Director of Kirov Ballet Jettisons Old for Young : Dance: Oleg Vinogradov bridles at criticism for casting off older dancers.

Oleg Vinogradov, artistic director of the Kirov Ballet, is leaning forward across the round table, his eyes narrowing in anger. Despite widespread evidence that his English is fine--spending four months a year in Washington, D.C., running the Moonies’ ballet academy has helped--he’s been doing this interview through an interpreter.

Now, though, he’s temporarily in English, riled at a question about a recent story in the New Yorker magazine charging him with sloughing off some of the Kirov’s older dancers and most experienced coaches. The story, he said, unfairly sided with the older artists.

“Do you want to see old dancers?!” he asks.

He goes back to Russian, saying unequivocally, “I don’t like to look at old artists onstage. I have 15-, 17-, and 19-year-old dancers coming in. What am I supposed to do with them? Ballet is the art of the young and the beautiful.”

And the artful machinations of the not

so young, such as Oleg Vinogradov.

In a society turned upside down, Vinogradov is a survivor, as is his 200-year-old company, regarded as the greatest in the world for the purity of its classical style. Can it survive the change in political systems with its purity intact? On July 10-12, audiences at the San Diego Civic Theatre audiences will have a chance to see the effects of the new order on the Kirov Ballet in three performances of “La Bayadere”.

“There’s a new generation, a new psychology, a completely different rhythm,” asserts Vinogradov, who has run the troupe since 1977. “There is almost nothing left of the old system, and this must be felt.”

New- and sort-of-new generation dancers include Yulia Makhalina, Vinogradov’s protege, who is scheduled to dance the role of Nikiya on July 11, as well as Larissa Lezhnina and Igor Zelensky, often compared to Baryshnikov, who is scheduled to dance the role of Solor on July 10.

In recent performances in New York and Los Angeles, there were new productions of the Petipa classics “Swan Lake” as well as “La Bayadere,’ and the company premiere in New York of Vinogradov’s staging of Lavrovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet,” among others.

At the same time, Vinogradov, 54, (who went to ballet school with Rudolf Nureyev) reveals that he is starting a new company. He is working in St. Petersburg and Moscow with the support of the Diaghilev Center in Moscow, dancer Andris Liepa and Sergei Prokofiev, descendant of the composer to bring back the repertory of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.

Always spiffy, Vinogradov wears a Hermes-print Windbreaker, gold jewelry and all-white outfit, down to white patent loafers that flicker through a few barre exercises as he rises in the St. Moritz Hotel meeting room to demonstrate the stunning shoulder and arm carriage known as epaulement that has always been one of the Kirov’s strengths.

It is this quality that he wants to imprint on his students at the Universal Ballet Academy in Washington. “It’s a new child, 2 years old, and it needs a great deal of attention.” Vinogradov also wants to start a company in Washington to emphasize the Kirov tradition.

The American public, he adds, still loves classical ballet. Also, he acknowledges, Russians still have a way to go when it comes to emulating the speed of a Balanchine-trained dancer.

When the big revolution happened, Vinogradov was in Washington, “In St. Petersburg, there was a degree of tension that had, in essence, to find an outlet, but I didn’t think that that idiotic coup was going to take place. They couldn’t even put together a proper coup.”

He adds, “There’s an absence of hope, a despair among people.” This is not the case with Vinogradov, or the Kirov, or, he says, the dancers. “Artists are very special people. They have a special religion as it were,” and “artists are now living much better than the average Russian.”

Under the old order, the Soviet government hauled in 90% of the take from touring; now the company has an impresario instead, Peter Brightman of Satra Arts International, who says the ratio is virtually reversed. The dancers, says Vinogradov, take money home and support their relatives. How much, he will not say.

The Kirov Ballet is moving, controversially, into the showmanship imperatives of capitalism. Vinogradov tried out two different endings to his new “Swan Lake” during the last California leg of the tour before deciding which one had more audience appeal. The old, state-imposed happy ending is out, he says, because the music’s minor chords will not permit a happy ending.

In one ending, Siegfried is left alone, and Odette leaves. In another one, “Siegfried, who fooled Odette and caused the wrong, must die. But Odette cannot become human, so she flies away with the other swans,” Vinogradov says, deadpan in America, “and they leave that horrible lake and go to Sarasota, in Florida.”

The Kirov Ballet will perform “La Bayadere” at the San Diego Civic Theatre at 7:3 p.m. July 10-11 and at 3 p.m. July 12. Tickets: 236-6510 or 278-TIXS