The Russians have come, the Russians have come - Russian influences on the art of ballet - Brief Article - Column

Dance Magazine, Feb, 1998 by Clive Barnes

How time flies when you're dead! A couple of months back a special gala Diaghilev Celebration was held at Lincoln Center's New York State Theater to honor the great Russian dance impresario Serge Diaghilev's 125th birthday. Actually it was a little late. Had the old boy been considerate enough to have lived, he would have hit that 125th benchmark on March 31, 1997. But still the thought was there. In actual fact, this oddly fascinating dance concert did not have much at all to do with Diaghilev--although Diaghilev was certainly the man who, as long ago as 1909, brought the Russian ballet to the West.

The Lincoln Center concert itself featured the latest and the brightest of the new generation of dancers from St. Petersburg's Kirov and Moscow's Bolshoi ballets. As they were dancing mostly pas de deux from nineteenth-century classics the program was one shrewdly calculated to make the iconoclastic Diaghilev stir moodily, if not actually turn, in his Venetian grave. This was a positive demonstration of the kind of dance frippery against which Diaghilev and his circle were rebelling. No matter. The magic names Diaghilev and Ballets Russes were once more made into a credible incantation, even if their spirit was not evoked.

But the young dancers were the real thing. In addition to such familiar heroes as Vladimir Malakhov and Igor Zelensky, there was a mouth-watering quartet of St. Petersburg ballerinas--Uliana Lopatkina (twenty-four years old), Maya Doumchenko (twenty-one), Diana Vishneva (twenty-one), and Svetlana Zakharova (eighteen), all but the first-named making their local debuts. They are destined to be among the leading ballerinas of the first decade of the next millennium, and it was a privilege to see them in that pristine, opalescent shimmer of youth.

All are sensationally gifted--as is their Kirov contemporary (not present here), Anastasia Volochkova. On today's dance scene, promising men literally abound, but the female of the species seems far, far rarer. The two apparently headed for superstardom are Vishneva and Zakharova. Remember these names--in ten years they will be household words in any well-brought-up ballet household. The intensely musical Vishneva proved gorgeously delicate in Balanchine's Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux, reminding me of Violette Verdy's original reading, while Zakharova in the second act duet from Giselle offered a thrilling, wraithlike poetry that recalled the 1961 debut of Natalia Makarova in the role in London.

And what would our 125-year-old birthday boy, Diaghilev, have thought? Well, that maestro of the new would doubtless have deplored this bare-bones reduction of the art of ballet to dancing and little but dancing. But the dancing itself--well, most of it, for a few of the Muscovite Bolshoi entrants were a tad rough, to put it at its kindest--he would have surely have loved.

Russian Ballet. Russian dancers. For more than a century, those words have, gone together in the popular imagination like Italian opera, or Italian singers. Indeed at the very beginning of the second invasion of Russian dance to the West during the early 1950s, London's indomitable Marie Rambert declared that just as we had the phrase bel canto for Italian singing, we should adopt a new phrase, bella danza, for Russian dancing. (Well, okay, the use of Italian was rather illogical--but who would have understood had it been in Russian?) And Rambert was tight in an important sense: These Russians were dancing differently from us in the West, although in fact we were, in our own way, also largely Russian trained.

Notice I said "second invasion." The first, of course, was the Diaghilev onslaught, which revitalized Western ballet. On his death in 1929, the remnants of his company were eventually gathered together by Col. W. de Basil and others, and the glamour and skills of the long expatriate Russians remained the dominant force in Western classic ballet until World War II. Then, especially in the United States and Britain, national ballets emerged and became dominant. But the allure of the Russians persisted, and when first the Bolshoi, spearheaded by the illustrious Ulanova, and then the Kirov arrived, that second--the Soviet--invasion had we had the great defectors--Rudolf Nureyev (who amazingly formed a unbeatably newsworthy partnership with the West's own most celebrated ballerina, Margot Fonteyn), Makarova, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. In the new-look media world of Western media, they acquired the iconic fame of film stars, royalty, courtesans, and that ilk.

And now--believe it or not--we have the third invasion. The post-Soviet assault, or rather, infiltration. For years there had been a trickle of Russian-trained dancers to the West. Somehow they got visas, they married Westerners, they, almost unobtrusively, defected--the last big, media--worthy defection being the late Alexander Godunov and the Kozlovs in 1979. Now with the fall of the Soviet Union, and the freeing up of Russian emigration, that trickle has become a torrent.