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Report From Leningrad: An Evening at the Kirov
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16257 |
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THE ARTS
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3 / 1989 |
1,228 Words |
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Cynthia Grenier
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It is snowing in Leningrad, and the city founded by Peter the Great on the banks of the Neva looks quite magical in the dark of early evening.
In the center of the city stands the Kirov Theater--named in commemoration of Sergey Kirov, whose assassination on Stalin's orders in 1934 touched off the Moscow Trials and the subsequent death of millions of Soviet citizens. Today, the fabled Kirov Ballet is performing the four-act Don Quichotte, which premiered at Moscow's Bolshoi in December 1869.
Tour buses disgorge dozens of tourists who throng into the brightly lit marble hall along with a press of local people. Outer garments and boots are checked on a lower floor in cloakrooms whose attendants dispense opera glasses for thirty kopecks a pair.
Bygone Feeling
Entering the theater is like entering another world or, more properly speaking, another age. All is sparkling white and gold, with five tiers of balconies rising to an elaborately chandeliered ceiling, a richly embroidered heavy gold and pale turquoise curtain, and individual velvet turquoise upholstered armchairs in the orchestra. Only the ornate gold hammer and sickle above the foyer royal box and the raised pattern of hammers and sickles in gold thread interwoven with the Cyrillic initials of the USSR remind one this is no longer the Maryinsky Theater of czarist times.
Don Quichotte was choreographed by that giant of nineteenth-century ballet, Marius Petipa, the father of Russian ballet. For forty years, the Marseilles-born Petipa presided as ballet master of the Imperial Russian Ballet, bringing into being a new national school of ballet. He fused French style with newly imported Italian technique by having it performed by Russian dancers expressing their Russian temperament. His results have marked not merely Russian ballet but international ballet to this day.
Petipa specialized in creating grand and complicated ballets, which were basically spectacles designed to constantly excite and titillate the all-too-readily bored audiences of the period. Don Quichotte is one such work that has remained in the repertory down to the present, although it has been modified more than once to accommodate changing tastes. The fourth act pas de deux is frequently performed in the United States and Europe to show off the technique of star dancers.
The ballet itself--perhaps more vaguely inspired by than based on Cervantes' celebrated classic--shows of course more than a trace of its nineteenth-century origins. Don Quichotte makes his entrance on horseback in several acts. At times nearly a hundred people fill the stage. Child dancers from the Vaganova School (which trained among others, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Rudolf Nureyev, and, in an earlier era, George Balanchine) appear as dancing marionettes in a gypsy encampment.
The story line is pure fluff, the merest of pretexts for one marvelous display of balletic pyrotechnics after another. Nothing is meant to be taken seriously. The ballet has been characterized as an operetta on toe, which is not an unfair description if one went only by the description of the action in the program. In the Kirov production, love, passion,
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