A ‘RELAXED’ DIRECTOR OF HIS OWN COMPANY

Where’s Vyacheslav Gordeyev? That’s one question balletomanes who remembered his appearances here with the Bolshoi Ballet in the 1970s were asking during the company’s recent American tour.

The answer has two parts. Gordeyev has joined the growing faction of Bolshoi dancers who are on the outs with the company’s artistic director Yuri Grigorovich, and he’s now running his own company, the Moscow Ballet.

Indeed, Gordeyev and the Moscow Ballet are now dancing westward on their first American tour. With 10 cities already behind them, they arrive in Southern California this week for three mixed programs in Pasadena Civic Auditorium (Thursday, Saturday and next Sunday) and at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (Oct. 26-28).

The soft-spoken Gordeyev, 39, claims to be more than satisfied with his new situation.

“I’m continuing to discover America,” he said during a recent phone interview conducted in Russian. “When I was traveling with the Bolshoi, there was always some tension in the air, but traveling this way, as the director of my own company, is more relaxing.”

According to Gordeyev, his artistic estrangement from Grigorovich explains why he was not included on the 1987 Bolshoi tour of the United States.

“My artistic relationship with Grigorovich has come to an end,” he said with a frankness that would not have been possible only a few years ago. “We still exchange greetings and all that, but I’m not involved in what he’s creating now. I have no artistic interest in what he’s doing.”

While his prestige as an officially designated “People’s Artist of the Soviet Union,” the highest official title that can be awarded to a Soviet artist, protects his position in the company, he is no longer involved in working on new repertory.

Gordeyev’s U.S. debut in 1973 brought him instant recognition from both the public and the critics. After seeing Gordeyev partner Nadezhda Pavlova in the pas de deux from “La Fille mal Gardee,” Arlene Croce of the New Yorker called him “one of the best classical dancers in the world.”

When he returned with the Bolshoi in 1975 and 1979, the public response was, if anything, even more enthusiastic--especially when he was dancing with Pavlova. Married in 1975, they were the Bolshoi’s sweetheart couple, a real-life Romeo and Juliet.

But the 1979 Bolshoi American tour was a troubled one. Though Gordeyev and Pavlova were showered with praise and affection, the critics had few kind words for the choreography by Grigorovich. It didn’t help matters when leading dancer Alexander Godunov, a friend and colleague of Gordeyev’s, defected--along with soloists Valentina and Leonid Koslov.

There have been many changes in Gordeyev’s personal and professional life since 1979. He and Pavlova are now divorced. Recently remarried (and not to a dancer), Gordeyev has continued dancing at the Bolshoi (“Nobody kicked me out”), but only once or twice a month, and always in roles created before 1979.

“And if I only dance one performance a month, what I am supposed to do with the other 29 days?”

The Moscow Ballet has provided the answer. Founded in 1979 by former Bolshoi soloist Irina Tikhomirnova, it is an outlet for Gordeyev’s talents as a dancer. It is also allowing him to develop new skills as a choreographer.

Before Tikhomirnova died of cancer in 1984, she asked Gordeyev to take over the company. Under his artistic leadership, the Moscow Ballet has more than doubled in size, from 16 dancers to 34. Only seven of the original members remain, the rest selected by Gordeyev personally.

Besides Gordeyev, the most familiar soloist on the Moscow Ballet tour is Lubov Kunakova, a principal dancer at the Kirov Ballet in Leningrad and a leading dancer in the 1986 Kirov tour of the U.S. “She works with me more than with anyone else, even more than with the Kirov,” Gordeyev claims, proudly.

Other prominent guest artists on the current tour include Natalia Tcherkasskaya and Vasili Polushin of the Bolshoi; and Vadim Pisarev, from the Donetsk Opera and Ballet Theater, winner of a Gold Medal at the 1985 Moscow International Ballet Competition.

Gordeyev himself dances in at least two pieces on each program.

During its current tour, Moscow Ballet is presenting three different programs. At the urging of the tour’s American sponsors, William Merriman and David Hermon of Santa Rosa, the excerpts have been selected primarily from classical Russian ballets, Gordeyev said.

Back in the U.S.S.R., the company’s repertory is more balanced, split “50-50 between modern and classical works,” Gordeyev observed.

At home, the Moscow Ballet performs in very large halls, such as the Concert Hall of the Hotel Rossiya and the Hall of Congresses, a gargantuan auditorium within the Kremlin walls that is used primarily for political gatherings.

But only about half of the approximately 130 performances that the Moscow Ballet gives each year actually occur in Moscow. The company also does a lot of touring throughout the Soviet Union (“the only place we haven’t been is the Far East”) and abroad. Not long before leaving for America, the company had danced in Italy and Japan, and the current tour will go on immediately to Paris.

“We’ll get back to Moscow on Dec. 25,” said Gordeyev.

Such a demanding schedule leaves little time for a private life. “For the moment,” says Gordeyev, “I don’t mind all the traveling.” He does look forward to “sitting at home for a while” in the winter, and having enough time “to put together a new program.”

To date, Gordeyev has staged 26 pieces with the Moscow Ballet. His guiding principle is “to try not to repeat repertory that has already been done. I’ve put a lot of energy into reviving and restoring forgotten classics.” Alexander Gorsky’s “Ocean and Pearls” pas de trois is one example from the tour repertory.

“Every year it gets harder to resurrect these old ballets, because the people who really worked in them and created them are dying. That’s why we need to do them now,” Gordeyev said.

The same respect for the distinguished past of the Russian ballet leads Gordeyev to object vehemently to one of Grigorovich’s practices at the Bolshoi: shelving venerated older productions in order to make way for his own new “updated” versions.

“We’re very sorry to see Leonid Lavrovsky’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and Rostislav Zakharov’s ‘Cinderella’ discarded from the Bolshoi repertory,” said Gordeyev. “The scenery and costumes are even being sold. These productions should remain with us, or else we’ll lose our own traditions. The Bolshoi should have its own repertory--not the repertory of just one man. It should represent all that is the best in the Soviet and Russian dance tradition.”

In working with his dancers in Moscow, Gordeyev said he tries “to avoid the look of the Bolshoi as much as possible. I was trained there, of course, so I cannot entirely escape the stamp of the Bolshoi style. But I still try. No matter how delicious it may be, eating black caviar every day is boring: That’s the Bolshoi. We’re looking to give the audience something new and different.”

For Soviet audiences, who have seen very little in the way of contemporary dance, the choreography of Russian-trained George Balanchine certainly qualifies as “new and different.” In fact, it was Gordeyev’s interest in Balanchine’s work that served to alienate him further from Grigorovich. In 1982, he and Pavlova spent some time in Italy, where they had the opportunity to learn a pas de deux from Balanchine’s “Donizetti Variations.”

When Grigorovich found out, Gordeyev recalled, he was “insulted. He felt that members of the Bolshoi company should not work with any other choreographer. We replied that Balanchine’s dancers were free to work with other choreographers, so why shouldn’t we be?”

Gordeyev is not the first Bolshoi dancer, of course, to have a falling out with the company’s artistic director. Ballerina Maya Plisetskaya has been feuding with Grigorovich for years. During a recent visit to America, she readily confessed that they “don’t even say hello to one another,” and that he “wants to create things by himself, and be No. 1.”

“There was always criticism of Grigorovich within the Bolshoi company,” Gordeyev said. “He is a very powerful man, and he has built up a strong position after all these years. He has many influential friends abroad. But I have always said what I thought about him. The difference now is that criticism gets into print.”

This is not the only change he has noticed as a result of the Soviet government’s new policy of openness.

“Much more attention is being paid to culture in general,” Gordeyev observed, “and especially to ballet. We are seeing more interest both from the bureaucracy and from the public.

“We also had many fewer problems this time in leaving the country to go on tour. In the past, we never knew what was happening until the last minute, but this time everything went smoothly.”

One more sign of greater openness: Valentina Kozlova, a Bolshoi defector now dancing in America, attended the opening night party in Baltimore. Similarly, Godunov attended the opening-night party for the Bolshoi Ballet in Los Angeles.

On the subject of his own choreography, Gordeyev is modest. Of his “Paganini,” he says only that “it is not anything like Balanchine. I avoid influence of all kinds, because it can often lead to bad results.”

Clearly, the new role of choreographer is one Gordeyev enjoys. And at a relatively advanced age for a dancer, he must be thinking about his own artistic future. How much longer can he dance? “We can talk about that after you see me perform,” is his coy response.

But to a different question--”Why do you dance?”--he answers without a moment’s hesitation.

“ Eto moya zhizn. It’s my life. I never thought of any other.”

Moscow Ballet’s Vyacheslav Gordeyev:

‘I cannot entirely escape the stamp of the Bolshoi style. But I still try. No matter how delicious it may be, eating black caviar every day is boring.’