Dance Review by Ellen Dunkel

A WINTRY BALLET

Bolshoi dancer In "Snow Maiden"

It's tempting to call Nina Ananiashvili the last of the great Russian ballerinas.

She was among the last dancers trained at Moscow’s famous Bolshoi Choreographic Academy when it was still under the Soviet system. She won most of the major international ballet competitions and was taken into the Bolshoi Ballet at an early age. Soon she was dancing with companies all over the world, leading her own tour of stars of the Russian ballet and booked as a guest artist around the world for years to come.

But unlike Baryshnikov, Nureyev, Makarova, and other famous Russian dancers who hit the West with aplomb, Ananiashvili - who opens as The Snow Maiden tonight with American Ballet Theatre - is not Russian per se. She’s Georgian, born and raised in Tbilisi.

More importantly, she never had to break her ties with the Bolshoi to broaden her horizons. Her first invitations from western companies came in the late Eighties when communism was breaking down.

"Everything started so easy", Ananiashvili said in a March phone interview from Texas, where she had just danced the world premiere of The Snow Maiden with the Houston Ballet. "My first of this kind of experiments was with New York City Ballet. Peter Martins invited me to dance Balanchine’s ballets. It was very interesting and fantastic experiment for me. And I like it so much".

"It was very good, because every time I do something new, ...something we don't have in the repertoire. So, of course, it was very important for me and very interesting to do this."

Ananiashvili - perhaps best described as a dancer of the world - also danced five years with the Royal Danish Ballet and England’s Royal Ballet. She’s danced American Ballet Theatre’s spring season for the past six years and also spends a month every fall with the Norwegian Ballet.

But it was her Russian ties that made her so appropriate for famed choreographer Ben Stevenson’s latest full-length ballet.

"I’d known The Snow Maiden story for a long time", Stevenson said of the fairy tale that’s well-known in Russia. "And then I was working with Nina Ananiashvili. We were going to do a work together. I had to think what I could do that would be something nice for her. And then I was in Russia, going around one of those art fair sort of things, and then I suddenly thought of The Snow Maiden".

Stevenson had already done a smaller production of The Snow Maiden several years before, for the students of the Houston Ballet School, and thought it would work well as an evening-length piece.

Ananiashvili agreed. "Snow Maiden is really an old Russian story, so of course we know it", she said. "And I think, 'Oh my God, it sounds very interesting'."

"And music", she added. "Tchaikovsky’s music is put together very good. And absolutely fantastic what Desmond Heeley, the designer, is doing with sets and costumes - absolutely beautiful. I never see before production like this".

That’s one of the reasons Ananiashvili says The Snow Maiden is here to stay. Another, she said, is while a wintry ballet may be welcome in June, we need another ballet for the grayer months.

"It’s special because in the West, companies in the wintertime usually just dance The Nutcracker. We don’t have any other performances for wintertime. And I think The Snow Maiden is really absolutely fantastic, because this is really a winter play, you know, and everything is outside with trees, and it looks magic - really magic."