Dance Review by Clement Crisp

PRINCE OF THE PAGODAS

We have often admired Nina Ananiashvili and Alexei Fadeyechev in their performances with the Bolshoi Ballet. Their gifts, though, have rarely seemed finer - because meeting a significant challenge - than on Friday night when they appeared for the first time as guest artists with the Royal Ballet in «The Prince of the Pagodas». It is a most welcome aspect of the new freedoms available to Soviet dancers that they can extend their artistic horizons in a Western repertory, just as it is thrilling for audiences here to see the apparatus of Russian training and temperament brought to bear upon our ballets.

For this is very clearly a two-way traffic, and if «Pagodas» stretched Ananiashvili and Fadeyechev as interpreters, the staging benefited from their presence. Their immediate impact had to do with the sustained emotional tone of their playing. ...Ananiashvili showed a concern for the psychic and dramatic value of every scene, every least moment. Technically she can command the choreography, and bring to it certain lovely nuances having to do with the richness of a Russian torso which opens out so generously to movement. In portraying the young princess’s uncertainties and her spiritual integrity, Ananiashvili found eddies of feeling, a play of light and shade, which spoke to us of the girl’s heart. I thought it a most touching and rewarding reading, which ended with a proper sense of fulfillment at curtain fall.