Vladimir Vasiliev: hauling the Bolshoi into the twentieth century - one of the great Russian dancers is now in charge of his home theater - Interview

Dance Magazine, Feb, 1996 by Paul Ben-Itzak

With his frank but wary gaze and piercing brown eyes, Vladimir Vasiliev looked like a man braced for important and delicate negotiations. Vasiliev, the former Bolshoi Ballet idol who last spring became the czar of the Bolshoi Theater, was in New York City last fall for a bit of ballet shuttle diplomacy. His mission: to snare ballets by George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins for the Bolshoi, and allow that esteemed but calcified ballet company to catch up with the twentieth century.

Last March Vasiliev was named artistic director of the Bolshoi Theater after a power struggle that in its political complexity evoked the old Bolshevik battles for political supremacy in the twenties. The players were Yuri Grigorovich, artistic director of the ballet company since 1963; Vladimir Kokonen, its general director; fifteen leading Bolshoi dancers who, at the beginning 6f a performance of Romeo and Juliet, launched a strike protesting Grigorovich's resignation under duress; ballerina assoluta Maya Plisetskaya, who some said was jockeying to succeed Grigorovich's the office of President Boris Yeltsin; and Vasiliev, the long-time Grigorovich danseur noble who fell from the director's grace in the eighties. No blood was spilled, but Grigorovich was for all intents and purposes purged and was last seen in England, attempting to start a dance school.

Vasiliev now finds himself astride the ballet equivalent of a dinosaur. As Dance Magazine contributing editor Lynn Garafola expressed it in a review of the company's 1990 New York City season: "Twenty years of [Grigorovich's] impoverished, undemanding idiom have left the Bolshoi in a sorry state. Turnout, balance, strength, control, timing, clarity, epaulement - all have gone. Whether the ballet is Swan Lake or Ivan the Terrible or the Grand Pas from Paquita, what the Bolshoi offers today is a show of big jumps, big turns, big poses - and dancers With an advanced case of boredom" [November 1990, page 741. Not much had changed by 1995, if one is to judge by Sergei Bobrov's Infanta and the Jester the athletic but artistically empty ballet the Bolshoi sent to San Francisco Ballet's United We Dance Festival last May.

While Vasiliev disparages some Grigorovich ballets, such as Romeo and Juliet and The Golden Age and his staging of Petipa ballets, he praises others, such as Spartacus and A Legend of Love. He also points out that if the Grigorovich canon were jettisoned light away, little would be left. "We are going to change the rep"' he says. "We just need time." The most ambitious repertoire change Vasiliev has in mind is the acquisition of works by such twentieth-century masters as Balanchine, Robbins, Jiri Kylian, and Maurice Bejart. The absence of their work (the exception is Balanchine's Prodigal Son) has left a gap in Bolshoi history, as well as in the education of its audience. "I want to fill that empty spot in the history of the Bolshoi Ballet with the names of today's world-renowned choreographers"' he says. "I don't want to have these works in order to bring them abroad on tour, but to show the masterpieces for Russian audiences at home."

While in New York City, Vasiliev met with Balanchine Trust executor Barbara Horgan and with Robbins. From the Balanchine repertoire, he would especially like to present Symphony in C (John Taras owns the rights), and perhaps Serenade. Of Robbins's works, he is most interested in 2 & 3 Part Inventions. The Russian was enthusiastic about the prospect of bringing Balanchine and Robbins to Moscow, but Horgan and Robbins were more cautious, saying only that the matter was under discussion. However, mounting a Balanchine ballet is a complicated proposition; you don't just buy it and stage it. The Bolshoi's dancers would have to be trained at least six months in the Balanchine style. When the Kirov Ballet performed Theme and Variations, Balanchine Trust repetieur Francia Russell worked with the dancers for six months; Suzanne Farrell did the same in setting Scotch Symphony.

Vasiliev himself planned to stage Swan Lake in December and says he would also like to change the Bolshoi's production of Giselle. Also this season, he will direct a new staging of La Traviata at the Bolshoi Opera. But with Vacheslav Gordeyev and Alexander Bogatyrev actually in charge of the ballet company, Vasiliev, who with Kokonen is responsible for the ballet, opera, and theater companies, is looking at the big picture. Chief among hit tasks is instituting a contract system for the ballet's 220 dancers, and raising the money necessary to keep the Bolshoi at a world-class standard.

The government currently provides the Bolshoi Theater $12 million per year, Vasiliev says, and the Bolshoi needs it to cough up $45 million. "When we get this money, we will be able to live by the standards of the whole world," he promises. He is not just waiting for the government to come through; the company is soliciting support from Russian and international corporations. In addition to operating costs, $350 million is being sought to renovate the deteriorating Bolshoi Theater and add a second theater. [See sidebar, page 77] When the Bolshoi's $1 million production of Mussorgsky's opera Khovanshchina opened in November, Vasiliev says, contributions came from corporations and some Russian banks. For its campaign to pay for renovating the theater, the company has received support from the Russian Elbim Bank, and newspapers Commersant and Commersant Daily, as well as KPMG, an international accounting and auditing firm. "Until we have the guarantee from the government that we will have a certain amount of money, we just look around for these sponsorships," says Vasiliev.