Dance Review by Christine Temin

BOLSHOI STARS BRIGHTEN SWAN LAKE PERFORMANCES

People who were lucky enough to have tickets to Boston Ballet’s Swan Lake on Saturday night saw one of today’s greatest interpreters of the dual Odette/Odile role: the Bolshoi’s Nina Ananiashvili, elegantly partnered by another Bolshoi star, Alexei Fadeyechev. No strangers to Boston audiences, Ananiashvili and Fadeyechev danced the leads in Swan Lake when the Ballet premiered this production two years ago. But they didn’t dance with each other: Ananiashvili performed with Boston’s guest star Fernando Bujones, and Fadeyechev with the Ballet’s Trinidad Sevillano.

The "glasnost" gimmick of having a Boston dancer partner one from the Bolshoi or Kirov had lots of PR value. But the wisdom of letting regular partners dance together was confirmed on Saturday. Ananiashvili danced with utter abandon, holding nothing back, confident that Fadeyechev would always be at the right spot at the right time. This was not a performance she could have delivered with a partner she’d rehearsed with only a few days. (Ananiashvili and Fadeyechev dance Swan Lake twice more during the current run: Thursday and Saturday evening).

Ananiashvili is not a textbook Swan Queen. She gives a highly individualistic, even eccentric, performance in which steps are subservient to feelings. In the «white» acts, you notice her trembling and undulating back more than you notice arabesques and pirouettes. Her back and neck are particularly pliant, her legs notably eloquent. The movement of her arms strays perilously far from ballet’s canonical positions, but the daring pays off. She really does seem to be half-bird and half-woman, and you see the struggle between the two taking place in her own body. It’s thrilling. This is a performance of extremes; the closest American equivalent to Ananiashvili’s passion was Gelsey Kirkland in her heyday. It’s a rare ballerina who is equally well suited to dancing the white swan and the black. A quintessential lyrical dancer, Ananiashvili is a born Odette. But she’s also fine as Odile. She’s seductive rather than malicious, an interpretation that has the side benefit of making her Siegfried look more intelligent than most when he falls for her. (Siegfrieds can look downright dumb when they’re taken in by particularly nasty Odiles). Ananiashvili takes great liberties with the Odile choreography, to the point of substituting an entirely different variation for the one specified in the Sergeyev Swan Lake that Boston performs. The Sergeyev variation is a lot more challenging and interesting than the one Ananiashvili actually performed, but the force of her dancing was so great that you simply couldn’t object...