A Balanchine Breakthrough in the City of His Birth

Until now, the ballets of George Balanchine have been contraband in the Soviet Union, performed privately--and illegally--if at all. Finally, thanks to a Los Angeles-born woman, Balanchine’s “Theme and Variations” was at last performed Tuesday night at the Kirov Theatre in the city where Balanchine was born.

Francia Russell, co-artistic director of Seattle’s Pacific Northwest Ballet, sits at breakfast in her Leningrad hotel the morning of the Kirov dress rehearsal for “Theme.”

She was invited by the Kirov to stage the well-known neoclassic ballet to music by Tchaikovsky and to teach Balanchine technique. That has not been easy. And, on this day, only two days before the premiere, with a great deal of work left to be done, she shakes her head at the wonder of it.

“Balanchine was the greatest choreographer of the 20th Century,” she begins. “He was a product of the Kirov’s school (before the company was named the Kirov), and was a dancer with the Kirov, but his ballets have never been performed here. Even China had his ballets before the Soviet Union,” she says. (Russell set those pieces on the Shanghai Ballet).

“The Soviet Union is the last country with a ballet tradition--in fact, it’s the last country with an active ballet company--to do Balanchine ballets.”

Her wonder at how this country could turn its back on its prodigious son is no less than that of the Kirov artistic director, Oleg Vinogradov. Why weren’t Balanchine’s works performed in the Soviet Union?

“It was idiotic,” says Vinogradov, refusing to mince words in this new era of glasnost .

“His art was considered Western, and if it was Western, than it must be negative,” he says, describing the official thinking of the past. It is not a thinking he subscribes to now, if he ever did.

At present, Vinogradov is in the vanguard of the movement to challenge all official interference in the arts. Only three weeks ago, he “courageously,” according to Russell, brought back Kirov defector Natalia Makarova to dance on the Kirov stage.

She was the first defecting ballet star to do so, but not the last. Vinogradov, much to the consternation of those who consider the defectors traitors, has also invited back former Kirov dancers Mikhail Baryshnikov and Rudolf Nureyev. And in June he will lead his company on a multi-city tour of North America where the Balanchine works will be performed.

But after generations of only one way of doing things--the official, no-suggestions-are-welcome way--it is difficult for the Kirov dancers to adapt to the newly permitted challenges, no matter their excitement at doing something new.

And even more difficult for Russell to attempt to teach them movements they have never seen and never tried or a method of learning that requires constant attention, vigilance and effort.

Unlike Western dancers, Soviet members of a ballet company are employed for life, Russell explains. They are paid regardless of whether they dance. They grow up in a society that spoils them.

Former stars become personal coaches to the up-and-comers, “pampering them, threatening them and watching out for their careers,” Russell says. In short, they are not used to working quickly--or working hard--to learn a ballet. And the Kirov is no different from any other Soviet institution. Nothing is organized; everything takes time.

As a result, last September when she first arrived to start working with the corps, Russell found herself facing hostile ballerinas who could not believe she would want them to start rehearsing on pointe when the actual performances were months away. In a tradition that gives dancers all the time in the world to rehearse (“unlike America, where time is money,” Russell says), the corps could not get serious about their roles that far in advance.

And in a company of more than 200 dancers, Russell says she never knew whose face would turn up in rehearsal from one week to the next, though she had been given carte blanche from Vinogradov to choose the dancers she wanted. When she left at the end of her first month there, to say the dancers were not prepared, was a “gross understatement,” she says.

To try her patience further, Russell found herself combating an exasperating tradition in Soviet ballet: the worship of male dancers. In a society chauvinistic at all levels, and especially about ballet, the male dancers were appalled to be instructed first by an American, when they consider themselves as the leaders in ballet, and second by a woman.

No matter that Russell’s credentials to do so are outstanding. She studied under Balanchine, was a soloist with his New York City Ballet, later becoming ballet mistress of the company. Since then she has staged more than 90 productions of his works throughout the world, at the same time acting as co-artistic director for Pacific Northwest Ballet.

The success of Sunday’s sold-out dress rehearsal that had the audience standing in the aisles screaming “bravo” at curtain call after curtain call, proves she has won out. (Balanchine’s “Scotch Symphony,” as staged by Suzanne Farrell, was also danced on this program.)

The Kirov traditionally dances at what Western dancers call “half tempo,” providing time to lead up to each step, something not permitted in a Balanchine work where, says Russell, “there is a great emphasis on speed. He wanted ballet bigger, faster, with more of everything. He broke barriers.”

Throughout this rehearsal, however the dancers, coaches and pianist seem to contrive only to break Russell’s “barriers.” The dancers’ usual coaches take advantage of the fact Russell does not speak Russian--though she speaks French, German and English--to interrupt her French instructions to the dancers, shouting out their unasked-for input in Russian. Their proteges answer back in Russian. What the orders are and what the answers are remain a mystery to Russell. No one explains. No one apologizes.

Russell calls for the translator and takes a deep breath. Then, ignoring interruptions, carries on with her instructions to the dancers both in French, and with the aid of the translator when necessary, in Russian. Midway through the rehearsal, through sheer professional stamina, she has managed to relegate the other coaches to the sidelines.

Then, in a brilliant move of diplomacy, she calls one of the coaches over, showing him what she is trying to teach the dancers. The coach instantly takes up her instructional point, chastising the dancers for not following her direction. It is a small victory in a day when she never knows what will happen next, whom she will be working with or what the dancers are thinking.

But the biggest obstacle she has had to overcome is the fact the Kirov dancers have never been exposed to Balanchine.

“Balanchine is abstract. They’re used to story ballets. Classics are in their bones,” she explains. “It’s like stripping naked and going out there on stage; it’s so unfamiliar. For Americans to do something new is stimulating and normal. Here it’s not and they’re filled with fright.”

In fact the lead dancers have all confessed that when they started to rehearse that they would not be able to do it. Says Zaklinsky, who was to dance the premiere with his wife, Altynai Assylmuratova: “There were moments when I was sure I wouldn’t succeed. I had to make myself do it.”

Agrees the exotic looking Assylmuratova, at a party thrown by the American Consulate here after the dress rehearsal on Sunday, “Balanchine provides you with a new job for your legs.” (Zaklinsky and Assylmuratova will be dancing as guests with American Ballet Theatre in Los Angeles early in March, though not in any Balanchine ballet.)

After the success of the dress rehearsal, Russell is beginning to reconsider her decision not to set Balanchine’s “Firebird” on the Kirov, as she has been asked.

“I have my own company to get back to, so in September I said no, but now I feel better about doing it,” she confesses. “Maybe.”

Based in the Soviet Union, Rinehart is a free-lance journalist specializing in the arts.