Acting on Instinct

What’s special about the Moscow Stanislavsky Ballet, warns artist director Dmitry Bryantsev, won’t be evident at a class Monday night in a Culver City studio.

“You’ll have 75 dancers arriving after a 12-hour flight from Moscow,” Bryantsev said, speaking through a translator. He had arrived in Los Angeles a few days earlier.

“They will be jet-lagged. My objective will be only one: On the basis of classical exercises, to restore their stamina, to make them normal. Everyone really will be in a state to dance the Mad Scene of ‘Giselle.’”

Actually, except for some rough terminations and more yawns than might be expected, the company--Moscow’s second major troupe, after the Bolshoi--looked eager and ready to tackle “Don Quixote” and “Swan Lake” today through Sunday at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood.

Ballet coach Arkady Nikolaev took them through a standard hourlong class, beginning with warmups at the barre, moving through increasingly complicated combinations of steps and finishing with space-devouring bounds and leaps in diagonals across the huge studio.

So what is special about the company, which is making its Los Angeles debut?

Its full title gives away one element: The Ballet Company of the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Music Theater. That would be Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, the two legendary founders of the Moscow Art Theater and what’s usually called method acting. The idea was to have the dancers draw on the same sort of psychological motivation as actors.

The present troupe was founded in 1941. Nemirovich-Danchenko directed its first productions. Bryantsev is just the third artistic director at the company; he took charge in 1985.

“We pay very special attention to acting and the dancers acting while dancing,” he said. “Everyone has to develop their character in a deeper way. There’s no unmotivated running from one corner to another as so many other companies unfortunately do. People must reveal the reason for what they do. There are no ‘abstract’ ballets in our repertory.

“My point of view is that I’m working in the most important art form in the world because we have to show the inner emotion, which sometimes is very deep, while dancing. It is like a surgeon’s work. We make a cut in the surface and reveal everything inside to the public.”

In addition to their psychological approach, the company is also bringing its own versions of classic repertory to Los Angeles: “Don Quixote,” as staged by Alexey Chichenadze, Moscow Stanlislavsky Ballet director from 1971 to 1984, and the more radical 1953 staging of “Swan Lake” by Vladimir Bourmeister, company director from 1941 to 1971.

Bourmeister went back to Tchaikovsky’s original 1877 score, choreographed by Julius Reisinger in a version that did not survive. It was not until choreographers Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov revived the work, rearranging some of the music, for the MaryinskiTheatre in St. Petersburg in 1895 that the ballet began to conquer the world.

Bourmeister re-choreographed the entire ballet, except for Act II. In keeping with his company’s founding fathers, he gave all the characters psychological motivations, and he made the divertissement dancers in the third act co-conspirators with the evil forces set against the hero and heroine. The U.S. first saw this company in this version in 1998, when the Moscow Stanislavsky came to New York.

“As a vibrant theatrical spectacle, it is all fire and ice,” wrote Anna Kisselgoff in the New York Times. “So many of Bourmeister’s ideas have seeped into other Russian and Western productions of ‘Swan Lake’ that it is difficult to imagine the initial impact of his rethinking of this 19th century classic. [His] third act may actually improve on Petipa’s character dances.”

On the other hand, Louise Levene wrote in the London Sunday Telegraph after the January tour that Bourmeister’s restoration of what’s now known as the “Black Swan” pas de deux to its original place in the first act was a mistake. “You can’t help agreeing with Petipa that the ‘Black Swan’ music is altogether too grand for Act I,” she wrote.

Either way, Bryantsev refuses to tinker with the ballet as he inherited it.

“I never intrude into others’ work,” he said. “That would be like painting another kind of eyebrow for the Mona Lisa, simply because a new kind of eyebrow is in fashion today.

His troupe, which has 165 dancers including an orchestra, is based in a 1,300-seat municipal theater that is state supported. It dances 18 performances a month on an 11-month schedule, according to Bryantsev.

“Each time, it is a full house,” he said. “If a company has problems, it’s because the repertory is not interesting enough.”

He tries to limit touring.

“I’m deeply aware that when you have many tours, it’s bad for the company in terms of its wear and tear on the dancers. We must always be in good professional form. You have to find the golden middle.”

Even so, the troupe’s schedule looks pretty filled. After Los Angeles, the company will dance in Denver and Salt Lake City, then go back to Moscow. Tours to England in December, Japan in April and China in mid-summer are also on the books.

In all of that, he has to schedule time for creating his own works. “I myself have something to say with my original ballets. I have many works for the future. Why collude with something that’s already been done?” Indeed, Bryantsev is regarded as “Russia’s leading contemporary dance-maker,” according to Jenny Gilbert, writing in London’s Independent in December. But only one of his works, “The Ghostly Ball,” is on the current tour (it was danced at the gala opening Tuesday).

Bryantsev is a little miffed about that. He would like to bring more of his works.

“I have to pay tribute to the most treasured classics,” he said. “At the same time, our contemporaries can’t live and see only these ballets. But when impresarios look to the East, they want those ballets that are only classical. When they look to the West, they invite only modern companies. They are thinking in terms of success. But I would like to bring my biblical ballets--”Sulamith,” from “The Song of Solomon,” and “Salome”--and “La Dame aux Camelias” as well as “Swan Lake” to show the level of the company. That would be very interesting.”

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The Moscow Stanislavsky Ballet will dance “Don Quixote” today at 8 p.m. and Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m. at the Kodak Theatre, 6801 Hollywood Blvd. The company will dance “Swan Lake” on Friday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. $32 to $72. (213) 480-3232.