The Australian Ballet’s limited season of Manon concludes. Manon is a poignant tale of young love that hews close to Shakespeare’s tragic and star-crossed lovers of Verona, Romeo and Juliet. While the zeitgeist may have moved away from tragic endings, the production has been a staple in opera and ballet since its inception. Manon is a ballet adapted from the opera of the same name, composed by Jules Massenet, with its first performance in 1884. Manon’s libretto by Henri Meilhac and Philippe Gille is based on the 1731 novel L’histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut by the Abbé Prévost. Notably, Giacomo Puccini adapted the same novel into the opera Manon Lescaut with its first performance in 1893, which I am partial to.
The first theatrical adaptation of Manon Lescaut, the novel, was in 1772, a comedy entitled The Virtuous Courtesan — a testament to the culturally enduring, though antiquated and patronising, trope of the ‘hooker with a heart of gold’. Prévost’s novel, however, follows a young Chevalier des Grieux who, on his way home, meets Manon Lescaut, a woman who is being forcibly taken to a convent. They both desert their respective journeys and venture to Paris. It is implied that Manon is materialistic; in their avowals of love to each other, des Grieux repeats the refrain “tous les deux / together,” while Manon repeats “à Paris / to Paris”. Des Grieux tries to prove his love to Manon by writing a letter to his father, proclaiming his intention to marry Manon and asking for permission. However, Manon faces the pressures of her brother Lescaut to marry a richer man. The ensuing conflict between the rich man and the young lovers involves high-stakes gambling at a party, crime, arrests, and eventual deportation to the French colony in Louisiana. By the end, the lovers are lost, delirious, and crushed by cruel fate.
The Australian Ballet’s production ran from the 29th April to the 17th May, and had a rotating cast with different members playing various cast members. I watched it on Tuesday the 6th May, and was glad to have seen Benedicte Bemet as Manon, Joseph Caley as Des Grieux, and Brett Chynoweth as Lescaut. Bemet and Caley portrayed first love in its purest invocation. Sir Kenneth Macmillan’s choreography of the ballet emphasises a classical simplicity in the young lovers’ movements, especially when they dance apart in solo moments. Massenet’s languid stretches of the strings are brought to life by des Grieux’s leaps that hang for suspended still moments in the air, and the wave-like oscillating crescendos of tempo lend themselves to Manon’s glissades across the stage. When the lovers collide in touch, however, intricate magic happens.
MacMillan choreographs lifts that are breathtaking, with Manon being thrown and spun in the air and caught by des Grieux in a couple of breathless seconds. Those moments of precarity perfectly captures the terrifying gravity of standing on the precipice of love. Manon’s internal experience of essentially being sold by her cousin, even if it is a temporary situation, is externalised by MacMillan’s expressionist use of the partygoers in the scene. She arrives on G.M.’s arm in a restrictively glimmering shroud that inhibits her movement. Instead of dancing, the male guests pick her up and pass her around. When they lift her, she spins in their orbit, perpetually tethered to the ground and especially to their hands that pinch, grope, and clasp her. As they circle her like vultures, we feel the spectre of her arrest for prostitution. A wave of men hold Manon’s body and surge forward and backward as she swings at the complete mercy of their movements. The sequence is dizzying and vertigo-inducing, like her pas de deux with des Grieux. However, it’s not the romantic headiness of first love (think Top of the World by the Carpenters), and her lifts into the air don’t connote her liberty. Her body is suddenly chained by a web of arms, and she’s disoriented from being tossed around like a plaything. It’s a delight to watch the complex motivations of Manon’s morally ambiguous characters unfold in dance: there’s the overtly villainous but ostensibly generous Monsieur G.M., there’s Manon who dupes men to pursue true love and espouse tendencies of materialistic greed, Lescaut who treats his sister as a commodity, and des Grieux whose fatal flaw is being helplessly in love with Manon.
Tragedy is foreshadowed in Manon, even in the literal levity of love’s transcendental power. Manon is a perfect example of tragedy because the ballet’s sadness is inherent and enmeshed in the very fabric of the story in unity, inspiring pity and fear in the viewer. Pity is inherent in the very character and circumstance of the ballet: Manon exemplifies the feminine condition of being prey to male will. Further, fear plagues the lovers from the very start. It’s not just because of their predicament of fleeing to a city of ill fates, but because love at its core is felt at its deepest when it is sharpened by the knowledge of death, of our fleeting mortality. Even as we witness Manon’s death, faced with the terror underscoring existence, the audience experiences the ballet as a life-affirming artwork. As Nietzsche writes in The Birth of Tragedy, dance acts as the antidote to despair because the spectator, moved by its bodily rhythms, does not sink to devastation when the ballet’s hero dies. Instead, Nietzsche claims that a ‘magic transformation occurs’ where the spectator realises that ‘life is, at the bottom of things, despite all the changes of appearances, indestructibly powerful and pleasurable’.
Love and death are timeless inevitabilities, which is why Manon continues to be performed today.
