Maillot, Jean-Christophe: Le Songe Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		4.0

Maillot, Jean-Christophe: Le Songe Blu-ray Movie Review

A Midsummer Night's Dream of a ballet.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman August 28, 2011

Brides are well acquainted with the famous adage:

Something old, something new
Something borrowed, something blue.

(A few may even know that little couplet actually has a third line appended to it which is frequently omitted: And a silver sixpence in her shoe). This famous, if slightly weird, saying seems doubly appropriate for Jean-Christophe Maillot’s charming ballet Le Songe, a sort of dance experiment treatment of several elements culled from William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Love and marriage are of course at the center of Shakespeare’s dreamy comedy, along with an almost pre-Freudian attempt to mine the depths of the human unconscious. The marriage angle is one way “something old, something new” links to Le Songe, but there’s a more literal way as well. Le Songe is an often bracing combination of old and new ideas, including some “borrowed” music (in this case Felix Mendelssohn’s famous underscore for Shakespeare’s play) resting rather surprisingly comfortably alongside newly composed orchestral and electronic pieces, and as for the blue part: well, one look at some of the screencaptures included in this review should help shed a little light on that subject. It’s hard not to think of Cirque du Soleil as one watches the wonderfully batty antics of Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo, a troupe which had been an unfulfilled dream of Her Serene Highness Princess Grace's, but which was founded in 1985 and now has its major royal supporter in Grace's daughter, Her Royal Highness the Princess of Hanover Caroline. Since we’re working within the confines of “something old, something new,” it should not come as a major surprise that this is not a “tutu-fest,” so to speak, with gracefully flapping swan princesses en pointe flitting around the stage. Instead we have a quasi-acrobatic approach at times, mixed in with more traditional elements, much like, in fact, the artful blending of different musics in the piece. Ballet purists may be shaking their collective heads in disbelief as they watch a piece which has a fairly traditional pas de deux one moment and then segues effortlessly into circus-like buffoonery, but for those more tolerant of an eclectic approach, Le Songe is a captivating and exciting companion piece to one of the best-loved plays in Shakespeare’s iconic oeuvre.

It’s a rare artistic project which is so effortlessly able to meld the traditional with the innovative, but Le Songe does manage that feat rather amazingly well, both in terms of its choices for music and its dance style. While this fanciful adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream plays out on a very minimal set, underneath some really cool looking wave like installations that seem to be made of some sort of woven material which accepts different lighting schemes and which can also be moved, the bulk of the ballet is about movement and music, rather than opulent sets and costumes. That said, there are some incredibly whimsical costumes here, including what can only be described as a large magical flower built around a Segway, replete with a sort of Teletubbies “clever nu-nu” hose that spews out a dream inducing mist.

While there aren’t an abundance of magnificent sets decorating this production, what is here are several elements which provide fun surfaces on which some of the more acrobatic elements of the ballet take place. A slightly curved bridge like structure allows for several characters to cartwheel, roll and frolic over it, and several other moving elements dart in and out and provide mini-stages upon which individual moments unfold. While nothing really totally rises to the literally over the top acrobatic displays of Cirque du Soleil, there is certainly a more athletic aspect to much of Le Songe which removes it from the more staid and stolid world of classical ballet.

This of course is not to say that there are no traditional elements in Le Songe. The ballet is divided into what might look on its face as an unwieldy 23 scenes (plus Epilogue), but these segue into each other seamlessly and the entire ballet moves along quite breezily. One of the major set pieces is the magical forest where the depths of the fairy world are revealed, and this section, called Le Forêt, opens with some fantastic ensemble work, with the grouped masses all en pointe and looking like a slightly surreal version of something you’d see in a Tchaikovsky outing.

Did Shakespeare somehow prefigure the work of Freud and even Jung as he crafted A Midsummer Night’s Dream? This is a piece which seems to have an almost intuitive understanding of the Id, Super-Ego and Ego, and which personifies those aspects in a way with its various interlocking human and fairy couples. Le Songe provides a sonic analog of sorts with three disparate musical contributions, all of which work amazingly well with each other. Alongside Mendelssohn’s famous piece, there are also very appealing pieces by Bertrand Maillot and Daniel Teruggi. These two more modern elements offer everything from proto-minimalism, with frenetic string collisions, to more soothing, redolent synth washes which wash over the action much like the wave like installations which float above the dancers.

Le Songe is a really unexpected little gem that comes from a perhaps lesser known ballet company, but which manages to stretch the boundaries of what is considered classical ballet in some wonderfully inventive ways. This piece may indeed be a near perfect marriage of the old and the new, and those lovers of old style ballet who are loathe to even look at anything which reeks of the modern may find this a more than appealing first step. Likewise, those who won’t look at anything pre-Martha Graham (if even that far back) may be delighted at how effortlessly Maillot is able to meld older styles within a very sleek and modern feeling piece.

Maillot, Jean-Christophe: Le Songe Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Le Songe somersaults onto Blu-ray with an AVC encoded 1080i transfer in 1.78:1. This high definition presentation offers wonderfully saturated color which offers the ballet's beautifully shifting lighting schemes in gorgeous hues and very natural looking shades. Some of the cooler blue shades tend to add a gauzy softness to the proceedings at times, as do the more intense, warmer red shadings. The only real artifact to speak of is persistent moiré patterns which crop up regularly on the wave like woven installations which float in midair for the bulk of the ballet. That said, the lighting schemes do tend to produce areas of minimal shadow detail with some moderate crush, especially upstage. Otherwise, this Blu-ray offers a nicely sharp and well detailed image which makes the most of the production's extremely fanciful costume designs and evocative lighting design.

Maillot, Jean-Christophe: Le Songe Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Le Songe was evidently filmed without a live audience and that may have affected a couple of unusual elements with regard to its audio. First of all, this appears to feature only pre-recorded music, not a live orchestra. Also, I believe this is the first ever instance in my reviewing experiencing of being offered a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 4.1 track (yes, 4.1, not 5.1). The good news is, there is beautiful fidelity on the DTS track, one which effortlessly supports both the classical fluidity of the Mendelssohn as well as the more modern aspects of the two contemporary composers. This is a soundtrack which segues from solidly diatonic offerings to more abstruse minimalism to droning synth ambient sound environments, and it does it all beautifully. Dynamic range is superb and all frequency ranges are presented with a great deal of robustness and sonic energy.

Maillot, Jean-Christophe: Le Songe Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The Blu-ray disc itself offers no supplements. The insert booklet includes good essays on Les Ballets de Monte Carlo, Maillot, and the piece itself.

Maillot, Jean-Christophe: Le Songe Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Every so often a nice little surprise drifts across the desk of every reviewer, and such a surprise is Le Songe. Too often contemporary artists simply want to deconstruct a classic piece, slathering on their own hubristic excesses, even if they keep the foundations somewhere in the background. That propensity has led to a number of hideous Eurotrash reimaginings of iconic operas, though ballet has not been immune to this trend either. Maillot, perhaps because he crafted his piece from scratch, has done an incredibly artful job in blending both classic ballet forms and tropes into a much more modern aesthetic, and perhaps just as amazingly he's managed to segue effortlessly from the hoary sounds of Mendelssohn to much more modern aural offerings. This is an unusual piece which is fun and funny, and which is so whimsical it should overcome most people's initial qualms. Highly recommended.