Dance Review by Allan Ulrich

BOLSHOI’S RETURN TO CALIFORNIA TRIUMPHANT

LOS ANGELES - Moscow’s legendary Bolshoi Ballet is back in California, and, if you can obtain a ticket, you won’t believe your eyes. After a 10-year absence, the company, not long ago an apparent victim of glasnost, dazzled a sold-out audience Wednesday evening in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of the Los Angeles Performing Arts Center with a new production of that Russian ballet staple, Don Quixote, starring the remarkable Georgian ballerina Nina Ananiashvili...

That the Bay Area should have been denied this extraordinary experience is unfortunate and marks another step in its decline as a first-tier stop for classical dance attractions...

Bay Area balletomanes have been deprived of a marvelously rejuvenated institution, one that, since its American debut in 1959, has for many been synonymous with Russian ballet. An abortive visit to this city and Las Vegas four years ago spelled disaster. But in 1998, former ballerino Vladimir Vasiliev, who is the general and artistic director of the Bolshoi Theatre of Russia, named Alexei Fadeechev as artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet. Fadeechev was prominent on the roster 10 years ago, and he is the son and pupil of Nikolai Fadeechev, an erstwhile partner of Galina Ulanova and Maya Plisetskaya.

So, there is a tradition in the Bolshoi (something you might expect from a company with a 224-year history), and what has not changed in the past decade is the incomparable expansiveness of the dancing. The first thing anybody learns about the company is that Bolshoi means "big"; the second thing anybody teams is that the dancers perform with a sweep, vitality and theatrical authority that should be the envy of the rest of the world. What seems to have changed is look of the dancers. The dowdy corps women and the brawny males who possessed thighs like oak tree trunks in ballets like Spartacus in the 1970s and 1980s were little in evidence Wednesday...

A. Fadeechev’s new version of Marius Petipa’s 1869 Don Quixote was the most astute of choices for export. The choreographer has incorporated elements from earlier stagings, including A. Gorsky’s (1900, 1906) and R. Zakharov’s (1946), and material provided over the years by A. Simachyov and K. Goleyzovsky...

Most American companies conceive of Don Quixote as a pretext for bravura dancing: That quality bubbles through the Bolshoi’s version, but the Muscovites are equally concerned with the art of storytelling in movement. Don Quixote and servant Sancho Panza are inextricably bound to the narrative; Cervantes’ hero is now treated with respect...

Of note in Wednesday’s cast was Vladimir Moiseev, grandson of choreographer Igor Moiseev; his cape-swirling toreador, a mixture of classroom technique and percussive Spanish attacks, was one of the evening’s outstanding vignettes...