THE last of the Kirov’s five London programmes showcased recent acquisitions, three 20th-century ballets selected to give the dancers from St Petersburg a new perspective on Western dance. They called the programme Contrasts. Well that’s certainly true. From the slick classical virtuosity of Etudes to the raw primitivism of The Rite of Spring, we are talking polar opposites.
The draw on Monday was probably The Rite of Spring, a controversial staging if ever there was one. Back in 1913 Nijinsky’s radical choreography and Stravinsky’s clamorous score scandalised its Parisian audience. The ballet had but a few performances, and although dozens of choreographers subsequently created their own Rites to Stravinsky’s music (there have been well over 100 stagings since then), Nijinsky’s legendary original was lost.
For her 1987 revival, the American choreographer Millicent Hodson (and her art historian husband Kenneth Archer) drew on contemporary photographs, written reviews, drawings and the memories and notations of Marie Rambert, who had acted as Nijinsky’s assistant during rehearsals.
Is this staging authentic? No. All one can say is that Hodson has reimagined Nijinsky’s shocking, modernist Rite using the fragments of documentary evidence still in existence. The result is choreographically crude, visually splendid and musically triumphant.
Hodson’s ensemble writing for the large cast (there are 47 dancers in all) is fairly one-dimensional — as, presumably, was Nijinsky’s — formed in the simple geometry of folk dance, the language wilfully pigeon-toed and flat-footed, an inversion of the classical technique the Kirov dancers have spent a lifetime perfecting. The reconstructed Nicholas Roerich sets and costumes are stunning: faux-naif, luscious and excited by colour. Stravinsky’s score is still a battering ram of musical invention and startling power, alive with the roar of nature.
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I was hoping for more primal ferocity in both the dance and the dancers. It couldn’t have helped that the front cloth got stuck in the middle of the ballet on Monday, forcing Covent Garden’s red curtain to come down and delay matters for a few minutes while the technical hitch was sorted.
Yulia Makhalina flew over specially from St Petersburg to dance the Chosen Maiden for us, the one selected by fate to be sacrificed to the pagan gods of spring. Makhalina stood frozen with terror as the noose of death tightened around her tiny, doll-like figure, before she erupted with great conviction into the climactic, self-annihilating sacrificial dance. The audience was certainly won over, even if Nijinsky purists were not.
The Kirov has been dancing Balanchine’s Serenade since 1998 and they certainly bring a thrilling uniformity to the ensemble work. They also accentuate the Russian roots in Balanchine’s first American choreography, approaching the serene, romantic writing (it’s set to Tchaikovsky) with more lyrical frills than their New York counterparts. The corps move through the abstraction with a kind of willowy reverie, although I did find the principal women (Natalia Sologub, Irina Golub and Sofia Gumerova) a little severe, given the circumstances.
Harald Lander’s Etudes has been delighting audiences with its shameless classroom display since 1948, when the Royal Danish Ballet premiered it in Copenhagen, but the Kirov acquired it only in April. I suspect Etudes (music by Czerny) has done them good, taking their technique back to basics and fining it.
Three hugely impressive dancers led the performance on Monday. The two men, Leonid Sarafanov and Andrian Fadeyev, were both excellent, Fadeyev especially, and the ballerina, Svetlana Zakharova, a woman of awesome technical facility. The flashy Zakharova (who is leaving the Kirov to join the Bolshoi next season) may not be the most convincing of dramatic ballerinas, but she’s in her element here.
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The Kirov is ending its season in a more familiar guise with further performances of Swan Lake and Le Corsaire. Beware the overlong intervals.
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