Ghosts ballet, based on the play Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen. Music composed by Nils Petter Molvær. Created and directed 2017 by Marit Moum Aune at the Norwegian National Opera & Ballet in Oslo. Choreography by Cina Espejord. Stars Andreas Heise (Oswald/Captain Alving, Oswald’s Father), Kristoffer Ask Haglund (Oswald as a Child), Camilla Spidsøe (Mrs. Alving, Oswald’s Mother), Sonia Vinograd (Young Mrs. Alving), Ole Willy Falkhaugen (Pastor Manders), Philip Currell (Young Pastor Manders), Grete Sofie Borud Nybakken (Regine, a Maid), Erle Østraat (Regine as a Child), Yoshifumi Inao (Carpenter Engstrand), Nils Petter Molvær (Musician), as well as other dancers from The Norwegian National Ballet (Artistic Director Ingrid Lorentzen) and The Norwegian National Ballet School. Set design by Even Børsum; costume design by Ingrid Nylander; lighting design by Kristin Bredal; video projections by Odd Reinhart Nicolaysen; voice over by Håkon Ramstad. Directed for TV by Tommy Pascal; produced by Xavier Dubois. Released 2019, disc has 5.1 dts-HD Master Audio sound. Grade: A
Because the vocabulary of dance is mostly limited to body movements and facial expressions, it’s daunting to make a ballet from works of literature based on abstract creative elements like writing style, written dialogue, time shifting, changes of voice, and political or philosophical ideas. But it can be done, as we have seen with HDVDs like Woolf Works, 1984, and Hedda Gabler (another Ibsen ballet from the Norwegian National Ballet). Ibsen’s Ghosts presented even greater difficulties than usual because there are only 5 characters (all adults) in the play and almost everything they say has to do with things that happened in the past. The solution was to invent 5 new characters. One of these new characters is a real ghost because the character has died. The other 4 new characters are younger versions of 4 of the adults.
With these 10 characters, it’s possible to show past events on the stage. But it’s hard for the audience is to keep track of who is who! So in the screenshots coming up, my main objective is to show you how to keep the characters straight and explain some of the important things that happen to them. There is a short, superficial synopsis in the keepcase booklet that can help some. To get more out of this show, you may have to read and study the play. But whatever work you do will be worthwhile because this production holds up well on repeated viewing!
My first screenshot doesn’t actually appear in the video but comes from the keepcase artwork. The girl is Regine, the household maid, played by Grete Sofie Borud Nybakken (who also stars in the Norwegian Ballet Hedda Gabler). The man is her stepfather, Engstrand (Yoshifumi Inao), who is a carpenter. I’ll tell you more about Regine and her stepfather later. The background is a Norwegian fjord. As the title opens, a voice-over describes the location — the text of the voice-over is taken from the first paragraph of Ibsen’s script for his play:
Now we meet our first ghost, the young Regine, with her stepfather while the adult Regine looks on. (Stepfather Engstrand is the only adult character who doesn’t have a ghost.) Director Marit Moum Aune mixes up the adults and the ghosts in many ways throughout the ballet. Some critics remark that Aune includes elements of child abuse in her version of this story, but there is no actual discussion of child abuse in the play:
I can’t tell if TV director Tommy Pascal tried to get the next shot below or if it was an error. Either way it works great in a video about ghosts:
Marit Moum Aune is an expert in theater and movie making, not dancing. She had all the dancers study the play. The dancers attended discussion groups and were then asked to improvise with the help of choreographer Cina Espejord. As a result of this method, the video file is full of dance moves you’ve never seen before like, for example, the shot below of young Regine falling off a table:
The maid Regine works for Helene Alving (Camilla Spidsøe), a wealthy, respectable middle-age widow, shown here in despair (near the end of our story) over what has happened to her:
Next below is a shot of Helene at the beginning of our story eating breakfast and reading a liberal newspaper. Helene appears to be a perfectly righteous member of the conservative Norwegian upper class; but because of things she has experienced in life, she has become cynical and a skeptic. Engstrand arrives and tries to convince his stepdaughter to leave her employ with Helene to help him open a “retirement home” for sailors. His real intent, however, is to operate a bawdy house with Regine as madam or simply a prostitute. But Regine despises her stepfather and is intent on making something of herself in life. When Engstrand tries to intimidate her and her dress falls down, she struggles to modestly cover herself. This move really stands out in a piece of modern dance!
The character in the view next below is our only real ghost. This is Captain Alving, Helene’s deceased husband, played by Andreas Heise wearing a mask. As you will see later, Heise also plays Oswald, the only child of the Captain and Helene. But when you see the mask, you’re looking at Captain Alving:
Next below in the nest is a view of (young) Captain Alving and his young wife Helene, played by ghost Sonia Vinograd. Maybe they are on their honeymoon. After the marriage, the Captain Alving and Helene had a son named Oswald.
Helene was a moral and proper young woman and wife. But she soon learned that her husband was “debauched.” He drank a lot and maybe did many bad things, but for sure he enjoyed having sex with the household maids whenever Helene wasn’t looking. There was a terrible crisis when the maid Johanna came up pregnant by the Captain. This had to be covered up. So maid Johanna concocted an elaborate ruse which resulted in Johanna marrying Engstrand (who was told that Johanna was pregnant by a boat owner from a foreign country who had sailed away after giving Johanna some money). Then Johanna died leaving Engstrand with his stepdaughter Regine. When the Captain died, Helene became the only person in the world who knew that Regine’s real father was Captain Alving. This may explain why Helene was especially happy later to have Regine as her maid:
There was a pastor in town named Manders (Ole Willy Falkhaugen). Helene and Manders had always been attracted to each other. Helene went to Manders for comfort, telling him that her husband was debauched. Citing his duty as a pastor and her duty as a wife, Manders rejected Helene as a woman. He also advised her to stay with her husband. Manders continued to be a friend of and pastor to the family. Manders stands for the hypocritical view that appearances are what count most. In the next image below we see the ghost of young Manders (holding up a Bible) with the ghost of young Helene while the adult Helene looks on in grief:
After the disaster with Johanna, Helene was filled with fear that her son Oswald would be corrupted by his father. As soon as possible, Helene sent Oswald off to boarding school to protect him from his father’s weaknesses. Many years passed with Helene closed off from everyone and suffering while keeping up the pretensions of a happy wife. When the Captain died, Helena didn’t want his money as she had inherited funds of her own. Manders and Helene agreed to spend the Captain’s estate on a new orphanage in town to be named in honor of the Captain. The next three screenshots depict a meeting between Helene and Manders to finalize plans for the orphanage. In the first of these shots, Manders advises against insuring the new orphanage building because buying insurance would suggest a lack of faith in God:
Manders and Helene daydream of a love they will never share:
Young Manders and Young Helene join in the daydream in the background. Much of the ballet is full of ghost dancers in the background making ironic comments about the real dancers in the foreground. This can be bewildering until you get firmly in mind the exact identity of each of the dancers:
Manders is so duty-bound and attentive to appearances! He even tries to get Regine to go back to her reprobate stepfather, but Regine refuses:
Son Oswald (Andeas Heise without the mask) returns home for the dedication of the orphanage named for his father. He has been gone almost all his life and is a would-be fine-arts painter in Paris living off an allowance from his father:
Adult Oswald and the ghost Young Oswald (Philip Currell):
Pop quiz: can you name all the characters in the image next below? From left to right they are Oswald, adult Manders, Young Oswald, Young Regine, adult Regine, adult Helene, Engstrand, and Young Manders:
An odd family portrait: The dead Captain, the adult Helene, and the ghost young Oswald:
Now we come to the crisis in this story. On the lower level, Manders is invited to dinner. Oswald and Regina are falling in love. Manders covers his face with a napkin — he’s aghast at the bad manners of this young man from an elite family getting involved with a household maid. Helene is horrified because she knows the new lovers are half siblings. Somehow she has to intervene! On the upper level we see young Regine in the bathtub, young Manders as dinner guest of young Helene, and young Oswald. All the evils started because Captain Alving couldn’t keep his hands off the maid. Now the story of the master and the maid is being played out again in the next generation with Oswald attracted to Regine, who just happens to be his sister. This is the true meaning of the title Ghosts: the sins of the father are now visited the son and repeated in the next generation. The injuries done to the women in the elder generation will lead to new injuries to the same women in the second generation:
The young would-be lovers are astonished to see how upset Helene is:
But there’s yet more distress in store for Helene. In the next two screenshots, Oswald tells her mother in vague terms that he’s terminally ill with some kind of sexually transmitted disease that he has inherited from the Captain. (When Ghosts come out in 1881, everyone thought Oswald had syphilis. But a child can’t inherit that disease from his father. Probably Ibsen had some bad science in his play, but let’s not get technical):
Regine is starting to catch on, and Helene has to tell her the truth. Regine has been cheated of her opportunity for a good education and an inheritance. She decides to leave and join her stepfather. If she gets a lawyer, she may be able to assert a claim for her inheritance against orphanage property!
But even this tenuous possibility of getting justice disappears as the new orphanage building burns down without insurance to cover the loss. The victory of hypocrisy over truth is total:
Wow! If you made it this far, you probably share with me thought that this is an astonishingly creative and effective ballet. Of course, there are sub-themes developed in the play that can’t be expressed in 66 minutes of dancing. And on the other hand, the choreographer had opportunity to express things in dance that were beyond the reach of Ibsen working with mere words and props. The dancing style is singular and innovative. The original music, mostly electronic and percussive, is always appropriate and even moving, especially when composer Nils Petter Molvær comes on stage to play his lonely trumpet laments. SQ is impressive. The video was shot in color. But much of the video looks like it was shot in a graveyard by moonlight. With images so somber as these, the video could have been could have been recorded in gray-scale. Still, PQ is fine in the HT. Pascal did a great job with such low light.
I did a Wonk Worksheet to analyze Pascal’s video content. The pace is 8.2 seconds per second, and only 41% of the video clips show the whole bodies of the dancers. This is worse than Pascal’s numbers in his video of Hedda Gabler (11 seconds per clip and 56% whole body shots). With numbers like this, I would normally grade a video down sharply for acute DVDitis. But Ghosts is a more complicated story than Hedda Gabler. The Ghosts statistics remind me of Ross MacGibbon’s video of The Age of Anxiety ballet (part of the Bernstein Celebration title) with 8-second clips and 45% whole body shots. I decided not to mark down The Age of Anxiety because MacGibbon shot that as a “realistic, movie-like” recording which required faster clips than the typical dance video. Similarly, I’ll not be too harsh on Pascal’s Ghosts video where he had to draw attention of the audience to an extraordinary number of ideas being expressed by the choreographer. Still, I think Pascal missed an opportunity to make a really elegant video. So I reduce the A+ to A for mild DVDitis.
Here's a trailer from BelAir:
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