EUGENE ONEGIN, FROM A 'WEST-SIDE' PERSPECTIVE 
                                              By D. Rane Danubian
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music and dance 
                                                                 Week of May 4-11, 2009
                                                                  Vol. 11, No. 99
          BERKELEY---The Eifman Ballet’s “(Eugene) Onegin” has them bouncing off walls and each other in lurid, melodramatic fashion, hyping up an arresting, timeless  drama into  the extremes of 19th-century theater. The modern dress, the contemporary (and coarse) setting, and the revolutionary overtones turn a soft-focus sets of love stories and tragedies into a slam-bang, sexy show that author Alexander Pushkin may never have dreamt of when he wrote his epic Russian poem.
            The nonconformist  troupe from St. Petersburg, Russia was back here drawing the usual large crowds, not all of them Russian.  Give Boris Eifman credit: He’s committed to psychodrama and modern story ballets, with a special appeal to the youth culture. The sets, lights and projections are Broadway-theater-caliber. He takes huge liberties with sacrosanct texts like “Onegin,” which are worshipped almost as if Scripture, memorized by millions of Russians.  This one has no elegant patrician drawing rooms or palace ballrooms; it looks a lot more like the gangs’ slum settings in “West Side Story.”
            But Eifman does his research into the original Pushkin. If he changes the Onegin-Lensky duel of two bosom friends into a fatal knifing, it’s because it matches the premonition/prediction in the heroine Tatiana’s dream. And where Tatiana’s dream is merely alluded to in the Tchaikovsky opera, here Eifman plays it out in spades, a veritable nightmare with sexually predatory monsters bedeviling the terrified Tatiana, straight out of Pushkin.
            Most surprising of all is the absence of ballet pointe shoes---fine for the array of toughs and molls marching about with military stamp in the sinister shadows of  bridges, but less than effective for Tatiana (Maria Abashova) and her volatile kid sister Olga (Natalia Povoroznyuk).
            The arrogant Onegin crassly dismisses the younger, virginal Tatiana when she confesses her love in a tender letter. Later, when Olga is dancing with her fiancée Lensky, Onegin butts in heedlessly, then fights and kills the provoked Lensky, his closest friend. After years of travel, Onegin returns to make a pitch to Tatiana, who is now happily married to the Colonel and declines to stir up trouble, tearing up Onegin’s letter before his incredulous eyes---turnabout being fair play. Unlike the opera, where a depressed Onegin is doomed to live, here he dies amongst a stageful of letters blown about in the wind for a riveting finale.  
            The ensemble was rousing, athletic, and immensely agile, capped by the Onegin of Oleg Gabyshev at the May 3 performance. Lensky was Dmitri Fisher, who had the advantage this time of returning posthumously in Onegin’s dream sequence. The music was a mishmash, not very skillfully edited, of Tchaikovsky excerpts and rock-band music by Alexander Sitkovetsky, all prerecorded.                             Artistic Director Boris Eifman, who had incredibly started his balletic revolution under the Communists in the mid-1970s and got away with it, took bows on stage before a responsive crowd.
                Eifman’s “Onegin” by the Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg, Russia, May 1-3 at Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley. Presented by Cal  Performances. For info: (510) 642-9988, or go online. 

        ©D. Rane Danubian 2009
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        D. Rane Danubian has been covering the dance and modern-music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area with relish -- and a certain amount of salsa -- for years.
    These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never weakly) will focus on dance and new musical creativity in performance, with forays into books (by authors of the region), theater and recordings by local artists as well.
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