On Dance
JACOBS, LAURA A.
On Dance STUMBLING AT THE BOLSHOI BY LAURA A. JACOBS Yuri Grigorovich, artistic director and chief choreographer of the Bolshoi Ballet, showed a sort of shrewdness in opening his...
...One instant he's a white knight riding the air, a leg crookedin front of him, the other extended behind...
...In the present stage of his development Liepa is thus a shallow dancer...
...The score has been buttressed with sections from Shostakovich's piano concertos (in the love duets), and the libretto has been pared down to the point of absurdity...
...Fadeyechev has a deep plié that makes for gracious landings, and his pirouettes are architecturally perfect...
...The delicacy that used to seem the instinct of an innocent has come to look like a theatrical effect, however, produced mechanically and—worse—atawhim...
...What Liepa lacks is Gordeyev's strength and artful placement...
...Its revelers are dressed in parti-colored jester tights and sport outsized feathers on eccentric hats...
...Liepa is beautifully built, with long, plushly muscled limbs, smallish hips and a little boy's face—a harmonious whole...
...Mikhalchenko, of the wasp waist and imperious gaze, does not have the articulation to be a soloist or the discretion to be an artist...
...she can give the impression of not feeling weighted in space...
...His uncanny ability to pause in the air can only be described as Nijinskian...
...Mukhamedov brings excitement to the stage, but not because he articulates any balletic ideals...
...First produced in 1930, the ballet failed and was forgotten until Grigorovich retrieved and revised it in 1982...
...The artistic inadequacies of Grigorovich weigh heavily on his dancers...
...He is a husky, oddly built fellow, with thick thighs and an impassive expression...
...If you have seen this choreographer's Spartacus, you will notice that The Golden Age is basically the same chunks in a different pattern...
...Andris Liepa, son of the Bolshoi's famous Maris Liepa, won a solid following as a romantic lead (especially when paired with Nina Ananiashvili...
...Then there is the soul-search, signified by a spotlit individual performing a dance soliloquy downstage...
...Semizorova is almost the complete opposite...
...On Dance STUMBLING AT THE BOLSHOI BY LAURA A. JACOBS Yuri Grigorovich, artistic director and chief choreographer of the Bolshoi Ballet, showed a sort of shrewdness in opening his company's threeweek engagement at the Metropolitan Opera House this summer with the American première of The Golden Age...
...When he leaves the ground, in jetés and cabrioles, a strange, gravity-defying calm emanates from him...
...Her push isn't really musical, but it is dramatically compelling, especially in a role like Juliet where it has foundation in the plot...
...The lovely blonde Semenyaka, so chaste and luminous in 1979, has hardened unattractively...
...The nightclub is brackish and gold-dusted...
...A young fisherman, active in agitprop theater, falls in love with a fair maid who moonlights as a cabaret dancer in a nightclub for the Soviet nouveau riche, called "The Golden Age...
...the next, he's soaring centerstage in a Chinese split, leaping tall buildings in a single bound...
...Moreover, heoften comes updry within a musical phrase, pushing off the floor with a flinch...
...She remains a meticulous dancer, a possessor of magnificent liquid bourrés that the rest of the Bolshoi women, with their catch-step version, could learn from...
...Those leaps were the star of the Bolshoi'sMet run, evenmore than the dancer who executed them, and that is deeply revealing...
...Ananiashvili was the dancer most aficionados wanted to see, perhaps because this long-stemmed woman with the girlish, wonderstruck face seems to blend American athleticism with a Russian temperament...
...Aleksai Fadeyechev does not win any points for looks...
...Yet in terms of dancing ability he surpasses Liepa with ease...
...Mukhamedov has a handsome hawk nose, Tartar cheekbones, a well-sprung brawler's ribcage, and rangy thighs leading up to a cherubic buttocks...
...In about half the Met performances of The Golden Age, the fisherman was played by 27-year-old Irek Mukhamedov—a hero to believe in, even if the moral is silly and the choreography tediously inexpressive...
...Simon Virsaladze's open air sets, which we see at the beginning and the end, have all the color, and subtlety, of a circus: Bright orange, aqua and spanking white banners unfurl in Constractivist fervor...
...NATALYA Bessmertnova, Lyudmila Semenyaka, Nina Ananiashvili, Nina Semizorova, and Alia Mikhalchenko—these were the principal women of the tour: the first two familiar from previous visits, the others new, noneof them to die for...
...its appearance now is a wink at the West, a high sign in the age of glasnost...
...Fortunately, Mukhamedov outdances his talent...
...The Bolshoi tradition of depth and grandeur is not self-perpetuating, and under his direction it is in danger of slipping away...
...By dint of his undeniable personal magnetism and an enthusiasm so strong it seems naïve, he is able to inflate simple or crude moments into powerful gestures...
...One misses, too, the flint of imagination...
...indeed, the way she knocks about in her fouettes suggests she could do with a plumb line...
...Cheeringly, the creep and his associates are vanquished at the end, enabling the maid to forswear the decadent nightclub and be united with the noble working-class fisherman...
...His elasticity through the groin gives added stretch and reach to his arabesques, and his line has an ardent quality reminiscent of Gordeyev...
...Her Giselle was bombastic in its mannerisms, its hyperactive responses, and its inattention to the music...
...First, there are scenes featuring the masses, who come three ways: in turmoil, in rebellion and in celebration...
...Those who came for great classical dancing, on the other hand, were bound to be disappointed...
...Finally, there's the Grigorovich pas de deux, in which the man is always an oak, the woman a reed bending to his benevolence (both are typically on the sinewy, bodybeautiful side...
...Bessmertnova, a model Bolshoi ballerina and wife of Grigorovich, was injured during the opening week, but performed long enough for us to admire her still beautiful arms and upper body—and to see that age has made her weak in the legs and muddy in the feet...
...She tends to dance "out," moving beyond her phrases as if into an open room...
...Ideologically, it's about as sophisticated as Rocky and Bullwinkle...
...As Odile in Swan Lake she was a leering blank, and in Ray monda she evoked Lewis Carroll's Queen of Hearts, kicking and elbowing the classical syntax then standing apart...
...Most of the action takes place inside the nightclub, where patrons indulge in such corrupt practices as drinking champagne and dancing the tango (to Shostakovich's own version of "Tea for Two...
...Hehasa few stock responses to any narrative, all State-approved and thus doomed to repetition...
...She, meanwhile, is pursued by her creepy dance partner, who also heads a band of thugs and keeps another girl on the side...
...She seems incapable of concentrating on the music or following the line of a choreographic phrase...
...Much as been written about Grigorovich's inability to tell a story through ballet, let alone create dances that are coherent in terms of rhythm, scale, and useof the classical vocabulary...
...She descends from the Bolshoi tradition of powerhouse ballerinas, yet she has taste and discernment to burn, and her quietness of foot is eloquence itself...
...As he moves a pose from the flat of his feet to demipoint (tiptoe), Mukhamedov may rise only a few metatarsal inches, yet it's as if he has pulled the stage up with him into an atmosphere of pure oxygen—where he performs his next series of heroic springs...
...He sometimes looks uncomfortable, shows strain: Setting himself for a leap he stares hard at his hand, as if it were a compass that might guide his trajectory...
...And it was bigness of heart, plus expenditure of energy, that the audience seemed to be reacting to during this Bolshoi visit...
...But none has the silvered refinement of Vyacheslav Gordeyev, well-remembered for his last tour in 1979, who is regrettably not on board this time...
...The rest of the men—and the Bolshoi is still a man's company—make a diverting assortment...
...Although not as demure a presence as the other women—she is one of the few Bolshoi dancers with a real Western turn-out—Semizorova was the only one who got under the music, consistently relating inipulse to form...
...What he lacks in sophistication he makes up for in heart—tatooed on his sleeve...
...at his best he gives merely the appearance of depth...
...He shows little evidence of having absorbed the classicism of Marius Petipa, ballet's one true source of renewal...
...Still, there is something vague about Ananiashvili...
...The Golden Age is set in the Russia of the '20s, a decade of relative artistic freedom and experimentation...
...Nor is he a technician of elegance: Though he deports himself with care and attention to the music, he has a tendency to jolt his torso doing classical work en l'air...
Vol. 70 • August 1987 • No. 11
