Bolshoi caught going through the motions

Dance can be the most volatile of performing arts, unpredictable, evanescent and very, very accident prone -- with the just-concluded engagement by the Bolshoi Ballet at the Orange County Performing Arts Center offering an especially vivid example.

In the celebrated “Kingdom of the Shades” entrance ensemble in “La Bayadere,” for instance, 32 women must move as one, and the degree of unanimity changes at each performance. In Costa Mesa, corps cohesion fell apart on Tuesday (the “Bayadere” opening night), pulled together impressively on Wednesday, but by Saturday afternoon began to erode again.

The raggedness Tuesday is easy to explain: The Bolshoi had been dancing other ballets in other cities on the tour and simply wasn’t ready to present another work in another town on another stage with another orchestra.

Pickup rehearsals are always part of a dancer’s life, and the Bolshoi simply needed more of them to look its best in Costa Mesa.

Different sets of principal dancers can also transform a familiar work within a run. In the legitimate theater, there’s one first cast and everyone else who turns up in a major role is labeled an alternate, understudy or replacement.

In ballet, however, dancers may be chosen for an opening night because of seniority within the company or because other principals are dancing other openings in other cities. The revelations often come later.

The six-performance Bolshoi engagement offered three slates of principals, and only one of them, the Wednesday/Friday lineup, took “La Bayadere” beyond mundane professionalism.

On Saturday afternoon, for example, Anna Antonicheva and Sergei Filin danced the leading roles for the first time in the engagement. A tiny, skin-and-bones ballerina, Antonicheva successfully projected lyric grace and expressive vulnerability, but brought no other emotional colors to her performance and only a limited dynamic range to the ballet’s technical challenges. Without the speed, force and majesty she needed in the last act, she couldn’t even dominate the “Shades” corps.

Filin partnered her capably and displayed technical refinement and very secure terminations in his solos. But his dancing never proved remotely individual or passionate.

And, with its hack music, kitsch-exoticism and melodramatic plot, “La Bayadere” is a vehicle that demands more than well-schooled anonymity to come alive.

Fine dancers like Filin who take no chances and aim no higher than a faceless proficiency may be responding to the institutional instability that the Bolshoi has suffered for more than a decade. For starters, a series of administrative upheavals established a revolving door for artistic directors -- a different one on each of the last four local visits.

Moreover, the company’s reputation in the U.S. became so tarnished by a series of dreadful, unauthorized “Stars of the Bolshoi” tours in the 1990s that two years ago American promoters insisted that international star Nina Ananiashvili dance the leading role in every ballet on every opening night in every tour city to assure quality control and public confidence.

Mission accomplished: The Bolshoi is once again a viable touring franchise. But it would be exaggerating to say that the company’s purity of style in “La Bayadere” surpassed that of the Kirov Ballet or the Paris Opera Ballet or even the Universal Ballet of Korea (run by a former Kirov artistic director) in the same work on Southland stages.

Moreover, there are Bolshoi stars that Southern California has never seen -- the luminous Svetlana Lunkina, for instance (who reportedly does not dance “La Bayadere”), and the glamorous Anastasia Volochkova (who reportedly does). These days, major ballet venues must do more than merely sign companies -- they must sign all the top-of-the-line artists who give those companies their star power in their home cities.

That’s exactly what the L.A. Music Center did regarding the American Ballet Theatre “Le Corsaire” earlier this year, and what the Kodak Theatre did not do regarding the American Ballet Theatre “Nutcracker” this week. The difference is palpable.

Dance can be the most volatile of performing arts and that’s what keeps some of us coming back, over and over, even to works with limited artistic compensations such as the Bolshoi “La Bayadere.”

But there’s a limit. Stale repertory, lackluster casting and debilitating tour conditions can make balletomanes feel like those 32 “Bayadere” shades: stone-cold dead, locked into a routine, headed nowhere in particular.

And you can bet that for every Bolshoi fanatic who yelled “bravo” every time a dancer got a foot off the floor last week in Costa Mesa, nine or 10 other ticket holders sat silently in their seats wondering, “Is that all there is?”