Bolshoi’s ‘La Sylphide’: Mismatch Made in Moscow

Some balletomanes believe Russian dancers can do anything: Balanchine, Bejart, Bausch, butoh, you name it. However, watching the Bolshoi Ballet belabor and bedevil Bournonville’s “La Sylphide” at the Shrine Auditorium on Tuesday provided a rude awakening, rather like the prospect of finding the Yankees in the Super Bowl. Great team, wrong game.

Giving a performance at once too big and too simple, Moscow’s finest enlarged and projected every detail of the choreography but missed the essential ease and modesty of Bournonville style, the sense of classicism at human scale. Moreover, nobody in the cast approached the sensitivity and depth of the Royal Danish Ballet in a definitive “Sylphide” at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in 1992--or even in the much weaker new RDB production in the same venue last year.

Some of the problem came from the corrupt edition of “La Sylphide” on view, one credited to Swedish ballet teacher and choreographer Elsa Marianne von Rosen and Kirov Ballet artistic director Oleg Vinogradov. Besides putting the Bolshoi village corps in slippers instead of heeled shoes (thus softening the vigor of the reel in Act 1), this version added dances for the witches and a whole new pas de deux for James and the Sylph that required the re-sequencing of mime and dance in Act 2. However, the ballet meant less than ever before because its key narrative issues succumbed to rough handling by the producers and the Bolshoi cast.

Mime and acting proved especially off-base on Tuesday, with Svetlana Ivanova spending so much energy clawing the air to show the world that Madge was evil-evil-evil that she took a fatal plunge into Halloween caricature.

As James, Sergei Filin concentrated on his perfect leg-beats and ignored the crucial expressive challenges of the role: showing exactly why the character runs off with the Sylph after rejecting her earlier and, even more important, that he desires to possess her physically. Without that burning need, James has no reason to seek the magic scarf that destroys them both. At best, Filin played James as recklessly capricious--but would he dare offer so generalized a portrayal in one of the big interpretive test-roles of the Russian repertory such as Albrecht? What makes him think that James is any less complex?

In the title role, Nadezhda Grachova gave an unfailingly gracious and technically polished performance of a very limited, cutesie-poo conception, a performance too monochromatic to reach genuine tragedy but always admirable for its refinement of execution. The Bolshoi’s Nina Ananiashvili has studied “La Sylphide” and Bournonville style in Copenhagen and one could wish for Grachova the same opportunity to explore her potential. Her choices and horizons in this ballet are much greater than anything she imagines.

As Effie, the winsome Erika Luzina inherited part of a variation that usually goes to Gurn and danced it sweetly. Replacing the injured Igor Yurlov as Gurn, Alexei Popovchenko coped with the reduced demands of the role and the silliness of the staging with great dignity. The 24-member Bolshoi sylph corps may have danced with the moonstruck gravity of Swans or Wilis rather than creatures of the sun, but the dancing itself looked ravishing--even in scenery by I. Press and V. Okunev with no atmosphere whatsoever. Strangely, the sets provided for a number of special effects--Grachova magically descending from a window, for example--but left the mechanisms for those effects baldly exposed.

Alexander Sotnikov conducted the Lovenskjold score with ideal passion and authority Tuesday. Nobody since British ballet conductor John Lanchbery has Sotnikov’s knack for both serving the needs of the dancers and rehabilitating the reputation of ballet composers scorned by musical historians. It’s sad when the only authentic performance of a classic takes place in the orchestra pit, sadder still when a company of the caliber of the Bolshoi makes so many destructive compromises when venturing outside the Russian repertory.

* The Bolshoi Ballet dances its last “La Sylphide” at 8 tonight in the Shrine Auditorium, 649 W. Jefferson Blvd. $30-$95. (213) 480-3232 or (888) BOLSHOI.