Dance Review by Janice Berman

LADIES OF THE LAKE

There exists in the ballet repertoire an extraordinary variety of Swan Lakes and there exists in ballet an extraordinary variety of dancers for it. American Ballet Theater opened its season Monday night with the traditional David Blair version that the company premiered in 1967. Tuesday’s Swan Queen was the Bolshoi’s Nina Ananiashvili. She and Julio Bocca repeated last year’s Swan Lake tour de force, setting the house afire with the blazing spins and leaps in their Black Swan Pas de Deux and receiving a standing ovation.

The set was designed by ABT’s late co - director Oliver Smith, to whom the season is dedicated. Jerome Bobbins, in a pre-curtain speech Monday night, affectionately remembered Smith as "tall, elegant and couth". He worked with Bobbins on the musical that was at first known as "East Side Story" and was a brilliant force behind more than 200 ballets and shows.

Smith’s Swan Lake sets - magical fog, fairy-tale castle, vaulted ceilings, gliding swan with coronet, a big fat rock for the evil Von Rothbart (Victor Barbee, who glowers with his entire body) to emote upon - are the same as ever. It’s the presentation that has changed.

Thanks to the coaching of the artistic staff, particularly Irina Kolpakova, the staging of artistic director Kevin McKenzie, and the brisker, brighter-sounding Tchaikovsky score under the baton of Jack Everly, this is as crisp and compelling a Swan Lake as ABT has ever staged.

The corps of swans is a marvel of gentle unity in Act II, choreographed by Lev Ivanov in 1894, and in the timeless divertissements there is dream-team- work. The Cygnets, or little swans, were enchantingly precise as danced both nights by Shawn Black, Sandra Brown, Paloma Herrera and Ashley Tuttle. (Herrera’s pointwork, by the way, was glorious in Monday’s peasant pas de trois.) The Cygnets' ebullience was smoothly counter-weighted by the gracious, beautifully matched big swans Christina Fagundes and Veronica Lynn, leading a quartet that also included Amy Wilder and Gabrielle Brown.

But as ever, the main event is Odette/Odile, classicism’s greatest artistic challenge. We could present here a box score of who did the most fouettes in the Black Swan variation, which calls for 32 whipping turns (...Ananiashvili did about 50 if you count her doubles), or who had the most ripples in her arms/wings as, in thrall to Von Rothbart, she bourreed out of sight. ...Ananiashvili, as if suddenly extracted from a whirlpool of love for Siegfried, whirred into the compass of Von Rothbart’s spell and, with liquid double ripples of her arms, bourreed into the wings facing us.

You cannot quantify the heart of the ballet, though: the second act Pas de Deux. The art of great ballerinas such as these is as radiantly different, one from the other, as snowflakes... The boldness of Ananiashvili's Odette approached operatic dimensions and her warmth inspired instant empathy. Her torso moved as freely, as liquidly as her arms, and when she shook her head it was as if she were about to speak. She and Bocca are not ideally matched in Act II; on point she is too tall for him, but both adroitly work stage magic that countervails our first impression.