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1 Legends D the rose and the scimitar Boston Phoenix, 21 November 2003 The first great choreographer of the twentieth century, Michel Fokine,setouttoreformRussianballet.TheclassicaledificebuiltbyPetipa, Ivanov, and the Maryinsky school in St. Petersburg was suffering from decadence and overfamiliarity, Fokine thought, and it needed to be scraped down to the essentials of training and dramaturgy. Away with virtuosity for its own sake, egomaniacal performances, characters who had nothing to do with the story, overblown productions, generic movement, and mechanical mime conventions. In order to fully realize his choreographic innovations, Fokine had to flee the reactionary management at the Maryinsky. For the best four years of his career he worked as house choreographer for Serge Diaghilev, who imported Russian ballet to Europe with sensational success. Fokine’s ballets were revolutionary. So revolutionary, in fact, that his prescription for a one-act story ballet or poetic evocation, with movement specifically arranged to suit its period, locale, and theme, defined ballet choreography for decades. Calling Schéhérazade ‘‘classical’’ in the same breath with Sleeping Beauty and La Bayadère, as did the rhetoric for the Kirov Ballet’s performances in Boston, simplifies what is actually a much richer history, and misinforms the very audience that could appreciate balletic diversity. The Kirov’s all-Fokine performances at the Wang Theater reflected this muddled and opportunistic thinking. Of the three ballets and two bonuses shown opening night, only The Dying Swan was choreographed before Fokine left Russia in 1909, as a solo piece for Anna Pavlova. Chopiniana, which we know as Les Sylphides, did originate at the Maryinsky, as a series of period sketches, but it assumed its marvelous abstract form during Diaghilev’s first Ballets Russes season in Paris. Chopiniana looks back, not to Swan Lake, but to an earlier era, to Giselle and La Sylphide, and it distills Romanticism down to perfume: three ethereal ballerinas and their noble escort (Daria Sukhorukova, Daria Pavlenko , Irina Zhelonkina, and Danila Koruntsev), with a corps of attendants in long white tutus. Dance historian Lynn Garafola pointed out to me that Chopiniana (as revived in 1931 by Agrippina Vaganova) has remained in the Kirov’s repertory ≤ m i r r o r s & s c r i m s pretty steadily, and this may explain the lucid account of it we saw. Aside from a few modern ultrahigh arabesques, the dancers preserved the otherworldly lightness we see in lithographs of Taglioni. I thought the corps was especially effective, wafting with a single impulse to the musical phrase. Fokine’s ballets seem to feature the ensemble much more than any standout solo dancers. I’m aware, of course, that he created for great stars —Pavlova, Nijinsky, Karsavina, Adolph Bolm, Ida Rubinstein—but they all had the ability to transform themselves, subordinate themselves to a choreographic idea. Few dancers today have the magnetism, or the mutability, of these legendary figures. But overinterpreting can throw Fokine’s stylistic unity out of whack. On opening night, Uliana Lopatkina made the Dying Swan into melodrama, as she caught her breath, flapped her arms frantically , clutched the air with a crooked wing. Fokine paid more than one tribute to the romantic period. Le Spectre de la Rose (1910), for Nijinsky and Karsavina, was a vignette, but a tender one, like rose petals pressed in a diary. A girl comes home after a ball and falls into a reverie—she dreams not of this ball or that suitor, but of an androgynous spirit, the idea of dancing itself. Irina Golub was delightful as the dreamy girl but Igor Kolb seemed to be twining and snaking into the Spectre’s delicate shapes instead of floating through them. It must be a challenge for contemporary dancers to embody these characters so unlike ourselves. Le Spectre is intimate, fragile. Nijinsky’s mighty leap at the end became legend, but the ballet says something more. For this performance the Kirov omitted Léon Bakst’s charming set, of a Victorian sitting room. So Golub reclined uneasily in a chair draped with blue cloth, and the Spectre had to entice her across an empty stage. When one of the components is missing, you see how thoroughly worked out Fokine’s theories of taste and style were, and how perfectly Diaghilev put together his teams of collaborators for each ballet. Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russo-Orientalist Schéhérazade and Stravinsky’s Russian-modernist Firebirdbecamestaplesinthemusicalrepertory ,andtheKirovorchestra,under Mikhail Agrest, played with a gorgeous, truly symphonic sensitivity. But the sense...

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