Laurencia
For some, watching on stage two of the greatest dancers in the world might be an experience akin to a state of trance. Your hands start to sweat, your eyes pop out at each jump, and your heart palpitates from excitement. This happens when one watches Ivan Vasiliev and Natalia Osipova dancing.
All the superlatives have been used to describe those tremendously gifted dancers, ex-Bolshoi stars who stunned the ballet world at the end of 2011 by moving to the Saint Petersburg Mikhailovsky Theatre, which stage can be called 'intimate' compared to the gargantuan Muscovite arena. A year ago, Bolshoi employees were sniping after the real-life couple's departure that the Mikhailovsky Theater is so small that Vasiliev risked leaping into the orchestra.
What Vasiliev demonstrated on November the 18th, dancing the Frondoso character in the Spanish-inspired and Soviet-era ballet Laurencia, is that he can leap higher than ever.
I had the privilege to watch him during his Bolshoi years in Don Quixote, Spartacus and Le Jeune et La Mort (just a few days before his 'defection'). Seeing him and Osipova on the smaller stage -- which magnifies their prodigious leaps and supersonic turns-- one can imagine the sense of loss that the Bolshoi must still feel. Not that the most famous theater in the world is in need of stars. But virtuoso dancers like Osipova and especially Vasiliev come every two or three generations.
Laurencia, a 1939 ballet set by Vakhstang Chabukiani, himself a Soviet ballet star, is not all about mighty jumps. You need the wit of Don Quixote's Kitri and Basilio and the revolutionary feeling of Flammes de Paris to be truthful to the work, based on Spanish playwright and poet Lope de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna. Laurencia has the appeal of an easy and clear synopsis: a peasant girl, Laurencia, leads a popular revolt against a ruthless tyrant who has wronged her and the ballet ends in a victory scene very much like la prise de la Bastille.
In a reminiscence of Vasily Vainonen's Flammes de Paris, set more than a decade after the October revolution, Laurencia's heroic theme must have been indeed, as the evening programme states, an "unqualified success" ahead of Russia's entry into World War II. Because soviet ballets LOVE their heroes. In the last two scenes, Osipova's Laurencia is as much the jolly spanish peasant who flirts with her enamorado Frondoso as Marianne in Delacroix's la Liberté Guidant le Peuple.
Both ballets show directly the righteousness of revolutions and nod to the French Revolution are reminds the 'soviet people' of their universality too. (A symbolic moment is when the 'people' kill the despot and his hat is paraded on a pique).
The production of Laurencia has been recently reshaped by the Mikhailovsky's Principal Guest Ballet Master, Mikhail Messerer. The choreography might remind you of Don Quixote's but is liberated from an overdose of the XIXth century mime. Plenty of tasteful dances, exhilarating codas not only for top roles but also for secondary parts like Pascuala, Jancinta and others, all performed faultlessly by the Mikhailovsky's first and second soloists.
I am not a fan of comparing stars over generations (the 'new Nureyev', the 'new Baryshnikov', etc), but the continuity in russian/soviet/russian ballet is quite something. In Frondoso role, Vasiliev's impetuosity is very much like Chabukiani's, who was the first to dance the role he created. As for Osipova, like in Don Quixote which propelled her to stardom, she has the same exuberance, the same rage de danser as Maya Plisetskaya, one of the XXth century's greatest prima ballerinas (and still alive and well).
A Soviet ballet then, shown by a theater whose general director is one of many capitalist figures in today's Russia: Vladimir Kekhman, who according to russian media, once described himself as the banana emperor of Russia. No problem with that, especially that ballet world needs money more than ever. In an article published last January in the Guardian, Luke Jennings was already saying that ' the company is now at a crossroads and the ballet world is waiting to see where Kekhman takes it'. Nearly a week ago, Russian press reports said mr kekhman has sought individual bankruptcy before a London court. Let's hope that there is nothing serious about this and that neither the company or the star couple will pay at any moment the price of business problems.
Read more:
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/business/article/banana-king-goes-bankrupt/471543.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2012/jan/01/mikhailovsky-ballet-bolshoi
Watch:
Natalia Osipova in Laurencia (when she was still at the Bolshoi):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QhVWT6Nqbg
Maya Plisetskaya and Vakhtang Chabukiani in Laurencia at the Bolshoi, 1956: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2MQkVeysXQ&feature=related