The Russians Are Back, The Russians Are Back

The big surprise of 2000 is what everyone in the dance world knew from Sergei Diaghilev’s first Paris season in 1909 until just about 10 years ago: When it comes to ballet, Russians rule.

This summer has offered positive proof, notably the extraordinary success of simultaneous performances by the Bolshoi and Kirov ballets on two continents. Less than two weeks ago, the Bolshoi added an exclamation point to its month-long, coast-to-coast tour of America by returning to the East for its first New York engagement in a decade. During the same period, the Kirov began an extended hot-ticket season in London. The companies’ twin triumphs proclaimed the definitive, end-of-the-century comeback for Russian classicism’s flagship franchises from their artistic and commercial irrelevance during the past decade.

The 1990s were a time of trial for virtually all state-supported Russian cultural institutions, with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the end of hefty government subsidies. Moreover, the ability of the Kirov and Bolshoi to secure prestigious foreign bookings suffered from all the fly-by-night touring companies that appropriated the companies’ names without authorization (“Stars of . . .”) or invented ever more grandiose titles to mislead the gullible. An inevitable cynicism set in as balletomanes expected every season to receive brochures heralding the advent of the newly christened Romanov Ballet, Rasputin Ballet, Volga Ballet or some other scherzo a la Russe dancing to tape at local culture malls.

It didn’t help that the turmoil in Russia led to ousted artistic directors and the defection of many of the companies’ greatest stars. And, worse, each of the companies endured American debacles midway through the decade. The Kirov’s 1995 U.S. tour had to be canceled when several venues dropped out, making the tour financially unfeasible, and a year later, inexperienced tour management left the Bolshoi’s visit to Las Vegas and Los Angeles awash in empty houses and huge losses.

As the ‘90s advanced, the very idea of Russian ballet became something of a grim joke--with the once-exalted term “Ballet Russe” darkening into the sneering “ballet ruse,” Russian roulette for dance audiences.

But suddenly this summer, before you could say “Ananiashvili” or “Asylmuratova” (assuming that you could say them at all), the Bolshoi was playing sold-out performances from Washington, D.C., to Costa Mesa, and the Kirov better than sold-out performances in the heart of Royal Ballet territory. What’s better than sold out? Having to add a performance--as the Kirov did for Balanchine’s full-length “Jewels,” not exactly standard St. Petersburg or London rep.

So how to explain the turnaround? More managerial and marketing savvy in Moscow and St. Petersburg, of course, plus a genuine need among high-ticket foreign dance presenters for the return of Russian primacy. Think about it: There are just so many world-class ensembles to go around. The lineup this season at the Orange County Performing Arts Center (the Southland’s primary importer of big ballet), for example, would have seemed awfully spotty without the Bolshoi. So another U.S. tour had to happen to test the market.

You could argue too that the Russian resurgence has been aided by a cyclical shift in the audience’s taste. The trend involves a move away from an emphasis on choreography (the glory of Anglo American ballet) and toward the exemplary full-company dancing prowess that has always sustained the Kirov and Bolshoi.

But the companies’ own capacity for renewal must also be credited. Particularly at the Kirov, the emergence of a new generation of star ballerinas has inspired repertory risks that, in turn, have reversed some of the oldest truisms about Russian classicism.

In the past, the Kirov represented restrained, conservative, classical elegance and the preservation of tradition, while the Bolshoi prioritized a sense of overwhelming star power and quasi-populist dynamism.

Today, however, it’s the Kirov that has become the more notably dynamic, adventuresome and star-making of the two, casting the opening nights of its foreign engagements with such newly minted sensations as Diana Vishneva and Svetlana Zakharova, even when a first-rate older artist such as Altynai Asylmuratova is on the roster. In contrast, every Bolshoi opening night in America this year goes to veteran international star Nina Ananiashvili, a fine dancer and a very safe bet.

Indeed, safety seems very much a Bolshoi watchword right now. Where, for example, the new Kirov artistic director talks casually and candidly with the foreign press, his Bolshoi counterpart demands that all questions be submitted in advance--in writing. Very Soviet.

Last year, the Kirov took the risk of dumping its beloved traditional reworking of “The Sleeping Beauty” and meticulously reconstructing Marius Petipa’s four-hour original in reproductions of the 1890 sets and costumes. This year the Bolshoi also looked back at its 19th century heritage, but instead of gambling on a reconstruction, it hired a French choreographer to rework, reduce and redesign for contemporary audiences Petipa’s four-hour 1862 “Pharaoh’s Daughter.”

The examples pile up, even as the Bolshoi follows the Kirov in bringing Balanchine’s “Symphony in C” to Lincoln Center and preps its dewy young ballerina, Svetlana Lunkina, for the kind of instant stardom that greeted the Kirov’s Uliana Lopatkina in London three years ago and in New York last year.

A protegee of Bolshoi paragon Ekaterina Maximova, the 20-year-old Lunkina represents the brightest prospect of the new Bolshoi generation, displaying the exemplary spirit and training of her young colleagues but with a greater emphasis on expressive depth and detail. And even she conforms to a new company aesthetic, one that carefully mediates between character-based Bolshoi dramatic traditions and the very different dance-for-dance’s-sake priorities of international style.

Assuming something resembling the Bolshoi’s former stance is a Russian company that American audiences never heard of until the late ‘90s: the Boris Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg. Founded in 1977, it made its Southland debut in May at the Universal Amphitheatre, dancing Eifman’s biographical full-evening “Red Giselle” with enough acting skill and sheer intensity to make the Neva run red.

Indeed, no more charismatic or brilliantly expressive male dancing has been seen on any Southland stage this year than that of Eifman principal Igor Markhov, while his colleagues Alina Solonskaya and Yuri Ananyan also contributed unsparingly powerful, unmistakably Russian dramatic dancing.

With his emphasis on openly emotional, neo-Expressionist storytelling, Eifman is reinventing a mode of primal Russian dance-drama that out-Bolshois the current Bolshoi--a situation that became problematic for him when he created “Russian Hamlet” (about the son of Catherine the Great) for that company last season.

For all their talent, the Bolshoi dancers couldn’t adapt to his style, he told The Times recently. And it’s his own ensemble that will present the same work at the Orange County Performing Arts Center next March.

Nor are the Eifman dancers the only new Russians on the U.S. touring landscape. In October, Cerritos and Santa Barbara will host the Southland leg of the first visit to this country by the Perm State Ballet, Russia’s third-largest classical company. Famed for its ballet school and for being the birthplace of Diaghilev, Perm has long sent stellar alumni to Moscow and St. Petersburg--Nadezhda Pavlova to the Bolshoi and Olga Chenchikova to the Kirov, for example.

And lest you think this might be another take-the-rubles-and-run fly-by-night, the company will travel with its own orchestra, something that even the Bolshoi didn’t do this year.

Back in 1911, Scottish author James M. Barrie addressed one of the burning issues of the day in a play titled “The Truth About the Russian Dancers,” verifying once and for all that these creatures are as magical and above the rest of us as, well, Peter Pan. If the classical Russian dregs of the past decade have often made us question his surety on the matter, the evidence offered by the Kirov in New York a year ago, the best of the Bolshoi in front of us this summer and the Eifman Ballet in its brief weekend stopover here suggests that Barrie was guilty of a drastic understatement.

Now, if we could only get Lopatkina and Lunkina on a local stage before the next millennium. . . .