Dance

...All were full evening in length and all of them were examples of Grigorovich's determination to eliminate mime from the stage and replace it with pure dancing...

...There is a slightly dark shading to Semenyaka's dancing as if she were perpetually living with some hidden sadness that was allowed to peek out to a slight degree...

...The New Testament is really the least of the targets, though...

...Nabbing Brian by the ear, the centurion impatiently corrects his Latin--a noun of direct address should be in the nominative plural, "Roman...

...How does one determine a refugee according to the tortuous conventions and regulations required to implement this international welfare scheme...

...To blend in, he begins ranting himself, saying whatever comes into his head about the birds of the air and the lilies of the field...

...The accent imparted to the movement suggests that it is, in some manner, removed from ordinary articulation...

...To his dismay, his sermon starts a commotion that draws attention to him...

...The most significant part of the Bolshoi visit was the demonstration that the company has an entire new generation of dancers capable of taking over from the principals who have dominated the company for the past fifteen years...

...They are both stunning dancers with a glittering future before them...

...7.95 Through your bookstore or postpaid from: Vant~0 Pross 516 W. 34 St., Now York 10001 26 October 1979:595product of the Kirov academy and had been a member of the company before transfer to Moscow...

...African nations complain that the United States does not take them seriously...

...Grigorovich has certainly laid his stamp on the image of the Bolshoi in these past twelve years and has much to answer for, though apparently not to the political watchdogs who keep him in power...

...Blasphemy is the first word that comes to mind as an adequate description of his recreation of the Petipa/Ivanov masterpiece "Swan Lake...

...He was made artistic director of the Bolshoi in 1967, the fifieth anniversary of the revolution...

...However, it is n,~t so much a counterpoint or any kind of a dynamic interchange but a decorative background...

...Almost without willed effort she will suddenly be propelled by her quicksilver legs into the most complex combinations and emerge serenely and confidently...

...Where others walk she glides and shimmers...

...Despite bureaucratic resistance, in most cases the UNHCR is successful in discharging its responsibility to support the refugees under its aegis...

...All were by the company's artistic director Yuri Grigorovich...

...Soviet pedagogy regularly produces dancers of special grace and Soviet political concerns just as regularly strangle creative choreographic expression...

...Written in the form of a Mass by a medieval scholar, this strikingly original novel takes medieval philosophies and events and makes them accessible to today's readers...

...The antagonistic relationship between Romeo and Tybalt in "Romeo and Juliet" is expressed with almost the same arched back leaps as characterized the adversary role of Crassus in "Spartacus...

...DON McDONAGH Screen BELIEF AS BANANA PEEL AND KRAMER STUMBLES C ONSIDER HOW many things are being sent up at once in a typical moment from Monty Python's Life of Brian...

...This trip was made without Maya Plisetskaya, Vladimir Vasiliev, Ekaterina Maximova, Maxis Liepa, Nina Sorokina, Mikhail Lavrovsky, Yuri Vladimirov and Shamil Yagudin, to mention only the top people...

...Spartacus" was but one of the five ballets that the company presented in New York...

...Domus" in the accusative, indicating motion toward, "Domum"--and then makes him copy the slogan over 100 times on the walls...

...The latter is consistently more interesting than the former...

...Brian (Graham Chapman) has been sent out by the People's Front of Judea to graffiti" Romans Go Home" in the market place, but a burly centurion catches him at it...

...Far more than any other nation Russia stresses a "speaking" quality to arm movement that Semenyaka uses to express anguish and dismay most poignantly...

...But Americans, rightly or wrongly, are now reacting cynically, at least in part due to African policies of thanklessness and abuse...

...Indisputably the industrialized countries, and mainly the U.S., are presently supporting, directly or indirectly, nearly three million people in central Africa, many of them widows and children...

...we have paid for innumerable political births, marriages, divorces and deaths with our aid...

...It's little more than the banana peel on which the other objects of this satire are taking their pratfall...

...Neither has as yet adopted the furious, energetic approach of the Bolshoi, but both rely on a chaste, singing line that only occasionally makes some bow to the dramatic acting so much a part and parcel of the Bolshoi...

...and yet the company presented five full evening ballets with great panache and artistry...

...I Dance THE BOLSHO...

...Now that President Nyerere with the tacit approval of his colleagues in the Organization of African Unity, has eliminated the power of a man widely regarded within the black African community as essentially evil, perhaps it is time for the OAU to face another one of its omnipresent and widespread griefs, the malignancy of the refugee problem...

...The core of the new generation consists of Ludmila Semenyaka, Nadezhda Pavlova (no relation to Anna), Vyacheslav Gordeyev and, until he left, Alexander Godunov...

...In almost all the ballets there are groupings upstage in some manner commenting on the personages downstage--their postures are a base for these principal dancers...

...Her legs almost have an interlocking relationship, so that rapidly traveling steps have a slight flickering look unlike the broader more defined steps that one ordinarily anticipates...

...One could even live with the rosy dawn happy ending were it not that every creative impulse was directed toward dragging this gossamer fairy tale into cartoon brashness...

...She has particularly eloquent arms and brings a range of expressiveness to her gestures that is special even by Russian standards...

...His vocabulary of movement is small and his conception of stage space is that of a In'st-year art student who has been told about the figure and ground distinction and v~ho ponderously adheres to the division in the most.correct and stultifying way...

...The problems are as serous as those that bog down our own welfare bureaucracies...

...verb in the imperative...

...As a result, most African states can afford to remain partly anesthetized, not feeling the full effects of these amputations of their own bodies politic...

...CONTINUES DANCING SKILL & CHOREOGI:tAPHIC PAP W ITH THE UTTER conviction that broad heroic gesture is still the most appropriate movement for dancers, the Bolshoi continues to present melodramatic ballets with technical eloquence...

...In attack one wields an 6p~e and the other a saber...

...Audiences are inevitably forced to choose between looking at the design of the ballets the dancers are given to perform or the manner in which they dance them...

...He is a classical dancer with the reserved temperament that one would associate more with the crystaline Kirov style and yet he is a total product of the Bolshoi school and has never danced with any other major company...

...Of the senior artists, Natalia Bessmertnova looked as lyrically assured as she has in the past and Nina Timofayeva, nearing retirement age at present, is still a compelling presence despite some fussy mannerisms such as dropping out of character when not center stage...

...But there are other profound effects, if only subliminal ones, on the African and Western consciousness...

...together they form one of the most popular.stage couples in the Soviet Union...

...Gordeyev is her partner and husband...

...Who is merely taking advantage of the confusion to establish a new identity for purely economic profit...

...Ere now, what's gown' on...

...Pavlova received her schooling in Perm, a Siberian city to which the Kirov company and school were removed during World War II...

...Semenyaka is a total Just Published...

...The Stone Flower" is a ballet from the '50s in which Grigorovich first demonstrated some of his theories about danced movement as opposed to mime and presumably brought himself to the attention of the powers that be...

...asks a passCommonweal: 596...

...The same is true even in scenes where Holy Scripture is being parodied directly, as when Brian, in another brush with the centurions, hides among some street-corner preachers...

...This patrician air, in some way, cut down on his effectiveness as the rough-mannered slave hero of 'Spartacus...

...Simultaneously getting the zinger here are radical splinter groups, traditional British schooling, dumb cops and, vaguely, the New Testament...

...Pavlova and Semenyaka are both extraordinary examples of Soviet training and, in particular, that of Leningrad's Kirov, the successor of the czarist Maryinsky school...

...In this he is in total agreement with George Balanchine, director of New York City Ballet, but Balanchine is one of the supreme geniuses in the history of ballet and Grigorovich is one of its hewers and drawers...

...PILGRIMS ON STRANGE STRANDS by David Horsman A fascinating, fictional retelling of the story of the renowned 12th Century religious figure, Peter Abelard...

...Pavlova's special quality is most easily identified in the effortless flow of her danced steps...

...It is an approach that does not rely on subtle character shading but strikes for the blunt, uncomplicated gesture that will be understood in the furthest reaches of the house...

...The latter charged through the ballet with the impetus of an angry locomotive...

...On this recently completed tour, politics prompted three requests for asylum in the United States, the first ever by Bolshoi dancers, who enjoy more privileges than most in this normally privileged class, who are exempt from military service, among other things...

...There is also a rigid symmetryrunning through the ballets which is not so much a classical balance as it is the hobgoblin of a rather limited creative intelligence...

...The Legend of Love," a turgid bit of Orientalia, appeared in 1961 and confirmed their good opinion of him...

...of leaving the comforts of Nairobi, or even Addis Ababa, to become involved in the vast amounts of nettlesome red tape and unimaginably unpleasant details which large-scale population movements involve...

...And it is true, we do meddle...

...The gap between the highly sophisticated presentational skills and the choreographic pap is vast...

...No one but Timofayeva could get away with it for a moment, but it has become part of her persona and therefore accepted along with the artistry...

...This influence was prominent in the school left behind them when they returned to Leningrad in 1944...

...He simple didn't look the type in the way that the less polished Godunov did...