Bolshoi Star Says Work Is Rooted in the Issue of Freedom/Captivity

Bolshoi premier danseur Mikhail Lavrovsky could as easily be describing himself as the hero of his ballet “The Novice,” created for San Diego-based California Ballet, when he said: “Spiritually, he is a very strong person. He had been born in freedom and didn’t want to live in captivity.”

Based on a poem by Mikhail Lermontov, Lavrovsky’s ballet relates how a young nomad, left wounded on a battlefield, is taken to a monastery to recover. “But the monastery is more a place of captivity,” Lavrovsky said through an interpreter in a recent interview. “And his desire all his life is to go back to his native land.”

For Lavrovsky, who is resigning this month after more than 25 years with the Bolshoi, the ballet becomes the story of spiritual growth. (The work will receive its premiere Saturday at the San Diego Civic Theatre.)

“In all my artistic search, that is the theme,” the 46-year-old dancer said after guest-teaching a ballet class at UC Irvine. “If a man doesn’t lose touch with himself, with God that lives within us . . . then he will know what the real truth is and fight for what he believes in.

“As I get older, this is a theme that is close to my heart. . . . The ballet is not just movement.”

Lavrovsky clearly rejects the idea that atheism, the official policy of the Soviet Union, has triumphed:

“They tried to kill (religion) with all their strength and power, but it is not possible to extinguish the light within the soul of man. If a man has a mind and a brain above that of a 2-year-old, he will think about the world, and he will also search for more than material reality.”

Material success seemed guaranteed to Lavrovsky when he began his career with the Bolshoi in 1961. Son of the famous Leonid Lavrovsky (choreographer of the first “Romeo and Juliet” with Prokofiev, among many other achievements), Mikhail was much favored and honored during the 1970s. He was the partner of Natalia Bessmertnova (wife of current Bolshoi director Yuri Grigorovich) and received the Lenin Prize in 1970 for his portrayal of Spartacus.

But after Grigorovich began killing off Bolshoi classics, including his father’s “Romeo and Juliet,” Mikhail joined the burgeoning anti-Grigorovich faction and was transferred to Soviet Georgia to head the ballet in Tbilisi.

He made unprecedented innovations there, including creating a ballet version of “Porgy and Bess” that used jazz movement, which was set up by Miguel Lopez, then a teacher from the Alvin Ailey company school in New York.

“It was practically contraband what I did, bringing in an American teacher to set (“Porgy and Bess”),” Lavrovsky recalled. “I took the opening step of glasnost. It was very risky.”

Lavrovsky credits Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze, who was then general secretary of the Communist Party in Georgia, for helping artists there: “If it hadn’t been for (Shevardnadze) at that time, I would have been eaten up alive.”

Nonetheless, political winds in Moscow blew against him. Expecting to be fired, he resigned from the directorship of the Georgian company, his innovations were killed and some of his best dancers sent to other companies.

With glasnost, Lavrovsky began working in the West. Last year, while in Arizona, he met Maxine Mahon, director of the California Ballet. Mahon invited him to create a work for the California Ballet’s 20th anniversary. “The Novice,” set to a commissioned score by Soviet Georgian composer David Toradze, is the result.

Lavrovsky said he is happy to work with U.S. dancers. “If at the beginning (of coming here 25 years ago), I could have said that there was a great deal of difference (between U.S. and Soviet dancers), I don’t see much difference now. It is more in nuances.”

Lavrovsky’s own spiritual journey is about to take a new turn as he resigns from the Bolshoi this month. Asked if the conflict with Grigorovich is the reason for his resignation, Lavrovsky replied: “There is something to that.

“But, after all, a lot of it has to be my age. Twenty or 25 years ago, I was dancing ‘Giselle,’ ‘Don Quixote,’ ‘Spartacus,’ ‘Romeo.’ . . . But there are no more roles at my age. . . . You must realize that it is not all that exciting for me just to sit in a classroom and just be a coach to the young men.”

But his thoughts reverted to Grigorovich:

“It is not nice just as I am retiring to talk openly against Grigorovich. But I don’t think he is totally right. . . . We were all in many ways very much influenced by Grigorovich, but we have to go beyond him.”

Lavrovsky’s plans include choreographing more ballets and perhaps making films. In all his works, however, there will be one constant:

“I’m putting down what I feel, how I perceive life. Artists have to put on stage part of their souls. They cannot separate from themselves such a profound part of themselves.”