La Fille mal Gardée – Cinderella – Coppelia – Eva Evdokimova and the Conductor

In the ballet world, most performances cater to the romantic ballets that continue to be staples in the repertoire of professional ballet companies.
While there are new choreographies that bring ballet into the more modern world and time, the classics from the romantic period of ballet continue to bring in great revenue and continue the legacy of the fantasy and image of ballerinas and the world of fairy tales and happy endings.
La Fille mal Gardée was a performance that was both.
Technically it was first seen in 1789, but it has gone through many musical shifts and choreographic changes so that it now is a part of all great ballet companies in the world. It is from the Romantic Period but has had many musical shifts in its scores and choreographic shifts to move with the changing abilities of the amazing ballet dancers in the modern era.
Shortly after that Paris moment from a previous chapter, the Berlin Ballet decided to set “La Fille mal Gardée”, for our company.
Eva Evdokimova was our Prima Ballerina Absoluta, and as always, she protrayed the main character of Lise.
This ballet is a joyful comedy and while it has a more modern look to it, it still holds all the lovely quaint, sweet, storyline that is typical of the Romantic Era ballets.
The title means, “The Poorly Guarded Girl” and also known as The Girl Who Needed Watching.
It is a ballet that mixes in the Clog dancing of the Dutch, the May Pole celebrations of Western Europe, and the classical artistry of ballet.
I remember, watching Eva dance this role … completely mesmerized by her acting ability and the complex emotions that moved through her expressions from her face to her feet. I will always smile thinking of when she is sitting on the floor, pretending to not see, her beloved, and was … instead of waving to him up above with her hand (as he was looking down from the loft of the barn) … she was waving with her foot because she did not want her mother to see that she was saying hello to her beloved.
The comedic quality of this ballet is what makes it so endearing and innocent.
I remember moments where the choreography was (to me) very new, different, innovative and because of all that, exciting. I discovered that I could do movements that I had never tried and such a thing is so exciting when you realize that when asked to do a totally new sequence … that one is capable and does it effortlessly.
At that young age, such a thing was very pleasantly surprising and tends to make us wonder what other things we might be able to accomplish that are also untouched parts of ourselves.
Watching Eva and Vladmir dance was a constant joy and they made things look so effortless in rehearsals.
They had a very playful banter and way with each other.
Eva was a soul that was effortlessly authentic around us. She was always professional and real. She did not put on airs, and she really did not show ego the way Pavarotti or Nureyev did.
There were only a few times when she surprised me and pulled the Ace out of her tutu.
One was when we were going to be doing Cinderella, for television in Germany.
I have to preface here that video in our time was not very good. In fact, it was terrible most of the time. Especially from 1978-1985. Things did improve after that. But it was slow.
So an opportunity to have a German Television Company film Cinderella, professionally was huge back in that time.
All of us were excited.

What we didn’t know was that they had never videoed a ballet performance before. They were clueless that we might not be able to do things over and over again for them to get the right angle or lighting.

I was dancing in Summer in the corps section. What was happening was that they had cameras all over the place but they were not running all of them at the same time.
We would do the whole thing, then they asked us to do it again. Then again, and again.
The first time, we thought this was going to be it, and we did it full out, performance quality, and everyone was awesome!
By the 6^th take, we were all exhausted and getting wobbly legged. And of course, they took and kept the one that was not the best and we were all struggling to do it well.
Eva was watching all of this unfold and she knew that in this ballet, she was dancing the majority of the time. She knew that there was no way that she could do 6-8 takes back-to-back and do them all performance quality.
She stands center stage to do her first really hard variation, and says commandingly, “I need everyone’s attention. I am going to do this once. Did you hear what I am saying? ONCE! That means that you will need all your cameras running at the same time. You can creatively splice it however you want later, but I will not do this variation again. So, you have this one chance to get it all correct. Are we clear?”

You suddenly here commotion happening as all the camera men stand up and start talking among themselves and trying to coordinate their actions, angles, lightening, etc.

And to her credit, that is what she did. She did all her hard sequences only one time. And she let the director and camera crews, know each time that this was her request again.
Ballet is hard, rehearsing is difficult but doing something that is performance quality repeatedly is exhausting, especially when there is no audience to feed energy off of.

The other time that I will never forget was when she was doing Coppelia. We had a new (auditioning) conductor that the Berlin Ballet was trying out. I can’t remember, where he was from, but I do believe it was somewhere in the east block and in the Russian territories. It might have been Latvia or Lithuania.
From this man being in the rehearsals in the studio, it was clear to all of us that he was not paying attention to what the dancers were doing and the steps that they needed to do to the music. He was only looking at his musical score and not paying attention to the accents that the dancers were attempting to do with that music.
In ballet, the musical score must adapt to the choreography that we are required to dance. It is not the dancer’s fault if the steps (that we are required to do), are not at the tempo that the composer wrote for that piece of music.
Many conductors want to keep the music to the true intention of the composer. And while that is admirable in a symphony orchestra performance, it is not what a ballet performance is about. That is why so many amazing composers were asked to specifically make music for ballet rather than a symphony. And all those compositions are done with the dancers in mind and the tempos are suited more to what we are required to do.
In the last big Pas de Deux in Coppelia, there is a difficult sequence where Eva would stand on one foot, to the beat of a note, and balance as long as she can. The conductor needs to watch her because balance on a point shoe is a precarious thing. And it does not work perfectly every time.
From that position, then Eva needed to step to another similar position with the opposite foot, and also balance for a moment. Then the steps continue in a sequence and then repeat.

Ballet loves to repeat things. We do it to the right, then the left, then again to the right and left. Most classical ballets are done with repeating sequences.
Now, Eva could balance amazingly well. I would watch her back muscles moving to keep her on a balance. It was incredible to watch so many rapid micromovements that happened in the muscles in her back, that would allow her to appear from the front as if she was suspended in the air, effortlessly.
But from behind she was a work horse. A beautiful thoroughbred that had power and skill that could be seen in her ability to make tiny movements in her back muscles to maintain a pose. It was like her muscles rippled like the waves on a lake.
On the performance, this conductor never looked up at the dancers. We all noticed it. The tempos were terribly difficult to dance, and we were all feeling not great in what we were attempting to do.
But for Eva, the prima ballerina, it was abominable.
She had struggled all night with this conductor, and she kept trying to get his attention to look up at her. She tried coughing, she stomped her foot at an appropriate moment but much harder that she would have normally. But this conductor never looked up.
Finally, during this above mentioned moment in her final big Pas de Deux, she went into that balance and the conductor had his arms in the air but he was not looking at her. The result was that she had to hold this position much longer than normal. I could see her muscles straining in her back to hold the pose. Then her balance had to change to the next balance. Again, he never looked at her, just holding the orchestra back from allowing the music to go forward. I see her face turning red and sweat pouring off her back.
She is doing everything in her power to deal with the situation. But she is not happy. The look on her face was nothing I had ever seen in her face, nor would I ever see it again.
Amazingly she finished the variation, takes her bow, and then just stands there, center stage, waiting for the conductor to look at her. She had her hands clasped in front of her. Her eyes are pinned on him, and she is waiting for him to look up.

The audience is confused and stops clapping because she is not going off stage.

Finally, the conductor looks up at her and she says to him, “Are you kidding me? You have to watch me!”

Then walks off stage.

You could have heard a pin drop from the audience.
We were all stunned on the stage as well.
You could see the conductor got very nervous and the rest of the performance was a blur of strange tempos and frantic glances as he tried to look up from his music.
Needless to say, that conductor was not at the next performance. He was gone. And we got back our old conductor. Thank goodness!

~Suzanne Wagner~

YouTube
https://youtu.be/PZBhmIZNGTo