The false note of the season was struck by Natalia Osipova, a guest artist from the Bolshoi Ballet who dropped in for one Giselle and two La Sylphides. Guest artists have always been a constant at ABT, and there are upsides to these visits (excitement, expanded stylistic horizons) and downsides (hysteria, stylistic disconnects). I did not see Osipova in the gala performances that won acclaim for her last year here in New York. After seeing her this spring, I’m still wondering what all the fuss is about. There’s no question that her phenomenal ballon—the light, springing height she achieves in jumping moves like assemblé, sissonne, jeté—is a special gift. In a ballet like Giselle —where, in Act One, the heroine has a bounding spirit, and, in Act Two, she is weightless—such height and lightness go a long way. But ballet is not a trampoline. While the ABT audience and some of the press were thoroughly wowed by Osipova’s aerodynamics, for me, she frequently bounced right out of the art form. If you were looking for a singing arabesque, a nuance in the shaping of phrases, you looked in vain.

Despite the rush of publicity, Osipova is still an unfinished dancer. She has a sickled right foot. She has scrunchy pointes that have very little power of articulation. More troubling is the lack of expression in her upper body. Though only twenty-three, Osipova has an old face. Please understand, offstage she looks twenty-three. But onstage, so little imaginative energy is resonant in the poitrine, the port de bras, that there’s a lack of affect up there. Her dancing is un-crowned. Perhaps this is why she had to pull faces to show us what Giselle was feeling, and why her mad scene was so disjointed it began to feel static, tedious, mindless in all the wrong ways. I must add, too, that she brought her Bolshoi bag of tricks to the role: bent-legged arabesques that tip the toe up higher; normally straight-legged assemblés that she pulls into pas de chat, knees bent under her skirt to give an illusion of greater height. This is fine at the Bolshoi, where everyone does it, but it seemed unfair to ABT’s other Giselles, who were doing the steps without tricks. As in all athletic endeavors, tricks at some point become cheats.