Chagalls’ timeless romance takes flight in WJT production

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This article was published 08/06/2022 (1547 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Marc Chagall took head-over-heels literally.

When the virtuosic artist was a young man in Vitebsk, in what is now called Belarus, when he was still called Moishe Shagal, he saw a young woman named Basha Rosenfeld and felt his feet lift. He was the son of a poor herring seller. She was a writer, the daughter of a jeweller. But when they met in 1909 — he was 22, she 19 — Chagall didn’t see their differences; he saw instead how they were dangerously alike.

“She is alone, completely alone,” wrote the artist, who died in 1985. “She is silent, me too. She looks — oh, her eyes! — I look too. As if we knew each other a long time ago, and she knows everything about me: my childhood, my present life and what will happen to me; as if she was always watching me, was somewhere nearby, although I saw her for the first time. And I realized: this was my wife.”

It took a few years for Chagall’s marital prophecy to be fulfilled, but in 1915, he danced the hora and called Basha his bride. That same year, Chagall captured the feeling of newlywed bliss in a painting he called Birthday. In it, Basha leans forward, lifted by a breeze of contentment, while Moyshe transcends the laws of physics and the conceit of anatomy to float overtop and behind his lover, craning his neck as if made of rubber to plant a kiss on her surprised lips.

It’s this fluttering romance that forms the basis of the Winnipeg Jewish Theatre’s next production, The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk, which takes the Chagalls from their Belarussian beginnings onward through a nomadic, elegiac love story three decades long.

“It’s a play about two people falling in love, and staying in love, while history happens all around them,” says Ari Weinberg, the director of the play, written by Daniel Jamieson, which has never been produced in Winnipeg until now.

That history is complex, and at times reminiscent of the Wandering Jew, a character Chagall painted floating above Vitebsk, incapable of finding a place to stay put. The couple began their lives both as individuals and as a single entity in their hometown, where in 1910 Jewish people made up more than half of the population. There was a thriving literary and artistic scene, as well as a strong Jewish presence that transcended religion into the realm of the law: the first trial in Yiddish held in Soviet Russia happened in Vitebsk in 1922, according to the historical organization YIVO.

By the following year, however, the couple and their young daughter moved to Paris, their homeland no longer a safe place. Moishe Shagal became Marc Chagall, and Basha was beautified to Bella. It was there that Chagall became famous, later called the finest Jewish painter and one of the most well-known artists in the world. In 1937, they attained citizenship, but were on the move once again in 1941 as the Nazi influence grew in France.

All the while, Chagall painted his Bella, and the Vitebsk of his youth, through unobscured eyes.

“You can see the love in his paintings and in her writing,” says Weinberg, who chose to stage the upcoming production “in the round” and under a tent outdoors, with audience members encircling the two actors — Isidora Kecman and Daniel Greenberg — tasked with bringing that love into three dimensions.

That was a challenging task for Sarah Topham, the production’s choreographer and movement director, who had to adapt Chagall’s dreamy-eyed paintings into physical tableaus that fit inside a circle. How can you make two people fly without the wire gimmick?

Topham looked not to Chagall’s finished works, but to his works in progress, for answers, soliciting the Museum of Modern Art’s collection of the artist’s sketches to better understand how he saw himself and, more importantly, how he saw Bella.

Much of the movement in Chagall’s paintings and sketches is physically impossible, but using shifting perspective and tiered staging, Topham says it’s translated in a way that makes sense in the space.

“I think that a painting always has movement, even without any (physical) movement in it,” she says. “That’s what makes an artwork great. You feel at any moment, it can move.”

Contrary to Chagall’s profession, to establish a focus on the characters and their constant motion, and as a function of its circular staging, the play has no backdrops, which casts the audience members as guests in the joint biography as it snakes from first meeting, to wedding, to Bella’s untimely death in New York in 1944, and to Marc Chagall as an old man.

“The play is dancing on the knife’s edge of joy and despair,” says Weinberg. In the grand tradition of the Yiddish theatre, that’s often the case. In a way, the Chagalls’ love story is a distillation of the Jewish experience of the 20th century, a period defined by tragedy and loss, a constant search for redemption and security, and memory — both hiding from and embracing it. It’s something Weinberg says is relatable to any audience, regardless of background or knowledge of the Chagalls.

Long after he left Vitebsk, long after Bella Chagall died, long after he remarried and resettled, Chagall continued to create artwork inspired by both of his lost loves — the place and the person who captured his spirit.

That’s what head-over-heels means to someone holding a paintbrush.

Proof of vaccination is required to attend The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk; masks are required inside the campus and are strongly encouraged in the tent venue.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com

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