How good is the Kirov?

The Kirov Ballet is the company that the choreographer George Balanchine left behind when he sailed from Russia in 1924. It is the company from which Rudolf Nureyev defected in 1961, followed by Natalia Makarova in 1970, and Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1974. Formerly known as the Imperial Ballet of the Mariinsky Theatre (named after Czar Alexander II's wife Marie), the Kirov is the great Russian mother company, a matryoshka doll hatching dancer after dancer--an infinity of dancers--from its Imperial School on Theatre Street, a continuum of star pupils that includes the legendary names Anna Pavlova, Tamara Karsavina, Vaslav Nijinsky. The company that is today called The Kirov Ballet of the Mariinsky Theatre--still Dickensian in its selection standards; still trained within the meticulous, luminous rounds of Vaganova technique; still a constellation of coaches pushing, pulling, their proteges to the top--she is always there, like Everest.

But we all have issues with our mothers. Perhaps no ballet company in the world is more daunting to write about than the Kirov. The company has a deep and detailed past which is the stuff of scholars, and a performance history that is hard to know given restrictions during the Cold War. And then there are the politics: the fact that Russian defectors escaped to the United States to dance; that it was Manhattan Balanchine chose as the concrete-and-steel setting for his New York City Ballet; and that it was American dancers on which he built his neoclassical style. Yes, Balanchine cherished his years in the Mariinsky school, drawing deeply on the sights and sounds of his childhood, his Proustian connection to ballets scaled for a czar. Solomon Volkov's book Balanchine's Tchaikovsky, a series of interviews in which the choreographer talks about the composer, is a rich remembrance of things past in St. Petersburg ("Everyone thinks the tsar's box at the Mariinsky Theater is in the middle. But actually, it was on the side, on the right. ... We would be lined up by size and presented. We were given chocolate in silver boxes, wonderful ones!"). Once Balanchine got down to work in America, however, he had to use what was at hand--no czars, no state school housing a classical tradition, no old world chocolates, but instead, strong, long-boned, USDA bodies ready to work hard to be classical. Balanchine had to start from scratch, and he began by establishing his School of American Ballet. Necessity would be the mother of invention.

What does this mean in practical terms? That Balanchine would choreograph to American strengths: a leggy athleticism, a competitive desire to prove oneself, a direct and down-to-earth presentation. He sought that quality of the quotidian that all mid-century American moderns were seeing as higher truth. "`Don't pretend to dance' he would say," Suki Schorer writes in the first chapter of her recent book Balanchine Technique. It was another way of saying, don't pretend to be what you are not, dancers with a deep tradition. New York was a new world and this was a classicism dimensionally unmoored, thinner, more linear, more musically prodigal--not Genesis, but Revelations--a powerful next chapter in the history of classical dance.

Balanchine believed in both God and fate, and it is in keeping with the mystic aspect of his life that after leaving Russia and landing in Diaghilev's Ballets Russes he choreographed The Prodigal Son (1929), a dance with an angular, openly sexual pas de deux between a rebellious boy and a looming, elusive Siren, Felia Doubrovska of the long long legs. But Balanchine never did go home. He continued to heed the siren's song, and forever following that song, he made a repertory in the West that is its own world with its own metaphysics. In short, the prodigal ascended to messiah status, and in the last year of his life, when his Catalogue of Works was finally published, he kept it at his bedside where it was referred to as "the Bible." Hence, when the Kirov comes to New York, it's a bit like the Old Testament abutting the New, and a defensive sense of competing religions can creep into people's responses.

The ...