On Dance
JACOBS, LAURA
On Dance ELUSIVE CLASSICISM BY LAURA JACOBS Only two foreign dance troupes —the Bolshoi Ballet and the Australian Ballet—ventured into Lincoln Center this summer. The Bolshoi'sproduction of...
...It is well known that there has long been dissension in the ranks...
...More pressing than the matter of company politics, however, is the question of company style...
...Stripped of her mime she is rendered inexpressive and static...
...This was most apparent in the company's performance of Suite en blanc, a curious work choreographed by Serge Lifar for the Paris Opera Ballet in 1943...
...As a scholastic ballet, it falls midway between Harald Lander's gut-busting Etudes and George Balanchine's jewelbox Symphony in C. Unlike those two, though, Suite toys with classical orthodoxies in unorthodox ways, twisting torsos into Egyptian profile, fixing arms in strange serpentines...
...The State Theater is more intimate and literal...
...During the last seven years Maina Gielgud has served as artistic director...
...Unfortunately, because many of the Australian dancers are imperfectly "placed"— that is, the alignment of torso to hips is not quite correct—they cannot play on the flamboyance of Lifar's experiments...
...They perform with enthusiasm and sincerity, but lack technical distinction...
...In 1987 the Bolshoi performed nextdoor at the Met and, to be fair, that is part of the difference...
...Still, on no stage could this production of Swan Lake make much sense...
...The peasant pas de deux, for instance, was danced not by the usual two soloists appearing out of nowhere, but by a pair ? f Giselle's peasant friends, young lovers we had seen frolicking earlier...
...Watching the Bolshoi now, one feels that in place of a shared sense of technique and moral imagination, a tradition of clichés is being handed down: space-eating lunges, overheld balances, snaky pas de deux...
...In this production, oddly, they remained wrapped within their wedding veils well into Act II...
...The effect was haunting, and might be taken as symbolic of a company that has yet to emerge from its cocoon and fly...
...those who don't are left with a surreal scene...
...Moreover, he has excised almost all the mime, leaving the characters' relationships to one another unclear...
...their dynamics are more deft and uncompromising...
...They try too hard to hit the positions and end up looking stiff and schoolgirlish...
...Pure dance" does not always keep a ballet moving...
...The Met is a big house that puts a flattering, almost voluptuous distance between stage and audience...
...Blame Grigorovich's tired repertory and his amusical reworking of the classics, blame the company's being cut off from Western trends—whatever, Bolshoi classicism is in jeopardy...
...These settingsspeak figuratively for the company as it appears today: old and self-aggrandizing and beached...
...Acts II and IV, the "white acts," took place not in the traditional lakeside glade, but on what looked like a rocky and desolate beach at the end of time...
...Bombast has displaced delicacy...
...As for the Australian Wilis, they are a more robust breed than their languorous Northern sisters...
...The Bolshoi'sproduction of Swan Lake, at the State Theater, began in a gloomy medieval castle interior of high windows and walls smeared with gold and tar...
...Who is that wandering woman dripping with rhinestones and wearing a silver dress that pools at her feet like melted candle wax...
...The Bolshoi dancers, who scale their movements broad and large, looked zoom-focused and slightly cartoonish...
...Those in the audience who know the story can get by...
...The company fared much better in Gielgud's production of Giselle, where the dancers' raw sincerity made for a committed telling of an old story...
...recently, two top men—Irek Mukhamedov and Andris Liepa—left for other organizations...
...The scale was out of whack...
...She is the Queen Mother, of course, but the first-time viewer would never suspect it...
...The incoherence of this Swan Lake reflects a larger incoherence within the Bolshoi...
...Artistic director Yuri Grigorovich has put a psychological twist on the drama by making the evil sorcerer Rothbart a figment of Prince Siegfried's imagination...
...Gone is the brashness that marked its American tour just three years ago...
...While her name has cachet—she is the niece of Sir John Gielgud—she has yet to put a stamp on the dancers...
...One's interest was also caught by many thoughtful details...
...it was therefore a new generation of dancers and practically a new company that New Yorkers saw...
...The Australian Ballet's Lincoln Center visit was its first to the United States in 14 years...
...The piece wears an air of pretty innocence even as its rhetoric swoons into decadence...
...Gielgud thus counterpointed the sad romance of Giselle and Albrecht with a happy one...
Vol. 73 • September 1990 • No. 12
