In Russian, “bolshoi” means “grand”—in the word’s fullest sense of being both huge and fine. In every other language, the word has come to be associated with the fabled excellence and grand spectacle of the dance troupe. When the Bolshoi Ballet Company arrives here for two rare performances of Swan Lake and four of The Nutcracker, Twin Cities audiences have every right to believe they will live up to their prestigious name.
“These are big, traditional productions, with a full corps de ballet,” said David Eden, who co-produces the Bolshoi’s current U.S. tour with fellow Russian producer Sergei Danilian. Among the 144 members of the traveling team are 102 dancers, a conductor (who works with local orchestras in each of the eight cities the Bolshoi will visit), and a full technical crew necessitated by six elaborate stage-sets.
A quick historical primer: Classical grandeur has been the hallmark of the Bolshoi since the 19th century. But the company traces its roots back to 1776, the same year John Hancock put his, erm, John Hancock on the Declaration of Independence. From its earliest days, Russian ballet included folk dance elements in its choreography, and had a vigor that distinguished it from European dance. In the latter half of the19th century, a great cross-fertilization in style happened, as choreographers worked across national borders, and the eminent French choreographer Marius Petipa came to Russia. During the next 60 years, Patipa codified classical ballet.
When Petipa arrived in Moscow, the Romantic Period was in full swing. Dances were typically built around plots that were heavy on traditional mythology—spirits from the natural world interacting with mortals, that kind of thing. By the time the Frenchman was operating at the peak of his powers, he collaborated with the Russian composer Piotr Tchaikovsky. Together, they developed precise scores designed specifically for ballet. These were unprecedented for their richness of melody and mood.
Petipa adopted Russian folk-dance elements into his choreography, and introduced to Russian dance a new expressiveness that worked more closely with the music. He choreographed more “pointe” work into Russian dance. (An “en pointe” ballerina literally dances on the tips of her toes in those specially blocked dance slippers. En pointe is, of course, technically and physically challenging. But it gives a gloriously delicate and elongated line to the leg.)
The Swan Lake that comes to Northrop is Yuri Grigorovich’s revised interpretation that uses some of Petipa’s original 1895 choreography. In this version, Russia’s greatest native choreographer dropped the happy ending that had been tacked on in the 1930s to meet Soviet demands. Only by the whim of political history do we see Grigorovich’s Swan Lake here; it might never have seen the light of day if the USSR had survived.
The Soviets supported the Bolshoi because it showcased the high quality of Soviet arts—an excellent source of positive propaganda. Dancers were among the privileged elite, like Soviet-era athletes. But the party controlled the Bolshoi’s artistic content with an iron fist. Under Communism, sad endings were forbidden. In the Soviet-endorsed version of Swan Lake, the prince always gets his girl.
But Grigorovich returned to Tchaikovsky’s original idea that the two bad characters—Rothbart and the black swan—represent the dark sides of the hero and heroine, and he re-choreographed the ending to match the inescapable sadness in the music. “At the dress rehearsal in 1969,” remembered Eden, “the minister of culture was in attendance. Grigorovich had taken some liberties with the narrative and had given it a melancholy ending. That was contradictory to socialist realist ideas, and the minister banned it.”
Swan Lake tells of Prince Siegfried, who longs for the ideal of pure love and avoids the girls vying to catch his eye at his coming-of-age soiree. As the party winds down, he becomes aware of a shadow at his elbow, the evil Rothbart. Rothbart leads him to a magical lake, where Siegfried meets—hold on tight here—the beautiful swan-maiden, Odette. He swears eternal love to this gorgeous bird, but tricky Rothbar later presents Odile, the black swan, and she’s a dead ringer for Odette. The very moment the prince announces he will marry Odile, the true Odette appears. But it’s too late for Siegfried to undo his error.
“The struggle is within the Prince,” Eden said. “Rothbart is an extension of Siegfried’s own personality, and there’s a parallel with Odette and Odile. The atmosphere is brooding and pessimistic, but poetic. This Swan Lake has great psychological depth and insight.”
Closeted behind the Iron Curtain after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the Bolshoi burst onto the Western scene in the 50s, when the Soviets allowed the company to travel to London. English critics raved about the dancers’ dramatic flair and technical excellence, in moves like the male dancer’s one-arm lifts, and the 32-revolution flouté, in which a ballerina balances en pointe on one leg and pirouettes with the weight of her other leg.
“The dancers have visceral, bold movements,” Eden said. “We call it the ‘bravura technique.’ In the Soviet era, they learned very big, bold jumps, techniques that stretched the dancer’s physical limitations and that evolved more and more toward drama and spectacle.”
The same acrobatics and drama infuse Grigorovich’s Nutcracker. Tchaikovsky based the ballet on a tale by the 18th-century romantic storyteller E.T.A. Hoffmann. Nutcracker is also a coming-of-age story, but this time the love object is, oddly, a nutcracker. At Christmastime, young Marie receives a nutcracker doll from the mysterious Drosselmeier and dreams that he becomes a handsome prince, whom she is on the point of marrying when she awakens.
Early choreographers struggled with the apparent contradiction of Hoffman’s fanciful children’s story and the often-tragic tones of Tchaikovsky’s music. In Grigorovich’s choreography for Nutcracker, Marie wakes among her toys and expresses in dance her grief for her lost childhood and unrequited love.
Both ballets feature the Bolshoi’s much-admired corps de ballet, the large group of superbly trained dancers who operate within a ballet rather as a Greek chorus operates within classical drama. So precise is the presentation of the corps that directors select dancers for uniformity of size as well as for their ability.
Linda Shapiro, affiliate faculty in the U of M dance department, can’t wait to see the corps de ballet dance as the mass of swans in Swan Lake. “For my money,” she said, “the Bolshoi is more about the corps; it’s a force in itself.”
“They’re all strong dancers, all traditionally trained,” Eden said. “Their arabesques are effortless, their lines perfect. We place great emphasis on the lyricism of the upper arms. It’s expressive and beautiful.”
During Soviet times, more emphasis was placed on technical excellence than on creativity. The Bolshoi existed in isolation, cut off from the genre-changing innovations of the great neo-classical choreographer Ballanchine, in New York, who divorced ballet from large-scale story-telling and embraced shorter, abstract forms.
Now, Eden acknowledges, the Bolshoi faces a challenge. “It has to become creative,” he said. “To be art, ballet must develop and evolve. It cannot be a fixed product.”
The tension between tradition and innovation exists in all art. But Shapiro believes this is a rare opportunity for the small, chamber dance companies of the Twin Cities to revisit the noble tradition. “This is the heart of ballet,” she said. “Everything else riffs off this classical form. It’s wonderful for us to see grand, poetic, fully-realized productions of major 19th-century ballets. It’s like seeing opera by the Met. These are brilliantly done bal
lets filled with fairy-tale legend and magic.”
Lise Houlton, artistic director of Minnesota Dance Theatre, gives her contemporary ballet dancers a classical training. “A classical training is essential for contemporary work,” she said. “The grounding in technique provides the point of departure for all styles of dance.” Arriving as it does, right in the middle of the local pre-Christmas Nutcracker season, Houlton admitted that the Bolshoi represents competition but, she said, “It’s wonderful they’re coming. It will help us build a larger audience for dance in the Twin Cities.” Judith Brin Ingber, a professor of dance history at the University, said, “I’m excited to see the Russians. They are the keepers of our tradition.”
Bolshoi Ballet Company’s Swan Lake, December 3-4, at 7:30 p.m. The Nutcracker, December 6, 8 p.m.; December 7, 2 p.m. & 8 p.m.; Dec. 8, 1 p.m. Northrop Auditorium, $26-$66. (612) 624-2345.
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