ANANIASHVILI AND FADEYECHEV : NEW PRINCIPALS IMPROVE ‘GISELLE’

Yuri Grigorovich’s new staging of good old, dear old, indestructible old “Giselle” for the Bolshoi Ballet-- his Bolshoi Ballet--remains a stylistic hodgepodge and an aesthetic compromise. Cast changes can’t alter that sad basic premise.

Strong individual dancers in the leading roles can do a lot, however, to stabilize the focus and raise the temperature. Nina Ananiashvili and Alexei Fadeyechev proved the point emphatically Thursday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Despite the general aura of dramatic abstraction imposed by the management, this Giselle and Albrecht delineated the characters and their ghastly predicament with eloquent clarity.

Grigorovich has deprived his heroine of much explicit mime. He has reduced his hero in Act I to little more than a handsome prop for the ballerina. Nevertheless, Ananiashvili and Fadeyechev dauntlessly managed to define mood and action in terms of dance gesture.

The purposeful articulation of their limbs and torsos told a lot. So did the involvement of their eyes.

Ananiashvili and Fadeyechev do not happen to be a standard Bolshoi pair. She dances most often with the company’s golden boy, Andris Liepa. Fadeyechev’s regular Giselle is Alla Mikhalchenko, who happens to be his wife and whose recent injury occasioned the unaccustomed partnership with Ananiashvili.

Be that as it may, Ananiashvili and Fadeyechev seem to bring out the best in each other.

Ananiashvili burst upon the scene in Act I with a touch of sadness already shading her features. This was no china-doll peasant but a breathing, vulnerable, soulful young woman. She embraced her lover with abandon that could not dispel an aura of doom. She stared gloomily into space at that awful moment when Grigorovich has her mother listen gravely to her apparently irregular heartbeat. She greeted her aristocratic visitors with touching timidity, fell into madness with a telling fusion of shrill hysteria and wounded pathos.

As the Wili of the second act, she allowed a lingering suggestion of human pain to underscore the rapture of spiritual liberation. She was stubbornly heroic, not just ethereal.

Ananiashvili is only 24. With time she will no doubt refine certain details. She may also tidy up some of her footwork and phrase with more consistent musicality. Meanwhile, one can exult in the exceptional power of her long and expressive arms, the generosity of her silhouette stretched in extension and the arching velocity of her leaps.

As Albrecht, Fadeyechev offered the comforting reminder that the genuine danseur noble is not an extinct species. His somewhat thick, muscular frame does not conform to the slender ideal dictated by tradition in this romantic category. But Nicolai Fadeyechev, Alexei’s illustrious father, didn’t look much like Erik Bruhn either, and that hardly prevented him from being the most dignified of princes and the most supportive of partners.

Fadeyechev fils , who bears an uncanny resemblance to Fadeyechev pere , conveys the same romantic sensitivity, the same courtly restraint, the same strength in reserve. Unlike his forebear, however, he takes to the air with amazing ease. He is the rarest of firebrands: one who can make even the most acrobatic feat look genteel.

His innate good taste did not preclude a passionate performance. It just kept the passion in perspective and in control.

In what was left of his Act I duties, he conveyed ardor on a grand scale. This Albrecht had eyes only for Giselle. His engagement to the preening Bathilde of Ilze Liepa was a matter probably beyond his control and certainly beyond his desire.

In Act II, he suggested Albrecht’s brooding remorse with agony all the more poignant because it was masked by poise. He also focused the desperation of the Wili-induced pyrotechnics with impeccably turned aplomb.

Unfortunately, like his immediate predecessor in the role, he succumbed to the idiotic neo-Bolshoi custom of interrupting the tragedy to acknowledge applause while sprawled in mock-exhaustion on the floor.

Apart from Vladimir Lyakin, a frail partner for the aggressive Maria Bilova in the peasant pas de deux, the remainder of the cast remained essentially unchanged.