Performing Arts : Bolshoi’s Quixotic Journey : After unauthorized spin-offs, an authentic satellite company offers a taste of Russian ballet.

The 225-year-old Bolshoi ballet brand has gotten a little tarnished--not to mention obscured--in recent years.

In 1996, a troupe called Stars of the Bolshoi traipsed across the U.S. confusing fans from Jacksonville, Fla., to Detroit. They were, for the most part, Bolshoi-affiliated dancers--including some over-50 erstwhile “stars,” as well as students from the Bolshoi Academy--but the tour was not sanctioned by Moscow. By its lamentable end, one dancer had accidentally kicked another in the head onstage in Florida, and the real Bolshoi was publicly protesting the unauthorized use of its name.

The same year, there was an ineptly organized and promoted Los Angeles and Las Vegas tour, which featured the full company and its orchestra onstage in such formerly fail-safe blockbusters as “Swan Lake” and “Don Quixote,” but this time to embarrassingly empty houses.

Meanwhile, back in post-Soviet-era Russia, the company’s leadership, the physical state of its theater and its ability to hold onto its dancers were constantly in question--at least from a Western vantage point.

So what are we to make of the latest Moscow ballet export to appear in Southern California, the Bolshoi Classical Collection, which lands in San Diego next weekend with a program called “From Russia With Love”?

As it turns out, this is the real Bolshoi--but it’s a satellite of the larger company, one meant to be an ambassador for the brand, and for the finer points of Russian ballet, in smaller venues and cities generally off the big-tour track.

“When Russia fell apart in 1989,” explains Bernie Lawrence, American producer of the Bolshoi Classical Collection, “people ran all over the world with costumes. ‘We’re friends, neighbors, sons of the Bolshoi,’ they’d say. It was a [lot of] mix and match.”

Lawrence, whose dance producing credits include touring Mikhail Baryshnikov for 13 years, first sponsored the Bolshoi Classical Collection in a string of successful engagements in the U.S. last year (including one on the Penn State basketball court).

“I deal with the home office of the Bolshoi,” Lawrence said by telephone from New York, “and with Mr. Vasiliev [former Bolshoi star and director of the Bolshoi Theater since 1995]. Every one of my kids was born in Russia and still lives and works there. There are no pickups. These are all bona fide, pure Russian dancers, direct from the Bolshoi.”

Indeed, 24 card-carrying dancers from the famed Moscow company--picked by Vladimir Vasiliev, according to Lawrence--are on the San Diego roster, along with a specially formed chamber orchestra. In its 1998 configuration, the satellite company earned some excellent reviews. The Denver Post called it “a dazzling glimpse of what the Bolshoi can offer,” while the Sunday Journal Star, reviewing a Peoria performance, noted the “mouth-gaping, gravity-defying moves.”

Still, “glimpse” has to be the operative word. The Classical Collection is definitely mini Bolshoi, not maxi Bolshoi.

For starters, the lineup is a fraction of the nearly 200-member ballet company--which was notably on view this summer in a monthlong season in July in London, where they presented six different programs. (It was the first time in nearly a decade London had seen any version of the company--critics there breathed a sigh of relief that the great Bolshoi still existed but offered mixed reviews overall.)

And instead of full-length works, “From Russia With Love” is meant to be a greatest-hits smorgasbord of short works and excerpts. Most important, while the roster includes dancers who have had featured, if not lead, roles in many Bolshoi productions, there are no true stars among them. Rather than seasoned “names” like Nina Ananiashvili or Andrei Uvarova, the cast, whose average age is late 20s, is weighted toward lesser-known, up-and-coming dancers.

Additionally, the tour’s headline presentation, a suite from “Don Quixote,” will showcase an older Bolshoi production, not its latest “Don Q,” which was unveiled internationally (and well-received) in London. (Expect the bigger stars and newer productions in June, when the full company will arrive at the Orange County Performing Arts Center and in Los Angeles at the Music Center.)

Indeed, the Classical Collection isn’t trying for that kind of flash. The Chicago Tribune’s Richard Christiansen, sent to cover the company in Lisle, Ill., last year, put it succinctly in his review: “This is essentially a barnstorming tour--but it is barnstorming of a very high order.”

Classical Collection company manager and former Moscow dance critic Valery Golovitser who now lives in New York, characterizes the company as “young and strong; in spite of their age, [they are] very experienced. Definitely some will go on to be big stars.”

Dimitri Goudanov, 21, a prizewinner in competitions in Paris, Moscow and Japan, is slated to dance with Elena Andrienko in “Le Spectre de la Rose,” and did dance in London with the full company this summer, though not in leading roles. Yuri Klevtsov also appeared in London, and besides dancing the “Spartacus” Adagio with his wife, Ellina Palshina, he also dances Basil to Andrienko’s Kitri in the pared-down, 51-minute “Don Quixote” suite.

Adds Golovitser: “Andrienko won plenty of international prizes. She is a bravura dancer, an extremely good technician, and she has humor. She danced a wonderful Katarina in John Cranko’s ‘The Taming of the Shrew.’ Palshina is [more] lyrical, with beautiful lines. She is blond and slim [like a] Balanchine dancer. Everybody,” he maintains, “is trying to show their best.”

“Even with young people,” Lawrence points out, “there’s the creme de la creme. In Cheyenne, Wyo., I was told, there are bison walking around, that grand ballet [wouldn’t work] there. But when the box office opened, [we] sold out at noon and they begged for a second performance. If you give them quality, they come.”*

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“FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE,” Bolshoi Classical Collection, Copley Symphony Hall, 1245 7th Ave., San Diego. Dates: Saturday and Sunday, 8 p.m. Prices: $30 to $75. Gala tickets, $150. Phone: (619) 459-3728.