Neumeier’s National Ballet adaptation of Anna Karenina is overstuffed and underthought

American-German choreographer John Neumeier has never been known as a movement innovator. What’s made him an important reinventor of the story-ballet is his imaginative use of the ensemble coupled with his instinct for distilling theme. He gets to the heart of a narrative without spoon-feeding us too much plot. In his masterful Nijinsky, for example, psychology and history were evoked side-by-side by exploiting something that ballet does naturally – it sets multiple bodies moving through time and space in striking ways.

Take away Neumeier’s visionary ensemble work, however, and you might worry that cracks in his choreography could show. This is one of the problems with his long and ambitious adaptation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, which received its North American premiere by the National Ballet on Saturday night. The production is a thing of curiosity, using music that ranges from Tchaikovsky to modernist Alfred Schnittke to Cat Stevens, and a choreographic vocabulary that is just about as unfocused. Tonally, the work shifts from high drama to camp comedy and while the action seems to be set in a contemporary Russia of corrupt oligarchs and luxury homes, Levin’s farmers still plow the fields with scythes.

Open this photo in gallery:

Some of Neumeier’s strong suits are still present. He’s designed an elegant movable set and contemporary costumes (minus Anna’s sleek dresses, which are designed by Albert Kriemler of the fashion house Akris). The ballet opens with a political rally for Karenin and there are interesting effects created with a wall of posters that rise to the rafters. But it’s almost immediately clear that Neumeier’s choreography is of a different calibre than his usual work. Much of the dancing looks excessively mannered and lacks technical detail; Karenin, for example, bobs his head dramatically and mouths words we can’t hear. Later, when Anna is alone in her home, her choreography seems to move on a uniform axis, wrapping her arms behind her back like a speedskater as though she’s trying to keep her balance. The effect is curiously inexpressive. There’s an ongoing sense that Neumeier has plotted his scenes and then tried to find enough steps to fill them.

The novel centres on Anna’s affair with the handsome, if immature, Count Vronsky, a character that can feel a little shallow in Tolstoy’s rendering. Ballet is well-poised to depict the intensity of infatuation and physical chemistry, but Neumeier doesn’t flesh out their romance with much in the way of genuine feeling. There’s a memorable moment of lust-at-first-sight at the train station but, after that, the choreography becomes symbolically sexual and overwrought. The pas de deux are full of complex mechanics that look cumbersome and trade intimacy for spectacle. Neumeier focuses on suggesting the idea of irrepressible attraction, rather than on depicting two real people experiencing it.

As the various conflicts unfold, the delivery turns almost didactic. When Dolly finds her husband Stiva in bed with the nanny, she has a histrionic temper tantrum that deploys ungainly jumps and flailing limbs. The mushik (a worker) who is crushed under a train – a foreshadowing of Anna’s own fate – reappears over and over again throughout the ballet in a fluorescent orange jumpsuit, dragging a body bag behind him. The convention is reminiscent of Diaghilev’s haunting of Nijinsky, but here it doesn’t have the same subtlety or impact. What Anna fears about this symbol of mortality isn’t sufficiently established and the mushik’s reappearance starts feeling gimmicky. In Act 2, when Vronsky and Anna have taken a sojourn in Italy, the mushik reappears and starts babbling – and then screaming – in French. It’s one of the ballets many avant-garde offerings that hangs like a loose thread.

Open this photo in gallery:

Tolstoy devotees might be especially baffled by why Neumeier has gone to such lengths to lampoon Levin. The moral backbone of the novel, Levin is transformed into a country fool who can barely walk straight in his gumboots and leather pants. He first appears reclining atop a bale of hay, before performing a hokey solo to Cat Stevens’s Moonshadow, in which he repeatedly opens his arms skyward in mawkish worship of his god.

Neumeier seems apparently so unconcerned with the politics of making yet another ballet about a woman who loses her mind and dies that he’s accessorized his adaptation with some additional female craziness. The production’s strangest scene places Kitty in a sanatorium (do sanatoriums exist in 21st-century Russia?) where she beats her body against the floor and appears to self-harm. Levin enters and calms the damsel in distress, though she’s become so delusional in her suffering that she’s placed her head inside a cardboard chair. Is this meant to be funny? Further evidence suggests that we’ve stepped inside a postmodern order where it’s okay to laugh: a video of the same scene plays on a screen beside the action, capturing Kitty and Levin in extreme close-up. But when this (ironic?) oddity is surrounded by scenes of unbridled melodrama, it becomes difficult to make anything intelligible of it all. Anna’s delivery of her illegitimate child, which happens soon after, would look over the top on a Jacobean stage.

The problems go on. Casting a company member (i.e. a grown man) in the role of Anna’s son introduces peculiar overtones as he rolls on top of his mother and sticks his head between her legs – the Oedipal inflections are interesting, but unresolved. The lacrosse game that has Vronsky injured (in the novel, it’s a steeplechase) is too long and choreographically uninteresting.

On Saturday evening, Svetlana Lunkina brought as much emotional detail and intensity to the title role as the choreography allowed. Heather Ogden’s Sunday matinee performance was equally strong – her Anna was infused with more gentleness and sensuality. But despite these fine dancers’ stamina and commitment, Neumeier’s adaptation remains overstuffed and underthought.

Anna Karenina continues at the Four Seasons Centre until Nov. 18.