HAVE I GOT A GIRL FOR YOU!

Kirov Ballet of the Maryinsky Theatre / Kennedy Center Opera House, Washington DC / December 30, 2003 – January 4, 2004

Daria Pavlenko, dancing Odette-Odile, was far and away the best thing about the three performances I saw (all three casts) of the Swan Lake the Kirov Ballet brought to Kennedy Center. She has, beside formidable technique, the magisterial authority of a ballerina. This is rooted in the ability to draw the audience into an imaginary universe of which she is the center.

Pavlenko is gifted for both lyrical and dramatic dancing—a perfect endowment for the dual personality of her Lake assignment. Her Odette displays an infallible harmony of line coupled with a flowing quality that prevents the sculpted shapes from being reduced to a series of handsome poses. The Russians call this the cantilena—singing—style, and Pavlenko lends it an added touch of grace with her delicate and eloquent use of her hands.

There’s more to this Odette, though, than ravishing dancing. Using—what, exactly? belief? fantasy? her big, flashing, dark eyes?—Pavlenko creates a potent expressive figure, an innocent young woman struck by tragedy. She calls to mind literature’s legendary victim-heroines as well as girls whose terrible fate you read about in the newspapers, the promise of their youth blighted by a random act of destiny.

Every move Pavlenko makes relates to the condition of Odette. When she chalks up even more experience in the role, she should be able to add a narrative element to her portrayal, so that Odette evolves from the opening of the Act II duet with Siegfried to its close, having experienced hope and the beginning of love. At the performance I saw, the audience didn’t scream and yell at the conclusion of the pas de deux the way it had for the Jester’s blitzkrieg antics in Act I, but when Pavlenko came back onstage for her solo, it got very, very quiet, signaling respect and anticipation.

With Odile, Pavlenko is working hard to create a believable figure that will be a counterfoil to Odette. The persona isn’t fully realized yet, but I’m eager to watch its further evolution every step of the way. With an artist of Pavlenko’s caliber, process is as fascinating as product. Here, too, she does much with her eyes, fixing them on Siegfried to see if her seduction’s working; glancing repeatedly at von Rothbart, father and coach, to receive further instructions; peering out at the audience, as if it were another group of party-guest/witnesses, seated along the imaginary fourth wall of the stage. Combined, that ravening gaze of her eyes and her minxish smile are positively diabolical, and the business of engaging the spectator in her agenda is deeply disconcerting, making you feel, minutes before poor Siegfried does, what it’s like to be the victim of black magic. She’s strong and sharp in the virtuoso dancing, and if she’s a little troubled by those damned 32 fouettées, she faces up to them with appetite as well as courage.

The fire of Pavlenko’s Odile enriches the persona of Odette that she returns to in the elegiac Act IV, increasing its pathos. When Siegfried first appears after betraying her, the look she gives him mirrors his remorse—focuses it, perhaps even dictates it. Reproach is irrelevant. She makes their ensuing duet an act of mourning for thwarted love, trust, and hope. Her dancing in this act grows increasingly fluid, as if her corporeal self were melting, fading, disintegrating. In Act II Pavlenko’s Odette is a girl with a problem. By Act IV, she has become the problem itself, a poetic abstraction, worthy of the word sublime.

Pavlenko’s resourcefulness is so rich, it even carries her through the Sergeyev production’s close, where she has to cope with the ludicrous happy ending the Russians imposed on Swan Lake during the Soviet period, to make the ballet politically correct. Not even she can make this turn of events cohere with the tragedy called for by the preceding choreography, to say nothing of Tchaikovsky’s score. She simply plays her sudden good fortune as a storybook miracle, her face radiant with surprise and delight, like a child’s on her birthday, receiving a gift that has been ardently desired yet too extravagant to be hoped for.

The second best thing in the Lake performances was the work of the female corps de ballet. Perhaps to offset the ballet’s companion piece in the engagement, a controversial newfangled Nutcracker, the Kirov brought its Konstantin Sergeyev staging of Swan Lake, a tradition-respecting production from 1950. Here, in its extended passages in Acts II and IV—sequences in which the ensemble is the whole show—and in its creating a frame that gently echoes the movement and mood of the soloists, this wonderful corps de ballet registered as an entity greater than almost any of the company’s individual stars.

It goes without saying that much of the effect is due to Lev Ivanov, the original choreographer of the ballet’s lyrical “white” acts. Yet choreography really exists only in performance, and the Kirov’s anonymous swans are admirable for their discipline, their musical response, and their submission to the demands of creating communal poetry. After their long “solo” in Act II, they fall still, profiled in diagonal lines, backs curved forward in sorrow, heads averted. As their action subsides, they seem to will their own transformation into a pictorial state. Entering, Siegfried gazes at them and he’s looking at a landscape of beauty and grief that expresses—before he has any specific knowledge of these things—Odette’s story and his own fate.

Granted, today’s Kirov corps is not the ensemble it once was, with every head inclined just so, every wrist angled exactly, every leg raised in arabesque to some preordained height, the uncanny unison work not mechanical but buoyed by the music. Still, the current group resembles the corps de ballet of the old days in kind if not degree, and it is a fine sight to behold.

The rest of the dancing was dispiriting. In contrast to the elements I’ve praised, large stretches of the performances were flaccid. This suggests the absence of artistic staff assigned to watch with an eye to keeping up standards of physical energy and emotional engagement, a carelessness that is as inexplicable as it is inexcusable. What’s more, the company simply does not have—or did not bring on this tour—enough world-class dancers to cover the principal soloist roles adequately. One evening it introduced its boy wonder, the 21-year-old Leonid Sarafanov, who has an undeniably light and airy jump, but is in no way qualified to play princely heroes like Siegfried. In appearance Sarafanov would make a perfect Peter Pan or, better yet, Tintin. He was nearly devoured by his ballerina who, beside his diminutive figure, blank face, and cautious, unprepossessing presence, looked like the kind of woman mothers warn their innocent sons to steer clear of.

The most heartening dancing after Pavlenko’s came from two women in the pas de trois, which revs up the dance-thrill factor in Act I. Strong, precise, and ebullient, these young women made a perfectly matched pair, like sisters in a fairy tale—one sweet and fair-haired, the other a scintillating brunette, both with flashing smiles. Both are built like soubrettes (compact and delectable). Both have perfected the Kirov jeté, which the choreography makes much off, leaping high and wide, the front leg thrusting upward as well as forward as it cleaves the air, the back leg curving slightly as an added fillip. And both have clearly been schooled to understand that blurring or smudging a step counts as a capital crime. The public was not allowed to know the names of these proficient charmers, the casting of the pas de trois being omitted from the house program. For the record, they are Irina Golub and Tatyana Tkachenko, and they deserve all the notice they can get.