical ballet of Petipa to the fauviste expressionism of Njinksy (who originally choreographed The Rite) and the more abstract neoclassicism of Balanchine (who choreographed Stravinsky’s later ballets like Apollo and Orpheus). 

In terms of this lineage Panov’s Petrushka might be described as a Soviet-era footnote to Fokine’s. As such it has less in common with Stravinsky’s own trajectory as an émigré artist (who like his compatriot and fellow émigré Nabokov remained fastidiously aloof from politics) than with that of a composer like Shostakovich, whose personal and artistic destiny remained cruelly entangled with that of Stalinist and post-Stalinist Russia. In fact Shostakovich’s music provided the score for Panov’s earlier three-and-a-half our ballet based on Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, which he created for the Deutsche Oper Berlin, and which also made a huge impression on me when I saw it in 1979.

Elstermann’s Petrushka: Game, Set, Match reframes the ballet as a tennis match, including a corps de ballet of six ‘ball-kids’ in runners and pale green shorts, tops and shaded caps (costume design by Molly Werner) who begin the first tableau by scampering about the stage industriously laying down masking tape to mark the lines of the tennis court, and return to perform various fun synchronised activities throughout the show. Petrushka (David Mack) and the Moor (Tyrone Earl Lraé Robinson) are rival tennis pros; the Ballerina (Laura Boynes) is the umpire; and the Magician (Bernadette Lewis) is a more ambiguous figure who seems to be manipulating the action and fixing the match in the Moor’s favour. 

 

At face value the production might be described as a playful postmodern pastiche which returns from the ‘other side’ of Balanchine and post-narrative contemporary dance to the storytelling and pantomime tradition of French/Russian ballet that gave rise to Petrushka in the first place. As such its apparently flip comic façade belies a highly sophisticated artistic self-consciousness and sense of dance history. 

 

Much the same can be said of Elstermann’s previous excursion into Stravinsky with The Rite of Spring, which was commissioned by the WA Youth Orchestra’s new Merge Initiative and vigorously performed by WAYO and six WAAPA Company LINK graduates at the Perth Concert Hall in January earlier this year. That work saw the same six dancers who play the ball-kids in Petrushka bouncing up and down on mini trampolines in front of the orchestra; things took a darker turn when five of them chased the sixth up into the choir stalls above and behind the orchestra, where they trapped and hunted her down. 

 

Petrushka: Game, Set, Match is a similarly tongue-in-cheek but more refined reworking of Stravinsky, once again using sport and sporting equipment as a visual metaphor for the parallel worlds of dance, ritual, psychology and politics. The work has apparently been in development for two years since 2019 (like many projects that had their inception ‘pre-pandemic’), and its lead dancers are all veritable stars on the Perth independent dance scene, all of which adds another layer to the content of the show. 

 

The choreography and dancing are witty, inventive and full of character. Mack and Robinson (in matching tennis whites) enthral with their puppet-like jerks, leaps, twists, flops and fixed grins; their movements and facial expressions become fluid and ‘real’ only when they play against each other, using racquets but miming invisible tennis balls and net. Boynes (in long white pants, sleeveless top and sunshade) is hilariously insouciant, especially in a sequence when she floats aloft on the raised feet of the prone players and Magician, posing swan-like as if in playful homage to Tchaikovsky. Lewis (in black short-sleeved dress and runners) provides a necessary counterpoint of sinister gravitas as the Magician, though her costuming and role were a little less clearly defined than the others.

 

All this surface play is however expressive of a more deeply ironic position in relation to the content of the original, and perhaps more broadly in relation to the current political and cultural zeitgeist. This is where things get more interesting.

 

For example, the casting of a Black performer in the role of the Moor necessarily complicates the already-existing ontological ambiguity of the original work: are we watching puppets or people; and what does race mean when applied to a puppet? Certainly the casting underlines and intensifies the racism inherent in Stravinsky’s conception of the original character, who is largely defined by his physical and sexual appetites, aggressiveness and prowess, all attributes underscored by the music. Unlike Petrushka, he is given no proper name, but is simply ‘the Moor’, a form of 'othering' reinforced in this production by having an announcer repeatedly refer to him as such over the loudspeaker whenever a point, game or set is called in his favour. 

 

To some extent these considerations also apply to the Ballerina, who is likewise a sexist stereotype in the original, having no proper name and being defined solely by her sexual attractiveness, faithlessness, superficiality and cruelty. She retains these characteristics – again partly because they are dictated by the music – even in her new guise as an umpire, who also seems to be in on the match-fix, and whose actions and movements seem less like a puppet than those of Petrushka or the Moor. All this makes her arguably even more morally complicit (perhaps more of a Delilah or Eve ) than she was in the original ballet. It also confuses her role somewhat with that of the Magician, who correspondingly seems more like a Satan or abstract demiurge, albeit one viewed through a potentially misogynous lense. On the other hand, the changes to both characters made them more complex and interesting, and made me think about how the intersectionality of race, gender and class can make someone both oppressed and oppressor at the same time.

However – despite the critique levelled by my friend and colleague Dr Jonathan Marshall along these lines in his review of the production at https://limelightmagazine.com.au/reviews/petrushka-game-set-match-scott-elstermann/ – the fact that the casting highlights the racism or sexism in the work does not necessarily make it racist or sexist casting; nor does the racism or sexism in the work necessarily make it a racist or sexist work. To be sure, casting is always a choice, and always has complex ramifications. For example while watching the show it occurred me that I could easily imagine Robinson as Petrushka, perhaps because of his dainty physique and trickster persona; while Mack with his heavier build and more directly focussed energy might be more obviously cast as the Moor. Conversely Elstermann’s casting made me feel more sympathetic to the Moor, and more antagonistic towards Petrushka, whose attitude of self-pity, envy, resentment and reproach (including the accusation of ‘match fixing’) reminded me of white supremacy, toxic masculinity and the populist right.

 

In any case – and notwithstanding Dr Marshall’s (or possibly his editor’s) suggestion at the top of his review that ‘the racial and sexual politics of the original are best left in the past’ – I’m not in favour of ‘cancelling’ works like Petrushka (or for that matter Othello, The Merchant of Venice or The Taming of the Shrew) because of their problematic or potentially offensive content. Every work of art – from any period or provenance – is problematic and potentially offensive; the most interesting works are often the most problematic; and one should never underestimate their potential complexity. Rather than cancelling them, the task is to lean into that complexity. This I believe Elstermann and the performers do.*

 

Petrushka is a work of and about power; the framing of that power depends on the context in which it is produced and seen. To a Paris audience in 1911, it may have been about power relations between puppets and people; dancers and choreographers; musicians and conductors; composers and impresarios; artists and audiences; men and women; body and soul; God and humanity; and the question of who was really pulling the strings. Less overtly, it was surely also about race, gender and class; those question may have been less explicitly posed, but the answers were already staring the audience in the face. Three years later, the world was plunged into an imperialist war, in which millions of soldiers were sent like puppets to their deaths. Three years after that, the Russian Revolution accelerated an even more intractable conflict between social classes and political systems that sent artists like Stravinsky, and later Valery Panov and Galina Panova, into permanent exile.

 

When I saw first Panov’s Petrushka in Vienna in 1981, the ballet was about freedom and tyranny; it still has those overtones for me today. When I saw Elstermann’s Petrushka: Game, Set, Match here in Perth last week, I enjoyed it first and foremost as, precisely, a fun game. However I think it’s also about what the American political scientist and neoliberal apologist Joseph Nye called ‘soft power’, and the ‘softer’ forms of tyranny and freedom under which we live, in this outpost of the neoliberal empire, with its underlying structures of patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism and corruption. These forms and structures of soft and hard power embed themselves in art and sport as deeply as they do in economics, politics, diplomacy and even war as it is currently being waged across the globe. Elstermann's final image of Petrushka's ghost in the form of a huge grinning wind-sock being wheeled on and machine-inflated by the ball-kids was emblematic for me in this regard: a towering yet ridiculous figure of soft power dominating the tennis court and the world-stage. It's the task of art not to replicate but to mimic and expose these forms and structures: to give us pleasure, but also to yield us knowledge about the world and its ways. 

 

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*As a footnote: I also differ with my friend Dr Marshall’s opinion that Elstermann’s use of the revised 1947 score – in a highly charged interpretation conducted by Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos and played by the London Symphony Orchestra – is appropriate for the production because that revision is allegedly ‘toned down’ or ‘tame’ in comparison with the ‘uncompromising spikiness’ of the original 1913 version. On the contrary, to my ears at least, the richer colours and thicker textures deployed by Stravinsky in 1913 are reduced in 1947 to achieve a greater clarity and transparency of sound that also has more sharpness and bite, using smaller forces, faster tempos, more contrapuntal harmonies and a more jazz-influenced instrumentation, including an expanded role for piano, trumpets and percussion. In other words, I hear it, precisely, as a more ‘spiky’ and ‘modernist’ score – and as such, entirely appropriate for the production. But perhaps it all depends on how you hear Stravinksy and view his trajectory, together with the broader trajectory of modernism. I look forward to debating these matters in more detail with Dr Marshall in future.

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Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer, critic and non-conceptual artist based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born in Flügelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963, and was the lead vocalist and flugelhorn player in Viennese prog-rock/jazz-fusion band The Flaming Squirrels (Die Flammende Eichhörnchen), who famously played a jazz-rock opera version of Stravinsky’s Petrushka arranged for keyboards, bass, percussion and flugelhorn with lyrics by Professor von Flügelhorn, all trace of which has now been lost. He left Austria and went into voluntary exile in 2000 after the election of the far-right coalition federal government, vowing never to return. He is editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flügelhorn where he holds a chair (remotely) in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He is the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations), Unzeitlich Sein (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by his friend and colleague Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.