The Bolshoi as Ballet School

...No fine emanations radiate with quivering intensity from the ballerinas of this company...

...The second half of the program was devoted to a new composition especially prepared for the Bolshoi's present American engagement, Ballet School...

...The company's men were dominant in the excerpt from Gayane...

...The performance I attended consisted of three works which, to judge by the New York critics, are among the best the company is offering on its current tour...

...All take the stage with fierce energy and command it absolutely...

...It was as if the Bolshoi dancers, released at last from the poetic milieu of the ballet and allowed to concentrate solely upon movement itself, were freed and transfigured, the beauty and spirituality inherent in the very materials of the dance flowing forth from the dancers' selfless motions...

...This "dramatic" intrusion distracted from the final rounding of a perfect passage...

...Another reason for the Bolshoi's lack of genuine emotion-in contrast to the crude excitement of physical empathy-is the absence of sensibility, or even personality, in the solo dancers...

...The most memorable moment was a brief pas de deux, of exquisite sculptured simplicity, performed by Miss Plisetskaya and Fadeyechev...

...This old ballet was followed by Act IV of Gayane, a popular modern piece based on Russian folk dancing, with a score by Aram Khachaturian...

...In any case, their best piece consists of nothing but technique, offered up plain without sets, costumes or poetic conception...

...The dancing of the principal soloists, Maya Plisetskaya and Nicolai Fadeyechev, was impressive technically, as was all the dancing throughout the evening...

...And for all the intensity of action ta this spirited medley of folk-inspired dances, there was no corresponding intensity of emotion...

...This raucous excitement is always ready to burst through during any ballet performance in America...

...and it was refreshing after the aridity of the classic ballet to see these ebullient fellows, dressed up in native costumes, bounding over a stage which seemed to shrink under their leaps to the dimensions of a table top...

...But from a great state-subsidized institution like the Bolshoi, we surely have the right to expect something more than an evening of "highlights...

...The Bolshoi movement is firm, hard and orbicular...

...But now, dressed in practice clothes and alone on a bare stage, they realized for a few breathless moments the ideal of beauty in motion...

...Their style is not especially authentic...

...But the same absorption in technique ultimately reduces the ballet from an art of the theater to a stunt for the arena...

...The employment of the corps de ballet, for example, was incredibly inane: 36 superbly trained dancers spent most of their time recumbent on the stage floor, forming an inert human frame for the solo dancers...

...This being so, it may be just as well that the Bolshoi does not perform the romantic ballets of the 19th century...

...they are all solid, beautifully modelled figures - women, not sylphs or wraithes...

...Certainly no tradition can sanction such an absurdity...

...Even here, however, the bluntness of the Russian sensibility was evidenced when a covey of youthful apprentices was sent stealing out on the stage to witness the closing moments of the lovely duo...

...every moment of it seems struck in marble...

...But here, too, there was a sense of energy bound, contained, turned in on itself-never free, never radiating beyond the field of the dancer...

...They require the same close study and inspired interpretation...

...Some of these leaps and turns made me want to fly off my seat, but some were merely grotesque...

...Even more bizarre was the sight of his head snapping around so far that it appeared to lodge between his shoulder blades...

...Perhaps the international tensions of the present day offer a better explanation of the success of these Russian companies than anything they actually do on the stage...

...The evening began with Act IV of Bayaderka, an unfamiliar "classic" ballet, presented with the traditional choreography of Marius Petipa...

...Ballet School begins with a series of vignettes from the practice room: First we see groups of little children exercising at the bar under the supervision of Asaf Messerer, who is actually the company's chief repetiteur...

...Yet it was also curiously dry and devoid of poetic suggestiveness...

...The same two dancers were disappointing earlier in the evening when they performed a pas de deux in Bayaderka...

...The great 19th century ballets are, like the opera of the same period, superb theatrical evocations, rich, various and complex...

...One is never prompted to ask, "Who is that...

...The individual dancer is simply an embodiment of the group style...

...One big fellow, after circling the immense stage of the Metropolitan in a half dozen tours jet?©s, came to rest in stage center and then began to spin so rapidly that he seemed to be suspended from a hook in the sky...

...In presenting excerpts from fulllength ballets, the Russians conform to the bad practice of commercialminded ballet troupes the world over -without, however, the usual excuse of being compelled to show a profit...

...But generally the welling intensities of the audience are held in check by the remote and dream-like style of the ballet theater, a theater curiously poised between the extremes of the physical and the spiritual...

...But this particular example of the master's work seemed to me exactly the kind of traditionalism that is best forgotten...

...After all, hackneyed commercialism of this sort contributes to the debasement of an art which the Bolshoi-more than other companies, one would think -should be dedicated to restoring to its former level of excellence...

...ON MUSIC By Albert Goldman The Bolshoi as Ballet School The tone of a recent evening with the Bolshoi Ballet at the Metropolitan Opera House was distressingly vulgar: Thousands of ballet "fans," jammed to the gilded ceiling of the venerable house, stamped, shouted and thundered applause until the atmosphere of the theater seemed no different than that of a sports stadium...

...But these sure-fire puerilities were soon dropped, and we settled down to the principal business of the ballet: a long series of brilliant passages by the Bolshoi's best dancers...

...They are all cogs in one great dance machine...

...We have seen comparable folk dances performed by other dancers with an abandon, even an ecstacy, that is far beyond the capacities of the Soviet performers...

...That the Bolshoi has some contact with the grand tradition of ballet is evident from its use of such traditional choreography as Petipa's for Bayaderka...

...These acrobatic feats completely routed the audience, and I left the theater with the sound of chain clapping in my ears...

...Needless to say, there is nothing effete about the male dancers in the Bolshoi Company...

...There is a little confusion here between art and reality, and turning to the program, I was not surprised to discover that the suggestion for this coupe de theatre came from Sol Hurok, of importexport fame...

...My impression is that the Bolshoi's insistence on drill, technique and physical culture has made it more an ideal training institution than an ideal ballet company...

...its dancers realize an ideal of physical perfection that makes every other company seem raw and unfinished...

...Unquestionably, the Bolshoi is the world's greatest school of ballet...

...After having witnessed such an event one understands how the most raffin?© and aristocratic of the arts could become an entertainment for the proletariat in the Soviet Union...

...Some of them are quite stocky and quadrangular, others have the physiques of American athletes...

...Watching Gayane, I was reminded at times of the Moiseyev troupe, which scored such an astounding triumph here last season...

...By its mindless concentration on physical form and physical energy the Bolshoi Company upsets the ideal balance, with the result that most of the time the audience responds on a level not much higher than that of a football crowd...

...The performances a few years ago of the complete Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty by the Sadlers Wells Company persuaded many of us that the common notion of the ballet as a string of flashy set-pieces is about as sophisticated as the once-common notion of the opera as a series of arias ending on high notes...

...they hardly seem to tap any deep source in the Russian folk spirit...

...the intensely physical nature of the dance stirs emotions that have no easy path of release...

...it is impossible to imagine such robust beings as figures of fine-spun fantasy...

...For the rest, Ballet School was a kind of flying circus, the male dancers seizing the opportunity to display their forte, a fantastic ballon, which is all the more remarkable for being shared by all four of the Bolshoi's leading male performers...

...The critics labelled these remarkable tours de force "fireworks," but this is an injustice to some of the dancers, for all the most beautiful dancing of the evening emerged in their exhibitions of pure and perfect technique...