The Russia we don’t get to see

The first notes of a recorded rock score by Peter Gabriel generate happy squeals throughout the theater as the curtain rises on Dmitry Bryantsev’s “Salome.” One of two steamy Bible stories being performed tonight by his company, the 75-member Moscow Stanislavsky Ballet, the dance drama represents a display of both the company’s classical training and its contemporary sensibility.

Replete with simulated nudity, the costumes by Vladimir Arefyev mediate between the fashion extremes of ancient, upper-class Judea and millennial, urban Russia. In the same way, Bryantsev’s choreography fuses a narrative about the murder of John the Baptist with the flash, danger and compulsive hedonism of contemporary late-night Moscow.

An English weekly here rates the city’s bars and nightclubs on the basis of money (how many rubles you need to spend per hour), threat (the likelihood of being attacked by flatheads, the new breed of Russian thug) and sex (the chances of scoring) -- and “Salome” drips with all three. Focused on a power- and sex-mad family, it culminates in an eerie trio showing Salome and her mommy dearest, Herodias, gloating over the Baptist’s severed head while a lustful, drugged-out King Herod reels away in disgust.

Created in 1998, “Salome” was not included in the Moscow Stanislavsky Ballet’s repertory at the Kodak Theatre this summer. Instead, there were multiple performances of the full-evening “Swan Lake,” “Don Quixote” and just a single night of mixed repertory with only one piece by a living choreographer (Bryantsev’s “Spirit Ball”). Reports suggest that the company’s return engagement next spring also will be dominated by familiar classics, and that pattern holds for virtually every Russian company that visits Southern California. The big exception: St. Petersburg-based Boris Eifman, with his intense historical dance-dramas.

So what we see on our stages creates the illusion that Russian dance audiences spend all their time at hoary tutu ballets. And that means the reality of Russia’s exciting, multifaceted contemporary dance goes virtually unrecognized.

Not tied to the classics

Besides being a new Sodom, Moscow offers a dazzling performing arts scene. In one recent week, you could have chosen from two adaptations of Victor Hugo’s “Notre Dame de Paris” (one a musical, the other a ballet), two stagings of Rostand’s “Cyrano de Bergerac” (one traditional, the other a brilliant modern-dress production), performances at two Moscow Art Theatres (one a monument to Chekhov, the other Gorky), a world-class “Turandot” at the Bolshoi, and “Lord of the Dance” at the Kremlin. Meanwhile, satirical revues undermine official views of the world and contemporary work of all kinds relishes the freedoms of the post-Communist era.

In the middle of this activity, Bryantsev runs a ballet company that tries to cover all bases. Each month, his company dances about 12 performances, sharing the Moscow Stanislavsky Music Theatre with a resident opera. Five ballets are usually classical, five contemporary and two aimed at children. A new theater complex will open in 2005, he says, and a planned second stage will allow ballet performances to take place on nights that now belong to the opera. He’s even planning a second company to dance small-scale and riskier new works in another Moscow venue.

“I’m looking forward to being part of the 21st century, doing different things,” Bryantsev says, and his varied body of work supports that statement. In addition to “Salome” and its equally macabre companion piece, “Shulamite” (about the doubly fatal adultery of King Solomon), his work ranges from the nostalgic, dreamlike “Spirit Ball” to a two-act “Taming of the Shrew” full of sunny, Mediterranean humor, and a completely re-choreographed, neoclassical “Le Corsaire” that just may be the most dramatically astute version anywhere.

He’s also known for a series of experimental short pieces that Russians call “miniatures,” some of them extremely daring thematically. In 1987, for example, he choreographed “The Road,” a duet for dancers portraying Christ and the woman taken in adultery -- but it was kept off the stage for two years by government authorities until the downfall of Communist restrictions (and, soon after, communism itself) freed it.

Veteran company member Dmitry Erlykin, who dances such character roles as Herod in “Salome,” says that “when Bryantsev came to the company in 1985, it became something new, combining what we already had -- ‘Esmeralda,’ ‘Snow Maiden,’ ‘Swan Lake’ -- with innovative choreography from the modern point of view.” And that combination has become the company’s chief distinction.

“I do not feel anything bad about the classics,” Bryantsev says. “It is our heritage. But I try not to be tied only to classical style. Whatever story or character or image I want to create, I do it. I use anything. Our movements must be as free as our emotions.”

Foreign companies’ influence

BRYANTSEV’S experiments are only a small piece of the Russian picture. “There’s a powerful movement toward contemporary dance now,” says Sergei Korobkov, artistic director of Nations State Theatre in Moscow, which organizes dance festivals throughout the country. “Even in small towns, people are no longer living in ballet fairy tales.”

The entrenched repertories of official, state-supported theaters often result in seasons that are 70% classical and only 30% contemporary, Korobkov says, “but when you look at the number of premieres, it’s vice versa: 70% contemporary and only 30% classical.”

Like a number of Moscow critics and dancers, Korobkov resents the fact that Eifman is the only contemporary Russian choreographer who is recognized in Europe and America at a time, he says, when “there are 10 to 15 very good contemporary dance companies in Moscow, Petersburg, the Urals and the far east” of Russia.

To Moscow dance critic and editor Anna Galaida, this new “explosion of contemporary dance in Russia” can be credited to the influence of foreign companies appearing in a series of festivals, beginning in the early ‘90s. “They educated and nurtured the audience,” she explains. She also draws a distinction between modern dance and modern ballet, believing there is more serious interest in Moscow in the former right now than in the latter.

By consensus, Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet -- the best known dance institution in all of Russia -- plays no important role on the contemporary dance scene. Blame artistic conservatism, limited dancer versatility and recent managerial upheavals, plus ticket prices that are sometimes so high, critic Alexander Firer says, “that only tourists and flatheads can afford to go.”

The dancers make news

At the Young Peoples’ Theatre, across the street from the Bolshoi, a chamber ensemble misnamed Ballet Moscow is performing a two-part program confirming that Russian modern dancers are no less impressive than their classical counterparts. There are no traces of ballet in Paul Selvin Norton’s “The Rogue Tool,” which plays with cyclical structure, discontinuity, tricks of scale and ironic new vaudeville moves, while Natalia Ficksel’s more conventionally focused “Don Juan Rehabilitated” uses contrasting duets to explore current gender attitudes.

Merce Cunningham technique, Pina Bausch dramatic strategies, Pilobolus gymnastics and a tradition of sophisticated Moscow stagecraft loom large here, but the dancers themselves are the big news: so accomplished and committed that they make even hand-me-down ideas compelling.

The choreography tonight may not merit international exposure, but when the next big thing comes along, they’ll be as ready to dance it as any company anywhere. And, who knows? The next big thing could be taking shape in their minds even now.

As many of the dancers, critics and administrators repeatedly mention in interviews, Russians such as Sergei Diaghilev, Mikhail Fokine and Vaslav Nijinsky changed ballet forever early in the 20th century. Afterward, only the imposition of an oppressive political system kept dance in Russia from following the modernist trends prevalent in Europe and America -- or developing home-grown alternatives.

“We were considered to be in the forward ranks of world dance and suddenly we found ourselves locked in one style,” Moscow Stanislavsky dancer Erlykin says. “We have lagged behind and we’re trying to catch up. And now we’re making huge leaps, even if those leaps do not always take us where we want.”

*

Lewis Segal is The Times’ dance critic.