In a studio at the recently opened Universal Ballet Academy in Washington, D.C., a dozen young dancers mill around center floor, waiting for class to begin. Clad in the usual practice garb - tights, tank tops, and no tops, a rolled up polo shirt, an assortment of leotards, gray-tinged legwarmers, or heavy men's socks cut out at the toe to fit over ballet slippers - they could blend easily into any class in a number of ballet theaters throughout the world. As they move to the iron-footed portable barres that circle the room and advance through exercise after exercise - plies, developpees, tendues, battements, and rounds de jambe - a certain magic sets in. Feet flash out and back, the carriage of the arms is perfect and unwavering, backs are open wide. After the barre the dancers move into a group at the back of the room and step forward in pairs and trios to travel a long diagonal, executing steps from the classical cannon - glides, jumps, arabesques - that are then developed into choreographic patterns.
Throughout the held poses, the big jumps, and the grand finales, it becomes clear that these are dancers speaking a common language. In the audience, a slim, middle-aged man leans forward in his seat, back straight, hands clasped. His brow raised in a state of perpetual alertness, the eyes cut across the room, following first this dancer, then that one. Watching their held poses, big jumps, dramatic grand finales, his thin lips pull into a faint reserved smile of satisfaction. This is Oleg Vinogradov, artistic director of the Kirov Ballet and the Universal Ballet Academy, and these students are the Kirov's youngest stars. They are the latest proponents of a 200-year-old tradition of classical dance and he has brought them to the United States, by way of preview, to "show what it is we Russians can do."
East-West Link
Launched in September when it opened its door to its first forty-five students, the Universal Ballet Academy (UBA), located in a renovated former Catholic seminary, establishes a link between American dance education and the most renowned bastion of classical dance in the world. Named to the academy in 1989, Vinogradov, fifty-three, recruited a faculty of four Russian teachers, and an administrative staff headed by associate director Oleg Briansky. The academy is funded by the Universal Ballet Foundation, which is financed by businesses associated with Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. The school's state-of-the-art facilities include four large studios with flooring designed to prevent injury, locker rooms with Jacuzzis and temperature-controlled lockers, a dormitory accommodating sixty students, lounges, an auditorium, and video and audio libraries. A total of $8 million has been spent on the project since its inception in 1986. When asked to comment on the amount of money expended, Vinogradov shrugs. "I never concern myself with finances, neither here nor in Leningrad. Eight million dollars. I don't know, is it a lot? I do know there's not a ballet complex like this anywhere in the world. The sponsors of the school have taken great care to make sure that all the necessary conditions to create excellent ballet dancers are here. Now we will show what were are capable of, having been afforded such fine conditions."
A man with a confirmed interest in what he calls "modern ballet," it is Vinogradov who brought the Kirov back from artistic bankruptcy to reclaim its place as one of the world's great ballet institutions. His goals for the UBA are no less grand. Envisioning a "Ballet
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