BOLSHOI BALLET DANCERS MOZARTIANA, BALANCHINE CELEBRATION 2000, KENNEDY CENTER, WASHINGTON DC, SEPTEMBER 2000 |
| From: THE VILLAGE VOICE, September
20, 2000 Dance Review by Deborah Jowitt THE MASTER AND HIS DISCIPLES New Yorkers get regular feasts of horse’s-mouth Balanchine from New York City Ballet, the company he founded. The Kennedy Center’s ingenious Balanchine Celebration offers six companies, three of them headed by former Balanchine dancers, in four different programs. Because of contractual obligations to orchestras, NYCB itself could not appear... The not too surprising revelation is the extraordinary care and pride with which disparate companies attack the Balanchine repertory... The only criticism that could be leveled at Program A is that it’s a sparkle-plenty affair (the others are more balanced). Mozartiana (performed by the Bolshoi), a deep and enigmatic ballet, begins the evening; then we’re into the coruscating wrangles of Rubies from Jewels (Miami City Ballet), the glinting cat’s cradles of Square Dance (Joffrey Ballet of Chicago), and that witty applause machine, Stars and Stripes (Miami again). Still, who’s complaining? Certainly not the audience, and Balanchine’s most entertaining ballets can offer profound revelations about the power of music and form to stir the heart. Suzanne Farrell staged the Tchaikovsky Mozartiana for six members of Russia’s Bolshoi Ballet (the four little girls who frame the ballerina in the opening "Preghiera" are Americans). What Nina Ananiashvili has absorbed from Farrell - for whom Balanchine made the 1981 ballet - is miraculous. Her limbs look longer, her performing more porous. Her gift for projecting emotion is not so much muted as contained, purified. When she gazes upward, lifting her arms and arching slightly, you feel she’s opening herself to the light of divine grace. And in the brilliantly complex necklace of alternating solos that she and her partner, Sergei Filin, string together, she’s bright-footed and intelligently playful. He’s a lovely dancer too - composed and serene, yet forceful in both feathery footwork and butter-smooth turns. Dmitri Belogolovtsev is not quite up to the kinky eccentricities of the "Gigue", but Yulia Efimova, Marina Zharkova, Anna Rebetskaya and Oksana Tsvetnitskaya perform excellently as the four busy-footed ladies-in-waiting.
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