Young ballerinas breathe new life into the Kirov - Young Dancer - Kirov Ballet Company

Dance Magazine, July, 2002 by Elizabeth Kendall

Maybe their early introduction to physical motion, both dance and sport, has given these three an edge in that brand-new genre, the Kirov contemporary, which draws on a wider variety of movement styles than Soviet contemporary ever did. Before the Iron Curtain came up, Soviet choreographers created their own version of the contemporary mode that wasn't influenced by the outside. Now that the Kirov performs the works of Petit, Neumeier, and Bejart, and any dance video can make its way uncensored to Russia, Russian dancers and choreographers can draw on the same vast history as the rest of the dance world.

In American companies, ballet dancers often need help with the classics. They already know how to be dynamic and hip; they have to learn to be quiet and precise in the nineteenth-century manner. At the Kirov, however, dancers are steeped in the classics, so they are inventing a contemporary , style that's innovative yet keeps nineteenth-century dance values alive.

And dance lovers can't help but rejoice, for the ballet world will be richer for this new Russian-flavored modernity--and for the dancers themselves. Why shouldn't they join the rest of young Russia's mad embrace of the pop-youth culture that was so long denied them?

"It's B.B. King and Eric Clapton," says Sologub, when asked what she's listening to on her portable CD player. "The taxi driver played it coming in from the airport. I didn't think I'd like it, but I loved it. I went right out and bought it for myself."

Elizabeth Kendall is a New York-based dance and culture critic and the author of Where She Danced; The Runaway Bride: Hollywood Romantic Comedy of the 1930's; and American Daughter, a recent memoir.