It has been nearly a decade since the Bolshoi Ballet last visited these shores. On that occasion in the summer of 1979, three of the leading dancers of the USSR's most celebrated ballet company defected to the West (Alexander Godunov in New York near the beginning of the tour, and Leonid and Valentina Kozlov in Los Angeles at the end). At the time, most people predicted that the USSR was going to punish the famous troupe in the same way as it had dealt with the Kirov Ballet a few years earlier.
When Mikhail Baryshnikov had defected in 1974 on a Kirov tour of Paris, the Soviet government had retaliated by indefinitely forbidding all tours to the West and restricting the company to its home city of Kirov. Until the visit of the Kirov to Paris in 1982, and a subsequent tour to the United States in late May and early June 1986, Leningrad's ballet company was not seen on Western stages for eight years.
At the end of this month, eight years after the 1979 wave of defections, the Bolshoi Ballet is once again being permitted to come west. The American tour begins June 30 at New York's Metropolitan Opera, and then goes on to Washington and San Francisco, ending in Los Angeles August 30.
Cultural Exchange
The Bolshoi's two-month visit to this country is part of the cultural-exchange accords agreed upon at the 1985 Geneva summit. Other moves on the USSR's current cultural offensive include recent visits of ballet students from the Perm Choreographic Institute, the Leningrad Symphony Orchestra, and the Moiseyev Folklore Ensemble, as well as an exchange of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting between American and Soviet museums.
The Bolshoi Ballet is noted for its presentations of full-length "story" ballets. These include not only such staples of the classic and romantic repertoire as The Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, and Giselle, but also such original Soviet athletic/dramatic spectacles as Spartacus and Ivan the Terrible. Choreographed by the company's artistic director, Yuri Grigorovich, Spartacus and Ivan impress audiences with their dazzling exploitation of a powerful male corps de ballet.
The Bolshoi is perhaps best remembered and appreciated among Western ballet admirers for the outstanding quality of its principal dancers. During the company's first visit to the West in 1956, the Bolshoi introduced the now-legendary Galina Ulanova. A few years later the name Maya Plisetskaya was one which was to bring even further renown to the company.
Today, when most balletomanes hear the name "Bolshoi," they probably think of the generation succeeding Plisetskaya, which includes dancers taken into the company between 1958 and 1961: Vladimir Vasiliev (1958), Yekaterina Maximova (1958), Maris Liepa (1960), Mikhail Lavrovsky (1961), Natalia Bessmertnova (1961), Yuri Vladimirov (1961), and Nina Sorokina (1961).
These artists have of course performed in most of the standard repertoire, although certain roles have become so totally their own that specific associations are unavoidable. What Bolshoi enthusiast could forget the elegant, flirtatious Basilio in Don Quixote, danced with amazing virtuosity and impeccable style by Vladimir Vasiliev,
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