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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Whatever the Bolshoi Ballet's difficulties during the thirty-year directorship (1964-95) of Yuri Grigorovich, an autocrat and a convinced Communist, its subsequent troubles have arguably been greater. In ten years, the Bolshoi has had five directors. This is terrible for a company. So when the Bolshoi hits town--as it did, for two weeks at the Met, in July--there are two questions to ask: How are the dancers doing? And how does the repertory look?
When the Soviet Union fell, much of what the Bolshoi had in the way of evening-length ballets was pre-revolutionary classics revised according to Soviet dictates and post-revolutionary ballets created according to those dictates, tales of brave underdogs besting--or piteously defeated by--corrupt, powerful folk. How was the company to replace, or even augment, this material? How, after seventy-five years, do you unlearn the artistic lessons of Communism: the bombast, the corniness, the texturelessness? Not easily, as one can tell by looking, for example, at the work of Boris Eifman, who until quite recently was the only post-Soviet Russian choreographer who got any regular showing in New York. Underneath its un-Soviet subject matter (sex, madness), Eifman's work looks like Grigorovich's. It's as mindless as the Soviet Union asked its artists to be.
The Bolshoi, in its first week at the Met, showed us two old standards, the pre-revolutionary "Don Quixote"--an 1869 ballet by Marius Petipa, heavily revised--and "Spartacus" (1968). It's hard to say which is more boring. "Don Quixote" has been performed by the Bolshoi more than a thousand times,...
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