A legacy in dispute - News - costumes, sets from Ballet Russes

Dance Magazine, Dec, 2002 by Marina Brown

Two grandes dames of Russian ballet--the Maryinsky and Bolshoi Theaters--are showing their age, and both are scheduled for face-lifts. But upgrading and improving the famed stages of the Kirov and Bolshoi is proving problematic, thanks to resistance to change in one case and budget shortfalls in the other.

Valery Gergiev, conductor and director of the Kirov Opera and Ballet, shook up the St. Petersburg architectural community by commissioning Californian Eric Moss to design a starkly modern addition to the Maryinsky Theater, the company's home. It is Gergiev's intention to restore the original theater, which was built in 1861, build a second theater, and erect a performing-arts center across the adjacent canal, in order to create a complex like Lincoln Center or the Kennedy Center.

His bold move led Kommersant, a leading Russian newspaper, to name him "architectural persona" of the year and to note that Gergiev "for the first time formulated a commission in a way that is common for the West but unique for Russia--a `building as an event.'"

But not everyone was enthusiastic about Gergiev's choice. Like I.M. Pei's Louvre pyramid, another attempt to inject modernity into a historical setting, the project, a composition of two glass rectangles, ignited ire. St. Petersburg, a city of canals and palaces, is regarded as a monument to classical architecture. And the Maryinsky design came just as the city was furiously preparing for its three-hundredth anniversary celebration, scheduled for the summer of 2003. One Russian magazine reported that after a March visit, Moss had to flee St. Petersburg "in disgrace," so angered were local architects and officials by his proposed design. Russia's culture minister, Mikhail Shvydoi, formed a committee in August to prepare an international design competition for the new theater building. According to a Maryinsky official, a final design will be chosen in June 2003.

But Gergiev predicted many post-Soviet bureaucratic hurdles and much wrangling with officials before construction is completed. "Because of its status, the Maryinsky can't give bribes; it can't give gifts to the necessary people, which are also bribes," he told Vedomosti, a daily business newspaper. "Things are far from cloudless--we will still suffer sorrow."

Scandals have also marked plans to renovate Moscow's grand but crumbling 146-year-old Bolshoi theater after years of halting construction, in a project that cost tens of millions of dollars; an annex housing a new second stage was completed as the two-hundred-twenty-seventh season got underway. The new theater seats almost 1,000 people, half that of the original Bolshoi--and includes a rehearsal stage, dressing rooms, and administrative quarters. David Sarkisyan, the director of Moscow's Museum of Architecture, called the result "technologically and aesthetically worthless."

Renovation of the main theater has been put off several times. Now the Bolshoi's general director, Anatoly Iksanov, says it will begin in January. But the estimated cost has been trimmed from $200 million to about $180 million. The plans to shut the theater down completely for several years and perform on the sister stage have been shelved. Instead, Iksanov has said repeatedly that the theater will be closed each year for several spring and summer months over the course of five years. "This is the only possible way of carrying out the reconstruction of this great theater in a way that preserves the troupe and today's Bolshoi Theater repertoire," he said in August as the troupe gathered for the new season.

Innovative designs may be difficult to construct in Russia, but they don't go completely unappreciated. Moss's plan for the Maryinsky and the designs of two Russian architects for the Bolshoi renovation represented Russia at this ,fall's Venice Biennale of Architecture.