Bolshoi Confidential

by Simon Morrison

  ALMOST A CENTURY before Winston Churchill defined Russia as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” the satirical novelist Nikolay Gogol wrote a parody of a satire of a lampoon about the country. In 1842 he published Dead Souls, wherein the spirits of serfs are bought and sold in the divine equivalent of a stock-market bubble; in his telling, landlords are brutal or grotesque, peasants wretched bumpkins. Positive values are hard to find, Gogol proposes. Baseness is the heart of the tale, concealed by a cloud of intrigue and spiritual ramblings. Narratives proliferate, interpretations of actual events substitute for the details, the facts. Russia has always been good at this: generating multiple meanings, conceiving competing realities, insinuating that we might never know the truth, that there might not be any truth at all.

  At the end of part one of the novel a sleigh races along the winter steppe, and Gogol’s narrator ponders the consequences of the wild ride. Will it end? Will it end well? Perhaps Sankovskaya and Ulanova and Plisetskaya asked and answered this same question in their own troubled times, in gestures rather than words as the sweat dripped down their backs. Recently an answer of sorts came from the bejeweled prima ballerina assoluta at the Bolshoi, Svetlana Zakharova. When asked about the future of her art in her country, she replied, “Only God knows what will happen to us.”3 Zakharova, a star who floats above the rank and file, nevertheless responded in the plural, considering “what will happen to us,” the dancers. The thought is that the performers at the Bolshoi, who know to distrust the ballet masters and the administrators overseeing them all, depend only on one another. This interaction is one of the elements of their style. This is the collective soul. As Arlene Croce wrote about the Soviet incarnation of the Bolshoi Ballet, “With long experience and that theatrical instinct which Bolshoi dancers alone seem to possess, they took their support from each other … No other resource was available.”4 Yet love for Mother Russia proves not enough to keep them home.

  At the end of 2008, Alexei Ratmansky jumped off the sleigh, resigning from his position as artistic director at the Bolshoi. His innovations had met resistance from old-guard dancers like Tsiskaridze, which in turn motivated Ratmansky to promote up-and-coming dancers over established ones and weed out the naysayers. The nastiness that resulted included “phone calls in the night, threats.”5 Ratmansky quit to escape the harassment, and accepted the position of visiting choreographer with American Ballet Theater in New York.

  In both Moscow and New York, Ratmansky has made ballet, a mature art, seem fresh and young again. Recently the dance historian Jennifer Homans has proposed that ballet has not changed much since George Balanchine, that the art is dying. Our world has no patience for angels who want to teach us morals, she suggests, and if people want something ethereal, pixels seem better than pixies.6 But that might be too simple. Classical music has died a thousand deaths, likewise opera and likewise ballet. Yet all endure. Ratmansky has enriched the ballet repertoire by re-creating certain Russian works that either were censored or never had a chance, owing to the suffocating political constraints of the Stalinist era. He is a counterfactual choreographer, seeming to believe that if things had gone differently in history, then narrative ballets on present-day themes would have prevailed over the coolly modernist abstractions of Balanchine and Stravinsky. He loves the what-might-have-been in ballet history, the what-could-have-been, and he has dedicated himself to making that alternate history real. Working from a post-Soviet perspective, and working outside of Russia, Ratmansky takes the measure of the decades and of the century that followed the revolution.

  Ratmansky seems also intent on liberating ballet from its own worst instincts. Interested in plot and character, he has put back the character dancing that Grigorovich took out of the Bolshoi repertoire, increased the tempi, and overstuffed the balletic phrases to increase by half or more the number of physical events per measure. Ratmansky finds his muse in the music of the Soviet composer Shostakovich, who was in his own youth (not his later years) an insurrectionist iconoclast. The composer was mistreated by the Soviet regime, as was Russian ballet in general. Ratmansky’s ballets to music by Shostakovich seem as though “created by some superhuman Methuselah,” writer and journalist Wendy Lesser remarks, “who enthusiastically participated in the Soviet Union’s early revolutionary fervor, suffered through the harsh repression of Stalinism and its dreary aftermath, and then emerged into a cosmopolitan twenty-first-century perspective from which he could view the whole preceding era with a certain amount of rueful distance.”7 In Ratmansky’s mind, ballet is still like a child, unruly and exuberant, who has yet to realize her full potential. His art has become more rhythmic than it was at the Bolshoi, his dances newly playful.

  And so in 2003, Ratmansky sought to restore the boisterous spirit of The Bright Stream, banned in 1936, without erasing its history. Thus he staged both the ballet itself and its reception, highlighting the prohibition against the composer Shostakovich and the choreographer Fyodor Lopukhov, staying true to their intent while also realizing the possibilities of the work—and of dance—for present-day audiences. An old couple pines for youth on the stoop of their dacha. Shostakovich parodied their nostalgia, as did Lopukhov, as does Ratmansky. Valerie Lawson glosses the resulting delights, including the performance of the old couple recalling their vanished youths on the stoop of their dacha in a patheticturned-sublime effort at a pas de deux. “She demands to be lifted at the end and while he kneels to bear her weight she drapes herself around his shoulders,” Lawson writes, “beaming with joy at the final pose.” The production, Lawson adds, brings to mind old-time, aw-shucks Broadway. Ratmansky includes “social dancing” in the mix, along with circus stunts. Amidst the games of dress-up and the congenial messing about, the characters somehow manage to harvest giant-sized vegetables from their collective farm, over-fulfilling Stalin’s Five Year Plan for agricultural development. Making reference to the denunciation of the original ballet in Pravda, which criticized the doll- or marionette-like behavior of the dancers, Ratmansky made them jostle as if tangled in strings. The cleverest episode in The Bright Stream featured, in the original 2003 cast, Sergey Filin in drag as a ballerina. In the specific performance Lawson annotates, the part was taken by Ruslan Skvortsov, arms “held in a ludicrously twee interpretation of a soft romantic position,” tulle billowing.8 The wit lies in the radical unnaturalness of the episode—it is hard (and a bit unusual) for a male dancer to move like Anna Pavlova—and that a ballerina with a five o’clock shadow succeeds in seducing a geriatric at his cottage. His wife turns up. She has evidently seen her husband succumb before and, having no patience for it, slaps him in the face.

  Ratmansky has also dusted off the agitprop spectacular The Flames of Paris, first choreographed in 1932 by Vasiliy Vaynonen. An excerpt from the revival was performed in 2011 at the gala performance celebrating the reopening of the Bolshoi Theater. The Flames of Paris is set in the third year of the French Revolution, which serves as a metaphor for the Russian Revolution. To the music of French revolutionary songs, quoted liberally and literally, the people storm the Tuileries Palace, oust their oppressors, and dance in triumph through the squares of Paris. The original choreographer was lauded for his crowd scenes, so the real revolution is converting ballet from its emphasis on the couple to an emphasis on the group—the essential communist principle. The essence of aesthetics under Stalin was people-mindedness, but Soviet choreographers like Lopukhov could never get the folk parts right. These always seemed strange, an anachronistic displacement of actual folk dances. Socialist realism was about the glorious existence to come, not the surrounding grayness. The doctrine was also premised on celebrated tales of yore, so that the directors of Russia saw less ruin in their wake, and more astonishing theatrical spectaculars.

  Ratmansky embraces that problem by successfully stylizing the stylizations. He somehow turns the aesthetic dogma of the 1930s into sincere drama, taking precepts that seemed aesthetically impotent in their own time and showing how they
might actually find force. There is caprice in his staging—with a morbid tinge, as Sarah Crompton claimed of a 2013 London performance starring Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev, two Russian dancers now living the high life in multiple time zones. The crowds waved their revolutionary hankies in blurry frenzy as Ratmansky privileged “great traversing jumps across the stage.”9 The glee ends with the thud of a guillotine; the celebration of agitprop turns into a kind of self-critique. The ideologies on which it is based, French turned Soviet, suddenly become dreadful. The dancers march in slow motion to the front of the stage looking like placards in a protest march, or the unblinking undead. This is Ratmansky’s own ending, not found in the original scenario, one that stages history as simultaneity. All of these events are imagined to cause effects as yet not understood.

  Ratmansky seems to want to tell us that he loves the Soviet aesthetic, but not the politics behind it. Or that he wishes the politics were different, or that he wishes ballet were different. That last wish is something that he can grant himself as he reaches back in time, into the forsaken Soviet repertoire, to resurrect ballet’s past and thus its future. In his more recent revivals of the three Tchaikovsky ballets, The Nutcracker, The Sleeping Beauty, and Swan Lake, a complicated relationship develops between archival artifact, familiar steps from favorite versions, and new inspiration. The wholes are more than sums of the parts, and look glorious, a mirage that pastes the present onto the past as a unified experience. In his most inspired moments, Ratmansky’s ballets fold one layer of time onto another, sometimes in searing radiance, other times in calm glow. Great artists make simple claims: Aren’t dancers beautiful? Ratmansky asks. Aren’t people?

  Meanwhile, the Bolshoi and the Kremlin across the square are left to quarrel not about the past and the present, but the future. There is no unified experience, of course, just the myths of nation and culture and art that arise from the imaginations of historians. President Vladimir Putin stands at the center of a small circle of associates, his motivations and intentions opaque by design or accident, as his administration, comprising the heads of the ministries and industries and the Federal Security Service, emulate Soviet and imperial Russian authoritarianism. The budget depends on oil, but the media reminds its audience of the spiritual and not material might locked within the black earth, the greatness, tapped and untapped, of the geographical landmass that stretches from the Baltic to the Pacific. Russia nurtures the impulse to expand even more, to reclaim the empire under Catherine the Great.

  The outsized contribution to culture that began in the nineteenth century, cultivated in part on the Bolshoi stage, is central to the national narrative of Russia. Putin seems to fashion his rule after that of Tsar Nicholas I, which included imperial expansion, the crushing of an uprising, and the exploitation of the agitprop powers of the Russian Orthodox Church. Like Putin, Nicholas liked to depict himself as a strongman, unfettered by the rationalist materialism privileged in the West. Every nation lives in its own combination of realities, and truth and facts can seem overrated and old-fashioned. In Russia today, it is the task of the media to construct the illusions in support of Putin’s imperial mission—and the task of the state-financed arts as well. The suppression of dissent and the promotion of traditional values by religious and cultural officials have left their mark, even as the government touts the legacies of victims of earlier periods of suppression and conservatism.10 Perhaps there is an acknowledgment here that artists, even those badgered into compromise, lay true claim to the Russian soul.

  THE BOLSHOI IS the most Russian of the nation’s cultural institutions and ballet the most Russian of the arts. Since its founding in 1776, the government has regarded the theater as an emblem of power, whether ideological or commercial or both, and ballet at the Bolshoi—its muscular style, its bravura, and its self-conscious insistence on its own historical importance—likewise captures something emblematic. For Russianness (or Americanness or any kind of collective identification, for that matter) is a process, a performance. It is tied to place, perhaps, following the imperatives of empire, but dominion can encompass more than landmass. In much Russian philosophical thought, the spiritual and the rational unite under the premise that human experience is boundless, and desire uncontainable. Existence lies beyond the self, and the world is best understood not through closed cerebral processes but through intuition and the creative act; those acts should be grand, even at the risk of ruin. To burn down Moscow to defeat Napoleon is to make sacrifice the price of survival. This act was turned into art, but also seen as art.

  Moscow has been rebuilt at regular intervals since 1612, and the Bolshoi repeatedly since the early nineteenth century. Preservationists decried the 2011 renovation, but like the city itself, the Bolshoi as an institution, as an icon, sees the past in service of the present, which loops back to rewrite the past. Tradition is invented anew—inscribed on the bodies of dancers at the Bolshoi generation after generation, advertised to audiences at home and abroad, sometimes sold for profit, and otherwise hoarded as an inheritance, a birthright.

  The history of the theater and of the ballet may be told in conventional, empirical fashion from then until now. Shocks and traumas duel with recalibrations and retrenchments. The narrative respects its own laws of storytelling; dancers live their lives loving their art; everyone strives. Thus the Bolshoi found a fresh start when Vladimir Urin was appointed general director in 2013, and now with Makhar Vaziev running the ballet as of 2016. They inherit the soul and the repertoire, the cliché and the truth behind it: Ballet is the cruelest and most wondrous of the arts, a discipline and a dream that asks people to aspire to the angelic in a demonic competitive process. The results of that process at the Bolshoi, time and time again, have proven artistically stupendous but personally, physically catastrophic. Yet the dancers keep dancing, hoping to escape the constraints of the here and now and grasp instead at something everlasting. There is no other choice. To dance, after all, is to condition the body, and with it the mind, to let go.

  PICTURE SECTION

  The Maddox theater, predecessor of the Bolshoi, circa 1800

  Side view of the Bolshoi Theater, with Russian imperial soldiers on parade, undated

  Ekaterina Sankovskaya, “as fleet as lightning” in the ballet Le corsaire

  Illustration of the appearance of the swan maidens for the original 1877 production of Swan Lake

  Playbill for the original 1869 production of Don Quixote, a benefit for Anna Sobeshchanskaya

  Anna Sobeshchanskaya as Odette in Swan Lake

  Ballerina and silent movie actress Vera Karalli as Odette in 1906

  Studio image for Ivan Clustine’s ballet Stars (1898), to a scenario by Karl Valts, showing Clustine, as Castro, holding a lightning bolt

  One of Gorsky’s “choreographic photo etudes,” 1907–09

  Alexander Gorsky

  Gorsky’s Children’s ballet Ever-Fresh Flowers, 1922

  A portrait of Lenin looms over the Bolshoi Theater stage, beneath an electric sign directing “the best people to the Soviet”

  Caricature of Elena Malinovskaya, Bolshoi Theater general director under Lenin and Lunacharsky, in a foul mood

  Malinovskaya at her desk

  Employee registration form for Vladimir Mutnïkh, Bolshoi Theater general director, who was arrested and executed in 1937

  Stalin with members of the government in a Bolshoi Theater loge in the mid-1930s

  Postcard image of Ekaterina Geltser in La bayadère

  The Soviet steamer arrives in the Chinese port in The Red Poppy

  Asaf and Sulamith Messerer in The Bright Stream, 1935

  Ekaterina Geltser as Táo-Huā in The Red Poppy, “the first Soviet ballet”

  Leonid Lavrovsky rehearses The Tale of the Stone Flower, 1953

  Mother Earth swallows the villain of The Tale of the Stone Flower, 1954, by command of the mistress of Copper Mountain

  Yuriy Grigorovich

  Khachaturian at the piano in the
Bolshoi Theater in 1957, with Yuriy Fayer, Leonid Lavrovsky, and Igor Moiseyev listening in

  Maya Plisetskaya and her brother Alik in childhood

  Alicia Alonso, minister of culture Ekaterina Furtseva, Plisetskaya, and Grigorovich at the first international ballet competition in Moscow, 1969

  Plisetskaya in The Dying Swan, 1940s