| FROM: THE NEW YORK TIMES,
May 13, 2003 DANCE REVIEW By Anna Kisselgoff
Jealousy and Betrayal in an Oriental Temple
La Bayadere
is not the thinking man's introduction to ballet or a work that will persuade newcomers
that ballet can be on the level of great music, great literature and great art. With its
secondhand orientalism and soap-opera plot (A loves B who loves C), this white elephant
choreographed by Marius Petipa in 1877 lacks the unity of both the Romantic ballets that
preceded it and the later high style of Petipa's Sleeping Beauty.
Why then did 4,000 people pack the Metropolitan Opera House
to see La Bayadere as staged by Natalia Makarova in 1980 for American Ballet
Theater?
......Audiences flocked on Saturday afternoon to Nina
Ananiashvili and Julio Bocca's passionate and exciting performance opposite Gillian
Murphy's Gamzatti and to see the fine cast on Friday night led by Julie Kent, Ethan
Stiefel and Irina Dvorovenko.
The obvious draw is the sheer spectacle of the opera house
scale of Ms. Makarova's remarkable modernized staging. She has cut much from the original,
kept the Soviet-era choreography for the male bravura solos and choreographed a final act
that was discarded after 1923 in the Soviet Union. Brilliantly, she set everything in the
grandeur of Pierluigi Samaritani's sets, creating a syncretic India of the imagination…
La
Bayadere
is Petipa's farewell to old forms. In The Shades, he shows off a
pure-dance-formalist structure that abstracts emotion but does not express it literally.
As 24 women in white tutus descend a ramp, one steps into arabesque on the right foot and
another on the left and then arches back. The repetition of the phrase and of Ludwig
Minkus's music is not an exercise in minimalism. Rather, the choreography expands across
the stage and into Petipa's already modern concept. This is that an art form finds itself
in its particular essence, and the essence of ballet is its dance element. Never has
Ballet Theater's corps performed so magnificently and with such style and control in this
act.
When the Kirov first came out with the Shades scene,
the dancing built into a raw climax. Ms. Stiefel understood this on Friday night but was
mismatched dynamically throughout the ballet with Ms. Kent's ladylike poetic Nikiya and
Ms. Dvorovenko's career-woman princess.
It was left to Mr. Bocca, who delivered all the right
technical bravura, and Ms. Ananiashvili, unabashedly sensuous in the first act and
projecting her classical style with exuberant form, to supply the passion that the ballet
should have. Sex was in the air, and Ms. Murphy's fire-and-ice Gamzatti was on the same
wave length.
No wonder the local high priest made advances to Nikiya.
Victor Barbee raged nicely on Friday, and Brian Reeder was effectively subtle at the
matinee. The Bronze Idol solo received the right bravura from Herman Cornejo, Carlos Lopez
and Joaquin de Luz......
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