When the curtain rose on opening night of the Kirov Ballet's summer engagement in New York City, the audience discovered a spectacle of startling proportions unfolding on the vast stage of the Metropolitan Opera House: an immense ship, lashed by wind and rain, tossed on a storm-gray sea as its alarmed crew dashed back and forth on the heaving decks. After several precarious minutes, the ship foundered, taking all but a few intrepid pirates to their watery graves.
So begins Le Corsaire, a three-act ballet heretofore known in the United States only by the sensational pas de deux of the same name. With that riveting shipwreck, the troupe from Leningrad embarked on its first season in New York in a quarter of a century with a literal smash.
Le Corsaire also began--at last--the first extended look many American balletgoers had ever had at the fabled Kirov. Say "Kirov" to a balletomane and images of czarist pomp are immediately conjured up. Known as the Imperial Ballet of the Maryinsky Theater prior to the Russian revolution of 1917 (it didn't acquire the present name until 1935, after Stalin had the eponymous Kirov murdered), the company was the leading ballet troupe in the world at the turn of the century. This is the company that premiered The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker, that employed the fountainhead of great classicism, the ballet master Marius Petipa, and that nurtured such great dancers and choreographers as Vaslav Nijinsky, Anna Pavlova, George Balanchine, Galina Ulanova and, more recently, Rudolf Nureyev, Natalia Makarova, and Mikhail Baryshnikov.
So the Kirov Ballet's recent American tour was eagerly awaited by many. In addition to New York, which enjoyed the longest engagement (three weeks) and the widest repertory (three evening-length ballets, one double bill, and three mixed bills of shorter pieces) of any city on the tour, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Costa Mesa, California, also played host to the Soviet troupe. These cities welcomed the Kirov into their leading theaters: the Metropolitan Opera House (which sponsored the entire tour) in New York, the beautifully small-scale Kennedy Center Opera House in Washington, the opulent War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco, and the bold new Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa. The Kirov was coming, and ballet fans coast to coast got ready.
Imperial Russian
Although the Kirov had long been out of sight, it was never long out of mind. The late George Balanchine, the dominant figure in American ballet in this century, studied at the Maryinsky school and danced in the company as a young man. Some of the Maryinsky dancers who left the Soviet Union with him in 1924 are still carrying on his work, teaching at the School of American Ballet, the influential academy Balanchine founded with Lincoln Kirstein. Often referred to as Petipa's successor, Balanchine is said to be the choreographer who, above all others, inherited the mantle of imperial Russian classicism and gave it new life by endowing it with a contemporary, and American, basis at his New York City Ballet.
His influence has spread across the country as former Balanchine dancers now direct ballet companies ranging from the Pennsylvania Ballet in Philadelphia to the Pacific Northwest Ballet in Seattle. And American Ballet Theatre, America's other leading company, is directed by
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