Probing a Darker Side of ‘Cinderella’

Maguy Marin’s dollhouse version of “Cinderella” is less a nostalgic view of lost childhood than a re-immersion in it: Childhood as a kid experiences it, with its cruelties, irrationalities and discontinuities, its needs and vulnerability. It is often not pretty. There are no drive-by shootings, but there’s enough real family menace to push it into dangerous psychological depths.

“Cinderella” was the magical, complex calling card of the Lyon Opera Ballet at the Los Angeles Festival in 1987, and the Lyon company brought the production--still magical and still complicated--back for a two-day run (with different casts of principals) over the weekend at Royce Hall on the campus of UCLA.

It begins with antique dolls and puppets enacting the fairy tale as a child might understand it, which is to say, not in a clear linear narrative. There are digressions and discontinuities. Fifteen years ago, that suggested a certain ineptness or poverty of imagination on Marin’s part. Not anymore.

Similarly, her intercutting of the Prokofiev score with baby noises and babble (credited to Jean Schwartz) was once particularly controversial. Those segments continue to trouble because they seem to go on too long and their movement invention looks so thin.

But Friday they also forced a sense of reexperiencing children’s consciousness, from fixating upon particular, not necessarily important events to being easily distracted or passing from wonder to tragedy and back in the blink of an eye. It makes little sense to an adult. But that may be Marin’s point: Childhood is not a simple, single thing, nor is it an especially rational one.

Wearing haunting, evocative masks by Monique Luyton and padded costumes by Monserrat Casanova that alter body proportions and restrict movement and dramatic parameters, the dancers nevertheless conveyed a rich sense of character.

On Friday, Ksenia Kastalskaia was a lovely, eloquent, vulnerable Cinderella. Pierre Advokatoff was her lyrical, touching and not always empowered Prince.

Julie Tardy made a gnarly, menacing Stepmother. Marketa Plzakova and Amandine Francois as the Ugly Sisters were cut from the same cloth as their mother. As the space-age Fairy Godmother, Flora Bourderon was less successful in projecting a personality, although the role scarcely gave her an opportunity to do so.

There were certainly elements of humor, whimsy or sheer delight, but the production continually pulls toward psychological depths, and in that lies its great accomplishment.

The central element is the egoism of children. This focus reached a comic highpoint when Cinderella and the Prince were bowled over by courtiers rushing to the table of sweets and fighting over lollipops and candy canes.

Set against that battle, Cinderella and the Prince taking an interest in each other was touching and a step forward in consciousness. Touch actually could be delicate and tender, as when the hands of the two met and pulled away at the intensity of the impact. When the Prince couldn’t find her later during his search around the world, he did a very unprincely but very childlike thing--he sobbed.

Marin also evoked a startling death-and-rebirth archetype in the final scene when the Stepmother squats on Cinderella, hiding her from the Prince’s sight. To a wondrous, upward harp arpeggio, Cinderella suddenly emerges from between her legs, toppling her backward. From that point on, good triumphs and evil is contained. The Father lassoes and ties up the Stepmother and the Ugly Sisters. Clearly, Marin is working on a number of levels.

Although we come to love the masks, the dancers hate them, said company director Yorgos Loukos in a post-performance question-and-answer session with the audience.

They have trouble seeing and breathing while wearing them. Some company members even resigned when asked to don costumes that so distort and camouflage their well-honed physiques.

When they remove the masks to take their curtain calls, it is a shock because we have already grown to “know” these characters and the real faces do not bear any resemblance to the characters we know. The magic, which is the glory of the production, suddenly disappears.