TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/071789/07178900.041

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 6KB | 105 lines

DANCE, Page 90

From Leningrad with Love

The Kirov's U.S. tour offers curiosities and stylistic contrasts

By Martha Duffy


    From the opening curtain on, exoticism was in the air.
Leningrad's Kirov Ballet, embarking on a four-city, eight-week U.S.
tour, chose to lead off its engagement at Manhattan's Metropolitan
Opera House last week with Le Corsaire, a full-length ballet that
very few Americans have ever seen. The kind of diversion that
appealed to 19th century audiences in Paris or St. Petersburg, Le
Corsaire now seems a genuine novelty, and, like the Kirov itself,
it signaled that something fresh and curious can still be found in
the post-glasnost era of big tours and cultural exchanges.

    The first tableau showed a little owl-and-pussycat boat
foundering in a tempest of billowing waves and lyrical lightning.
For the next scenes, set in the land of some randy, warlike Pasha,
the Soviets seemed to have unwound their every bolt of gaudy cloth.
No fewer than five composers are credited with contributing to the
noisy score; the choreography, some of it by Marius Petipa, is
strictly cut and paste; the plot went down with the ship. But Le
Corsaire provides the occasion for some florid dancing, especially
in the hands of bravura technicians like Tatyana Terekhova and
Farukh Ruzimatov or a poet on point like Altynai Asylmuratova, the
company's reigning ballerina.

    The Kirov, the revered Soviet classical company that nurtured
George Balanchine, Rudolf Nureyev, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Natalia
Makarova, came stocked with an impressive repertory. It has been
25 years since it played New York City, and in that time Manhattan
has become entrenched as the dance capital of the world. Local fans
are well informed and tough. Balanchine, who died in 1983, is still
very much the presiding genius, and the purity and speed of his
choreography set the pace. In addition to the perennial Giselle and
some short pieces, Kirov artistic director Oleg Vinogradov brought
his new production of The Sleeping Beauty and -- displaying either
guts or foolhardiness -- two Balanchine ballets.

    The Kirov does not take a diversion like Le Corsaire very
seriously. In the case of a masterpiece like Sleeping Beauty,
Vinogradov sticks to tradition. The sets and costumes are pastel
and pretty. What stands out beyond the spectacle or even the
dancing is the warmth of the manners the characters show to one
another. The Russians know how to animate never-never land.

    How good are the Kirov dancers? There is little question that
Americans are technically superior -- faster, stronger, more
rigorously trained. Some credit must go to Russian immigrants.
Balanchine revolutionized ballet by demanding that a performer move
swiftly through positions rather than prepare for them and then
hold the pose. Baryshnikov, as artistic director of the American
Ballet Theater, adapted Balanchine's methods to the old story
ballets.

    Beyond technique lies the elusive area of style. Kirov dancers
seem to know viscerally how to put across the drama in the music.
A ballerina may fall off point more than her American counterpart,
and her fouettes may veer out of control. But apparently this
bothers neither her nor her bosses. The dancers display an
endearing, innocent pleasure in the least of their achievements;
a chaste young demi-soloist, having completed her variation, will
milk the audience for applause -- and get it. At the New York City
Ballet such deportment would be considered inexcusably vulgar.

    Differences between the two approaches show up starkly in the
Kirov's foray into Balanchine: Scotch Symphony, set to Mendelssohn,
and Theme and Variations, with its vibrant Tchaikovsky score. City
Ballet's Suzanne Farrell and Francia Russell, a former soloist who
is now co-artistic director of the Pacific Northwest Ballet, went
to Leningrad to teach the works to the Kirov. Russell, who prepared
Theme, had the harder assignment because the choreography is
difficult for even Balanchine dancers. Both women learned that the
no-nonsense rules they live by do not apply at the Kirov. By
American standards, classes were poky. Dancers might rehearse one
day and never be seen again. The principals arrived with their
personal coaches, rather like gymnasts in competition, and saw no
reason not to slow down the music or change the steps.

    Seen during the Canadian part of the current tour, Scotch
Symphony, Balanchine's musings on La Sylphide, worked best with
Yelena Pankova, 25, as the sylph. A springy dancer blessed with a
high, light jump, she seemed to grasp the choreographer's oft
repeated injunction: respond to the music and "don't think -- do"
the steps. Senior ballerina Galina Mezentseva tried to make a
romantic story out of this plotless work and as a result looked
coy.

    Theme and Variations featured Larisa Lezhnina, 20, a richly
talented Kirov prospect. But her consort, Ruzimatov, literally got
in her way. Defeated by the partnering in the pas de deux, in which
the woman must execute many steps while appearing to move
languorously, he acted like a man caught in a turnstile. In one
Montreal performance, Lezhnina was forced to retract her extended
leg to let him get by.

    But in its own way, the Kirov paid rich tribute to the
choreographer who danced on its stage as a youngster. The set
suggests the theater itself, its balconies aglow in mellow light.
The marvelous, downy tutus use the colors of the Kirov curtain.
When danced by Asylmuratova, one of the handful of great ballerinas
today, a magical fusion of dance tradition and Balanchine's
revolution occurs. She may lack the technical wizardry of City
Ballet's Kyra Nichols or Merrill Ashley, but she is the most
musical of dancers, delightedly bathing in the score, modestly
using her bewitching personal beauty to enhance the glamour of what
is, in fact, a triumphant moment in ballet history.