Dance Review by Louise Levene

THE BOLSHOI can't be doing with mood lighting.

They assume (correctly) that you want to get a good look at the dancing and they feed shillings into the meter with reckless abandon. From the instant the curtain rose on Monday's Raymonda in the velvet heat of the Coliseum you knew you were in for a seriously good time. Simon Virsaladze's sparely handsome set was bathed in light and filled with nobly posed dancers who immediately burst into life, in Petipa's late - flowering tale of a French maiden, her princely cavalier and a love - crazed Arab chieftain.

Killjoys grumble that although Glazunov's score is sublime the libretto is meaningless tosh — as if boy meets water nymph - boy loses water nymph - boy dies kissing water nymph was the acme of narrative realism. Few companies today can deliver the dazzling array of solos, the ardent melodrama or the peppery boot dances. So what if Grigorovich's production isn't ideal? It's the only one they've got and the Bolshoi dance it magnificently.

Sergei Filin was a stylish hero and Mark Peretokin lent a certain pathos to the man deranged by an understandable passion for American Ballet Theatre's Nina Ananiashvili *, making a guest appearance with her old company. She has feet like little pink sugar mice. Her bravura variations were all superb but simple steps can be equally ravishing: just watching her leg peel slowly away from her body into a perfect attitude can make you catch your breath. By the third act her dancing had amplified to a queenly melancholy and she danced the Hungarian solo with the strange, wild pride that possesses the great flamenco divas.

I wanted it to go on for ever.

* Spider’s note. Nina never tires of repeating, «that she was, is and will be the Bolshoi Ballerina». As a matter of fact, she never for one minute has left the Bolshoi Ballet. Ms. Louise Levene, noted British critic, obviously did not have a correct information