A tale of two schools - Vaganova Ballet Academy from St. Petersburg and School of American Ballet from New York City - Column

Dance Magazine, May, 1998 by Clive Barnes

My memory may be at fault in the details, and somehow I couldn't find the text in my library, but in Chekhov's one-act play The Wedding, I recall a little Greek baker, or pastry cook or something similar, starting a tipsy toast to the happy couple with the words: "There is Russia . . . and there is Greece. There is Greece . . . and there is Russia." For some reason best known to my quirky mental processes, that phrase resonated through my mind the other day at the Brooklyn Academy of Music when and where the Vaganova Ballet Academy from St. Petersburg squared off against the School of American Ballet from New York City.

Squared off? Come now, that's surely a bit harsh, for it wasn't a competition. But, face it, it was undeniably competitive. For so far as my Russian-style ballet goes, it might be said, echoing my Chekhovian Greek, "There is St. Petersburg . . . and there is New York City. There is New York City . . . and there is St. Petersburg." Yes, I know that although Britain's Royal Ballet School seems currently under a cloud, the Paris Opera School, under the invigorating direction of Claude Bessy since 1972, is today probably the top ballet school in the world. Yet that much-heralded balletic summit meeting between the SAB and the Vaganova Ballet Academy did possess a special piquancy.

Although the Vaganova, formerly the Russian Imperial Ballet School and still situated on Theatre Street, is 260 years old, and SAB a mere upstart stripling of sixty-five, they have a special heritage in common, over and above that classic tradition that all such institutions are heir to. SAB was, after all, founded by one of St. Petersburg's most illustrious graduates, George Balanchine, and is based on similar pedagogic principles. They are fraternal twins--of a sort.

The Vaganova Academy, stiffened with a few stars from its parent company, the Kirov Ballet, had been giving performances at BAM's Opera House. It is not all that common for ballet schools to travel abroad for performances--although Moscow's Bolshoi School has toured quite widely, the Paris Opera Ballet School has played City Center, and even SAB danced in the Holland Festival a few years ago. The ordinary performances by the St. Petersburg students (the joint appearance with SAB was only the icing on the wedding cake at the Saturday matinee) were remarkable enough. They offered what Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof sang about: "Tradition. Tradition."

In comparatively few of mankind's activities is tradition so highly revered as in the formalized and stylized art of classic ballet. Tradition is what gets dancers up in the morning to take class, and it is what makes that class, generation stepping upon generation, always the same, if always slightly different. And nowhere is our tradition of classic dance more jealously guarded than in the Vaganova Academy.

It proved a thrilling, inspiring experience to watch these sixty-five beautifully schooled young dancers go through their paces. There is something both humble and humbling about young dancers with the dew of tuition still behind their ears, and the pride of hope informing their manners. They nervously know that the very stage beneath their feet bears the future of their art; yet at any minute that stage can crumble quite unforgivingly. Student dance performances at this professional level are no place for the meek. At BAM the Vaganova students, under the direction of Igor Belski, first performed to Drigo music a theatrical class piece devised by the late Konstantin Sergeyev and involving both senior and junior students. Starting with barre work, demonstrating the students' perfect placement and grave concentration, the classic exhibition moved, in the manner of Harald Lander's Etudes or Asaf Messerer's Bolshoi imitation, into the cool bravura of center work. After divertissements (some given by students, some by Kirov stars) the evening programs ended with an extraordinary performance of the Kingdom of the Shades from La Bayadere, with the leading roles taken by Kirov principals, either a sublime Uliana Lopatkina or a glamorous Anastasia Volochkova, both partnered by the magisterial Igor Zelensky. However, the stars were not the main event but the rest of the ballet. Here were twenty-four young women, all students of the senior class, plus three outstanding classmate soloists (Alfia Sharafoutdinova, Irina Perren, and Alesia Boyko), and the overall ensemble performance was virtually world-class.

Some observers criticized the Russian women's new emphasis in class on those high extensions that, in fairness, started with Balanchine, and were later taken up by such European divas as Darcey Bussell and--much admired in St. Petersburg, even taken as a role model--Sylvie Guillem. I accept those high extensions as a special means of choreographic expression; others think of them as aberrant contortions. Well, pointe work was once an aberrant contortion. Style, and the technique that sustains it, changes and develops. It's the final expression that counts. And it was here--when the Russian and American schools went one on one--that the Russians faltered.