It’s what Petipa wanted

It’s Degas heaven as dozens of teenage ballerinas in lacy white tutus, with ribbons around their waists and necks, flood the stage of McCaw Hall, this city’s newly refurbished opera house. Demurely, sweetly and elegantly, they are dancing the first performance in living memory of the 15-minute divertissement or dream scene, “Le Jardin Anime,” from Marius Petipa’s 1899 ballet “Le Corsaire.”

Some readers may protest that they saw American Ballet Theatre perform “Le Jardin Anime” as part of “Corsaire” at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in 1999, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in 2002 or on the PBS “Great Performances” TV series. Lots of pretty women -- including children -- pretending to be flowers, garlands and vines, right?

Yes and no. That’s what every version depicts. But the Ballet Theatre edition was substantially revised and reduced from what Petipa created -- while the one danced in Seattle by the Pacific Northwest Ballet School has been meticulously reconstructed from detailed choreographic notation completed while Petipa was still active at what is now the Kirov Ballet in St. Petersburg.

As the choreographer of “The Sleeping Beauty,” “La Bayadere,” “Raymonda,” half of “Swan Lake” and “Don Quixote,” plus the revision of “Giselle” that serves as the basis for nearly every modern staging, Petipa is a genuine icon in the ballet world: arguably the greatest name in the history of classical dance. From 1862 until his retirement in 1903, this autocratic Frenchman upgraded Russian dancing and choreography according to the highest standards of Parisian ballet -- even after those standards began to drastically erode in the country of his birth. He died in 1910.

“Le Corsaire” is a ballet he worked on at several major junctures in his career, and “Le Jardin Anime” is a classical respite from its swashbuckling derring-do. But significant alterations in all his choreography began to take place less than 15 years after his death, and now, a century later, many of these changes have become “traditional,” defended by generations of dancers and critics.

To use notation to return to Petipa’s original choreography thus represents the ballet world’s equivalent of “the director’s cut.” And certainly the Seattle “Jardin Anime” validates the process by offering a far more complex and sophisticated experience than Ballet Theatre’s adaptation.

For starters, Ballet Theatre used 42 dancers, but Petipa called for 68 -- and gets them in Seattle. It’s not merely a matter of spectacle -- more dancers doing the same thing -- but an emphasis on layers of motion, counterpoint, light and shade. Moreover, even at the Kirov, which considers itself the official guardian of Petipa tradition, a century of revisionism has taken its toll.

“Ninety percent of ‘Jardin’ is not what the Kirov does now,” declares Doug Fullington, and he should know. As one of the handful of specialists in the world fluent in the antique system of dance notation used to record Petipa’s ballets, the Seattle-born, 36-year-old musician and musicologist has also reconstructed passages from the choreographer’s “Daughter of Pharaoh” for the Bolshoi. And -- working with former Pacific Northwest Ballet principal dancer Manard Stewart -- he has brought “Le Jardin Anime” to life in the first Petipa reconstruction of its kind in the U.S.

At the Kirov, Fullington says, “some [of the sequence’s original] steps are retained, but a lot of it is changed or watered down so the same steps are done over and over. Sometimes a grouping will be similar, but the steps that are done in that formation are not at all the [Petipa] steps.”

Erin Lewis, the 19-year-old who danced the prima ballerina role for Fullington and Stewart in the two June performances, finds the reconstruction full of “combinations of steps that aren’t done anymore -- people danced differently then, and how we move our arms has also changed. So it was a challenge to go back to that.”

Looking for Petipa

More than five years before the Fullington-Stewart project, former Kirov dancer Sergei Vikharev detected similar wholesale changes throughout the now-traditional versions of 19th century classics in St. Petersburg. “Today, in the [Kirov’s] Petipa repertory, there are four or five ballets, and in each of them about half the choreographic text is original,” he told a Russian interviewer in 1999. “That’s still a lot, but no one really knows what is actually Petipa. There are some variations and fragments, but can you really get a sense of the balletmaster’s greatness from them?”

To answer that question, Vikharev persuaded the Kirov to restage the complete “Sleeping Beauty,” consulting the same archive of Petipa notations that Fullington later turned to for “Le Jardin Anime.” Now at the Harvard Theatre Collection, that archive -- 21 ballet scores in various states of completeness -- was taken to England during the Russian Revolution and subsequently used for productions by many companies, including those of the precursor to the Royal Ballet.

As a result, Vikharev’s 1999 production -- quickly dubbed the new/old “Sleeping Beauty” -- displayed many links to the Royal Ballet’s choreographic text but emerged at a scale (200 artists) and length (four hours) that the British company had never attempted.

It also offered a different kind of Russian Petipa than audiences expected. The Kirov’s previous, revered 1952 production represented a classical abstraction, but Vikharev’s reconstruction gloried in all the contrasts that Petipa built into the work: the pantomime, processions, children’s dances, character showpieces and special effects that the 1952 “Beauty” deliberately pruned away.

The question is why Soviet-era balletmasters tampered with Petipa while still using his name as the touchstone of classicism. Stewart says with a laugh that until recently, he accepted what he calls “traditional ballet dogma,” implying that any changes in a ballet classic “are always for the better, and if things have been forgotten then they probably weren’t very good.” But viewing videotapes of the Kirov and Ballet Theatre stagings of “Jardin Anime” right before or after seeing the Pacific Northwest Ballet School performances easily overturns those assumptions, leaving other theories on the table.

Sometimes choreography disappears because of an administrative action (the original 1877 “Swan Lake,” for instance, was lost when the imperial theaters closed). Reductions in company rosters during hard times, a prima ballerina’s demands for simpler or flashier showpieces, new systems of training, the poor memory of someone staging a ballet, distorted notions of style imposed by others -- any one of these can also leave the original choreographic text in tatters. And many audiences just don’t care: They’ll applaud anything that a star feels like performing.

It’s an old story. Music and theater historians will remind you that classics are often simultaneously honored and distorted -- that, for instance, after the death of Johann Sebastian Bach, his music was subjected to one grandiose orchestral adaptation after another. (The Paul Taylor Dance Company used some of them as accompaniments to Taylor’s “Promethean Fire” at the Music Center a few weeks ago.)

Similarly, Shakespeare’s plays were ruthlessly abridged and sometimes rewritten for production -- the most notorious example being the “King Lear” with a happy ending seen by London audiences for more than 150 years.

However, everyone could study the original Shakespearean texts during that period and (if they could read music) discover what Bach actually intended. But “reading” a notated dance-score has always been way, way beyond the capabilities of even the most knowledgeable dance critic or balletomane.

Fullington can carefully explain the detailed coding on the “Jardin Anime” notation pages, and you see what he means. But to mentally connect those symbols into a coherent choreographic experience, or use them in the theater to overturn everyone’s assumptions about Petipa -- well, that’s a task for specialists.

Not always a popular move

Unlike director’s cuts -- which can be newly marketed -- reconstructed new/old classics are seldom greeted enthusiastically by the dance establishment, though. Their greater length, cast size and use of children make them prohibitively expensive as touring attractions, which is why Los Angeles saw the Kirov dance an old Soviet reduction of “La Bayadere” last year instead of Vikharev’s acclaimed new recension.

Pride and cultural politics play a role too. As Tim Scholl explains in his recent “Sleeping Beauty: A Legend in Progress” (Yale University Press), the back-to-Petipa process proved highly controversial in Russia largely because it demolished what he calls the myth concerning “the Kirov’s careful cultivation of its legacy: the curatorship of a style, technique and repertory -- the careful stewardship of the 19th century repertory.”

Nobody likes being exposed as championing fake antiques -- or dancing them. In addition, “the notion that Russia’s leading ballet theater should petition a U.S. library to receive copies of unknown manuscripts from the theater’s former archive amounted to a humiliation,” Scholl writes.

But like it or not, it’s happening. Seeing the Seattle “Jardin Anime,” you savored a ravishing delicacy of pose and step -- Petipa’s transplanted French style -- wedded to the architectural grandeur he found in Imperial Russia. The scope could be as small as Erin Lewis’ carefully maneuvering through an obstacle course of flowered hoops laid in her path or as spectacular as the corps’ suddenly raising three dozen of them.

At such moments, again and again, Petipa looked like Petipa -- classical genius, master showman -- and the lessons of his rehabilitation might possibly assist the current worrisome attempts to sustain the text, style and impact of masterworks by the prime classical icons of the 20th century: George Balanchine (dead 21 years), Antony Tudor (dead 17 years) and Frederick Ashton (dead 16 years). Or do we pretend that only Petipa has changed?

It’s hard to think of ballets that we see season after season as lost works, but at the very least, Fullington, Stewart and the Pacific Northwest Ballet School prove that, whatever Ballet Theatre or the Kirov want us to believe, there’s far more that’s anime in Petipa’s real and true jardin than those companies or we ever suspected. And that the future of the art’s greatest monuments may lie in a library rather than a rehearsal studio.

Lewis Segal is The Times’ dance critic. He can be contacted at lewis.segal@latimes.com.