La Bayadere. - Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C - dance reviews

National Review, May 10, 1993 by Linda Bridges

But what about the decision to end with this scene? I can't help wondering what solution Nureyev might have found had this project not been postponed until he was weakened by illness, since making the dramatic and the technical aspects of a work reinforce each other was always his forte.

What he typically did in his restaging was to bring these nineteenth-century ballets, not into the twentieth century, but in tune with the literary sensibility of the nineteenth century. When these ballets were first created, dramatic unity was less important than giving everyone in the company something to do (hence the innumerable "national dances," such as the mazurka, czardas, and Neapolitan dance in Swan Lake; the variations for the fairies in The Sleeping Beauty; and the dances for the "Negro children," the Golden Idol, and the girl with the water jar in La Bayadere), and providing an opportunity for upper-crust St. Petersburgers to make assignations with the girls in the corps or (in the case of very upper-crusters) with the ballerinas (the rising star Mathilde Kschessinska, later a noted Nikiya, was the mistress of the young Nikolai Romanov, later Czar Nicholas II). Dramatic continuity was often left to fend for itself.

Furthermore, the leading male dancers were divided into danseurs nobles and danseurs caracteres, a distinction that persisted long after the imperial court had closed up shop and the ballet company had been renamed the Kirov, after the man whose assassination gave Stalin his excuse to begin the Purges. The danseur noble partnered the ballerina; the donseur caractere did the glittery stuff. Actually, even the partnering was sometimes shared: in Act II of Swan Lake, for example, the Prince's friend Benno shared in the scene with Odette--rather as if Romeo gave Benvolio half his lines in the balcony scene.

Nureyev was scarcely the first to alter some of these arrangements, but he was, having burst on the Western scene so dramatically, the most widely noticed. When he was criticized once as selfishly aggrandizing his role, he replied, "A pas de deux is a conversation of love. How can you have a conversation if one partner is dumb?" Thus in La Bayadere, both in the scene at court and in the Kingdom of the Shades, Solor has as big a solo as Nikiya--just as in Swan Lake Nureyev added the brooding solo between the scene where Siegfried's mother tells him he must choose a bride and his first encounter with Odette; and he added a can-you-top-this? element to the Black Swan pas de deux.

Unchivalrous, those of the Anton Dolin school would say. One might counter: No, merely giving the princess a prince worth having.