A Refreshing Sojourn Along the Shores of ‘Swan Lake’

Nearly a half-century ago, Vladimir Bourmeister’s restaging of “Swan Lake” for Moscow Stanislavsky Ballet represented high-risk revisionism. However, on Wednesday, when the company added this 1953 production to its ongoing engagement (through Sunday) at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, it seemed an artful compromise, integrating Bourmeister’s musical and dramatic innovations with 19th century traditions and Soviet-era political mandates.

Danced with disarming freshness and an unerring command of classical style, it is easily the best “Swan Lake” seen on local stages since the Royal Ballet brought its reconstruction of the Petipa-Ivanov edition to the Music Center in 1995.

For conservatives, there’s 3 1/2 hours of Tchaikovsky lyricism, conducted with great authority by Georgy Zhemchuzhin, plus painterly sets and sumptuous costumes by Vladimir Arefiev, and even infusions of the classic 1895 Lev Ivanov choreography for Act 2. As usual, there’s a nasty sorcerer, a stricken swan queen and an ineffectual prince--along with several dozen young women in gleaming white tutus moving gracefully through large-scale formal dances as if cloned for this purpose.

For collectors of unusual staging ploys, there’s a brilliantly conceived ballroom scene in which the seductive Odile keeps materializing amid the national dances, plus Bourmeister’s celebrated prologue in which Rothbart turns Odette into a swan. (If that idea sounds familiar, many productions have borrowed it, most recently the one by American Ballet Theatre.)

You’ll also find a lot of the music in unexpected places, for Bourmeister chose to follow the original score rather than the cut-and-paste job in use by ballet companies for more than a century.

You can also find a few anomalies: vestiges of conventional gesture-language in a production otherwise mime-free, for example, and, more seriously, a last act with genuine tragic sweep that suddenly and none too convincingly switches to the happy ending required of every Russian “Swan Lake” under communism.

Obviously, some balletomanes care only about the dancing, but it does make a difference when Tatiana Chernobrovkina as Odile performs 28 fouettes (four of them doubles) in Act 3 to music that you’re not used to hearing in the Black Swan pas de deux. Or, conversely, when Dmitry Zababurin as the Prince dances a solo in the first act to music that you are used to hearing in the Black Swan pas de deux.

Chernobrovkina has the majestic line, refined technique and carefully schooled musicality for the role, but her phrasing seems almost by rote rather than personalized, so you end up admiring her performance as the Swan Queen but not falling under its spell. If she only dug a little deeper....

Zababurin partners her adroitly but stays mopey rather than thoughtful, antiheroic even when walking on water in the last act’s climactic flood--and utterly ordinary as a soloist. Dmitry Erlikin flaps enormous wings and hurls a scarlet cape with great assurance as Rothbart, and Denis Perkovsky brings a welcome lightness to the incessant bravura intrusions of the Jester.

Among the subsidiary women, Anastasia Pershenkova dances with great delicacy as the Prince’s girlfriend and great zest in the Neapolitan divertissement. Kadria Amirova leads the Spanish forces commandingly and the Act 1 pas de quatre (replacing the usual pas de trois) showcases Ekaterina Safonova, Natalia Schelokova, Roman Malenko and Stanislav Boukharaev.

All of them embody a style less extreme than the hyper-extended norm for dancers from the Kirov or Perm companies. Just like their production of “Swan Lake,” they represent a bridge between past and present, updating a classical legacy inherited from Imperial Russia but in no hurry to adopt the radical changes in body placement formulated early in the Soviet era.

They are, in every way, a noble breed--contemporary artists proudly associated with the house of Stanislavsky who can just as proudly merge their individuality in the anonymity of a swan-corps to renew a classic that many, many better known ensembles diminish into mere showpiece fodder.

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“Swan Lake,” Moscow Stanislavsky Ballet, tonight at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m.; “Don Quixote,” Saturday, 2 and 8 p.m. Kodak Theatre, 6801 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. $32-$72. (213) 365-3500.