Up in the air, so valiantly

The grand old columns are swaying and corkscrewing and, one day, if architects are to be believed, could topple altogether and dump Apollo and his great bronze chariot all over busy Teatralnaya Square.

The backstage reeks of cats. No wonder: There are 50 of them in residence, furtive and brazen creatures that sometimes swing from the ropes of the majestic old bells, the largest theater set in the world, hanging over the back of the enormous stage. Fire officials have long warned that the sweeping interior, five tiers of balconies coated with 13 pounds of gold leaf, with barely a stairway in sight, is a colossal deathtrap.

Of course, everything about the Bolshoi Theater is huge -- Bolshoi means big, after all -- and as the theater’s storied ballet troupe closes its main home stage for renovation and goes touring in the U.S., the cost of repairing and reoutfitting one of the great palace theaters of Europe promises to be big as well: $700 million, most likely, 10 times what it cost to refurbish La Scala in Milan.

Coming as it does just a few weeks after the company officially shuttered its main stage until March 2008, the Bolshoi Ballet’s four-city U.S. tour -- the first of at least six foreign tours, culminating Tuesday through next Sunday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center -- has the whiff of houseguests who show up with a truckload of suitcases while their home is upended for remodeling.

But such an impression would be wrong. Still unsettled after a series of directorship changes, still reinventing itself as a successful Western-style enterprise, still reeling from the hostile reception that greeted last year’s radically modern presentation of “Romeo and Juliet,” the Bolshoi remains the Bolshoi -- arguably the most majestic ballet company in the world -- and the troupe is determined to remain a force even on its home turf here in Moscow, where it will be performing on secondary and borrowed stages for the next three years.

“We are preserving the company, their repertoire, we are continuing to issue new productions even during this period of renovation; thus we are not only preserving the artistic core of the theater, but we will develop it,” general director Anatoly Iksanov said in an interview at the theater’s modern auxiliary wing, which opened in 2002.

In Orange County, the 220-dancer troupe will be playing one of its trump cards -- the monumental, even bombastic “Spartacus,” awash in powerful leaps, lifts and sword brandishing, a Yuri Grigorovich-choreographed ballet of the kind the company is famous for, though a recent spate of injuries has taken off the roster some of the company’s most celebrated male dancers, who are badly needed to carry off the audacious ballet.

There will also be a rendition of composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s “The Bright Stream,” attempted by the Bolshoi’s latest and perhaps most risk-taking artistic director, Alexei Ratmansky.

The ballet -- originally a light, almost vaudevillean take on Communist-era collective farms, which earned the wrath of then Soviet leader Josef Stalin when it premiered in 1936 -- is part of a Shostakovich trilogy Ratmansky is undertaking for the composer’s 100th birthday next year. While described as “a frothy delight” by some critics, it has also provoked some consternation in Russia.

“It has nothing to do with classical music, with collectivization or with any kind of normal staging of a ballet. And it’s not even funny! What is there that’s funny in seeing 2-meter-tall men putting on tutus?” complained Anatoly Agamirov of Echo of Moscow radio, a dean of the Moscow dance critic corps. “This is good for a student’s study, for a comedy talent show. But when you’re talking about Stalinist collectivization, where millions died? This was a national tragedy, and there’s really nothing to laugh about.”

The reception reflects the divisions that have accompanied Ratmansky’s brief reign as artistic director since he was hired from the Royal Danish Ballet in January 2004. The mixed feelings over “Bright Stream” were followed by a frosty critical reception in London for the Bolshoi’s unusual production of Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet” last July.

Though it was choreographed by Moldovan choreographer Radu Poklitaru, with no direct involvement by Ratmansky on the playbill, the new artistic director -- the company’s fourth since the legendary Grigorovich left in 1995 -- was taken to task because the ballet earned his approval and unfolded largely on his watch, having premiered a month before he joined the company and having sailed into critical purgatory in London (though it met with a significantly less hostile reception in the U.S.) during his first months on the job.

The production was decidedly un-Bolshoi-like, abandoning pointe shoes and featuring Juliet as a gawky teenager in trousers and Mercutio in drag.

For many Russians, it came to symbolize the Bolshoi’s search for a way to at least occasionally depart from what they see as the exquisite but dated classicism of Grigorovich’s ballets toward a more inventive and vibrant choreography in which the company’s younger dancers might have a stake.

“This was a fundamentally important step for the troupe. For the first time ever, they became participants in the process. They didn’t simply inherit an old staging, and their emotional involvement in the production was bigger than ever,” said Tatyana Kuznetsova, dance writer for Moscow’s Kommersant newspaper.

“The dancing was permeated with emotion, the battle scenes were very powerful. The dancers were yelling, thrusting their legs, putting on frightening grimaces -- showing that in passion, there’s nothing to turn away from. Changing the thinking of Russian ballerinas to dance this way was a very important step,” she said.

Ratmansky continues to defend the ballet. “It says something about today’s world, and it gives dancers an opportunity to be contemporary people and not dancers who live in a gilded cage,” he said. At the same time, he added, “It’s something we would do only once in a while.”

For many, the Bolshoi was plainly adrift.

“Ratmansky is searching for something new, but he’s conducting the search along a route the whole world has already taken and finished with,” Agamirov said. “In the past, the Bolshoi was known for an incredible dedication to classic choreography. Technique that was at the precision level of Olympic champions. And absolutely wonderful backdrops. But virtually all of this has been lost, in the name of a search for something they think is new but which the whole world has already found long ago.”

History meets modernity

RATMANSKY, whose lean dancer’s physique is a quiet and unimposing presence in the narrow corridors of the old theater, in surprising contrast to his power, says his aim is a balance between the old artistry and new creativity that will keep the Bolshoi as a creative force in the 21st century. He also aims to create a repertoire of standards, leaning heavily on the Russian sensibility, that can’t be seen anywhere in the world except at the Bolshoi.

“When I came, I worried that maybe because it is such a famous ballet company, what can you do? I thought that new works would be vital for the company. New works created for dancers. I wanted to encourage Russian choreographers. This is something opposite to what the Maryinsky [the rival Kirov Ballet in St. Petersburg] does now -- they build their repertoire from unquestionable masterpieces,” he said.

“We take more risk here at the Bolshoi, and I think it’s good. I know there are people who don’t like it. But the theater has to be alive. The Bolshoi is the Bolshoi, but we have young dancers, and they need new works.”

At the same time, Ratmansky is maintaining a full repertoire of the Grigorovich masterpieces and inviting promising young Russian choreographers to take a fresh look at the classics: One of next season’s three premieres (all debuting on either the Bolshoi’s 2 1/2 -year-old but acoustically awful New Stage or at the larger Kremlin Palace) will be a fresh look at “Cinderella” by Yuri Possokhov, a former Bolshoi dancer now in San Francisco.

In “The Bright Stream,” which Ratmansky created for the Bolshoi before he joined the troupe, he saw a chance not only to celebrate one of Shostakovich’s lesser-known works (though the music enjoyed wide popularity among Russians in suite forms on the radio) but to revive a work that, thanks to Stalin’s distaste, ended with choreographer Fyodor Lopukhov’s termination as director of the Bolshoi and the arrest of the author of the scenario, Adrian Piotrovsky.

“Doing this ballet again now is sort of making historical justice,” he said. “But the main reason for me is, Shostakovich is an unquestionable genius of Russian music, and to have these scores and librettos and not perform them I thought was a waste.”

While Ratmansky and others have been updating the company artistically, Iksanov has overhauled the theater organizationally and financially. From a state-dependent relic of the Soviet era, in a stagnant funk for much of the 1980s and ‘90s (the low point was probably a Las Vegas tour in 1996 when thousands of seats a night stood empty at the Aladdin Hotel), the Bolshoi has more than tripled its budget, to $40 million a year, and earns 40% of its revenues from box office sales and sponsorships.

Ticket pricing was revamped, with an estimated $4 million a year that once went into scalpers’ pockets now going onto the books. New contracts allow the theater to pay top dancers wages comparable to those of major companies in the West, reportedly as high as $1,000 a performance. Some dancers saw their earnings grow by 600%.

Yet old Soviet-era labor laws also guarantee most dancers contracts for life, a phenomenon that led to the painful attempt to fire pop diva dancer Anastasia Volochkova in 2003 and to a stable full of less-than-perfect performers who are nonetheless kept on at small government-set wages. Dancers show up late to rehearsals with impunity and often refuse to accept anything other than optimal roles.

“The atmosphere is very relaxed. Sometimes it’s too relaxed,” Ratmansky admitted. “But it’s very secure, and in general, that’s very good.... We have more than 200 people. I would say that a third of them are not very good dancers, but they’re very useful. They can stand as statistes, maybe they’re very beautiful. We have character artists who are not dancers but pantomime actors. A director in the West might fire them. But here we have a use for them.”

Iksanov has pledged to seek a change in the labor laws for performing artists in Russia. But his biggest challenge is getting the theater through its upcoming renovation.

Though the doors closed at the end of June with final performances of “Swan Lake” for the ballet and Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov” for the opera company, the federal government has yet to approve a final budget for the project. Ticket revenues will drop drastically during the restoration, since the alternate New Stage has half the seats of the main theater.

Yet nearly everyone admits that moving forward on the project is the only option. An underground river nearby, underground parking for the old TsUM department store across the street and more than 200 Russian winters appear to have undermined the 180-year-old theater’s foundation and introduced new cracks into its load-bearing walls.

Moreover, the theater has no “pockets” for fast scene changes, acoustics that were compromised by a layer of concrete installed under the seats in the last century, and nowhere to store the companies’ 30,000 costumes and various set pieces (some of which sit outside under the snow when not onstage). The linoleum-like floor rolled out for the ballets is decades behind modern art design and leaves most leaps landing in thuds.

The new plan calls for digging deep under the existing stage and out into the nearby square to provide critical extra room for modern stage equipment, storage, wardrobe rooms and safe building exits. The plush red-and-gold interior will be renovated, and the famous gold-threaded hammer-and-sickle curtain, already hauled down after the last performance, will be replaced with one featuring symbols of Russian empire.

“Over the past several years, the task we were faced with was to adjust the theater to new political and economic conditions,” Iksanov said. “We have had to look for money to survive, and use the funds accumulated to look for new repertoire, new approaches, to set the course for what the Bolshoi would be all about today.

“Of course, that has been very complicated because it’s difficult to change anything, especially in a well-established organism,” he said. “A majority, not only in our theater but in the world at large, always feels fear before changes. But the most active and the most creative part of the collective has welcomed the changes.”

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The Bolshoi Ballet

Where: Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa

When: 8 p.m. Tuesday through 2 p.m. next Sunday

Ends: 2 p.m. next Sunday

Price: $25 to $110

Contact: (714) 556-2787, www.ocpac.org

What: “The Bright Stream”

When: 8 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday

What: “Spartacus”

When: 8 p.m. Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. next Sunday