The Brooklyn Rail

Firebird always left me cold. The story was too simple, like a crayon drawing of a house with no door. I couldn’t get inside it, couldn’t understand it, maybe because though there is an enchanted bird and a prince, they don’t fall in love. Instead, he goes for a blandly beautiful princess. Something about the divided ballerina roles and divided drama split my attention and finally left me bored.

Not until I saw Dance Theatre of Harlem’s revival of its 1982 John Taras production did I get it. Much well-deserved hype has accompanied this revival; the company had been forced to shelve the ballet for twenty years while budget cuts drove down the size of its roster, and so Firebird’s return has been heralded as a new era of strength for the company. Firebird is all about strength, but it took this production to teach me that. Before, when I thought about a magical bird, I always had Swan Lake on the brain.

But Ariana Dickerson (alternating in the role of the Firebird with Alexandra Hutchinson) is no enchanted woman. All stern, haughty splendor, with angular limbs and cool defiant expression, Dickerson darts across the stage. Even when captured by the Young Man (Micah Bullard, courtly, chivalrous, with wonderfully clean lines), her agitation stayed avian, rapid twitching coupled with a flat impersonal stare.

Eventually her Firebird is soothed, and gives the Young Man one of her red feathers. He wanders into a court of Beautiful Maidens, and falls in love with their leader, the Princess of Unreal Beauty. The usual silly court dancing, braided lines and low, decorous footwork, ensues. When an ominous wind chills the kingdom, the Beautiful Maidens flee, leaving our Young Man to ineffectually battle a host of brown crawly things and a horrible Prince of Evil (David Wright).

Desperate, the Young Man brandishes his feather; Firebird arrives, and shows us what to do with evil: circle it up and send it to hell. With strong downward jabs of her finger, she vanquishes the demons. But even as she becomes the hero of these human affairs, Dickerson retains her beaky otherness.

The Geoffrey Holder sets and costumes delight throughout—I loved the dangling pink orchid, and the scrim of faded botanicals—but the ending tableau, with the court in a glory of pinks and oranges, and the happy couple in white, is stunning. Slowly the Firebird rises above the court. Here—Taras seems to be saying—is civilization, and above it the natural world. Benevolent, yes, but firmly apart.

A few days later and ten blocks uptown, another flock of Firebirds took to the stage. The New York City Ballet production offers a starkly different interpretation of the Russian folk tale.

Marc Chagall’s sets and costumes (which steal the show) and George Balanchine’s choreography portray not a wild creature aiding the human world, but a prince’s skewed psychology as he comes of age. The Prince sees his bride and the Firebird as two sides of the same woman. Chagall makes this clear by linking bride and bird by color—the Princess is wearing a long red veil when she first meets the Prince—and by his opening painted scrim, which shows them floating together in an indigo sky.

Relegated to symbolism, the Firebird here is also consigned to a supporting role. She does not vanquish the strangely delightful demons herself, but with a meek bow of her head delivers a sword to the Prince. The meaning could not be more apparent: before he can wed, the Prince must harness the wildness of woman into a helpful tool for man.

In their performance of the opening pas de deux, Gilbert Bolden III in the role of Prince Ivan and Isabella LaFreniere as the Firebird play their burgeoning relationship for laughs. They lock eyes, equally scared and intrigued by each other, like a toddler and a dog running into each other at the park. Slowly the Prince soothes the Firebird until, wriggling with pleasure, undulating her hands, she begins to dance freely with him. At the end of the pas de deux, his hands frame her face, making a picture of her beauty. This Firebird has been seduced by vanity, a decidedly human trait.

LaFreniere is grand, regal, and confident in this role. Her technique is lush and assured; she’s a joy to watch. But I found myself missing the fierce avian weirdness that Dickerson brought to the role. I never forgot that LaFreniere was a ballerina in a tutu, but Dickerson made me think of robins and jays.

Several years ago, while hiking with my brother in the Rocky Mountains, we came to a craggy glen of jutting boulders. Beneath a lowering sky, in this emerald-dark meadow, appeared a young bull moose—massive. He eyed us. A humming in my ears began.

Even after leaving that barren, uncanny place, I remained disquieted. Between the moose and me I had sensed a link, but every attempt to articulate that link diminished the moose’s wildness. We were connected; I had no doubt of that. But how to acknowledge this without minimizing his sovereignty?

At its best, Firebird asks this same question. How can we exist in relation to the animal world without domesticating it? The easy choreographic solution is a dodge: make the bird part of man, part of politics and culture, even psychology. The more difficult thing is to show how the natural world gives us strength and succor, yet remains outside—and above—us. This is what the Dance Theatre of Harlem’s Firebird shows us. May it return many more times in the years to come.