It wasn’t quite intended that way, but the Kirov Ballet indirectly contributed most of New York’s dance excitement this summer. In July, not usually a very good month for ballet, the Kirov’s first defector, Rudolf Nureyev, came to the Met with the National Ballet of Canada. Then American Ballet Theatre, holding its regular summer season across Lincoln Center plaza, announced that its own resident Kirov defector, Nataliya Makarova, would be joined for several performances by the most recent defector, Mikhail Baryshnikov, who had already been acclaimed by those few who had seen him in Leningrad as one of the best classical dancers of our time.
Besides the dancers, the Kirov also contributed some of the choreography: Makarova’s new staging of Act IV of La Bayadere is based on the Kirov version (as is Nureyev’s staging for the Royal Ballet, seen here this spring). The first time I saw this Bayadere, with the leads danced by Cynthia Gregory and Ivan Nagy, it bore little resemblance to the Royal’s version, which I am used to. Besides the differences between the two corps’ abilities (in the long series of arabesques at the beginning, several of ABT’s girls were wobbling alarmingly), the male solos were just not the same choreography. Not entirely coincidentally, the male dancer has become a good deal more prominent since Nureyev came West: he has been given more solos and more intricate parts in the pas de deux (“How can there be a love duet if one partner is silent?” Nureyev once asked). Makarova may have wanted to return to the status quo ante, when the ballerina was dominant, or it may be that ABT is short on male virtuosos (Nagy, an elegant dancer, lacks the panache of Baryshnikov or Nureyev—or, for that matter, of the Royal’s Michael Coleman); in any case, Nagy omitted some of the more difficult steps. Two weeks later, with Baryshnikov dancing, the variations had been spruced up considerably.
Comments