Stirring Up Russian Ballet’s Soul

Clutching her hands to her face, the tutu-clad Ballerina crouches at the edge of the stage, while her colleagues arrange themselves into pretty pictures under the terrorizing eye of the cane-wielding Teacher.

A few minutes later, the ensemble, this time in opulent gold brocades, surges on to take a bow after an imaginary performance beneath the blue dome of St. Petersburg’s Marinsky Theater, a dome that will later descend on our heroine like a glass bubble, encasing her in madness. In between, she will try to find a place for herself in the arms of the Secret Police Agent, the excesses of the Russian Revolution and the Roaring ‘20s, and with her Partner, who, unfortunately for her, prefers men. The only place the Ballerina does find a home is on the stage, above all dancing the most romantic of roles, Giselle.

If this sounds like the plot of a silent film or a romance novel, it isn’t. Russian choreographer Boris Eifman, with his Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg, has taken the life of a real dancer, legendary Diaghilev-era ballerina Olga Spessivtseva, and put his own spin on it. “Red Giselle” will introduce the company to Los Angeles this week.

Spessivtseva (1895-1991), renowned for her beauty and ethereal quality, was a member of the St. Petersburg Ballet who, like others of her compatriots, joined Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in the teens. She made her debut in New York in 1916 in Fokine’s “Le Spectre de la Rose.” After the Ballets Russes’ demise, a peripatetic career led her all over the world until she stopped dancing in 1939. She had become renowned for her role as Giselle, particularly as partnered by Serge Lifar. Her later life was marked by tragedy; she spent 20 years in mental institutions on the East Coast, and, from 1963 until her death, she lived on a farm belonging to the Tolstoy Foundation in upstate New York.

In an after-performance conversation in New York in early April, the 53-year-old Eifman, a rough-looking man with a shock of wild and graying hair but gentle eyes, spoke movingly in his imperfect but serviceable English about what led him to call back to life this almost forgotten dancer.

“I know ballet history, and I was sad that the greatness of such artists as Nijinsky, Pavlova and Diaghilev was [acknowledged], but nobody knows about Spessivtseva. I read a lot about her, especially her letters, and the more I got into her [life], I realized that I must do something for her. She really was the last great romantic ballerina. She was the greatest Giselle, and in her life she repeated the story of ‘Giselle.’ I wanted to bring back her name, and I also wanted to use her name to show something about our profession, about the life of ballerinas, about life backstage.”

What immediately impresses a viewer upon seeing “Red Giselle” at the City Center Theater in New York, where the company appeared recently for the third time since 1998, is its boldness. Eifman paints in the broadest of strokes, engaging his dancers in acrobatic partnerings, massing them into sweeping unisons--whether they are in a ballet class, rioting in the streets or inundating Parisian nightclubs. His characters verge on cliche--the crude Secret Police Agent, the cold-to-the-point-of-cruelty Partner (the Lifar character), the rigid and demanding ballet Teacher. This is choreography as spectacle rather than nuanced movement invention or abstract designs.

And that’s the point: Eifman wants to make sure his message connects. His dances, Eifman has been quoted as saying, are meant “to shake the audience emotionally, to enter deeply into their hearts and minds. The information goes through the heart, then to the head.”

Judging by the audiences in New York, Eifman succeeds. Fans, many of them Russian emigres, have flocked to the company’s performances--there has even been talk of ticket scalping, not a given when it comes to ballet tours.

But the critics are more divided. “Brilliantly danced psychodramas of passion and soul” wrote the New York Post about past appearances; “lurid melodramas” countered the New Yorker. “A ballet world in search of a major choreographer need search no more,” said the New York Times; “do not look for subtleties,” cautioned the Village Voice.

Eifman defends his way with a dance drama: “The most important thing I do, is that I send a message from my feelings, I make visceral contact. Then, I know, they understand.”

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Controversy is not new to the Siberia-born, St. Petersburg-reared Eifman. When he started his company in 1977, at that time named Leningrad Ballet Theater (the company acquired its current name for its New York debut), he had a 10-year apprenticeship behind him as the school choreographer for the Vaganova Academy, which is still Russia’s premiere training school for classical ballet. He had also supported himself with pickup jobs creating dances in ice shows and operas. Having graduated from the Leningrad Conservatory in choreography, he never wanted to be a performer but wanted to develop Russian ballet and bring in new audiences. “I wanted to make ballet for people who hate ‘Swan Lake,’ ” he remembered.

In the years since, Eifman has developed what he likes to call a philosophical approach to ballet that appeals to the mind as well as the senses. His works always are about the big issues of the human soul--sex, power, passion, ambition, repression, the dramas of history worked out within the individual.

His first efforts were not exactly welcomed by the establishment. Perestroika was almost a decade away, and the Soviet ballet line was almost as ironclad as its political line. “It was very hard; we received no money. We had to survive on what we made touring within the Soviet Union,” Eifman said. “But it was a good time for me. I learned what kind of theater I wanted, and I learned my style. I want to show that dance does not come from the body only; movement comes from the soul. Dance can be very philosophical, it is psychological and emotional. It is a very powerful instrument to explain human beings.”

What attracted him were big themes and realism, not the classical fairy stories or state myths of Soviet ballet. He would ultimately focus on individuals and their stories, with sociopolitical issues simmering beneath the surfaces, often using history and literature as inspiration.

In 1980--he had 30 dancers at the time--he created his version of “The Idiot” by Dostoevsky, an author he would return to 15 years later in “The Karamazovs.” “Therese Raquin” (1991) is based on Zola’s pessimistic tale about a woman driven to murder by an oppressive bourgeois morality. “Tchaikovsky: The Mystery of Life and Death” (1993), scheduled for the San Francisco leg of this U.S. tour, is Eifman’s reflection on the composer’s tortured life (because he was both gay and an artist). The title character is danced by two performers, the better to show his warring selves.

To realize these ambitious visions--and there is a dreamlike quality to his ballets--he creates elaborate scenarios, collages his musical scores (Bizet, Schnittke and Tchaikovsky are the major contributors to “Red Giselle”), commissions dramatic scenic and lighting designs and opulent costumes. “Red Giselle” alone has 280 of them. His production values rival those of a Broadway producer.

Eifman is not the only choreographer who strained against the fossilized Soviet ballet system in the late ‘70s. He acknowledges another independent choreographer, Leonid Yakobson--”he called me his heir,” Eifman says. And there were others too--Dimitri Briantsev, Valentin Elizarev and Yevgeny Glebov. But Eifman has become by far the most successful. And he has done so quite rapidly.

Still, he started small. His first piece, “Last Love,” was a duet between an older woman and a younger man. “I did it to Pink Floyd,” he said. “At that time [this] music, of course, was forbidden, but I loved it. It made the authorities wonder, ‘Oh my God, what have we done; we have let the genie out of the bottle.’ ”

By 1979, when another of Eifman’s duets, “Boomerang”--which already showed the intertwining limbs his dances have become famous for--was presented in Moscow, a New York Times correspondent noted that “when the houselights go up, half the audience breaks into delighted applause, the other half sits on its hands, shocked and embarrassed. But every seat in the spacious theater is taken.”

Today Eifman talks almost nostalgically about those early years, when all he had was confidence. “This was an important time for my company. More and more young people came and learned to love ballet and art. They didn’t go into the streets and drink vodka, they came to the theater.”

Some of these “young people” have become the Russian emigres who crowd into Eifman Ballet’s New York performances, often with their families in tow. To accommodate them during the current tour, the signs in City Center Theater are in Russian as well as English.

He even gets recognized in the street, he says. “Sometimes people in Israel and America come up to me and say, ‘Thank you. You were the first ballet we ever saw, and afterward we continued going to the ballet. You opened our eyes to this art, and we thank you for it.’ ”

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The Eifman Ballet these days employs 44 dancers picked for their range and flexibility, their ability to interpret his idiosyncratic moves and meet Eifman’s demands for expressivity.

“I want them to be natural, not natural like in the street, but natural in the way you express feelings. If you are happy, your body must be happy. Your face must be happy, your leg must be happy, everything in your body must explain itself,” he said.

On the Tuesday morning after their day off, these dancers appeared anything but happy as they dragged themselves to their daily morning class. Pale, even gaunt, they looked tired and worn in their washed-out rehearsal clothes, a few of the women in battered toe shoes, most of them in scuffed slippers. One of the men sported a spiffy new T-shirt emblazoned with “Sex Therapy, First Lesson Free.” But Eifman’s dancers are clearly committed to the style and substance of his work. About halfway through class, as their bodies warmed up, a spring emerged in their walks, and the tilt of a neck, the flick of a wrist provided glimpses of the shimmering butterflies that in a few hours would, one more time, emerge from these dowdy cocoons.

Despite their obvious early fatigue on this rainy morning, they are also an exceedingly good-looking group, even covered in sweat and drab rehearsal clothes. The women have been described as “long-legged beauties who might have been drawn by Edward Gorey,” and the men tall and displaying little of the exaggerated musculature that sometimes intrudes these days into the lines of male ballet dancers.

After class, in the break before starting the afternoon rehearsal, a few of the dancers gathered, with an interpreter, to talk about their work for Eifman.

For starters, they travel about half the year, a sign of the company’s success and its continuing need to make money by touring. Eifman Ballet may be successful, and the dancers are on full-time contract--something still rare in American ballet companies--but their pay in Russia, the interpreter explained, is minimal. It’s the per diem they get when they are abroad that keeps them going at home, so they try to save much of it. Which means they don’t do much sampling of the New York City high life, for example.

Yesterday, three of them went to see their first musical, “Phantom of the Opera.” Handsome, dark-haired Igor Markov, who dances the Lifar role in “Red Giselle,” also had spent some money--for an air mattress (“It’s good for traveling,” he said); the company’s other Lifar, Yuri Smekalov, had slept all day.

Eifman said he looks for dancers who are “tall, beautiful and kissed by the fairy.” They also need to be good actors. Many of them join the company because they were dissatisfied with dancing only the classics, a practice that in an earlier generation had driven such dancers as Rudolf Nureyev, Natalia Makarova and Baryshnikov into exile and that still dominates in Russian ballet. “It’s getting easier for me to get the dancers I want,” Eifman said, “though there still is, in Russia, a great pull by older companies”--referring to the Kirov and Bolshoi ballets.

With the others nodding assent, Albert Galichanin (who dances the Secret Police Agent in “Red Giselle”) said that the best part about being in the Eifman company is the process of creating a new work. “It’s always the same. You can see something come alive. You can see what will happen from beginning to end, and what happens with an idea in the movement.” Yelena Kuzmina (Giselle), a nine-year company member, added that, “I can realize myself, all of me, through the ideas of his choreography.”

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The dancers won’t have to wait much longer to get their hearts and bodies into a new creation: Eifman has a new work planned for a world premiere a year from now in New York City.

Once again, he’s tackling big themes and well-known characters.

“I am going to work on Don Juan,” Eifman said. Just thinking about it, he started waving his hands in the air, talking as much with them as with his words. “It’s going to be on Moliere and his ‘Don Juan,’ ” he explained, and then clarified: “It’s going to be about Moliere on stage and also about his relationship with his wife off stage. It’s going to be an anti-’Don Juan.’ ”

His voice rises with his hands, describing what he’ll do to get the most out of the story’s elements of love and betrayal.

When Eifman was 9, he said, he broke into tears when Prince Siegfried, in “Swan Lake,” chose the treacherous Odile over the pure Odette. It was a reaction Eifman has never forgotten, and the one he’s been trying to re-create ever since. *

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“Red Giselle,” Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg, Saturday, 8:15 p.m., next Sunday, 2:15 p.m. Universal Amphitheatre, Universal City, $33-$58. (818) 622-4440.