At a Gallop

“The Pygmalion Effect”
Hungarian National Ballet
Hungarian State Opera
Budapest, Hungary
June 01, 2024 (matinee)

by Ilona Landgraf
Copyright © 2024 by Ilona Landgraf

Boris Eifman’s The Pygmalion Effect took my breath away. The dancers of the Hungarian National Ballet whizzed through two, at times terrifically fast, acts and then appeared at the curtain call as if they had merely finished warming up. Hats off! Budapest’s audience has loved the ballet, which was created for Eifman’s home company in St. Petersburg in 2019 and has been in the Hungarian National Ballet’s repertory since June 2023. At Saturday’s matinee, the house was packed to the roof.

Greek mythology has two Pygmalions; one was the son of King Belus of Tyros, and the other is from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and was a sculptor who fell in love with his creation. This creation—a statue of a woman who was later called Galatea—subsequently came to life. Eifman took inspiration from Ovid’s Pygmalion and the so-called Pygmalion Effect, a psychological phenomenon that was observed in classrooms showing that a teacher’s anticipated judgments about students will cause them to become true.
Eifman drew from this serious, deep subject to create a blazing tragicomedy in a ballroom dance hall. There, the vain ballroom star, Leon (Iurii Kekalo), transformed the uncouth slum girl, Gala (Kristina Starostina), into a refined dance partner. However, the draconian measures that he took to metamorphose Gala according to his wishes failed. The cane clamped behind her shoulders stiffened her, and electroshocks only momentarily turned her into an obedient dance robot. It took the sensitivity of an experienced coach (Luca Massara) to unleash Gala’s talent. Yet she couldn’t shake off her family background, which ultimately prevented her from belonging to Leon’s world.

Eifman interwove several side plots into a multilayered, action-packed narrative. A metal-glass framework, designed by Zinovy Margolin, allowed smooth shifts from one location to the other.

Gala’s father, Holmes (András Szegő), a carriage driver fond of booze and women, tampered with his daughter’s advances, and even the intervention of an angel (Carlos Taravillo Mahillo) couldn’t chasten him permanently. Leon’s housekeeper (Soobin Lee) and her maids idolized their lord, and woe to anyone who dared intrude into the domestic territory. He was kicked out at the earliest opportunity. Competition at the ballroom was fierce, and envy, grudges, and intrigues were commonplace. Other dance couples (Diana Kosyreva and Valerio Palumbo, for example) constantly contested the starring role of Leon and his usual partner, Tea (Jessica Carulla Leon).
Neither character was ordinary but rather represented an over-the-top stereotype, and Eifman sometimes applied clumsy, thigh-slapping humor. However, entertainment was certain given the eye-catching details of Olga Shaishmelashvili’s costumes (a neon pink wig, headdress, and little glittery jacket, for example) and the happy-go-lucky bliss of Viennese waltzes, polkas, marches, and galops (by Johann Strauss II and his brothers among others), especially as the music and the dance seemed to compete to outrun each other. A few slow pas de deux and solos offered chances to breathe, but Eifman narrated with a density and speed that left no time to contemplate.
The corps portrayed an excitable slum mob, gangsters eager to rob Leon, tourists who favored an in-sync march for a ride with Holmes, and hyped-up ballroom dancers who were snappy but too balletic for Blackpool.
The melange of effervescence and melancholy that conductor Thomas Herzog and the Hungarian Opera State Orchestra contributed was thoroughly infectious.

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