Bolshoi Confidential

by Simon Morrison

  Plisetskaya deliberately added to the strife by speaking her mind to the foreign press. While on tour in the summer of 1977, she revealed to newspaper and magazine reporters in France that she wanted to escape the theater’s tedium. Her comments were relayed by the Soviet embassy in Paris to the Kremlin, which had been tracking the reception of the Bolshoi Ballet abroad. For “bourgeois propagandists,” the interviews were a gold mine, and Plisetskaya had the audacity to stand by them. Stepan Chervonenko, the ambassador of the Soviet Union to France, reported on her activities to the Central Committee.

  Firstly, M. M. Plisetskaya expressed her thoughts about the stagnation in our ballet art, its alleged dullness and conservatism (“in Russia freedom must be earned”; young Soviet ballet dancers “are not given sufficient opportunities to travel outside of Russia”; “the Russian public also wants to see something new”; “Are there choreographers in Russia who reach beyond the outdated rules?—I (M. M. Plisetskaya) don’t know of any. —Then what’s to be hoped for?—Little if anything”). Secondly, M. M. Plisetskaya criticized the Bolshoi Theater, its repertoire, “which today under the influence of Yuriy Grigorovich has become deadly dull. Think about it, not one of the Bolshoi Theater choreographers has created a ballet for me!”143

  Upon returning to Moscow in July of 1977, Plisetskaya was invited to the Central Committee for tea and a chat with its director of cultural affairs, Vasiliy Shauro. The exchange is not recorded, but she apparently stood her ground, boasting of upsetting “ballet Moscow” and incensing the bureaucrats by bringing word to Russian ballet-goers that Maurice Béjart had discovered “new worlds” in dance.144 In attendance, besides Shauro, was Mikhaíl Zimyanin, the editor in chief of Pravda under Brezhnev and the Central Committee’s ideological watchdog. Plisetskaya had to go around him to bring one of Béjart’s worlds, a planet conjured into being through sexual fantasy, to the Bolshoi stage, and had to plead for Brezhnev’s approval through one of his assistants.

  Grigorovich had also shown an interest in Béjart, and dispossessed Bolshoi Ballet dancers slandered him for it, ending what might have been a revolution at the top. For Plisetskaya, however, Béjart seemed the antipode to Grigorovich, a messianic iconoclast at once down and dirty and intensely cerebral, the escape valve for her aspirations. He claimed Plisetskaya as a kindred spirit, a “liberated” artist like himself, albeit one fluent in “the grand Soviet tradition.”145 For Bolshoi Ballet observers outside of Russia, this was not much of a compliment. Arlene Croce lampooned Béjart’s pretentiousness, describing his choreographies as once-fun nightclub acts masquerading as serious philosophical treatises. She suffered them, then swept them into the dustpan with a one-liner: “Béjart’s ballets are like serious parodies of things that are no longer taken seriously.”146

  Plisetskaya began to collaborate with Béjart, and he with her, in Brussels in 1975. There she starred in a revival of Béjart’s 1961 Bolero, standing on a blood-red table with a group of dancers seated in a half circle behind her, and another group in the background. The scenario derives from an earlier 1928 script by Ida Rubinstein and Bronislava Nijinskaya, in which an exotic gypsy maiden dances atop a table in an auberge in Spain, enticing and exciting the loins of the male spectators, the threat of gang rape made plain. When Maurice Ravel’s Basque-themed score began, Plisetskaya initiated a seduction rite. She learned the part in a week, having obsessed about doing it for a year (she had seen it in 1974 in Dubrovnik and claims that her letter to Béjart expressing her desperate desire to perform the dance disappeared, like most mail bearing foreign addresses, in the Soviet postal service). The movements “came hard” to her, owing to the diluted Southeast Asian aspects of Béjart’s art and the cross-rhythms—with four counts in the dance rubbing up against three in the music; in truth, the surrounding men in the cast had trickier rhythmic misalignments to navigate.147

  The effort showed, and her performance evinces a studied, self-conscious coolness. It was not definitive—the American ballerina Suzanne Farrell, and Béjart’s own dancers, both male and female, also gave the role its soft-porn sizzle—but it was nonetheless a statement, a declaration of intent. Béjart sang Plisetskaya’s praises in a filmed recollection of their collaboration, folding his arm around her shoulder paternalistically as she looks away from the camera, suddenly the shy, retiring Soviet citizen. But she fought hard to bring his “striptease,” as it was derided in the Central Committee, to Moscow, using her official awards and several decades of service to the Bolshoi as leverage.148 Bolero received grudging last-minute permission for a performance in Moscow in 1977, along with a dance about Isadora Duncan that Béjart created especially for Plisetskaya.

  Objections from defenders of Russian-Soviet tradition poured in, as they had for Carmen Suite and even Grigorovich’s Ivan the Terrible. Both the outspoken red-haired diva and the ballet master with the no-nonsense buzz cut were heckled by ballet-going puritans. Grigorovich seemed to be going in for shock value and titillation—“shame on you!”149 The defenders of Soviet moral values feared that his next ballet, The Golden Age, would traffic further in tawdriness. It included, after all, gangsters and shooting, cabaret dancing, musclemen, and musclewomen.

  The result was tamer than expected. Grigorovich’s version of The Golden Age updated the Yakobson-Shostakovich ballet from 1930. Some of the brash original score was tossed, with the rest rearranged and supplemented to make the music more lyrical. Shostakovich’s two piano concertos and an interlude he composed for a drama by Honoré de Balzac provided music for the adagios, which are given out, like meals on a ration card, to the hero and heroine, Boris and Rita. Boris (danced in the premiere and on subsequent tours by Irek Mukhamedov) is a fisherman in a Russian seaside town, who must rescue Rita (danced first by Natalya Bessmertnova, then by Alla Mikhalchenko) from her demeaning job in a cabaret. She escapes his clutches and ends up dressed in white just like Boris, the stain of her days in the cabaret bleached out. The moon and the stars bless their love, before individual desires are necessarily sublimated in the collective. The seaside folk festival that opened the ballet resumes, as Boris and Rita disappear into the crowd.

  Grigorovich coauthored an illustrated book about the ballet to explain his transformation of the original 1930 version, and his collaborators likewise attempted to justify the ballet in articles and reviews.150 They argued that the cluttered original scenario, by Alexander Ivanovsky, prevented Shostakovich from expressing his true musical self—at least as defined by his later years. Had he composed The Golden Age in a mature voice, the argument continued, the ballet would have had the same lyrical content that Grigorovich brought to it—never mind that the lyrical content dates not from the late 1970s, when the ballet was restaged, but rather from the 1930s and 1950s. Thus references to the original ballet’s stylizations are highlighted as stylizations; the past appears in quotation marks. But the plot of the ballet is no less hackneyed, no less a caricature, than the divertissements, and so it proved a difficult product for the actual flesh-and-blood dancers of the Bolshoi to perform with zest. Still, they did so, at home in the Bolshoi Theater in 1982, for the Soviet television broadcast in 1983, and on international tour in 1987. “The Bolshoi dancers defy us not to adore them and their vehicle,” the Los Angeles Times concluded. “They are very competent high-pressure salespersons.” Then some acidic remarks about the actual dancing: “The corps struts, gesticulates, preens, twirls and contorts with an irresistible combination of Rockette precision and pristine Muscovite fervor. The secondary dancers—most notably Stanislav Chasov as the frenetic nightclub emcee—perform as if lives were at stake. The youthful principals manage to convey savoir-faire and conviction under fatuous, demeaning pressure.”151

  The ballet marked the end of an era, not just for Grigorovich but for the Soviet Union. Six days after the premiere, Brezhnev died, and with him the softer, gentler edition of Stalinism that had defined his regime. The supreme leader had covered his chest in medals in his final years, hiding behind the
emblems of power as the USSR lurched along, living standards low but stable, health care and pensions guaranteed, dissent squashed, the past and the future replaced by an eternal present. “Until,” to quote the title of a book on the Brezhnevite stagnation, “it was no more.”152

  PLISETSKAYA TOOK A PASS on stagnation, and on “fatuous, demeaning pressure,” devoting her final years at the Bolshoi to her own creative initiatives. She created two chamber ballets to music by her husband that did not require massive resources or a large number of performers; both set texts by Anton Chekhov, bringing that writer to the ballet stage for the first time. The process was predictably arduous, since Grigorovich had effectively blackballed her. Chulaki and the general directors of the Bolshoi Theater who succeeded him (including, between 1976 and 1979, Georgiy Ivanov) upheld the de facto ban. Plisetskaya either had to stage her dances at another venue or plead her case to the minister of culture, Pyotr Demichev.

  She did, and he supported her. Doubtless her husband, Shchedrin, used his own influence as chairman of the Union of Russian Composers. Thus her ballets were staged at the Bolshoi in 1980 and 1985.

  The first, The Seagull (Chayka), is metatheatrical. The cast includes an actor, an actress, and two writers—one an aesthete, the other an anaesthete. The action includes a play within the play, and the staging references the scandalous 1896 premiere of Chekhov’s original. Plisetskaya’s sequel, Lady with the Lapdog (Dama so sobachkoy), is of more modest proportions. Premiered in celebration of the ballerina’s sixtieth birthday, it is a dialogue between a modest, provincial woman at a seaside resort and a Muscovite who surprises himself by developing genuine feelings for her. The ballet is a Don Juan tale of sorts, but without its erotic and exotic aspects. Yet the staging was still “naturalistic” enough to offend crustier Soviet TV watchers, who thought it inappropriate for their children to see Plisetskaya partnering with a male less than half her age.153 Their duet imagines the affair that might have happened, each escaping seemingly unfulfilling marriages for the delight of a new lover, had forbearance not prevailed. He gazes into the sunset, bleak and jaded; she looks into the light, the emotional equivalent of an iceberg.

  Nothing more opposite to Spartacus can be imagined. Her adaptations of Chekhov appealed to non-ballet audiences, to lovers of serious drama and music. The drama unfolds in gestures, the ballet steps compressed, as it were, from octave leaps to half steps. The reduced technical demands suited not only the restrained qualities of Chekhov’s bourgeois tragedy, but obviously also Plisetskaya’s own inevitable decline as a dancer. She could no longer perform the parts of fancy-free girls or cursed princesses, but her own ballets kept her on the stage after she was pensioned. In her youth, it seemed that she could go anywhere in the universe she liked, conquering time and space. As the years advanced, her universe shrank to a point of abstraction.

  She was accused of hubristic overreach in her ballets (much as Vasiliev would be accused of hubristic overreach for taking on Shakespeare’s Macbeth in 1980), and they could not in truth survive without her name in the cast. Russian ballet observers outside of the USSR expected more of her self-declared love of “formalism” than “guts and stamina.” Alastair Macaulay tut-tutted about Anna Karenina in a piece in The New Yorker and, critiquing a BBC program on the Bolshoi, said of The Seagull and Lady with the Lapdog: “Chunks of her Chekhov choreographies were then shown, and there descended between the television screen and this viewer a thick fog of incomprehension.”154 In her well-publicized eagerness to distance herself from Grigorovich’s hyper-obvious narratives and the crudities of the “mimeless mime,” in which the same arm or hand gesture is made dozens of times in variation without the meaning ever changing, she had forgotten that dance in and of itself, pure dance, is not automatically meaningful.155

  Grigorovich shunned her, as did the artists under his control, the communists, and the “bitch goddess” known as Mother Russia.156 In her sixties, Plisetskaya concentrated her energies elsewhere. She directed and coached, held master classes, and adjudicated competitions throughout the world. She brought Carmen along with her on most of her trips, Anna Karenina and the lady with her dog much less often. In the late 1960s, she had told the journalist George Feifer that she had as much chance of taking vacation in Italy as “flying to Mars on a broom.”157 Eventually she got her broom. From 1983 to 1985, Plisetskaya held the position of artistic director of the ballet of the Rome Opera; during the last three years of the decade she served as head of the Spanish National Ballet in Madrid. The Seagull was tolerated in Boston in 1988, as part of a Soviet-American cultural exchange. After the show, Plisetskaya released a dove, Soviet symbol of peace, into the rafters of the theater.158 She remained a Soviet citizen until the end of the Soviet Union, but by the 1980s she could accept the foreign offers she liked without resistance from the authorities. Frustrated by her failed attempts to depose Grigorovich, she left—as had Stravinsky; Diaghilev; the defected dancers Baryshnikov, Makarova, and Nureyev; plus countless other members of the Russian-Soviet artistic intelligentsia before her. In 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, she moved with her husband to Vilnius, Lithuania, the birthplace of her mother, and then to Munich. Beloved in every theater except the one she loved the most, she retired as a prima ballerina of the world stage even as she still longed for the Bolshoi.159

  She had fought for, not against, Russia throughout her life and considered it her home from the distance she maintained as a global citizen. Even those who never saw her dance felt her absence from the international stage. Her last Russian state honor (she compiled an impressive list of them from other nations) came from President Vladimir Putin in 2000; she declined to comment on his administration and kept essentially silent about the Bolshoi in her final years, letting prying researchers know that she had said all she wanted to say in her memoir.

  GRIGOROVICH AGED IN place, with no thought of retiring, pulling back, or letting go. He remained the eternal overlord. After finishing Ivan the Terrible, he presided over the bicentennial of the Bolshoi in 1976. He and Ivanov lobbied for funds to repaint and repair the cracks in the walls before the official celebrations began. Tributes poured in from the Kremlin, artists, and even the boss of the machine-building plant Kommunar, whose House of Culture hosted Maksimova, Vasiliev, and Plisetskaya for performances. The cosmetic repairs were completed, and Pravda found the Bolshoi looking “young” again.160

  As part of the bicentennial celebrations, Grigorovich created dances for the Siberian melodrama Angara, set to music by a young composer, Andrey Eshlay, and based on an exceedingly popular play that had made the rounds of Soviet theaters and been filmed for movies and television. It concerns a simple Soviet woman destined for psychological transformation. Her husband drowns in the Angara River, leaving her alone to care for their two children. She is also called upon to replace her husband in his job. She faces obstacles but ultimately makes it all look easy. Angara lasted in the Bolshoi Theater repertoire for eight years; its sentiments presaged those of the iconic Soviet movie of 1979, Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears.

  After The Golden Age was staged in 1982, Grigorovich slowed further as a choreographer. The Supreme Soviet offered him a golden handshake in the form of the Hero of Soviet Labor award on the last day of 1986, but Grigorovich did not retire. The following spring, Sovetskaya kul’tura announced the “capital renovation” of the Bolshoi, everything from the foundations to the plaster-work. It was to begin in the summer, Grigorovich explained, then pause for three months of performances, then resume. During the planned shutdown, for an extremely underestimated “2–3 years,” ballets and operas were to be performed in the Kremlin Palace and on another stage, known as the New Stage, located just across from the Bolshoi.161

  After years of extreme economic stagnation, the Soviet Union began to undergo an overhaul initiated by the last Soviet leader, Mikhaíl Gorbachev. He had ascended to the highest ranks of the Communist nomenklatura from the humblest of places: the collective farms of
the North Caucasus, where, as a teenager, he drove combine harvesters. He worked for local, regional, and national Communist Party offices as the USSR weakened; his tinkering with broken-down industries and the discredited constitution merely hastened the collapse. His provincialism was obvious to those who heard him speak on television and radio in the Soviet Union, but Gorbachev proved a capable statesman. Perestroika (rebuilding) failed as an economic initiative, but the liberalization known as glasnost’ (openness) succeeded, albeit too much so for the regime to survive. The Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986 could not be covered up as radiation spread from Ukraine through Europe. Gorbachev failed to put down the ethnic strife in Azerbaijan. The end of the Soviet empire was nigh.

  His essentially bankrupt government did not have the resources to commit to the renovation of ballet and opera houses. To survive, the artists of the Bolshoi needed more than ever to tour. The public abroad continued to take to them, as did the critics, since the performers demonstrated such astonishing technique and commitment. As in the past, reaching back to the Sankovskaya era, the principal dancers had famous Bolshoi retirees as personal coaches, and these luminaries (Ulanova, Kondratyeva) passed along their wisdom. The coaching system could have its downsides in the form of overpolished, unspontaneous performances, but it helped to preserve the old-time aura. It was felt in 1986 in London, despite concerns about the “bad wigs and fondness for turquoise eyeshadow.”162 Ticket lines were long, and the flamboyance missed after the dancers and their props had left town.