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PRESS: Kirov at the City Center. April 2008 Tour 
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Kirov displays its technique, talent during extended NY run

NEW YORK: New York culture mavens are notoriously jaded. After all, you can see almost anything here. But the past three weeks were a treat for even the most blase ballet fans. The Kirov Ballet was in town, for the first time in six years.

The engagement that ended Sunday, bringing some 100 dancers (plus orchestra) to City Center, gave New Yorkers a rare look at some of the most talented performers in the world — some now at the top, and some on their way up.

Barring a trip to St. Petersburg, when else would one get a chance to see Uliana Lopatkina perform in Fokine's "The Dying Swan"? Less than five minutes long, this piece was made famous by the great Anna Pavlova, and Lopatkina, who has a delicate, mournful face and long, expressive arms, is known as one of the best.

Indeed, she managed to make the last moments of a swan — something that could lend so easily to farce — seem unaffected, by immersing herself in the melancholy of Saint-Saens' music, and in the moment. It helped that she was performing on the smaller City Center stage, where faces are in sharper focus, rather than the Metropolitan Opera House, the usual theater for Kirov visits.

The stint began with excerpts from ballets by the 19th-century master Marius Petipa. A few of the vignettes had a stuffy feel, and some dancers felt they needed to pause ever so slightly and invite applause after major steps. But they were a good introduction to the famously rigorous technique of this 200-year-old company.

In the Slavic-accented "Raymonda," the dark-haired Victoria Tereshkina signaled she was one to watch as the weeks went on. She was full of precision, confidence and verve the following week in the difficult choreography of "Etudes," by Harald Lander, which begins with the dancers as ballet students at the barre, progressing to virtuoso turns and leaps and seemingly enough grand endings for four ballets.

Another standout here was Leonid Sarafanov, who is well into his 20s, but with his blond cropped hair and boyish face, looks like he's all of 14. Sarafanov dances like a graceful virtuoso gymnast, and nowhere more so in the contemporary work of William Forsythe, where Sarafanov ripped off one exhausting combination after another in "The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude," set to Franz Schubert.

As for Tereshkina, her smile morphed into a steelier expression as she threw herself into the edgier Forsythe material. Forsythe, an American who has worked for decades in Germany, loves to toy with the boundaries of what's onstage and what's not, what's performance and what isn't.

He does it with lighting — keeping the house lights on while his dancers begin "Steptext," for example — or by having dancers suddenly start acting as if they're in the rehearsal studio, redoing a step and discussing it aloud, as in "Approximate Sonata."

For Kirov purists, these ballets may not have been the favorites. But the dancers seemed thrilled to be performing them, as if suddenly jolted with an electric charge. The palpable energy in these works was in marked contrast to Fokine's "Le Spectre de la Rose," which seemed dated and dusty.

"In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated," a clear crowd-pleaser, featured Tereshkina in the lead role once danced by Sylvie Guillem at the Paris Opera Ballet, as well as the gorgeous, towering redhead Ekaterina Kondaurova. The latter's dramatic leg extension might have seemed showy in classical ballet but was perfectly suited to this work, in which dancers kicked their legs into dizzying poses to the crashing, crackling sounds of Thom Willems' score.

Diana Vishneva launched into "Steptext" with abandon. The gorgeously proportioned Vishneva is well known in these parts due to the spring seasons she now spends with American Ballet Theatre, in classical roles such as Giselle, Odette/Odile and Juliet.

The Vishneva performances here were more memorable that those she gave with her strangely unsatisfying show in February at City Center, "Beauty in Motion," featuring three works commissioned just for this powerful, expressive dancer who is at the height of her powers. Unfortunately, that program was a disappointing mix of the inaccessible and the borderline trite. Vishneva lovers had much more to admire in her varied Kirov performances.


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22 апр 2008, 03:48
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Kirov displays its technique, talent during extended NY run
By JOCELYN NOVECK, Associated Press Writer

New York culture mavens are notoriously jaded. After all, you can see almost anything here. But the past three weeks were a treat for even the most blase ballet fans. The Kirov Ballet was in town, for the first time in six years.

The engagement that ended Sunday, bringing some 100 dancers (plus orchestra) to City Center, gave New Yorkers a rare look at some of the most talented performers in the world — some now at the top, and some on their way up.

Barring a trip to St. Petersburg, when else would one get a chance to see Uliana Lopatkina perform in Fokine's "The Dying Swan"? Less than five minutes long, this piece was made famous by the great Anna Pavlova, and Lopatkina, who has a delicate, mournful face and long, expressive arms, is known as one of the best.

Indeed, she managed to make the last moments of a swan — something that could lend so easily to farce — seem unaffected, by immersing herself in the melancholy of Saint-Saens' music, and in the moment. It helped that she was performing on the smaller City Center stage, where faces are in sharper focus, rather than the Metropolitan Opera House, the usual theater for Kirov visits.

The stint began with excerpts from ballets by the 19th-century master Marius Petipa. A few of the vignettes had a stuffy feel, and some dancers felt they needed to pause ever so slightly and invite applause after major steps. But they were a good introduction to the famously rigorous technique of this 200-year-old company.

In the Slavic-accented "Raymonda," the dark-haired Victoria Tereshkina signaled she was one to watch as the weeks went on. She was full of precision, confidence and verve the following week in the difficult choreography of "Etudes," by Harald Lander, which begins with the dancers as ballet students at the barre, progressing to virtuoso turns and leaps and seemingly enough grand endings for four ballets.

Another standout here was Leonid Sarafanov, who is well into his 20s, but with his blond cropped hair and boyish face, looks like he's all of 14. Sarafanov dances like a graceful virtuoso gymnast, and nowhere more so in the contemporary work of William Forsythe, where Sarafanov ripped off one exhausting combination after another in "The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude," set to Franz Schubert.

As for Tereshkina, her smile morphed into a steelier expression as she threw herself into the edgier Forsythe material. Forsythe, an American who has worked for decades in Germany, loves to toy with the boundaries of what's onstage and what's not, what's performance and what isn't.

He does it with lighting — keeping the house lights on while his dancers begin "Steptext," for example — or by having dancers suddenly start acting as if they're in the rehearsal studio, redoing a step and discussing it aloud, as in "Approximate Sonata."

For Kirov purists, these ballets may not have been the favorites. But the dancers seemed thrilled to be performing them, as if suddenly jolted with an electric charge. The palpable energy in these works was in marked contrast to Fokine's "Le Spectre de la Rose," which seemed dated and dusty.

"In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated," a clear crowd-pleaser, featured Tereshkina in the lead role once danced by Sylvie Guillem at the Paris Opera Ballet, as well as the gorgeous, towering redhead Ekaterina Kondaurova. The latter's dramatic leg extension might have seemed showy in classical ballet but was perfectly suited to this work, in which dancers kicked their legs into dizzying poses to the crashing, crackling sounds of Thom Willems' score.

Diana Vishneva launched into "Steptext" with abandon. The gorgeously proportioned Vishneva is well known in these parts due to the spring seasons she now spends with American Ballet Theatre, in classical roles such as Giselle, Odette/Odile and Juliet.

The Vishneva performances here were more memorable that those she gave with her strangely unsatisfying show in February at City Center, "Beauty in Motion," featuring three works commissioned just for this powerful, expressive dancer who is at the height of her powers. Unfortunately, that program was a disappointing mix of the inaccessible and the borderline trite. Vishneva lovers had much more to admire in her varied Kirov performances.


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24 апр 2008, 19:51
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Oppositions
The Kirov's Balanchine at City Center
By JEFFREY GANTZ

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NEW YORK — The end of a three-week, thousands-of-miles-from-home season is never the right time to assess a dance company, and that’s multiply true of the Kirov Ballet’s engagement at New York City Center, which ended this past Sunday. The usuals — injuries; tired, jaded dancers; audience-demoralizing last-minute substitutions — were just the beginning. Having found no room at the Metropolitan Opera House, where it had performed La Bayadère, Don Quixote, Swan Lake, and George Balanchine’s Jewels at the 2002 summer Lincoln Center Festival, the company had to settle for the theater that Balanchine and New York City Ballet abandoned in 1964 for the new and more capacious New York State Theater at Lincoln Center. (One apparent casualty of the smaller space was the “Kingdom of the Shades” entrance from the third act of La Bayadère, which was performed without the zigzag ramp.) Back home in St. Petersburg, meanwhile — well, that was the problem: the Kirov’s director, Makhar Vaziev, was back home, having failed to make the trip, amid rumors that he’s about to retire. Vaziev and Valery Gergiev, the general director of the Mariinsky Theatre (where the Kirov is based), do not see eye to eye these days; Gergiev — who, depending on who you talk to, does or doesn’t know jack about ballet — has criticized Vaziev in everything from choreography to casting and training. At home, the company is again known as the Mariinsky Ballet of St. Petersburg (both the theater and the troupe were named for Maria Aleksandrovna, wife of Tsar Aleksandr II), but it still tours under the familiar — to Westerners — name of the Leningrad Communist Party leader, Sergei Kirov, who was assassinated in 1934. Peter the Great had no brand-name guarantees when he built St. Petersburg in a swamp; perhaps this company should imitate him and go forward under the appellation it prefers.

The last time the Kirov appeared in Boston, in November 2006, it was to perform Swan Lake, at the Wang Theatre. There were no evening-length ballets at the City Center, only programs of Petipa (excerpts from Paquita, Raymonda, and La Bayadère) and Fokine (Chopiniana, Le spectre de la rose, The Dying Swan, Sheherazade) and William Forsythe (Steptext, Approximate Sonata, The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude, In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated), with the odd Vaganova (the Diana and Acteon pas de deux) and Harald Lander (Études) thrown in. Reviewing the opening Petipa program, Alastair Macaulay in the New York Times fired the first critical shot: “The Kirov is one of those ballet companies that too often present show-off steps as if the art lay nakedly in nothing but excellence of technical execution.” Freelancing for the Village Voice (the Paper That Used To Have a Dance Critic), Deborah Jowitt seemed to have had a better time: “The women sparkle like perfectly cut diamonds. You may occasionally fault their phrasing or their lack of emotional nuance, but never their technique.” Everybody noticed principal Uliana Lopatkina’s chin pointed defiantly at the upper balcony.

This past weekend, the Kirov’s New York season culminated in a Balanchine program: Serenade, Rubies, and Ballet Imperial. The company’s 2002 New York Jewels was an eye opener. Marcia Siegel in this paper observed that “in stepping into this choreography of Balanchine’s, the Kirov’s members seemed to be learning a different way to dance.” Laura Jacobs in the New Criterion wrote, “To see the company in this looming Balanchine after nine days of story ballets was to see them with nothing on but their dancing. And what a sight.” Even Macaulay in this past Tuesday’s Times described as a triumph the company’s “galvanized, glowing 2000–2002 accounts of Balanchine’s Rubies, and to a lesser extent, the rest of Jewels.”

What I saw in that 2002 Jewels was a company that stretched and softened what had become the New York City Ballet hard line without sacrificing sex or, for the most part, speed. This Balanchine might have lacked the élan of the Paris Opera Ballet’s, but it harbored greater innocence. That impression was confirmed by the first three movements of Serenade Saturday night. Titian-haired Ekaterina Kondaurova and Danila Korsuntsev made for a large, gracious Waltz Girl and Boy, she with her authoritative upper body and he with his easy tours jetés. The dancing had volume and extension and effortless lifts and pillowy phrasing; flipping turns were light-hearted rather than show-offy, and Ekaterina Osmolkina’s Russian Girl was a jubilant presence. There was even a puckeringly astringent traversal of Tchaikovsky’s cloying second-movement Waltz from Mikhail Agrest and the Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre; it elicited bittersweet waltzing from Kondaurova and Korsuntsev. And the religioso feel in the women’s-mysteries opening of the Tema Russo third movement led to gamboling that could have been inspired by the fairy footing in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

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But it all vanished faster than Nick Bottom’s dream. The women did not let their hair down for the Elegy, and notwithstanding Arlene Croce’s dismay at this 1977 development in Serenade’s history, it signals that the Waltz Girl — who’s just been deserted — is moving into a different realm. The Dark Angel and the Elegy Man — Daria Vasnetsova and Alexander Sergeev — strode on with little gravitas, and between them they could hardly manage her 720-degree turn on pointe: it wobbled fearfully. In Boston Ballet’s Serenade, the Russian Girl flashes a warning look at the audience before rushing on to join the other three, her hair flying behind her; Melanie Atkins could compress the entire ballet into that one look. Osmolkina hardly bothered. The Apollo-like conjoining of the Elegy Man with the three women never cast its spell, Sergeev being too light to anchor it and Kondaurova losing her thread. As she was borne off (into the light?), she didn’t even do the signature backbend, only tilted back her head.

Sunday afternoon’s performance was better and not. Victoria Tereshkina affected an unusually somber Waltz Girl, frozen in contemplation at the end of the Sonatina, meeting her fate with head bowed at the end — and bending deeply as she went off. Kondaurova, now the Dark Angel, weighted the Elegy and was steady in her big turn. Back as the Elegy Man, Alexander Sergeev was marginally better, but Nadezhda Gonchar’s Russian Girl had little nuance and strayed ahead of the beat, and Yevgeny Ivanchenko labored where Korsuntsev flew.

One might wonder how the pieces in this program were selected and ordered. Serenade (1935) and Ballet Imperial (1941) are early Balanchine works set to Tchaikovsky; Rubies is later (1967) and set to Stravinsky. All three offer a lead couple plus a second woman who’s outside their orbit. And in all three, there aren’t enough men to go around. The four men who come on in the Elegy of Serenade have to partner eight women, and at the end the men bear the Waltz Girl out while the women they might be dancing with look on. The Rubies curtain rises on a daisy chain of four men and nine women, and that’s as good as it gets for the women; later on it’s “Boys’ Night Out” — just the boys. Ballet Imperial opens with a line of eight men advancing to release their partners from fourth position, but eventually the women’s ranks swell to 16, and in the second movement the male lead swings a line of 10 women, five on each side, as if they were the Swan Lake princesses that Siegfried will never marry.

Rubies is the “American” section of Jewels (Emeralds being “French” and Diamonds “Russian”), with its spiky, spoofy 1929 Stravinsky score, the Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra — and never mind that the composer wrote and premiered it in Paris. The music’s three movements — Presto, Andante rapsodico (with an enigmatic brass chorale near the end that anticipates the second movement of Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra), Allegro capriccioso ma tempo giusto — are nothing if not capricious. The choreography is period Picasso Cubist, with a nod to the Paris Jockey Club: the ladies have to shake and shimmy and smile without looking as if they were trying to hustle customers. And no lagging behind the beat.

The Kirov girls of 2008 are challenged by Stravinsky’s jagged rhythms in a way that I don’t remember of the class of 2002: they don’t displace their pelvises with enough bite (theirs is the art of classy stripping), and in the pony sections they don’t pump their knees high enough. (The orchestra and pianist Lyudmila Sveshnikova also seemed soft-edged.) But coming on for Alina Somova as the couple girl Saturday night, Olesia Novikova was pert and teasing and rippled through her big leg swings; she’d kick a leg up to her tiara without making a big deal of it and then, after a swirl of chaîné turns, exit with a wink. Leonid Sarafanov was a cocky, virtuoso partner in the Andante duet but not an idiomatic one, and as the big girl Nadezhda Gonchar looked uncomfortable from the outset: as the orchestra reprised its opening thunder and lightning, she let the four men manhandle her in the “Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors” section, and she had difficulty with the three nasty flat-footed penché arabesques that follow.



Sunday afternoon, Novikova was back with a comic foil of a partner in Vladimir Shklyarov, who, bucking like a cowboy out of Rodeo, nearly fell during his duet shenanigans before letting the audience know he meant it. The “Boys’ Night Out” chase in the third movement can be a Jets-and-Sharks parody; here it was more like the Keystone Cops. It might not be what Balanchine — or the Balanchine Trust — had in mind, but at least it was something. Kondaurova turned up as a sly, slinky big girl, out of her element in the jockey prancing but later controlling her four men as if she were Marilyn Monroe surrounded by paparazzi, eluding them with ease and then clearing the stage with the serenity of her penché arabesques. Novikova and Shklyarov were so conspiratorially playful, their duet didn’t hold much tension. The ballet didn’t finish on the beat here, and it doesn't on the Paris Opera Ballet Jewels DVD, instead ending with a post-musical exclamation point.

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25 апр 2008, 20:59
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Mariinsky Ballet
April 2008
New York, City Center

by Eric Taub


02 май 2008, 19:28
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Breathing Light Into Ballet

By ROSLYN SULCAS. Published: May 4, 2008

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IT was another evening at the ballet three weeks ago when the Kirov presented an evening of works by William Forsythe. As the audience members settled into their seats and looked at their programs before the first piece, a dancer appeared on the stage. His presence and his cryptic, telegraphic gestures seemed to indicate the start of Mr. Forsythe’s “Steptext,” but as the house lights remained on, the audience only gradually quieted its chatter, a little unsure about exactly what was happening.

This ambiguous moment at the beginning of “Steptext” is Mr. Forsythe’s sleight-of-hand demonstration of how unquestioningly we accept the laws of theatrical lighting and illusion. The auditorium dims; we are in the dark. They — whoever they are, the purveyors of magic and art — are in the light.

That convention is taken for granted, but as the great lighting designer Jennifer Tipton said in a recent interview, lighting onstage is invisible to most people most of the time. This is particularly true in ballet, where lighting is mostly designed to show three-dimensional bodies moving in complex ways through space clearly and unobtrusively without intruding too much on our consciousness.

Over the next few weeks, as the New York City Ballet proceeds with its Jerome Robbins Celebration (for which Ms. Tipton is overseeing the lighting) and American Ballet Theater opens its spring season, audiences are far more likely to note the beauty of the dancing than the glory of the lighting.

But glory it often is. The way a dance or theater work is lighted affects the audience as crucially and subliminally as the swelling strains that cue a love scene or a frightening moment in a film. The spotlight on the swan queen and her prince as they declare their love, the gauzy box of light that Jean Rosenthal created for Robbins’s “Afternoon of a Faun,” Ms. Tipton’s dazzling columns of light in the Royal Ballet’s version of Balanchine’s “Rubies”: these different techniques don’t just show us what is onstage. Like that film music, they critically affect the way we feel about what we see. (When the lighting is nondescript or tacky, as it can frequently be, particularly in story ballets, it can be notably detrimental.)

At a Guggenheim Museum Works & Process talk last month Ms. Tipton showed how lighting affects perception to great effect, demonstrating the way a front-lighted body looks flat and one-dimensional, a backlighted body offers a sculptural shape in space and a side light shows a fully dimensional figure. “The space breathes with the light,” Ms. Tipton said poetically. “It creates a landscape for dancers to exist in.”

But this landscape may be changing.

Ms. Tipton, much sought after by theater and opera directors and a regular collaborator with the Wooster Group, says that the creation of this landscape is the lighting designer’s chief duty. “Working with choreographers is like working directly with a playwright,” she said during a conversation at her apartment in Lower Manhattan. “There is no director to mediate, and in some ways you take on that role.”

Ms. Tipton is a master of this art of mediation. No work by Paul Taylor, Twyla Tharp, Trisha Brown or Jerome Robbins ever displays “typical” Tipton lighting, since there is no such thing. The dances are simply more characteristically themselves, thanks to the craft Ms. Tipton brings to her intuitive blending of a lighting vocabulary with the choreographer’s vision.

But in an era when most new classical pieces — following the model introduced by Balanchine in the first half of the 20th century — have neither story, sets nor elaborate costumes, ballet choreographers seem increasingly drawn to using light as a kind of alternative scenery. The tendency was noted last fall by Alastair Macaulay, the chief dance critic of The New York Times, who wrote, in a review of new works at American Ballet Theater, of “the current international trend of lighting dancers from angles that will make them partly or largely shadowed to the audience.”

If it is a trend, it suggests a move away from an emphasis on the dancer as individual toward the dancer as an element in a visual composition. Mr. Macaulay held Mr. Forsythe responsible, but if he is, it is probably because his ideas about lighting and his theatrical sensibilities have a particular resonance in a contemporary world filled with visual and aural fragmentation. (The individual dancer is also more likely to be de-emphasized when the full-length story ballet is no longer the paradigm for new work, even if it is still tenaciously loved by audiences and those who balance ballet company budgets.)

Ms. Tipton herself is not averse to obtrusive lighting strategies: the smoky golden light that enables the dancers seemingly to appear and disappear at will in Ms. Tharp’s “In the Upper Room” is justly famous in dance circles, as is her lighting for Dana Reitz’s “Necessary Weather,” in which light appeared to emanate from the dancers themselves. But mostly Ms. Tipton uses light to amplify the choreographer’s onstage world, rather than using it, as Mr. Forsythe put it in a telephone interview, “to make empty space more visually active.”

The desire to deploy light as an overt theatrical strategy, sometimes as an element equal in importance to the dancing itself, is even more pronounced in contemporary dance. New York designers like Joe Levasseur and Jonathan Belcher have made distinctive contributions to pieces that can often look as much like installations as dance.

“I don’t feel that it’s my duty to help the choreographer express themself,” said Mr. Belcher, whose recent work for Keely Garfield’s “Limerence” featured two onstage lighting instruments that he intermittently manipulated, evoking a literally and psychologically dark, inconsistent universe. “I have my own expressing to do.”

Ms. Tipton is well aware that younger lighting designers are likely to see the world in a different way, and that technology has changed both the possibilities and the aesthetics of lighting over the last few decades. But she is wary. “I always say that Bill Forsythe is the greatest lighting designer in the world,” she said. “But lighting is only as good as the people using it, and what I see is a lot of surface effect that is not the product of craft.”

The craft that Ms. Tipton refers to is the meticulous technical understanding she brings to her designs. In the United States these designs are usually governed by a lighting plot (a technical diagram showing where each light in a theater is positioned) designed for dance by Ms. Tipton’s first teacher, Thomas Skelton. This plot is still widely in use, and there are certain conventions about the way it is used that have dominated American dance for several decades. But perhaps not forever.

“We know the traditions,” Mr. Levasseur said, “but we are interested in paring things down. There are only so many places you can hang lights, and dance tries to cover all bases so that you can light people who are moving around. But is it interesting? It has to be considered.”


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05 май 2008, 01:00
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