Dance Review by Clive Barnes

FOOTWORK OUTSHINES PROGRAM

After a gap of 10 years, Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet has finally returned to town at the New York Theater as perhaps the most glamorous, and certainly most celebrated part of Lincoln Center Festival 2000.

The company, like Russia itself, has of late had its ups and downs, but, although very different in look and manner, its dancers can still whirl your heart away with their power and intensity.

Today the entire Bolshoi Theater - ballet, opera and orchestra - is under the direction of the former superstar dancer Vladimir Vasiliev, who has entrusted the artistic direction of the ballet company itself to 40-year-old Alexei Fadeyechev, himself a former principal dancer.

The company has decided to offer New York two separate faces - Vasiliev’s own new production of Giselle, and a varied program of mixed repertory including George Balanchine’s Symphony in C.

Basically, like virtually all productions of this 1841 classic, Vasiliev’s Giselle is largely based on Marius Petipa’s 1884 staging, although it adds many flourishes and grace-notes of his own...

Nina Ananiashvili’s Giselle is familiar from her performances with American Ballet Theater. Here, her first act was marred by a certain cuteness of expression, but her exemplary dancing in the second act has never been better. Fantastic.

And in her Albrecht, newcomer Sergei Filin (one of the Bolshoi’s new young male dancers), she found a partner of great promise who danced with confidence and acted with ardor...

The second night’s mixed bill opened with the a scene from Yuri Grigorovich’s Spartacus, brilliantly danced by the male ensemble...

"The Kingdom of the Shades" scene from Marius Petipa’s 1877 La Bayadere is the touchstone of classic ballet, and this new-look Bolshoi company takes to it like a dream, with exquisitely poised dancing from the corps de ballet, and a forcefully eloquent account of the ballerina role Nikiya by Galina Stepanenko...

...In a Don Quixote snippet, Nina Ananiashvili, at the top of her immaculate form, quite overshadowed Andrei Uvarov, despite his strong partnering.

Bringing Symphony in C to the New York State Theater, the very House that Balanchine Built, required nerve.

Yet mounted by a Balanchine specialist, John Taras, the Bolshoi dancers swept through the ballet as if they had been dancing it since its Paris creation more than half a century ago.