Ballet Review By Jennifer Dunning

SO SUNNY IT SEEMS UN-RUSSIAN

Humor informed by a love of classical ballet

BECKET, Mass. Recent showings of contemporary ballet from Russia have tended to be disappointing. But there is good news from the Bolshoi Ballet, that cradle of big, bold, dramatic Soviet ballet. The news came in yet another imaginatively conceived Russian dance program produced by David Eden, in a performance by Nina Ananiashvili and principals of the Bolshoi Ballet on Wednesday night in the Ted Shawn Theater at the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival.

The Bolshoi has struck gold with Aleksei Ratmansky’s «Charms of Mannerism» and «Dreams About Japan», choreographed respectively in 1997 and 1998. Mr. Ratmansky is little known in the West except by reputation as a promising young Russian choreographer and a gifted dancer who now performs with the Royal Danish Ballet. «Charms of Mannerism» and «Dreams About Japan» are both in suite form and have the same cheeky humor. By Western standards their light, sunny disposition seems very un-Russian. But each ballet is informed, through and through, by a knowledge of and love for the classical ballet canon and manners that allows Mr. Ratmansky to give full play to his considerable imagination.

The four dancers in «Charms of Mannerism» begin and end as doll - like figures who become the suggestions of characters implicit in the titles of musical pieces by Couperin, orchestrated by Marina Kovaleva, to which the ballet is set. Even more, they will have raced saucily through many of the conventions - and mannerisms of ballet in dance that even incorporates pleading quotes from classics like «Giselle» and the «Sylphide».

Mr. Ratmansky gives his two men plenty of opportunity to show off the elegant body lines, beautifully articulated feet and classical purity that have contributed to the reputations of Sergei Filin and Andrei Uvarov as young Russian dancers to watch for. (Mr. Uvarov replaces the originally cast Aleksei Fadeyechev, the Bolshoi Ballet’s much-admired new young artistic director.) The choreographer also allows individual personality to shine through the high jinks, with Mr. Uvarov the tall long - suffering poet of Romantic ballet tradition and Mr. Filin an eager, elegant pup.

Ms. Ananiashvili is adorably woebegone, her suggestion of a long black glove giving her the look of a refugee from Balanchine’s «Cotillon». And Tatyana Terekhova is revealed as a ballerina with giddy comic gifts. Ms. Terekhova gets to go after and get her man, even when that ends in abrupt falls and unladylike but funny lifts. She falls asleep as Ms. Ananiashvili’s lovelorn lass, a demure pal in other wonderfully silly moments, recounts a long sad tale.

There is an amusing duet for Ms. Ananiashvili and Mr. Uvarov, a fine partner, as the doomed lovers of countless ballet scenarios. The two men have a polite encounter that turns into a sword fight and ends with the two pledging eternal fidelity in a ballet gesture usually reserved for wooing females. Admirably, all this occurs without a trace of mugging.

There are one or two passages in which Mr. Ratmansky indulges his humor a little extraneously. But one is willing to forgive him anything because of his obvious delight in stretching and playing with the ballet vocabulary without ever doing it injustice. «Charms of Mannerism» is crammed with detail, with the dancers in action down to their fingertips. Nothing is cramped, however, and while this may be a «new» Bolshoi endeavor - matching, perhaps, a modest, current seeming - resurgence of ballet choreography in the West - the powerful expansiveness of the Bolshoi style informs almost every moment of the ballet.

«Dreams About Japan» is in large part the response of Mr. Ratmansky - and Ms. Ananiashvili, who conceived the ballet - to the genuine riches and the stereotypes of Japanese traditional dance. Elements of those dance forms are to be found here for the most part smoothly knit with the moves and gestures of classical ballet. The piece was inspired by the plots of four Kabuki plays, but the narratives are not all that evident in the ballet, which is set to Japanese drum music performed live by members of the Bolshoi Theater orchestra, conducted by Aleksandr Sotnikov.

What emerges is a vision of Mr. Ratmansky, recounted in Ballet Review in 1998, of falling asleep and dreaming he was turning the pages of a beautiful Kabuki album. Exotic costumes by Michael Makharadze and masks and makeup by Aleksandr Shevchuk helped create the sense of a stream of colorful, sometimes grotesque images.