ARTS
Dance
Simply magical
Deirdre McMahon
The Kirov Ballet (Business Design Centre, Islington and Covent Garden) The Australian Ballet (Covent Garden)
The Kirov Ballet last performed in London in 1970, at the Festival Hall. Natalia Makarova defected during that season and this week Festival Ballet is performing her production of Swan Lake at the Festival Hall. The dancers who defected from the Kirov since 1961 — Nureyev, Makarova and Baryshnikov — have enriched our knowledge of the 19th- century classics with which they grew up in Leningrad. In recent years, however, their productions of the classics (especially Nureyev's) have become more and more muddled and wrong-headed. The Kirov, on their tour of Ireland and Britain, are demonstrating the supreme virtue of their Swan Lake and Giselle — simplicity. The Kirov doesn't belabour audiences with 'dramatic logic' or Freudian concepts. Their Swan Lake, designed by Igor Ivanov, is light and spacious; there is none of the appalling clutter of the Royal Ballet's latest version which seems deliberately designed to obscure as much as possible. For the Kirov, the beginning and the end is the dancing and the power of their perform- ance lies in the fact that every dancer on that stage knows what he or she is doing and why. It is not just a matter Of well-drilled swans or tidy Wilis. The dan- cers project an impalpable force in scenes one normally never thinks about — at the end of Act I as twilight falls when the dancers drift gently offstage, holding their lanterns; or in Act IV when the lines of black and white swans step mournfully down the stage. There is nothing histrionic here, just magical images that linger in the memory. No image is more magical than that of Altinay Assylmuratova.
Assylmuratova first attracted attention when the KirOv went to Paris in 1982. I saw her then in the Esmeralda pas de six and I A subtle and powerful musicality: the Kirov's star ballerina Altinay Assylmuratova, with Faroukh Ruzimatov. Caught her Swan Lake in Paris last Decem- ber. She is one of the most beautiful women on the ballet stage at present, and besides her striking oriental looks she has a voluptuous quality of movement that en- riches every role she dances. She has been Compared with Callas, a piece of hyperbole typical of the reaction she has provoked since 1982, but there is some point to the comparison. When Assylmuratova dances Swan Lake and Giselle, she rejuvenates these dreary old warhorses in the way Callas did with the bel canto repertory. When she dances them, they deserve the title 'classics'.
Assylmuratova is the only dancer I have seen who sustains the dance as drama right through the ballet. She has a subtle and Powerful musicality (not a Kirov strength) which she deploys with a remarkable range of shading. In Act II her Odette is full of yearning and pathos; in Act III her Odile is warm, radiant but voracious. Assylmurato- va's real triumph is in Act IV. This is a notoriously difficult act. The fireworks of the previous acts are over and one often gets the feeling that ballerinas are simply marking time until the curtain calls. Assyl- inuratova's Act IV is a tragic elegy. At one point she does a series of travelling arabes- ques in a backward diagonal. The momen- tum is checked as she sinks briefly in fondu, arms outstretched towards her part- ner. It was just a moment but one which illuminated music and choreography. Only once in a generation (if that) does a dancer of her calibre come along. Savour it while you can.
The Kirov Giselle is, like Swan Lake, mira- culous in its simplicity. The drama flows from the dancing, not from a producer's conceits. The girl harvesters in Act I, as they dance in twos and threes, are a sinister portent of the Wilis; at the end of Act I the music is played slowly and solemnly, not pounded out as it is in most Western productions. Act II is a particular triumph. Again, dramatic motifs like the cross and the lilies are sustained consistently. Tatyana Terekliova is a superb Myrtha, the incarna- tion of thwarted love as she glides implac- ably across the stage. Faroukh Ruzimatov Was a Byronic Albrecht but there is some- thing about his dancing that leaves me cold he is finished, competent and disci- Plined but there is a straining after effect that robs his dancing of spontaneity. His Giselle was Veronika Ivanova. She was pretty but colourless and her footwork was uncomfortably blunt at times. At Covent Garden the Australian Ballet opened the bicentennial celebrations with its production of The Sleeping Beauty. This has been staged by its artistic director, Maina Gielgud. It was an agreeably clear, unfussy production with an impressively solid performance from the whole com- pany. How nice it was to see perfectly matching attitudes from the fairies in the Prologue, an image I haven't seen on the Covent Garden stage for many years.
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