Ballet’s Classical History, the Kirov Edition
<First published online in the New York Times on April 3, 2008>
The best way to learn dance history is in the theater. And the three-week Kirov Ballet season that opened at City Center on Tuesday night looks on paper like a major course in the history of ballet classicism. You could know nothing about dance and learn from this season much about the forms of ballet and how they have changed. Audiences perusing the lineups will assume the season’s focus will be on choreography. It has started with the first of two Petipa anthologies and will include a Fokine, a Balanchine and a Forsythe program.
The three late-19th-century ballets presented on opening night, all Kirov home repertory, are core texts of the ballet classicism perfected in St. Petersburg by Marius Petipa. Act III of “Raymonda” (1898) is a nonpareil demonstration of how Petipa could take folk dances as thematic material on which he then concocted exuberant classical variations. The Grand Pas from “Paquita” (1881) is a bright classicization of Spanish dance style that stops to include a series of solo variations. And in the Shades scene from “La Bayadère” (1877), an Orphic journey into the realm of the dead is shown as a Romantic vision but arranged in intensely and hierarchical classical-ballet terms.
There is an infinity of detail to be learned from each of these works and from the immense resources of Kirov ballet style evident in all three. And yet the company’s productions treat them in part as far more finite affairs. For any Kirov season, alas, is an exercise in balletomania (obsession with dancers rather than with choreography), in ballet mannerism and in circus acrobatics.
“Yes, that phrase I just danced was charming, wasn’t it? You cannot have missed how I pivoted from my above-head-level sideways extension into a spectacular arabesque penchée. (The raised leg remained just as high, but now my torso turned into profile and plunged low, the kind of change of silhouette in which Petipa specialized.) Now bear with me while I walk - so slowly, so proudly - across the stage, looking so dignified while I collect my breath, change gears and prepare for the next event. Watch! Here I go around the stage doing the same jump (or turn or both) again and again and again; ah, how kind of you to applaud even the first one.”
Ballet often takes circus acrobatics and turns them into thrilling art, but the art comes in two ways: stylistic liquefaction and choreographic ordering. The Kirov is one of those ballet companies that too often present show-off steps as if the art lay nakedly in nothing but excellence of technical execution. Michel Fokine (who was dancing in “Raymonda” in 1898) began complaining about this in about 1904, but has the Kirov ever changed this aspect of its act since then? A century later the Kirov’s way with Petipa choreography would surely make Fokine every bit as angry. Much about the style is moment-by-moment glamorous and shows the immense wealth of Kirov training; but the delivery is often the world’s least spontaneous. And the emphasis often attends to academic nicety and pyrotechnic splendor rather than sheer dance pleasure.
To make matters considerably worse, any Kirov (any Russian) season is accompanied by numerous audience members who behave like a claque, talking (usually in Russian) right through the dancing, applauding through the music, creating what ovations they can for individual dancers. Need I say that this creates the law of diminishing returns?
On Tuesday night you could feel how Diana Vishneva in “Paquita” made less of a sensation than she deserved. As lustrous a ballerina as any in the world today, she seems now to have reached the early summer of her powers; but by the time we had come to her variation, we had already been asked to applaud turns and jumps beyond count.
Equally eminent among Kirov luminaries is Uliana Lopatkina, who on Tuesday danced the “Raymonda” ballerina role. Although in past years I have known her to exemplify the worst kind of Kirov mannerisms, she seems now to have simplified her style and to address her music with refreshing directness; and she carries her authority lightly.
I’m inclined to think the Kirov’s way with the “Raymonda” classical dances has airbrushed a lot of the real dance juice out of them. (The old film of Maria Tallchief dancing Balanchine’s arrangement of this material in “Pas de Dix” might jolt them usefully, as might the texture and phrasing of Rudolf Nureyev’s version for the Royal Ballet.) Even so, this staging - gorgeously designed, as is the “Paquita” Grand Pas - is the highlight of the opening program, not least because the Maryinsky Orchestra, as conducted by Mikhail Sinkevich, brings such rapturous color to Glazunov’s music.
It was fascinating to watch the five guest ballerinas who preceded Ms. Vishneva in “Paquita.” The grandly dignified Ekaterina Kondaurova deserves special acclaim, though even she exhibits the too-polished guardedness that often deprives these exceptional dancers from making the impression they should. The opening of the “Bayadère” Shades scene - badly lighted and taken faster than ever before - was simply the most obvious demonstration of how the Kirov has painstakingly combed the poetry out of this choreography; and Alina Somova’s account of the ballerina role typifies the company’s most glacially showy and least appealing features.
In “The Importance of Being Earnest” Lady Bracknell says, “The chin is worn particularly high this season,” and for several years I have suspected that Lady Bracknell is now one of the Kirov’s ballet mistresses. Ms. Lopatkina used to wield her chin like a ship’s prow, and now Ms. Somova has acquired the habit. She also skews her pelvis sideways to achieve her high extensions, even though the angle of her tutu in this role shows just how much this distorts her line.
Ms. Somova was partnered in “Bayadère” by Leonid Sarafanov, the fastest and most astoundingly buoyant of the opening night’s male dancers. He is also the most youthful; and, like Danila Korsuntsev (who partnered Ms. Lopatkina in “Raymonda”) and Andrian Fadeev (Ms. Vishneva’s consort in “Paquita”), he shows a freshness of manner that seems not to be allowed among the women. It will be good to see more of these and other dancers as the season proceeds. But will the stunt-heavy nature of Kirov dance theater make it as great a pleasure as these artists and their choreography deserve?
@New York Times, 2008