The house was a little better than half full one recent night as the lights dimmed and the corps of lithe, lean dancers took to the stage. They twisted and jumped and lurched about in a variety of modern compositions to the accompaniment of recorded pop music, beneath a scrim of lava-lamp psychedelic lights.
Nothing much unusual in any of that to American eyes. Unremarkable, overly exuberant modern dance performances go on before half-full houses on stages all across the United States and Europe many nights of the week.
Except this was not just any stage in New York or London or Paris. This was the venerable, incomparable, suffocatingly traditional Bolshoi Ballet Theater in Moscow. And things like modern dance, canned music, lava lamps and– gasp!–empty seats simply are not done at the Bolshoi.
At least, they didn’t used to be done at the Bolshoi.
Yikes! Talkin’ ’bout a revolution! Somebody drained Swan Lake!
Five years after communism collapsed and the grim, gray Soviet Union cracked apart, the Iron Curtain has finally lifted at the Bolshoi as well. A new director, new choreographers, new dances, even a new financial system for paying the performers are all suddenly blowing gusts of fresh air into what had remained, even in the new, untamed free-market Russia, a musty and moribund outpost of stultifying Soviet classicism.
There’s a palpable sense of freedom inside the gaudy, baroque, red-velvet theater these days. The prima ballerinas are discovering the freedom to dance new roles and characters and to make guest appearances with famous ballet companies abroad. Directors have the artistic freedom to invite foreign dancers and actually incorporate their ideas into Russian ballets.
Then there’s that other new freedom: the freedom to fail. The new Bolshoi has experienced that as well. An autumn tour of the western United States was a financial washout, and the modern dance performances the Bolshoi has staged at home have sometimes played to empty chairs.
Yet none of that is particularly worrying to Vyacheslav Gordeev, the man behind the dramatic changes at the Bolshoi Ballet who is now in the middle of his second season as the dance troupe’s artistic director.
“The Bolshoi has always been a barometer of social changes in this country,” Gordeev observed, relaxing in his ornate alcove office stuffed with enough red velvet Louis XIV-style furniture to fill a museum exhibit, or at least a good-sized booth at a flea market.
“When there was stagnation in political life, there was stagnation at the Bolshoi. Now the critics demand modern dance, and when we give it to them, then they demand the classics. But that’s OK. It’s all part of Russia’s renewal.”
Renewal arrived at the Bolshoi in the spring of 1995, when the ballet’s longtime boss, Yuri Grigorovich, was ousted from power in an artistic putsch so freighted with political overtones that President Boris Yeltsin personally intervened to carry it out.
Grigorovich, hailed as a masterful choreographer in his day, had ruled the Bolshoi Ballet with an iron hand for 31 years, setting the world standard for classic performances of ballets such as “Swan Lake” and “Giselle.” But Grigorovich’s choreographic ideas had gone stale years before and he resolutely refused to consider anything new from outside of his cloistered repertoire.
Russian balletomanes and unsuspecting foreign tourists still flocked to the Bolshoi and filled its seats every night. But an evening at the theater at the end of Grigorovich’s reign was as static, predictable and even tedious as a grade-school assembly.
With the appointment of Gordeev and Vladimir Vasiliyev, who heads the entire Bolshoi theater complex including its opera and orchestra, the Bolshoi’s heavy carved-wood front doors flew open.
The two men, former ballet stars, immediately introduced a western-style contract system to reward the ballet’s best dancers, freeing them to perform abroad without penalty and then return to the Bolshoi as their home base. Gordeev began staging what he calls “evenings of modern dance,” and earlier this year choreographed his own new ballet, “Last Tango,” complete with the lava lights.
Soon, excitement started coursing through the corps de ballet.
“In the past, there were times when I could go for two months without any part in the repertoire,” explained ballerina Juliana Malkhassiants, whose specialty during 13 years at the Bolshoi has been performing character and folk dances. “Now I have seven or eight performances every month, in operas and modern dances. I could never have dreamed of such opportunities before.”
Some of Moscow’s most important ballet critics have been less enthusiastic, however.
“Now, whether we want it or not, we are witnesses to changes in the Bolshoi Theater,” said Valeria Uralskaya, grande dame of Russia’s ballet critics and editor-in-chief of Ballet Magazine. “It is a painful process. So far it has not resulted in better performances.”
Uralskaya’s principal complaint seems to be that, while Gordeev and Vasiliyev are talented dancers, they have yet to prove themselves as choreographers. That, and the fact that Gordeev likes to change performances on short notice.
“I can’t even publish a schedule because they are always changing the repertoire,” she lamented. “They have no stability there now.”
Nor do they have much money. The Soviet government used to underwrite all of the Bolshoi’s costs when the ballet was a cultural weapon in the Cold War arsenal. Now the Russian government’s contribution covers only base salaries for the 216 dancers in the ballet corps. Those base salaries average out to the equivalent of $200 per month, about what an average Russian worker now earns, although the best dancers receive additional stipends each time they perform.
All the other costs of running the theater–the expense of scenery and costumes, mounting new productions and renovating the crumbling theater building–must be raised through ticket sales or other means, such as sales of videos, CDs and Bolshoi Ballet T-shirts, another recent innovation.
The financial pressures make Gordeev’s modern dance performances look more than just artistically bold: The theater can scarcely afford nights like the recent one when “Last Tango” failed to fill the house.
Asked to explain the empty seats, Gordeev said, “The number of people coming to the theater depends on the general situation in the city. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are bad because people are busy working at their jobs. And if terrorists explode a bomb on a bus or the metro, that naturally reduces the audience.”
The failure of the Bolshoi Ballet’s U.S. tour in October was a stunning blow as well. Dance critics in Las Vegas and Los Angeles, the two major cities on the tour, praised the performances, but skeptical audiences simply refused to show up, doubting that the Bolshoi was really the Bolshoi.
That was because, in the wake of the Soviet collapse, numerous pretender troupes calling themselves the Bolshoi had already trekked across the United States. They were in fact all false Bolshois, featuring dancers who had retired from the ballet company or been fired or had never even set foot on the stage of the big theater in Moscow.
Yet for dancers like Malkhassiants, who was on the U.S. tour and has had many opportunities to dance abroad, no foreign stage can ever match the Bolshoi in Moscow.
“A real debut,” she said succinctly, “is when you are accepted on the stage at the Bolshoi.”
